In my last year of high school, the town we called home was forced to petition for broadband internet. Residents could have it, they were told, if they proved they would use it, and so for months we were asked to sign paper rolls that would demonstrate our intent to sign up with Telstra. This act of administrative enthusiasm got in the way of my being gay.
Throughout my adolescence, the only window to the gay world was through dial-up internet, though connecting to it stole the telephone line and made a noise so alarming it might have stood in for one of those ‘scared straight’ programs I’d read about. I didn’t know any gay people. My friends didn’t know any gay people. There was one character on TV who was gay. Well, I suppose his boyfriend was, too, but he didn’t seem very happy with it.
We knew of one gay kid, an older boy who had moved to Brisbane and ‘become’ gay after high school. He was spoken of only in hushed tones, as if he had gone to prison or died at war. ‘Did you hear Paul is gay now?’ my friends and I would murmur. Paul had always been gay, of course, but we didn’t know that. As near as we could make out, Paul had moved to Brisbane and been involved in a radioactive incident at The Wickham.
When I became that man, the one who suddenly ‘turned’ gay after moving away and moving back, a helpful resident of Boonah popped a message in my mailbox. It was a fairly meandering morality exercise that ended in the word ‘faggot’ and a half-decent picture of Jesus Christ on the crucifix. It did not escape my attention, almost a decade later, in 2017, that while getting ready to vote in a petition for my right to marry another man, I was receiving junk mail calling people like me an abomination.
Officially, there are more than 46 000 same-sex couples in Australia. There are many more people who are transgender or identify as queer, gender fluid or bisexual. Maybe one in ten Australians fall on this spectrum. Might be more, could be less. Who’s counting? I never wanted to be among them and, in some small way, I never felt like I was. How could a man who won’t accept himself ever feel included?
Long before I knew what the words meant, my father called every other person he didn’t like a faggot or a poofter. He had elaborate ways of figuring out how to spot them, which mostly relied on the presence of a single earring in a man’s ear. Paul Reiffel the cricketer was a faggot, Dad told me once when I was five. So was Shane Warne at one stage and some actor on E Street, which was a show I understood less than the word faggot. Mum was nicer, though her world experience was scarcely any broader. She had met a gay man once while working in her youth at David Jones in Brisbane. He had an interest in teapots, she recalled, which became both her red flag and her yardstick for measuring future gays.
Statistically, in those early years on the cattle station, it ought to have been possible that I had met a gay or lesbian person. But if 10 per cent of people are gay, then that presented problems, for it was only my father, mother and older brother Toby who lived permanently on the property. By my reckoning that means 0.4 of one of us was into the same sex.
Mum must have known, though even she mistook her early awareness for causality when I finally came out to her, aged twenty-one. The very first words out of her mouth gave it away: ‘Oh darling. Was it the Ken doll I gave you when you were six?’ I had already drunk 2 litres of cask wine on a friend’s hotel balcony when I made the phone call. The box of Stanley was nestled on my lap as we spoke and I fiddled with the nozzle to top my glass up.
In late primary school, Mum would nudge me in the ribs when Priscilla, Queen of the Desert came on the television. I would pretend to be mildly interested while, in my head, planning how I, too, could be draped in 30 metres of space-silver fabric in the middle of the outback.
In high school I conducted a morning audit of the way I moved. I wanted rigid, manly gestures. My gestures had to be mountains, not flowing streams. I practised in front of a mirror. I kept a mental list of the names of girls at school who could be considered attractive so that I could name them should other boys begin the inevitable discussion. I never stared in the change rooms after sport. I found other cover, too.
The telephone company had just introduced a rather complicated feature, three-way calling, which was so new that nobody (me) thought to be wary of it. All I knew was that the thought of being on the phone to one person was tiring enough but three just seemed incalculably obscene. Anyway, the first three-way telephone conversation I ever had was also my last in a personal capacity. It was also how I got my first real girlfriend, which is a shame.
For reasons not entirely clear, a girl in my Year 10 class, Britteny, had become interested in me, and an eager mutual friend, Danielle, decided to do something about it. Danielle phoned me and began asking a series of questions about Britteny. ‘Do you like her then?’ Well, of course, I answered. To my mind the answer was given in the same way I might talk about my fondness for Ace of Base or chicken and mayo sandwiches but it certainly didn’t mean I wanted to fuck them. By the time we’d made it to the end of the conversation I was a piece of sandstone worn down by the geological force of teenage sexual intrigue. ‘So would you go out with her?’ Cornered, and believing it was just myself and Danielle on the line, I said yes. There was a muffled voice on the line. It was Britteny. Danielle announced her to me as my new girlfriend in the style of a gameshow host revealing the grand prize is a new car to a contestant who was born and lives underground. My intricate game of pretend was made entirely more complex.
A week into my new relationship and Danielle was sent to me at the end of one lunch break, an emissary with a message to bear. I wasn’t holding Britteny’s hand during the breaks and had hugged her only once. This ought to have been a sign but it was construed as playing hard to get. Any confrontation with a teenaged girl could be considered an armed hold-up and so, at gunpoint, I began holding Britteny’s hand. This sealed the early fissures in what she thought was a relationship and what I knew to be an elaborate ruse. I was torn entirely between wanting to preserve our friendship and wanting to appear straight, a survival instinct so strong I was living in unbearable stress.
The second big test of this messy dance came when my girlfriend invited me around to her house one Saturday afternoon. ‘My parents won’t be home,’ she said, unzipping a duffel bag filled with hints and scattering them before me. Sometimes, when my brother and I were left home alone, we soaked tampons in petrol and used them as fuses to blow up cans of deodorant. Call it intuition but I suspected that was not what Britteny had in mind.
Her parents owned one of those L-shaped sets of square couches, from which we were to watch a movie. I waited for Britteny to sit on one far end before employing my scant knowledge of mathematics, following the imaginary hypotenuse between the two end points and sitting as far away from her as I possibly could. A glacier of awkward sexual tension, Britteny bum-shuffled closer throughout the movie until she had me pinned against an armrest with no escape route. There were explosions on the screen and, in them, I saw the inevitable destruction of my deceit. We never kissed.
I did all of these things because I was terrified of who I was and how people would react to me. From the age of twelve, I spent every day in witness protection. Every waking hour spent with another person was a gamble.
For his controversial essay ‘The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness’, the writer Michael Hobbes interviewed researchers in an attempt to understand the mental health impacts of being gay. It comes down not just to discrimination but the expectation of it. ‘John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realising your sexuality and starting to tell other people,’ Hobbes writes. ‘Even relatively small stressors in this period have an outsized effect—not because they’re directly traumatic, but because we start to expect them.’
Travis Salway, a researcher at the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, says: ‘No one has to call you queer for you to adjust your behaviour to avoid being called that.’
A study out of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California found that growing up gay is a lot like growing up poor. Too bad if you did both. The research revealed there were lower levels of the hormone cortisol among gay adults than the average. Cortisol regulates stress. In other words, gay people have their stress response triggered so often and almost without pause during their youth that the mechanism just stops working efficiently.
The stress comes not from being called a faggot every day or avoiding a hate crime. That might happen; it has happened to all of us many times. The point is that it could happen on any day and our mid-evolution brains activate the fight-or-flight response in advance. Think about when something in your home intermittently gives you a static shock. If it happens often enough in a short space of time, you become hesitant when approaching metal surfaces. You change the way you reach for the metal surfaces. Remember the rats? Now imagine the thing is not a static shock but something that goes to the core of your being. Endure that over and over again and by the time a person reaches adulthood, the damage is written into their bones.
These key studies were done in major cities of the world. I’m not sure they had ever heard of Boonah. It’s not an especially terrifying place but it is relatively isolated from the rest of the world. It took three years after I moved away to find the courage to come out, but even then it was because I feared what the rumours would say back home.
I didn’t belong in my country home town and I didn’t belong in my city, having just come out as gay, either. The barbs of my life undercover were still in my skin. I didn’t feel happy to be gay; I felt trapped. Whatever life I might have embraced as a proud gay man in the city seemed impossible to square with my internal hatred. I passed in both worlds, but neither of them felt like home. There is something to be said for this listlessness that is hard to understand if one has never been on the outside of anything. Many, though not all, gay people find their home in the queer scene. Perhaps it was my conditioning from a young age, my nature or both, but the ‘scene’ made me uncomfortable. Everyone was so confident—it was like they’d had two decades to ferret around in their psyches and come up with a way to exist vigorously. It was never that simple but that’s how it appeared to this young man, fresh off the drying rack.
Coming out averted an imminent disaster but it wasn’t going to hold me together in the long term. It seems hard to believe, even as somebody who has lived it, that these apparently small things can have such a sweeping presence in the lives of Australians in the twenty-first century. As Hobbes says in his piece, ‘We bring the closets with us into adulthood.’
I was in Year 5 when Tasmania cut homosexual crimes from its criminal code. I was thirty when same-sex marriage was legalised. If that feels like a burden, what must the lives of those who went before feel like?
Michael Rogers was seventy-four when he first came out as a gay man. He was living at a Brotherhood of St Laurence aged-care home in Melbourne when something finally broke and he told a support worker. ‘I have become a real person for the first time in my life,’ he tells me when I speak with him. ‘It was like living the life of a spy. I feel sad that I was unable to feel sad, that I was unable to admit or accept who I was.’
He’s describing this idea that to get away with the cover-up, one has to dull one’s senses and emotions. There can be no room for introspection. The search for a place to fit in even led Michael close to marriage with a woman. ‘I was a confused person … I knew that it was men I wanted to be with but something inside me said “Oh you should be married, you should be with a woman”,’ he says. ‘I became a Catholic and I was a thoroughly unbendable menace of a person. It was probably internal confusion. I was seeking some system that would say that I was right in my feelings.’
Michael, like all of us, was a product of his time. He came out as gay more than five years after I did but also five decades later, in real terms.
To this day, I have never had a relationship with another man. I’d like to, but I don’t know how. Most of my twenties zipped by with me having no gay friends at all, something about which I was quite happy. When I first met Shannon, one of my closest friends now, I was afraid he would hate me. So afraid I downed two bottles of sauvignon blanc in quick succession and vomited it all back up while we were sitting smoking on a friend’s verandah in Brisbane. ‘There, there, get it all out,’ he soothed, scruffing my hair in the process.
There is something insidious at work here. Gay people, particularly men, are modelled on an existence that expects rejection. They factor it in at every turn. Some overcompensate with these loud couldn’t-care-less attitudes, others just go along with it like I do. The problem is that expectation informs reality. I didn’t just think Shannon was going to hate me, I knew it. I have run away from or actively sabotaged at least three potential relationships because I was convinced the men were playing some kind of sick game where they pretended to be interested.
This fear is primed, at first, by family. Mum accepted who I was almost immediately. She had her own questions, as I did, but she loved me and she made it clear nothing would change that. I never told my father but would come to learn of his reaction nonetheless.
Sometime in 2014 my brother met with Dad for the last time face-to-face and Rodney told him up-front that he ‘didn’t like’ what I was doing with my ‘lifestyle’. That’s it. There wasn’t some great cataclysm. We hadn’t even spoken for six years before that point. We had dogs that I knew better and had spent more time with than my father. Nevertheless, the man who had abandoned our family once was leaving me again, this time through words. That was the moment I finally became unseated from a throne of precarious ease with myself.
In a qualitative study of gay and lesbian Australians, the effect of family rejection is measured by their own words. ‘You think parents have unconditional love and to, like, find out that, you know, how do I put it … that love comes with an actual condition. That was probably the hardest thing,’ a woman called Emily told the study authors. ‘Cause you like [starts to cry], I don’t know, you expect things from people, you don’t expect that from your parents.’
The authors go on to add: ‘The fact that someone can reject a family member after coming out indicated a strong message that the gay/lesbian family member was generally unlovable. Facing family rejection for being gay or lesbian is not simply unacceptance of a voluntary and changeable aspect of an individual; rather, it is a rejection of a core component of a person—a central and unchangeable part of who someone is.’
What struck me reading the responses from young people in this study was how they directly and eerily mirrored my own experience.
A man called Tony told the researchers: ‘I had always experienced anxiety and I could cope with it, but what sent me to the doctor was the fact that when this happened I couldn’t cope anymore. This was what pushed me over. So other people that are in this situation, if they’re already at a high level of anxiety and something like this is going to happen to them [and] it’s going to push them over again, I would hate to think what avenues they might take in that situation.’
I had what I now know to be my first anxiety attack when I was twenty-one. Freshly removed from the closet, I was attending the first of my high-school friends’ twenty-first birthday parties in Boonah. I hadn’t seen any of them in person since the news broke that I was gay. I coped with the violent shaking and cold sweats by drinking myself into a stupor. For the rest of my twenties I kept these attacks mostly in check. They never became severe. Until the day I learned what Dad thought of me.
I now measure my life in two halves: the moment before I heard that news and the almost four years since. Happiness, always so difficult to pin down, seems more distant still.
In his 1989 New Republic essay which kickstarted the American debate on gay marriage, Andrew Sullivan makes a conservative case for access to the institution and recognises a fundamental shift in the way queer people interact with society at large. ‘Much of the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical. Marriage, for them, is co-optation into straight society. For the Stonewall generation, it is hard to see how this vision of conflict will ever fundamentally change,’ he writes. ‘But for many other gays—my guess, a majority—while they don’t deny the importance of rebellion 20 years ago and are grateful for what was done, there’s now the sense of a new opportunity. A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong. To be gay and to be bourgeois no longer seems such an absurd proposition.’
Today in Australia there are some who still reject the notion of joining the team that never picked them. For the most part, however, we are sick of being on the outside. In the internecine, fifteen-year-long public battle for marriage equality, tempers have frayed and I’ve found myself caught in something of a Venn diagram of not-being-with-everyone-else. A gay man behind enemy lines, so to speak.
In 2014, while still relatively junior at The Australian, I was tasked by my editor-in-chief to write a piece about a gay advocate who had appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program and whom the editor-in-chief believed was a hypocrite for having unsafe sex and talking about the HIV epidemic. But my chief-of-staff refused to ask me to write the story and, having heard about the editor-in-chief’s request, I was incensed. The national broadsheet is a broad church but there was no way I would allow my sexuality to be used as cover for a hit-job news story that had no public interest value. When my higher-ups leapfrogged my chief-of-staff and demanded I write the story, I walked out of the office and went home.
The story never ran. That was the last of it. There were no repercussions, no sanctions. Life moved on. But it was this same activist who would later come to attack me and other gay staff members at The Australian for being ‘complicit’ in what he said was an agenda of hate against the queer community. He and others came to the conclusion that we were siding with the enemy by working for the newspaper and demanded we prove what difference we had made by being on the inside. He didn’t know about that near-miss.
My mental health had never sunk so low. I felt I was being attacked from all sides for either being me or not being me enough. I was abused on social media by those who are disgusted by homosexuality and targeted by those who thought I was working hand-in-glove with an editorial stance that gave succour to the same anti-queer forces in our community.
For the first time in my life I was earning good money doing a job I loved. It was enough that I could help support myself and my mum and sister when times got tough, as they frequently did. I knew the effect our coverage had on young queer kids. I’d been there myself. But I also knew that leaving wouldn’t make it any better. And doing so would cut myself and my family off at the knees after a lifetime spent trying to stand. These are the shades of grey in a person’s life that always become collateral damage in a culture war. As the last year of my twenties closed out it became entirely clear that I had made little personal progress. I had left the country, where I never felt at home, for a city in which my sheltered upbringing was all too obvious. I was gay, though neither fully embraced by gay culture nor willing to fully embrace it. I was successful but still judged by parts of society as being unequal. Had devotion to my family immobilised my principles or was I just a coward after all? Culturally, I was a drifter, looking for a place to set down my things but never quite receiving permission, let alone a welcome.
Anyone looking for a reason to explain the rates of suicide and self-harm among queer Australians need only look at the shrapnel wounds of disgust and rejection they’ve collected over a lifetime. The rates are even worse in regional Australia.
One of the biggest longitudinal studies in Australian history, run by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, looked at more than 3300 teenagers who had suicidal ideation and who cut, burned or otherwise harmed themselves in the twelve months before they were interviewed at age fourteen or fifteen. Crucially, the researchers controlled for a litany of factors that might have made them want to do that. They looked at socioeconomic status, family structure or breakdown, individual characteristics and relationships. After doing so, only a handful of factors remained significant. The standout risk factor was having a sexuality other than heterosexual.
That’s a big deal. Nothing predicts the deterioration of your mental health more than being queer. In the American Journal of Public Health we start to find out why this might be and it’s not, as some would like you to believe, because being gay is a mental illness in and of itself. A study reported in the journal found that ‘LGB respondents reported higher rates of perceived discrimination than heterosexuals in every category related to discrimination.’
There is much to treasure about being gay. It has opened in me a font of compassion that I’m not sure would otherwise have been there. It has played a role in formulating my ambition to succeed, which has driven me out of my poor teenage-year prospects and beyond the statistics. I hustled because I knew I couldn’t stay in the town that had raised me. I worked harder because, well, what else was there to do? Maybe it saved me. Who can say?
Everything has a cost, however, and I’ve overspent. Those early years spent agonising over whether I would be found out and hung, drawn and quartered in the schoolyard have cast a lasting shadow. When everyone else was figuring out how to love and be loved, going on dates and breaking hearts, or having their own mashed into the soft earth, I was stuck on this quixotic project of self-preservation. My time would come, I reasoned, because it did for the others I knew. When I turned twenty-one I still told myself my time would come. Again, when I turned twenty-five. My fears burrowed deeper and deeper over time. The anxieties enmeshed with my vital organs. My heart became a tool for the expression only of panic. My time would come, I said yet again. Perhaps when I turned twenty-eight. I spent that year rushing between doctors and psychologists and slowly losing my mind. But the time would come, I said, once this was dealt with. Turning twenty-nine marked a return to the same episodic madness, and thirty represented an uneasy truce. The jangles are still behind my flesh somewhere, vibrating every so often with the accumulated dirt of two decades’ reckoning.
As a nation, we have convinced ourselves that all of us has the same standing start, but this is neither true for the working-class whites from broken families nor for those with black or brown skin. It’s not true for those without a proper education nor for those who were abused. Researchers call it ‘minority stress’, of which being queer is just one form. But it is one of the only forms where you go through it alone until the secret breaks open inside of you like a seed. You shoulder it on your own, keep your own counsel, make catastrophes of your own many futures. When the time is right you share it around. If you are lucky, the embrace comes swiftly. If not, the bad counsel one kept is made incarnate by the reality of those rejections.
When I was in high school I used to spend my weekends and evenings rushing to hit ‘record’ on my tape player when a favourite song came on the radio. The dial-up internet made it difficult to download music; you really had to commit to a tune, which seemed an effort. My friends would make these mixtapes for their girlfriends or boyfriends, expressions of childhood love. They got to hand theirs out, secure in the knowledge they gained only via osmosis that this was what teenagers did.
I made them for myself, entire cassettes of the world’s worst pop music. When no-one was looking, I danced.