Living and Loving in Diversity by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

Author:Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, JFSJ, BIO031000
ISBN: 9781743056080
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2018-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Only ‘Dot Dot Dot’ in Your Village

Benjamin Law, as told to Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

Diversity isn’t justified by one accent. Every single person is like a myriad of things at any given time. And when I think of growing up in the suburbs of coastal Queensland in the 1990s, television was pretty white and it was pretty straight. Those two things make you very aware of what normal is supposed to be, so you really do feel apart. And growing up in an especially white part of Australia kind of amplified it. When you’re the only ‘dot dot dot’ in your village, sometimes you grow up with internalised racism or other kinds of minority phobias. You see white as being cool and you see straight as being cool and the way in which that can manifest is that you won’t want to engage in Asian cultural things. Or you’ll see camp people and you’ll think, ‘Well, I might be gay but I’m not one of those gays.’ And it took a long time to get that out of my system and realise that there’s nothing wrong with being camp and that it’s a judgement you’ve been taught by straight people who potentially hate gay people. So I now say, don’t kowtow to the straight or white idea of what has currency. You need to form your own identity on your own terms. And that can be really hard; but finding a community of other people like you helps.

Which reminds me of another thing that amplified feeling apart: dial-up internet was just coming in for our generation as I was leaving school. So, really, the main access point to the rest of the country, or to my idea of the rest of the country, was television. So when I’m asked about who and how I identified with other people, I think the simple answer is that I didn’t. I didn’t meet another gay person until I was an adult. Then I met some people online or talked to them in private, covertly. I didn’t have Asian friends or any non-white friends. If you were a non-white adult, you might not have been picked on or anything like that, but you really stood out. I would hear stories about Asian suburbs in big cities and I’d think, ‘Oh my god, there are Asian majorities in Australia?’ I had no idea of that whatsoever.

So these days, I think queer people being online is a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse in that everything is so geared toward sex and hooking up, and the pressure or emphasis is on that rather than making friends. Whereas if you go online and access organisations, it can also be about forming community and making friends and getting resources. So, first of all, find your tribe by going online.

I think film and television are changing and I think people like Tony Ayres are at the forefront of that. It’s not like he goes into his meetings and broadcasts, ‘We’re going to put a show on about intersectionality.

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