Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  BY RUTH DAVIES

  IN THE AUSTRALIAN SPRING OF 2016, WHEN I HAD PLANTED sunflowers for the first time and was delighting in the blooms opening, Elizabeth Gilbert announced that the end of her marriage to a man was due to her realization that she was in love with her—female—best friend of fifteen years, Rayya Elias. Elias has pancreatic cancer, and that diagnosis made Gilbert face the difference between loving someone and being in love with them. Her announcement was long and apologetic, using phrases such as “something which I hope and trust you will receive with grace” and “please understand . . . . I trust you are all sensitive enough to understand how difficult this has been.” She explained that because she lives in the public eye, she has to tell the truth publicly.

  I felt elation, at first, for the brief glimpse into new love and, selfishly, for the value that such a high-profile relationship can lend to the acceptance of my own. Then I was sad about the tragedy of it. Then I was annoyed at how deferential she seemed to feel she needed to be, in the face of everything else going on for her and Elias and for their families. If she had left her husband for another man, there would be less of a need for the summer of silence while they all came to terms with presenting this new status to a judgmental public.

  Just a week before Gilbert’s anouncement, my partner of more than ten years and I had attended the wedding of close friends of ours. My partner had been working overseas for the previous few months and it was going to be wonderful to have her home for a few days. Guests gathered in a small park overlooking Brisbane’s Story Bridge on a perfect spring day, and we took the opportunity to catch up with other friends of the couple whom we hadn’t seen for a while and to meet people we had been hearing about, or who had been hearing about us, for years but somehow hadn’t met. People mingled, laughed, admired the banksias blooming and talked about the jacarandas that would soon provide a canopy of purple flowers over the park. Then the celebrant called for us to come together, and we watched while the bride and groom walked down the footpath towards us, hand in hand, smiling at each other, at us, at the day. At love. We listened while the celebrant welcomed all of us, no matter our beliefs. Then we listened to him marry them, with the words legally required in Australia that state marriage is the union of a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others.

  The original Marriage Act 1961 had a stance against exclusionary definitions, but in 2004, conservative Prime Minister John Howard rushed through an amendment to the Act, specifically to protect Australia from the rising tide of marriage equality that had begun in other countries: the Netherlands in 2001, Belgium in 2003 and in various U.S. states. The government wanted to lock down the definition of marriage not only within Australia, but to ensure that same-sex marriages in other countries could not be recognized as legal here.

  Since 2004, things have improved. In 2008 and 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd introduced reforms that gave equal entitlements and responsibilities to same-sex couples that de facto and married couples already had in areas of federal jurisdiction, such as social security, citizenship, taxation, and superannuation. In some ways, these changes have made me complacent about same-sex marriage, as it seems that in my relationship, we already have the legal recognition we need. However, some state laws also govern aspects of relationships, and these laws don’t all provide full equality. In most states, gay and lesbian relationships are recognized through civil partnerships or by granting most of the same rights as de facto relationships have. But in a case in South Australia, a British couple—two men—were honeymooning in Adelaide, when one of them died. Their marriage was not recognized in the state, and the surviving partner had to hand over all decisions about the funeral and other matters to his father-in-law. This reminded me that the only way to guarantee full equality is to provide same-sex couples with the option of marriage. Marriage is a federal law in Australia—so that is where the battle for marriage equality must be fought.

  Across the same years that support for marriage equality has continued to grow, federal politics in Australia have had a period of unprecedented instability, where social issues—not least, the issue of marriage equality—have been used as bargaining chips in party-room politics. The most recent of these was in 2015, when yet another leadership spill delivered Malcolm Turnbull, our fifth Prime Minister in six years. I roared with laughter when it happened, being particularly affronted by the outgoing PM, but I hadn’t realized the cost: a previous election promise had to be kept of having a plebiscite on same-sex marriage. A plebiscite is an expensive way of being seen to consult the whole electorate, without having to enact the voters’ decision. And it provides a platform for bigotry that will be damaging to people who are already vulnerable, particularly LGBTQ youth. Suicide rates among gay youth are up to six times higher than among their heterosexual peers. My children are now in their early twenties; I look at them and wonder how they feel about this. What is going on inside, under the discussions that we have about it? Hannah Gadsby, an Australian lesbian comedian, posted about the impact her state’s campaign against legalizing homosexuality had on her in the 1990s. She said she learned that she “was subhuman during a debate where only the most horrible voices and ideas were amplified by the media.” That we can still do this to young people twenty years later fills me with despair for our political process.

  The plebiscite was blocked in the senate; conservatives threatened that the topic won’t be addressed again by this government and we’ll have to wait three more years, until our next election, before it can be reconsidered. It’s so tedious, all this political strategizing: keeping party-room promises, angling to take credit for reform, landing blows on the other party. Even in the preparation for a possible plebiscite, the Australian media was full of opinion pieces about why our personal relationship should be held up to be the business of everybody. It’s an astonishing hypocrisy to me that the opponents of same-sex marriage are often politically conservative; they are the very people who are opposed to government intervening in their lives, yet they think the government should intervene in ours.

  At our friends’ wedding, we saw that people had traveled, some from overseas, to be part of this ceremony, to witness the choice to stand publicly and declare, “We are committed to each other” and to have that commitment endorsed by the state. While we don’t feel we need this endorsement, marriage would carry some practical considerations for my Dutch partner and me. She has a permanent resident visa in Australia, but can’t have dual citizenship according to Dutch law—unless, that is, she is married to someone with another citizenship. For the most part there is no problem; she doesn’t particularly need the dual citizenship. However, her permanent resident status here depends on her being in Australia for defined periods of time, and in her job, overseas posting is a real possibility, which might lead to her visa being revoked. But if we married, she could have dual citizenship without having to give up her birth nationality, and she wouldn’t be worried about the travel conditions of her permanent resident visa.

  There is also the peripheral endorsement that comes not just with a personal decision to marry or not, but with how society treats you if you are able to marry. Marriage equality would mean we’d be less fearful of how we talk about our domestic situation at work, less calculating in choosing who to say what to, when. It would mean the burden of carrying someone else’s prejudice would shift back over that fence to their side.

  It’s one thing to experience the abstract political process that reveals other people’s inability to see our loving, stable, happy relationship. It’s another to be confronted by it much closer to home. We had left our friends’ wedding feeling happy: happy for the couple, happy for having rekindled connections with their friends, happy for having been part of the collective goodwill and celebration. We were then brought back to earth pretty quickly when a close family member said to my partner, “Perhaps you’ll meet someone in that new job you’ve got.” We felt winded. Meet someone? She doesn’t need a new someone. She
has me. We have each other. We’ve been together for more than ten years. We’ve bought a house together, each of us has lost a parent while we’ve been together, we’ve lived in two countries together. We’ve been each other’s rock for all of that time. In one fell swoop, this person revealed the depth of their blindness to our commitment. We’ve been sending love notes to each other and cooking meals and laughing at silly movies and sharing elated whoops at the top of mountains and mopping fevered brows, in sickness and in health; all of this is—in that person’s world—nothing. What’s even more annoying is that we are living the suburban domestic life that person wants us to live, except that we’re both women. We go shopping on Saturday mornings. We grow vegetables in the backyard. I can’t even imagine the social pressure on people whose relationships don’t follow this model and are even more subject to social critique.

  I’m looking for the kind of society that exists in most of my daily interactions and when I’m surrounded by friends, a society where I can actually forget for a while that there’s anything about me worthy of the judgment of a nation. I’m looking for the kind of society where people like Elizabeth Gilbert don’t have to ask the public for their “grace” while she’s nursing her dying partner. I’m looking for a society that lets its government do important things, like stopping human rights abuses in refugee camps, instead of wasting all this time and money on an issue that can easily be changed with a stroke of a pen, as we saw when the Marriage Act was changed in 2004. As I write this in 2016, same-sex couples can marry in twenty-one countries. Australia, ostensibly so progressive, is way behind.

  I hope that the outcome of all this politicking is that people see sense somehow and just pass the legislation. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m still hoping that perhaps Malcolm, our conservative Prime Minister, has made a secret deal with Bill Shorten, the Labor opposition leader, in a quiet bathroom stall somewhere.

  “Hey, Bill?”

  “Yes, Malcolm?”

  “I don’t want to do this. You know I don’t want to do this. I’m a money man. There’s a lot of money in gay weddings.”

  “I know. I’m a union man. You’ve got to see that I want unions—between organized labor, between people. I’m all about working together. Stick it to the bosses.”

  “So listen, Bill. You’ll have to push back and keep pushing. I’ve just got to make those fascists think I’m going to keep working for the plebiscite, but you blocked it—so, I’ve done all I can, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, and you know it’s obvious that I’m going to introduce my own change to the legislation, so that we can do what Howard did in 2004 and just sneak it through.”

  “It’s going to be Christmas soon. How about you get that ready, and on the last day of sittings I’ll make sure all the right-wingers are busy opening shopping centers or something and we’ll pass it.”

  “Deal, Malcolm. I’m on it. And listen, when we get this through, I know people in all the relevant unions who can make sure you get that pink-dollar business.”

  Enough

  BY VANESSA SHANTI FERNANDO

  I.

  I WASN’T EXPECTING THE BREAKUP, LET ALONE ALL THAT came after.

  Writing about your relationship (as I did in Dear John, I Love Jane) takes supreme arrogance. It is a special sort of curse. The words in my original piece were so unapologetically hopeful, so wide open. “I am with the most amazing person in the world,” I had written. I’m stunned that I had the nerve to think it, let alone write it down on paper.

  And yet, we were perfect until we weren’t. We met online—I in Canada, she in Mexico—so the very fact of us stumbling across each other’s dating profiles felt like a minor kind of miracle. She used the word “quintessential” in her profile and it didn’t hurt that she was gorgeous: masculine of center and boyish, an out lesbian in a border town. I sent her a message despite my cautious self, and when she wrote back I felt my stomach flip.

  I fell in love with the idea of her before we met in person. She wrote letters with her fountain pen and drew little cartoons in the margins. We whispered secrets over the phone like we were kids with tin cans pressed tight to our ears, attached with string. Two years passed like this, crammed full and urgent with plane trips, scrapbooks, late-night phone calls, and piles of letters.

  By the time we found ourselves in the same city, it was clear that we were destined to be together. Fate was the only explanation that could make sense of the years we’d spent flirting and fantasizing over two thousand miles and two international borders. If there were other moments—when the space between us seemed to stretch thicker than geography—I didn’t dwell on them. She had never been loved well by either parents or partners, so I told myself that I was the answer. I felt a swelling sense of pride and purpose when I thought about how I would now be able to fill in her hollow places with the strength of my longing for her, and the home we could start building together.

  She was, all of a sudden, a daily fleshy constant. For our anniversary, she made me mac and cheese, putting candles on the table. We did our laundry together, mingling socks and underwear, and stored our Sarah Waters books on the same shelf. On weekends we went grocery shopping together. She liked anything processed, especially the snack packs of crackers with a tiny square of liquid orange cheese.

  But she didn’t like my friends. They were pretentious, she said. She was all about having the ability to take a joke, to not be too sensitive, to laugh at tragedy. She had seen a lot of tragedy, so I deferred to her on this, even though I felt uncomfortable sometimes with the jokes she chose to laugh at. At school and in the organizing collectives to which I belonged, we talked frequently about acknowledging our privilege. Deferring to her seemed like an extension of this practice. What I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge was the doubt that unfurled in sticky tendrils, once in awhile, in the pit of my stomach.

  And then a friend of mine died, right around the time that her parents disowned her for being a lesbian. I couldn’t stop coughing, doubling over in fits on the bus, in class, in the movie theater. She played video games for hours. She didn’t want me to touch her. We lay in bed night after night for months with our bodies curved away from one another like crescent moons from distant calendars.

  One night, all that had been silent and swollen burst. She’d gone out drinking and come home wasted, loud, and messy. I’d had enough of her drinking. She’d had enough of my social-justice jargon, my not-so-silent disapproval. I cleaned her puke from around the toilet while she slept, slung diagonally across the bed. Afterward, I sat out in the hallway and cried—letting myself acknowledge, finally, that my love wasn’t enough to fix this.

  After all the noise—the packing, the plane ticket, the fighting, the ripping up of photos and scrapbooks, the hollow pledge to try and stay friends—after all that, the end was anticlimactic. I had spent many nights before she arrived imagining what it would be like to live together, finally. I’d close my eyes and picture the two of us lying together on my tiny bed. I’d zoom the frame out, seeing the apartment on Clark Street, with its narrow staircase and the zig-zagging streets of the Plateau Mont-Royal all around us. Now the picture faded, crumpled. After all that imagining, there was just me, the bedroom we’d shared, the remnants of a Montréal summer.

  II.

  I step off the bus and navigate Ontario Street until I reach the storefront I’m looking for. JJ’s barbershop is tucked away on a side street, flanked by a cobbler on one end and a dépanneur on the other. There’s an elaborate display of bow ties in the window, next to a small hand-painted sign saying “lesbian haircuts for everyone.” I push open the door and see him sweeping up from his last cut. I’ve never met JJ, but I’ve heard his name over and over from cute queers with shaved undercuts. He’s slight with wavy brown hair shaved at the side. He’s wearing a button-up shirt that cuts close to his frame, slim pants, and oxford shoes. On someone else the look would read as conservative, but on him it looks sexy and just a little bit f
ey.

  JJ nods at me and pats the chair. I sit down.

  “What can I do for you today?” he asks. He spins the chair around so that I can see myself in the mirror, and talks to my reflection. My hair is thick and dark, the color of mud. It’s growing out past my shoulders into a distinctly triangular shape.

  “I want a lesbian haircut,” I joke. What I mean is define me. Make me recognizable. Help me be seen.

  “What does that mean?” he says, smiling. “Every haircut can be a lesbian haircut. That’s the point.”

  I feel chastened. Called out. I’m weak, I want to tell him. I just want the social approval that comes from conforming more closely to queer aesthetics, which are too often conflated with masculine-of-center presentations. In other words, I’m single and I want queers to ask me out on dates.

  “I was thinking something asymmetrical,” I say.

  We settle on half long, half short. I get a fringe and long curls down one side, and a shaved cut on the other. As soon as the hair starts falling, I feel a sense of relief. I check out my reflection in the mirror. I can’t quite recognize myself. It feels good.

  On my way home, I notice that my new hair is working its magic. I notice queers giving me the eye far more than usual. I feel cute, so I practice flirting. My preferred method involves holding the person’s gaze for a beat longer than usual, smirking just a little, and then looking away. It’s a nice day to practice. Hot and bright, but not sticky.

  I’ve already got a date lined up for tonight. I’ll be meeting up with Laura, a green-haired zinester I met on the same website as my ex. Our compatibility rating is 90 percent, so I had to message her. Her photos are full riot grrrl. She’s wearing ripped baby-doll dresses and smeared eyeliner, and she has full tattoo sleeves.

  I wear a new shirt. It’s a collared short-sleeved button up, pastel yellow with faded pink sleeves that reminds me of melting Neapolitan ice cream. I button the shirt up all the way, even though it feels tight around my neck. It’s important to button the shirt right to the top to get the look right: it’s the difference between cute androgynous queer and feminine business casual. This summer I’m learning that hot means androgynous means far away from femme, unless you’re going for dandy. I’ve stowed my summer dresses at the back of my closet, and donated most of the clothes that my ex liked me to wear (the strappy tank tops, the high-heeled shoes, the lingerie). I feel lucky to be lanky and flat-chested. It makes it easier for me to conform.