Growing Up Queer in Australia

Benjamin Law, Benjamin Law

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781743821084
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

No amount of YouTube videos and queer think pieces prepared me for this moment.
The mantle of "queer migrant" compelled me to keep going – to go further.
I never "came out" to my parents. I felt I owed them no explanation.
All I heard from the pulpit were grim hints.
I became acutely aware of the parts of myself that were unpalatable to queers who grew up in the city.
My queerness was born in a hot dry land that was never ceded.
Even now, I sometimes think that I don't know my own desire. Compiled by celebrated author and journalist Benjamin Law, Growing Up Queer in Australia assembles voices from across the spectrum of LGBTIQA+ identity. Spanning diverse places, eras, ethnicities and experiences, these are the stories of growing up queer in Australia. For better or worse, sooner or later, life conspires to reveal you to yourself, and this is growing up. With contributions from David Marr, Fiona Wright, Nayuka Gorrie, Steve Dow, Holly Throsby, Sally Rugg, Tony Ayres, Nic Holas, Rebecca Shaw and many more.

Sometimes I Call You Even Though I Know You Can’t Answer. It’s a Symbol, I Think . . .

Anthony Nocera

When I was younger I had problems with phonetics. When I first wrote that, I typed it all in capitals. Like I was yelling or REALLY EXCITED about my illiteracy. Trouble with forming words and correlating them to meaning, with reading and comprehension. I couldn’t follow stories. It stemmed from an inner-ear problem that affected my ability to hear.

My mother took me to a doctor and said, ‘Is this why he’s slow to pick up reading?’

‘Yes,’ the doctor said. I, of course, couldn’t hear him. But he nodded, so I put two and two together.

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘WE’RE TALKING ABOUT YOUR READING!’ Mum shouted so I could hear.

‘YES!’ the doctor shouted, ‘YOU’RE SLOW!’˙

*

‘Have you seen Call Me by Your Name?’ he asked.

I was sitting with a friend in a loud bar. He got the drinks. Beer. I hate beer, but I drank it anyway, making ‘ah’ noises after every sip to hide the fact that it tasted like a foot to me. It felt intimate, though, despite all of the noise. We made conversation in the pockets of quiet when we could.

I said, ‘Yeah.’

‘My first time was exactly like Call Me by Your Name.’

‘How so?’

‘I was sixteen, and we were camping down by the beach and me and my friend were in a tent and I remember we’d been swimming all day, yeah . . .’He trailed off, and his eyes lingered on the distance like he was back on that beach looking at the way the water ran down his friend’s body like tears, or like sweat, or ropes of cum, and how the muscles moved underneath his skin like they were moving just for him. ‘Yeah, and we had this moment in the water when we swam together, swam into each other and we both felt something. And later that night, when we were in the tent, we just started to touch each other and kiss, and then I was balls deep for days.’

‘That sounds . . . romantic.’

‘It really was,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you think so. When did you see the film?’

‘With my boyfriend a few weeks ago.’

‘That’s right, you have a boyfriend.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How’s it going? Are you two in love?’

‘I think so . . . I guess.’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I don’t know how you could ever definitively know.’

He nodded. ‘That movie, it just . . .’ He took a sip of beer and I did too, to make it seem like I was keeping up. ‘Good, isn’t it?’

‘Love it,’ I said. ‘And I love beer. Ah!’

‘But that movie, it’s just like my life . . . you know? It’s so beautiful. It explained so much to me.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I saw myself in it,’ he said. ‘What I wanted and all that.’

‘Like your life corresponds to it?’

‘No, but it . . . talks to it,’ he said, and I thought how nice it would be to talk to something, to be in conversation but not have someone talk back.

He told me that his first experience set the tone for his entire sexual existence. He said, ‘Sex for me is, like, sunny, you know? Total euphoria, man. I just bliss out.’

*

A film studies lecturer once told me that quite often films tell us how to watch them in their opening moments. They show us how to read the film, how to understand it, the lens through which we should examine what’s being considered by the work. For example, at the beginning of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, a polaroid photo un-develops – it’s shaken into blankness – signalling to the viewer that this is a film in which parts will be told backwards. In the opening sequence of Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight, a predator chases a deer through the woods and the perspective shifts back and forth between the predator (a vampire, Edward Cullen we assume) and his prey. It’s an opening that says: ‘This is a film that is going to play with the notion of the gaze; it’s going to tinker with ideas about watching and being watched.’

I thought about my first sexual experience, my sex, my gaze, and how it was much more like William Friedkin’s movie Cruising, an ’80s slasher movie set in New York’s gay leather scene. It begins with a severed arm floating in a river. This opening said, ‘Being homosexual is dangerous’ or ‘To be gay is to get hurt’. After we made out for about an hour, he, my first lover, just turned his back on me. I asked him, ‘Where did you go?’ and he said, ‘Somewhere else’; I took it as a challenge to get his attention again. I kissed his spine, each and every vertebra until I got low enough to make him stir and turn back around.

‘How was that?’

‘It was good,’ he said, ‘I suppose.’

We had sex and it was okay, I guess. He inserted the tip of his penis into me and came immediately, groaning, ‘Oh my god, yes, yes.’ Then he collapsed on top of me and asked, ‘Was it good for you, Anthony?’ I should have rolled over and turned my back on him, and gone somewhere else during my deflowering, but I just silently nodded, and he asked me to leave as he tossed a condom on the floor, and I watched his cum ooze out of it as I packed up my things.

For the next few weeks I kept thinking about the cum oozing out of the condom and how it felt loose when he was using it and I called my mum in a panic and screamed, ‘What if I have AIDS?’

‘Did you use protection?’ she said, coolly.

‘Yeah, I did, but what if it happened anyway?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘did he seem AIDSy?’

‘What is AIDSy?’

‘I don’t know . . . Was he wearing a lot of leather? Did he look menacing and have a handlebar moustache?’

‘No. What the fuck?’

‘I’m just asking the questions that need to be asked.’

‘I don’t think that needed to be asked!’ I said.

‘Anyway, you don’t have AIDS.’

‘How do you know?’ I said.

‘Because, Anthony, if you had HIV you’d be thin.’

*

The film begins with a title card that reads, ‘Somewhere in Northern Italy’. It’s an opening that says, ‘This is a fantasy. This is a romance.’ I wondered what my opening said about me, what the opening of my sex life was trying to tell me. Probably: ‘This is not going to go well’ or ‘It’s only going to get worse’ or ‘This will make you anxious, you will be unnecessarily stricken with panic’. Or maybe, ‘You didn’t think it was possible to sprain your arsehole, but it is, and you will’.

*

‘You should know,’ my friend said as the bar quietened down again. He took a sip of his beer and so did I.

‘Delicious,’ I said.

‘The beer?’ he asked, and I nodded.

‘Know what? What should you know?’

‘Whether you’re in love or not,’ he said. ‘You should know where you stand. It should be definitive. You should be sure.’

*

Call Me by Your Name is interesting in that it takes male queer desire and wanting, traditionally associated with violence, corruption, infection and monstrousness (if it was depicted at all) and places it within the language of mainstream feminine desire.

One of the first texts I studied at uni was ‘Ripe Figs’ by Kate Chopin: a short story about a girl, Babette, and her godmother waiting for figs to ripen from hard little green marbles into soft, supple fruit before they go and visit their family. The ripening of the figs and the waiting symbolises adulthood, sexual maturity and how everyone needs time and patience to ripen.

I remember a girl in my tutorial hated the text. ‘Women aren’t fruit,’ she said.

‘It’s a symbol,’ said the tutor.

‘I’m no palm reader. I don’t need to understand symbols,’ she said.

*

In Call Me by Your Name, Elio and his sexuality – and his coming to terms with it – is the ripening fruit, the fig that Chopin was writing about; he is the apricots that Oliver, the older, handsome lover, gobbles down by the basketful, he’s the nectar that Oliver drinks and is re-energised by every morning. I think it’s very romantic to be eaten. Especially when you start to soften towards someone. Like Elio does with Oliver.

Well, Elio, you’re not the only one who is a piece of fruit, I thought. When I was eighteen I used to go on camming sites and jerk off with people halfway across the world. When one of them saw my naked body and I told him I didn’t have a dildo, he said, ‘Get a banana from the kitchen and fuck yourself’. And I did as he said: I waddled to the kitchen with my hard-on painfully bouncing around and grabbed the smallest banana from the fruit bowl and then sat in front of my computer screen with my legs in the air and tried to fuck myself with it. I didn’t really know what I was doing so I just kind of lifted the banana like a dagger and rammed it into myself. And it just hit the wall of my arsehole so hard that the skin of the banana loosened, and the fruit shot out the other end onto my bed and I just lay there, yeah, I just lay there looking at the ceiling and used my leg to subtly close my laptop.

*

It wasn’t the first time fruit had entered my bedroom. When I was fourteen, or thirteen, young and ripening like an apricot or a fig, I decided that I wanted to stick something in my arse. After watching a lot of porn, I wanted to see what it was like. I googled ‘what to put in your arse that isn’t a penis’ and came upon a Yahoo! Answers page that said to use a vegetable that is penis-shaped and to microwave it until it feels human. I determinedly grabbed the most manageable, slimline carrot I could find out of the vegetable crisper and put it in the microwave for two minutes. When I took it out, I felt it sear into my skin and I threw it down and looked at the long cylindrical burn across my palm.

I wonder what a palm reader would have seen. I googled it and apparently a long cylindrical burn across your palm from a makeshift dildo is a symbol for being a fuckwit. And for dying alone, probably.

I looked at Elio and his ...