by Nevo Zisin
The leader of the group looked at me as I explained my sexuality. Throughout the meeting I wasn’t sure if she was flirting with me or just being friendly. My heart raced and my palms got sweaty. I was overwhelmingly attracted to her. I had never felt that way about anyone. I couldn’t wait for meetings each week. I just wanted to be near her, but I was also terrified. We began speaking more and more; I pretended to be confident and experienced. I had no idea what I was doing. We began messaging a lot over Facebook, eventually via text. I could feel things progressing but I wasn’t sure if I was just making it up. One night, she came over for a sleepover so we could do some homework together. I knew we weren’t going to do homework. I had never had a sexual interaction with anyone. The furthest I had gone was kissing, and I never particularly enjoyed it. Probably because I was kissing boys I didn’t actually like.
We sat on my bed talking. I have no idea what was said. All I could think about was kissing her. Her smell was intoxicating – I can still remember it. I ate some chewing gum and before I knew it, she was kissing me. It was amazing, also unexpected and scary. I didn’t want to any more. I told her I needed to go to the bathroom. I spat my gum out in the sink and looked in the mirror. I told myself this is what I wanted, what was I doing? I needed to go back out there. Things escalated further than I was comfortable with. I didn’t feel like I could say no, didn’t want to offend her or expose myself as inexperienced. I felt pressured, uncomfortable and overwhelmed. When I told her I didn’t want to have sex she stopped the kissing, turned around and said we may as well go to sleep then. I apologised and felt terribly guilty.
The next morning she told me things didn’t feel right between us. Cuddling me didn’t feel like it did with her ex. Was it okay if we were just friends? “Of course it’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t okay. She left. I was devastated. She had made huge hickeys on my neck, as if she felt it necessary to mark her territory. I hated them, and also kind of loved them. They made me feel grown-up, sexually experienced. I tried to hide them throughout the peak of summer by wearing a scarf at school. Everyone noticed. She mostly avoided me in the hallways, while I was dying for her attention. She prided herself on being a player, sleeping with as many people as she could and cheating on them with others. She used me to feel good about herself, while I was falling apart. I begged her to give me a second chance. She told me she wasn’t interested, but then when I least expected it, she made out with me. She strung me along for a long time and I didn’t know how to protect myself. It was my first heartbreak, and one I will never forget.
My mum eventually saw the hickeys on my neck. I had tried for weeks to hide them from her. She asked if they were from a girl and I couldn’t lie to her. She didn’t want to hear about it, was visibly uncomfortable and we didn’t talk about it for a while.
I wasn’t sure that I was a lesbian. I wasn’t certain I would never fall in love with a man, or someone who wasn’t a woman, and I felt scared that if anything changed, it would invalidate the feelings I was having then. I assured Mum I wasn’t a “full lesbian” and that I still liked men. She saw this as a way of holding onto hope that I could possibly marry a man and have children.
Mum had told me for so long she wouldn’t be surprised if I turned out to be a lesbian, but she was. I always imagine parents are kind of like GPS – they have set destinations for their children. In the Jewish community that quite often tends to be for their children to become a doctor or lawyer, and if anything sets them off track, it takes a little time to re-route. I think that’s what my mum went through when I came out. So I spent time at my dad’s house, so she could process things alone.
The whole concept of coming out bothers me. I hate the idea that someone is straight until proven otherwise. This is incredibly harmful to young queer people and other members of marginalised communities. Instead of expecting people to go through a deeply personal and exposing experience of revealing to everyone that they are not what they were assumed to be, we should stop making assumptions about people.
One issue for Mum was that she was no longer sure how to monitor my sleepovers, because suddenly anyone could be a love interest. I had to convince her I wasn’t romantically involved with everyone I was interacting with, especially at the age of fourteen.
My friends were understanding about my coming out. I explained I was no longer interested in boys. Some of my friends asked if I was going to become attracted to them, and joked that they would no longer invite me to pool parties, because I would look at them in their bikinis. I told them not to flatter themselves; they weren’t my type anyway. The same way they were not attracted to every boy in the world, I wasn’t going to like every single girl, especially my friends. Boys in my year level tried to argue with me that lesbian sex isn’t real sex, showing me the definition of sexual intercourse in the dictionary as evidence against my identity, despite many of them having a rather large collection of lesbian porn on their computers. I was frustrated that I had to defend myself against their vitriol, and no one was there to argue alongside me.
Through coming out, I began my lifelong vocation of becoming a walking search engine. Something very fascinating happens when people discover you are different to them. They forget other resources exist, and direct all of their questions to you, often without recognising the mental and emotional energy required to educate them.
I waited before coming out to the rest of my family. I went on a holiday with my dad to Vietnam and one night over dinner I kept bringing up gay issues in the media. Eventually, he said to me, “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” So I told him I was gay. His response: “No worries, you’re always welcome to bring home a girlfriend to my house, as long as you don’t make out with her in front of me, but that would be the same as if you had a boyfriend.” And that was that. I was relieved.
My dad told my siblings, which I hadn’t exactly given permission for. I think it’s important not to come out for someone without their consent, but it did pave the way for me to discuss it with them. They were unsurprised and supportive. However, it was interesting to see the ways in which my brothers’ language shifted around talking about my partners. When I was assumed straight, they would make jokes about bashing up my boyfriends. This changed when I started dating girls. They suddenly commended me for dating hot girls and I felt rewarded for being sexual, rather than punished.
Nevo, sixteen, on a camping trip (2012)
Chapter 5: Queerings
Often I’ve heard “It’s just a phase” and “You’ll grow out of it” used about me and other queer people in relation to our gender and sexuality. Well, guess what? Everything is a phase. Like that person you can’t believe you dated in high school, or that TV show you used to love but can’t stand any more, or the course you dropped out of, or the friendship that ended over time. It doesn’t mean those things weren’t important or meaningful when they happened, it only means nothing is permanent and things change. Who would we be if we didn’t evolve and grow throughout our lives?
The fear of uncertainty around my sexuality dissipated as I began to recognise there is no true certainty in something that is destined to be fluid. I felt more confident in identifying as a lesbian, but this came with its own internal difficulties. I had to say goodbye to the heteronormative life – a “normal” heterosexual life with a nuclear family – I had been told I would have. Although things are changing, there’s still not a lot of representation in the media of non-normative family structures. I had always felt I would be a parent one day so it scared me to be a lesbian. I didn’t understand how I could negotiate those two things. I began to mourn the idea of having a husband and kids, and tried to comfort myself in the knowledge that no matter my sexuality, I could still be a wife and mother regardless.
Things have changed significantly since then. I see more representations of families that could suit the future I want to have.
I met my first girlfriend at a Minus18 event when I was fifteen. Minus18 is a wonderfu
l organisation I’ve had the privilege of both being a patron at and working with. They run social and dance events for LGBTQIA+ people under the age of twenty-one and I am so grateful I discovered them when I did.
I met Tia at one of their social events and added her on Facebook. We spoke for a while online and then met up and watched a movie. I felt awkward, confused and excited. I had a big crush on her but it became clear she wasn’t interested in me in a romantic way. I hoped things would change. I wanted her to be my girlfriend more than anything. She began dating her best friend and I was incredibly jealous. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t be with me. She came over for a sleepover and we spoke about her relationship. She told me she wasn’t monogamous and wasn’t interested in being with only one person. I didn’t understand at all, but I realised that perhaps her relationship didn’t need to be an obstacle to us getting together. I wasn’t really sure how to flirt but something must have worked because before I knew it, we were kissing. I had never felt anything like this before. I was overwhelmed and short of breath. Before we went further, she asked if I was comfortable. I wasn’t used to that. Consent was never something I was taught in sex-ed classes and it wasn’t something I had learned in my previous sexual experience. I was surprised at Tia’s diligence in making sure I felt comfortable.
Through Tia, I developed self-confidence. I owe a lot of who I am to her. Together, we learned about feminism and gender politics. I was in a safe relationship, where I could navigate challenging topics and learn.
It was Year Ten when I first owned my feminism. I had thought about it before, spoken about it and fought for its politics without realising, but I think this was the point where I truly took on the term for myself.
I’m not going to make you a feminist. I’m not going to waste words trying to convince you. Do your own research, make up your own mind. I am a feminist and I will never apologise for it. Once I began to see the world through a feminist lens, it was difficult to switch it off. I could suddenly see the underlying oppressions and microaggressions of the patriarchy. My awareness of women’s issues spread into other intersecting marginalised communities and I was suddenly aware of many things I hadn’t recognised earlier.
I found support in Tia and the queer community. However, my fellow students did not appreciate my newfound and passionate feminism. I was already othered for being a lesbian, for shaving my hair when I was younger and for generally not giving a shit about the expectations put on me. I had a bunch of piercings, dyed hair and I wore my uniform the way I wanted to. Needless to say, my school wasn’t happy with me, despite the fact that I was an A-grade student. Students, and particularly boys, were intimidated by my opinions. People boxed me in as political, opinionated and radical, and therefore didn’t want to hear anything I had to say. I wasn’t trying to be political for the sake of it.
There’s often this misunderstanding surrounding issues of oppression and privilege that people are being too “politically correct” or politicising something unnecessarily. This statement usually, if not always, comes from someone with immense privilege. It is easy to be cool, calm and collected about an issue that doesn’t and hasn’t ever affected you. But my life and my body is political. Not necessarily because I wanted them to be, but because they had been politicised, and that made me opinionated and angry. Besides, as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
As I embraced my lesbian identity and a long-repressed masculinity, I found new clothing and new goals for my body. Accepting I was a masculine person who had always been interested in developing large muscles was liberating for me. I stopped seeing my body as impossible. I had always felt uncomfortable in what I had deemed a fat body, but felt I could never truly be skinny like the girls I went to school with, or saw on television, or literally saw everywhere. I tried so hard to lose weight and slim down, and I did, but my body wasn’t built that way. I wasn’t petite and I was never going to be.
Once I stopped caring about the attention of men, I no longer cared about the beauty standards they had set. I didn’t need to be skinny to feel attractive as a lesbian. I saw a lot of diversity in my community and felt liberated to know I no longer had to try to be something I wasn’t. I began to gain muscle – something I had always wanted to do – and wasn’t worried any more that I would appear too manly, which I had been concerned about when identifying as straight. My focus in exercise shifted from losing weight to gaining muscle, which made me feel powerful for a long time. I thought this process would help create a better relationship with my body. It did for a while, but there was always a dissonance between how I felt inside and what my reflection showed, and I had always attributed it to my weight. So when that weight reduced and I wasn’t feeling any different, there was more confusion about who I really was.
Habonim Dror was still a huge part of my life. In Year Eleven, members of the movement have the opportunity to become leaders themselves. I was excited to become a leader. For six months prior, I and others in the movement had been part of a process called Hadracha. Hadracha loosely translates to “leadership”. Lehadrich is “to lead”, and the words stem from their shoresh, or “root”, which is derech. Derech means “pathway”. Basically the concept is about not necessarily creating the pathway, but helping kids find it and being there to support them. The idea of the movement is very much a sort of “leading from behind” mentality, for people to discover their own ideas but have leaders behind them, supporting and encouraging their development.
We spoke a lot about the expectations of being a leader in the movement: what it meant to take responsibility for a group of kids and what standards we should be holding ourselves to. I wanted to provide the type of support to children that I had received at the movement when I didn’t feel I had it in many other places.
Throughout Year Eleven, I led kids from Year Four. I was part of a group responsible for running weekly informal educational programs as well as biannual camps. The movement took a large chunk of my time and energy. This affected my relationship with Tia as we lived about an hour apart, and weekends were the only time we could spend together. Saturdays became entirely enveloped by Habo commitments. Through Habo however, I felt for the first time I could be a leader. One week, I ran a program on role models. At the end of the program a little girl, probably not older than nine, came up to me and asked if I wanted to know who her role model was. Assuming it would be a celebrity of some sort, I was immediately taken aback when she told me her role model was me. After my childhood of exclusion, isolation and repressed anger, I had been afraid that I could never be a role model to anyone. I had been a bully, I had treated people badly and I didn’t think it was possible to be someone people looked up to.
Year Eleven was quite a difficult year overall. I struggled to balance Habo commitments, work, my relationship and studying Year Twelve Hebrew. I broke down many times to my Hebrew teacher, who was my mentor and guiding angel. Her office was always open for rants, tears or a cup of tea. I am grateful to her for giving me the space and understanding to love and believe in myself.
Nevo and Tia at the Minus18 Same-Sex and Gender Diverse Formal (2012)
Year Twelve began and immediately I felt anxiety and encroaching depression. I am lucky to be capable academically and to have access to the kind of education that I do, but VCE was utterly terrifying. In so many ways, high school is a breeding ground for mental illness. And if I felt that way, I can’t imagine what it would have been like for people with more issues dealing with academia. School was never too difficult for me – I was always difficult on myself. Nothing I did was ever good enough; I never remembered the good marks, only the bad. I became an overachieving perfectionist.
Luckily for me, across all the mental health issues I was dealing with and the huge workload to keep up with the private school VCE pressure, I discovered gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria is this fun thing that happens sometimes when you exist outside of society’s ve
ry narrow understandings of gender, and it slowly started sneaking into my life. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but on a long road trip I began to unravel the signs that maybe something deeper was going on.
Tia and I planned to go to ConFest together. ConFest is a folk festival I had been going to since I was a young child. It involves various workshops on physical, mental and spiritual ideas and provides an environment in which nudity is encouraged and a non-judgemental, free attitude is nurtured. Tia had just gotten her licence and we were excited to get away together, just the two of us. The drive to the festival is six hours. We spoke about everything and after a significant portion of the trip, I felt the need to bring up gender as a conversation. I explained that certain things in our relationship were becoming uncomfortable for me and I was experiencing a lot of sexual anxiety. Something had shifted lately and I was no longer comfortable with the kind of sex we were having. I wasn’t sure why but I was finding it distressing.
Tia was amazing. She immediately came up with ideas to improve things. She also tentatively mentioned that I might be transgender. I became defensive. It was something she had brought up before and I had immediately rejected. She backed off but suggested I start doing some research. I tried to push the conversation to the back of my mind until I could return home and get online.
Going to ConFest was always a bit confronting for me. Naked people comfortable in their skin was something I wasn’t often exposed to. I was always really uncomfortable in my body, but I hadn’t met any women who weren’t. Our society profits a lot from people’s self-doubt. The more you hate your body, the more money you’ll spend on products that promise a solution.