Growing Up Queer in Australia by Benjamin Law

Author:Benjamin Law
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

Living in a Fridge

Michael Farrell

When I think about the idea of growing up, it makes me wonder if the conditions of queer adulthood are possible – or even desirable. The notion of adulthood seems so enmeshed with heterosexuality. It also makes me think of Paul McCartney’s ‘Coming Up’: ‘like a flower’, to bloom, to be plucked, or mowed. Mightn’t it be better to remain a bud, full of potential, a seedling?

Ways of being queer are ways of being human, but being human can feel limited sometimes. Poetry helps me think metaphorically of how I was trained, like a vine, to grow and flower in certain directions. A human child is closed off from the adult world in many ways, and as much as I might have wanted to join it, I thought more about joining the animal world. The cattle-farming world, the bush world. I still have a residue of this, a deeper sense, in fact, of relation to Melbourne birds; to kangaroos, in statue or poem; I look out for them in a roadside mob.

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After my first attempt at writing this, I realised I hadn’t mentioned that staple of gay memoir: religion, growing up (predictably) Catholic. But I don’t think of the rituals, hymns or altar-boy smocks, or of naked Christ on the cross; the only abuse I suffered was from a priest’s knuckle to the head once, and from the nuns’ ‘dark sarcasm / in the classroom’ (Pink Floyd). What I think of is truth. The rite of confession did, I think, influence me strongly. I haven’t always been a completely honest person; I confess that the truth doesn’t always seem personally honest – or kind – but I find social lies and performance difficult. And growing up queer means, for me anyway, growing up secretive. I am structured like a nut, in the hard-to-get-at-the-seed sense.

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It’s a slow process, finding out how other people live, when you’ve grown up in a small country town. I think that observing animal life broadened that perception, however – and reading books. In an unlikely sense, Henry VIII, whose life I stumbled on in the school library, was a liberating example: he wasn’t constrained by marriage or the Catholic Church. Just like the Protestant side of my own family (no beheadings, however).

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As the concept of queer, and attitudes towards gender, gets more diverse, the way we understand and tell our growing-up stories gets more diverse. Ten years ago, I would probably have written this as a fairly standard growing-up-gay-in-the-country story. This is not so different, perhaps, but back then the emphases would have been identified in a more positive way, the non-normative aspects would have been presented as badges of being gay. As if I was struggling towards something recognisable, rather than being something that was in itself interesting.

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I like how vague ‘non-normative’ sounds; it’s like a category of ambient music. Growing up non-normative . . . it sounds like it would be hard to be abused in those terms. But back then, the word ‘abnormal’ had a fair amount of derogatory power.

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