Binary School

Roz Bellamy

I’m fifteen years old and I’m in love with numerous people at my Jewish high school.

One is a girl in my prayer group. In the mornings, the boys and girls are split into different rooms for Shacharit, the morning prayers. In the boys’ room, they recite a blessing that ends with the line ‘Shelo asani isha’, meaning ‘Blessed are you, God, that you did not make me a woman.’ In the girls’ room, we substitute that line for ‘She-asani Kirtzono’, meaning ‘Blessed are you, God, that you made me according to your will.’

The girl I like doesn’t fit the mould, and anyone who doesn’t fit in at my school fascinates me. All of us, the misfits, are different in some way. She is smart and cynical, which I admire. There is much to be cynical about, which very few of my classmates seem to recognise.

My sister and I have trauma in our DNA that stems from anti-Semitism, Nazism and the Holocaust, like many others at the school – but ours is different.

My mother’s parents had to flee from their home town of Odessa, Ukraine, when it was occupied by Nazi Germany and their Romanian allies. During the Holocaust in Odessa, Jewish people faced kidnappings, imprisonment, mass shootings, death marches, ghettos, starvation, concentration camps, forced labour and torture.

My grandmother and her family were starving, eating frozen earth when they could find nothing else. Decades later, after migrating to Australia, my mother’s family added an ‘e’ to the end of their surname. They wanted to assimilate and, to do so, needed to sound less foreign.

My father’s parents were British Jews who faced rations and bombing raids. My grandfather joined the British army to fight Hitler, after changing his name from Cohen to Bellamy in case he was captured by the Germans.

At Sydney airport my mother and her family had the word ‘stateless’ stamped on their arrival cards. My father and his family arrived as ‘Ten Pound Poms’ on a ship, by choice. It’s a complex mix to have in your DNA: those who were forced to give up their citizenship in search of safety and those who chose to leave. Another binary alongside those I encountered at school.

As children, when we learnt about Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, the girls in my class played the role of Ima, mother, lighting the candles, preparing the food and nurturing the family, while the boys played Abba, father, reciting Kiddush, the blessings. At twelve, I had chosen to reject the Orthodox model of a bat mitzvah and instead followed the model of a bar mitzvah that boys have at age thirteen. This was acceptable at my family’s progressive and egalitarian synagogue, but was considered unusual at my Orthodox school, where a bat mitzvah for a girl involved reading a speech, tucked away in the separate women’s section.

Following my bar mitzvah, I continue to struggle with these rigid binaries. To me they are unequal, even while I have been raised in a religion and a community where they are seen as natural and are enforced constantly.

*

I don’t say anything to the girl in my prayer group. I write her name in my diary and then cross it out. I do not ever write about what the crushes on girls might mean.

My school doesn’t talk about homosexuality, apart from some kids using the terms ‘homo’, ‘dyke’, ‘fag’ and ‘lezzie’ out of the teachers’ earshot. I learnt to keep my attraction to girls a secret years earlier, when I came out to myself in my diary without even realising it.

The first sign that something was up was when I stuck both the Mulder and Scully stickers from TV Hits in my diary. I was ten years old and found both actors incredibly sexy.

At fifteen, I am more aware of my sexuality, even though I don’t know the words to use. I watch The X-Files with my father, discussing extraterrestrial life and conspiracy theories, but keeping the other new, strange – dare I say ‘alien’ – world to myself.

We learn about sex in PE and Health. This is a particularly cruel turn of events for someone who already finds PE teachers terrifying. In Health, we are taught an abstinence-focussed curriculum with no mention of sexual or gender diversity. Nothing in the classes is useful to me, including the biological information and an awkward session about condom use, which I have already learnt from Judy Blume books.

Books are a respite from a world that is otherwise quite lonely. I pick up a young adult novel at my local library and discover that it is about two girls falling in love. Reading it, I am wide-eyed with disbelief and I feel a growing sense of longing. I don’t know what ‘gay’ looks like, apart from a few outdated stereotypes on TV, but the book helps me start to figure it out.

A year later, I watch the TV broadcast of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. I love the fierce Dykes on Bikes, the spectacular drag queens and the roar of the supportive crowd. I turn it to the lowest volume level, fearful at the prospect of being caught. Not that my parents have an issue with the parade, but being caught watching it alone might reveal something.

It is the ’90s before TV has any queer characters that grab my interest, before the internet is suddenly available as a private agony aunt, and I am on my own.

One day, my parents take me and my sister to see the musical RENT. I am riveted by the confident and feisty bisexual character, Maureen. I barely know the word ‘bisexual’, apart from when the word ‘bi’ gets dropped around the playground, accompanied by a sneer. When Maureen sings to Joanne, ‘Ever since puberty, everybody stares at me! Boys, girls, I can’t help it baby,’ my heartbeat quickens. Not because boys and girls notice me, but because I notice them.

In Year 11 my school participates in a community ball. We do a certain number of community service hours and then we are rewarded with a party. My best friend and I decide to do the community service without attending the ball. Our official stance is that we shouldn’t need a bribe to do community service. My personal reasons are more complex: I don’t date, being too confused, shy and unconfident for that.

One of my close male friends calls me in the lead up to the ball.

‘Um, hey,’ he says, ‘I was wondering if you want to go to the ball together.’

I don’t know how to respond. It is the first time someone has asked me out. After an awkward pause, I remember my official stance about the ball.

‘I’m not going to the dance,’ I reply, and tell him that my friend and I are boycotting it. ‘We’re going to stay home and watch Buffy.’

‘Oh, okay,’ he says, sounding embarrassed. ‘No problem.’

I stay home but, even during the magic of Buffy-watching, I wonder if I should have gone.

In Year 12 I am preoccupied with my studies but spend a significant part of the year with crushes on males and females. I only tell my best friend about my heterosexual crushes. When I mention one of the boys I am most attracted to, she scoffs. ‘He’s so boring!’ she says. ‘And he’s dumb.’ We have never seen eye to eye on boys. Whenever I swoon over video clips of Taylor Hanson, she says, ‘but he looks like a girl!’

During the first year of uni two close male friends come out. One is the friend who invited me to the community ball. It turns out that he had wanted me there as his beard. When I find this out, I wish I had agreed. How cool would that have been? Two questioning teens being beards for each other at a Jewish community dance.

I don’t tell my gay friends about my sexuality. Being romantically and sexually attracted to men makes me decide against it. Maybe I will end up with a guy, I think. Nobody needs to know about my big gay feelings.

I feel fortunate to pass as cisgender and heterosexual, even if I’m isolated and unhappy.

I start going to gay clubs and bars on Oxford Street with my friends. They assume I am there for fun, like the other women in our group, who put on dresses and heels and join them for a night out free of unwanted male attention.

I dance, nod appreciatively when they point out various men they are pursuing, and drink. I notice butch and androgynous women or gender diverse people with short hair, piercings and tattoos, who move around the room with a confidence I can’t imagine possessing. Sometimes we make eye contact from afar – mine tentative, theirs flirty and bold – but I am too afraid to approach. I settle for being complimented by a drag queen. ‘You’re dancing in such high heels,’ she says. ‘Bless your heart!’

The only time I feel I can explore my attraction to women is on my own, not at the clubs with my friends. University offers anonymity and freedom, but I’m unable to do much more than walk past the queer space or fantasise about the Scandinavian exchange students.

I’m not concerned about being attracted to people of all genders. It feels like a naughty secret. I walk the hallways propelled by a rush of hormones and adrenaline; I am attracted to a ridiculous number of people. I don’t feel the need to talk to friends about it, or label it.

*

Only years later do I realise that gender is irrelevant to my attractions, because sexuality and gender are not binaries for me, and I do not fit into binaries. I am sexually attracted to people, not to the specific and sometimes arbitrary categories we classify them with. Not to one type of genitalia. Not to a particular ratio of sex hormones. Gender may or may not have anything to do with sexual attraction for me.

My own gender varies depending on the day, my mood, my hormones, my feelings. Sometimes I am male or female, sometimes I am both, and sometimes I am neither. Sometimes what I am is undefinable, but when I first hear the words ‘genderqueer’ and ‘gender non-binary’, I feel a sense of peace. They fit. They make me feel less alone.

I talk to my parents about gender. I discover that if I had been assigned male at birth my name would have been Richard. Dick. I find this quite funny and hard to comprehend at first, but later, I am perplexed. What would Dick’s life have been like at my school? If the kids were so nasty to me – that a little, closeted, cis-appearing girl – what would they have done to him? They likened my curly hair to pubes, so what would have happened to Dick? Would he still be here?

*

A lot has changed since the ’90s. I’m out and proud, and publish writing in which I am vocal about identifying as queer, bisexual and non-binary. I am married to a woman, Rachel, and have overshared in the public domain about her and our marriage.

If I want to understand more about my family history, I can choose when I wish to learn about the trauma that took place in my family over multiple generations, rather than being tested on pogroms and concentration camps as though they are algebra or spelling.

If I want to explore my faith, I can do so without being restricted by gender or sexuality, like I was constantly at school. I don’t have to thank God for anything if I don’t want to.

It’s my choice if I want to say ‘Baruch Hashem’, or ‘Blessed is our God’, for making me queer and non-binary, because now I wouldn’t have it any other way.