Content warning: violence.

 

I remember the dusty air carrying rice husks across the horizon. The smell and sound of sheep being sheered, the sting of blades of grass as they cut my infant feet while I whizzed about the front yard.

That was the country. Deniliquin.

Famous now for the Deni Ute Muster, back then what put the town on the map was housing the biggest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere. Don’t all start planning your weekenders at once though: it’s been decommissioned.

Rice was the perfect metaphor for Deni in a way, because all the goodness the place managed to cultivate was eventually shipped out to other parts of the country, leaving a hollow, tasteless husk of a community that really only served to get stuck in your teeth.

Apparently, I’m still flossing.

When I was tiny, my Mum would take me to her sewing class where I would strut beneath the high tables serenading the other ladies with an innocent ditty I’d learned at home: Sweet Transvestite, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I had no idea what a transvestite was, but I was definitely a sweet one.

True to form, I made my pre-school debut wearing a floral, cotton dress, accessorised with a sparkly, pink tiara. It was apparent at this point that Mum and Dad were conducting their own, localised experiment into the nature versus nurture debate, and were hoping to steer things in a particular direction. And it was around this time that I learned something about myself, something that can actually be traced back to that first day of preschool. I was gay. Still am, in fact.

But it wasn’t revealed through a miraculous, rewarding period of self-discovery. It was just something people started to tell me.

I remember kids coming to pre-school and saying, “You’re gay”. I had no idea what that was either, but I soon found out that it was me. And that it was bad.

I’ve always felt this was a huge failing on behalf of the town’s parents. I mean the kids hadn’t gone home and suddenly had an epiphany, ‘Hang on! Cute dress? Stunning accessories? That boy’s going to try to fuck me in the ass…!’

They were clearly told. Overheard. In the car, around the dinner table, at nap time.

“That boy’s gay”, the parents will have said. And like a rice husk on the wind, the kids carried it to pre-school with them.

To be fair, there were signs. Beginning with the dress.

And it probably didn’t help that my two favourite films were The Wizard of Oz and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And it certainly didn’t help that one of the first jokes I ever learned, courtesy of Mum, went:

“What does 3-day-old cum smell like?”

*Breathes*

But despite the uncanny accuracy of Deniliquin’s diagnosis, it still seemed premature to let me know what my sexuality was at such a young age.

Soon enough, I discovered that my sartorial instincts were incompatible to the expectations of mainstream Deniliquin society and started to wear ‘gender appropriate’ clothing, dressing like a good, country boy.

Life became a breeze! I got good grades, I was a standout member of the community. I was even one of the school’s sporting champions, although I avoided the change rooms like the plague for fear of an unwanted erection.

(To clarify, an unwanted erection would have been my own. Even back then I was quite eager to encounter someone else’s).

Soon I was voted School Captain, then Junior Mayor of the town. The gay taunts still bubbled to the surface every now and then, but people also seemed to notice some attributes aside from my flagrant homosexuality.

As the years wore on, so did Deni life. And it soon came time to attend high school, a melting pot in which all the town’s youth came together in one ugly, adolescent penitentiary.

And once I arrived, all the good things that had happened in primary school –  the grades, the sport,  the contributions to the community – were eradicated by one sweeping recollection.

I’d worn a dress on the first day of pre-school. I was gay.

Again.

There’s a particular aroma to a thick, green glob of mucus flying through the air on a 40-degree day in rural NSW. It smells like a kind of acidic fury. It burns. Not the skin, but the air around it, then floats up the nostrils and singes the brain.

That’s what I remember from my first day of high school. Walking out with the crowd at the chime of the bell. Thinking everything had gone smoothly. Happy enough. Until I heard it. The retch of the glottal cleanse and grubby whistle as the projectile took flight. I didn’t feel it land, but knew it was for me. I knew because of the directive guiding this missile to target.

“Faggot”.

I glanced behind me and saw the spitter snicker to his friends as they marched away. Chin up, chest out. A proud homophobe.

I stopped, took off my jumper and frowned down at the glob of green phlegm glinting in the sun. Then I carefully rolled it up in the poly-cotton of traffic-light red (what torturous human designs school uniforms anyway? Don’t they realise adolescence is hard enough without mass sartorial shaming?) and stuffed the sad bundle into my back pack.

I arrived home to a mother brimming with enthusiasm, desperately hoping that high school would be a continuation of my positive but tenuous social trajectory.

I tried to match her mood as she enquired about my day, but a few moments into the chat I handed over my jumper and asked her to wash it. My smile wavered slightly as I did so, but I didn’t want to drop the ball.

That’s the thing about arbitrary discrimination: you don’t just put on a brave face for yourself, but for those around you as well.

Very soon, high school demonstrated that my efforts to be a good student and a stand-out social citizen were in vain, so I decided to take the low road. I gave up school and sport for drugs and alcohol, finding a new community amongst the town’s other self-destructive misfits.

Flailing desperately, my parents shipped me off to boarding school in Ballarat in the hope that big city minds would be less crushingly closed than those of the local townsfolk.

It’s possible you may have some romantic ideas about boarding school, and I don’t want to disappoint, so let me say this from the outset: yes, it was exactly like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Burnished, brick towers framed an ancient boarding house, replete with turrets and tunnels. Classrooms and corridors brimmed with crowds of pre-pubescent young men just waiting for an opportune moment to experiment with their wands.

Wingardium leviosa.

Petrificus totalus.

Expelliarmus.

As luck would have it, I soon picked up some talented wrist work to apply to my own wood.

Jerking off really defined the boarding school experience to be honest. It was all anyone really wanted to do or talk about.

I remember bunches of guys standing around in the communal showers jerking off together while I diligently brushed every square millimetre of my watering mouth.

Actually, sometimes they would branch out of the conversational circle jerk and want to talk about sex. With girls.

And as I was only interested in about 50% of that discussion, when the boys started talking about girls, I started day dreaming about my roommate, Brendan. Brendan Tool.

Good name, right?

Brendan was always on my mind. Day and night. His curly, brown hair. His handsome face, friendly persona, throaty laugh. The perfect curve of his perfect ass…

I often snuck glances at him in the shower too. Glances that would linger as he soaped up his tanned, smooth, body, rinsed off the suds, dried himself and then made his way over to the sink, where he would put on his bed time boxers: silky, shiny satin, with a Superman print. I spent a lot of time looking at the Man of Steel in those days.

I remember wandering into Brendan’s cubicle in our room one day when no one was around. I think I was there for an innocent reason – to pilfer a packet of noodles or smoke a cigarette out the window. And there he was, strewn lazily, sexily across the bed: Superman.

I stared at him for a moment, checked to make sure I was alone, and then gingerly picked him up from Brendan’s pillow. Gently, as if he were the most precious thing in the world.

I caressed the silky fabric and held Superman up to the light of the window, a gentle breeze blowing through.

The aroma of adolescent man filled my senses, that fabric having clung to Brendan’s tool for hours, days, months as he slept.

The first moment of  truth came with those boxer shorts.

It was the first time I admitted to myself that I was attracted other guys. Internally. Silently. But an important step nonetheless.

Years later I found Brendan on social media and saw that he was happily settled in Melbourne…with a boyfriend! I was so touched to think we might have experienced some of the same things at boarding school.

And I couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d ever cautiously wandered over to my bed, checked to make sure no one was around and caught a casual whiff of Homer Simpson.

But I also felt a little sad. Sad that we weren’t living in a world in which I could coyly bail Brendan up after class, the Basics of Biology covering my adolescent erection and say, ‘Hey, do you want to go out with me?’.

There’s something so beautiful about awkward, high school romance. It makes me sad that I never experienced it.

Unfortunately, boarding school wasn’t the panacea we’d hoped it would be. Despite attempting to fortify myself in the closet with a faux girlfriend, people began to notice my points of difference and, once again, let me know that they made me a lesser human.

A sharp drop in classroom attendance ensued. But I made up for it with more drugs and more alcohol. And then it was time to come home. Back to Deniliquin High, to see if round 2 might be more successful.

I was happier, I guess. I was growing up, and so was everybody else. But that toxic glob of phlegm had left a pretty stubborn stain.

“Faggot!”

I’d been sitting around, snacking at a local cafe, feet up, relaxing with a couple of girlfriends. We were eating hot chips with chicken salt and BBQ sauce. A ritual. We were around 15.

The noise came out of the blue, “Faggot!”, along with a random punch in the face.

I sprang up, shocked, and looked up at my attacker who was already striding angrily, purposefully down the street. Chin up, chest out.

I’d never seen him before in my life.

But he clearly knew who I was. Or at least, what I was.

He turned on his heels and strode back towards me. “He’s a fucking faggot!”, he announced to the stunned people at the café, as if that would be an adequate explanation for his behaviour and they’d all calmly go back to their meals.

I pulled out my mobile phone to call home for a lift. I wasn’t comfortable walking with this guy around.

“Are you calling the cops?!” he screamed, standing over me.

I was speechless. Terrified. How could a person who I’d never met harbour so much hatred towards me? How could he be so sure that I was gay? And why was it a problem?

It was the final straw. The last hate-filled husk.

The high school taunts had now spilled out onto the street and Deniliquin was no longer a safe place to be.

The whole family moved this time. To Melbourne. And it was refreshing.

I remember the winding streets, the tall buildings, the seasons. Deniliquin didn’t ever seem to have seasons, just heat, husks and prejudice. And Ballarat was basically just masturbation en masse to ward off the encroaching chill.

I enrolled to finish year 12 in a very special high school called Swinburne Senior Secondary College.

It was a college for misfits drawn from all over Australia. Hippies, punks, goths, gays. Not just the students, but the teachers too. A mixed bag of non-conformity.  The school was quite novel, more like a university than a high school. No uniform, a 4-day week, you called the teachers by their first names and everybody smoked, so nobody got in trouble.

Pretty soon I’d graduated and settled into Melbourne life, and much of the homophobia was drowned out. I was getting older now – 17 – and there was something exotic and interesting about fluid sexuality.

Despite all the odds though, the pre-school dresses, Superman sniffing, phlegm and “Faggots!” hurled my way, I still hadn’t managed to come out to my family. It was getting a little ridiculous.

Looking back, I think it was because of those early years in Deni and then again throughout high school, when people just kept telling me I was gay. I think I was waiting for the opportunity to tell them. It was my news after all.

Obviously the hints kept coming, mainly relating to my general behaviour and interests from birth.

I was camp as fuck.

All my friends were women.

I wanted to be a theatre performer.

I used to ask Mum to tape Queer As Folk for me every Friday night then drop me at The Peel.

And if all that wasn’t enough, the internet search history was probably a red (rainbow?) flag. Not many straight dudes regularly peruse guyssuckingdicks.com.

It wasn’t until I started dating though that I ended up bursting out of the closet in a cloud of glitter with a couple of high-kicks and a shimmy, drunk at a family dinner.

Mum and Dad almost flat-lined from lack of surprise. I was so offended.

In Melbourne the homophobia was far less prevalent. In fact I was shocked when it would surface, which sometimes made it worse. Things often sting a bit more when you let your guard down, so I learned to not let it down very often at all. I became preternaturally defensive. Not that it helped much.

I remember walking through Flinders Street Station one day, older now, around 19. I was striding down a platform to meet a friend when I heard it again: “Faggot!”. I looked up and was met by a familiar scene: two guys snickering as they walked away. Chins up, chests out.

I’m not sure what it was that gave me away that afternoon. My choice of scarf, perhaps? Winter was approaching so I’d knitted something new.

Not long afterwards I was walking home from work up chic Little Collins Street. No scarf this time, just a plain, black suit. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man cross the road towards me but thought nothing of it, until the onslaught came.

Two swift punches to the nose and mouth, followed by the familiar, “Faggot!” as he marched back across the road and down the hill, teeming with rage.

That one didn’t have his chin up or his chest out. He was struggling with his own demons by the looks of things.

The scars are still with me. Literally, I was left with a noticeably larger top lip, which eventually, being the eternal optimist (well, kinda), I managed to fashion into rather a fabulous stage persona.

Prince Pout III: The Lord of Lechery, Queen of Collingwood and Patron Saint of Ultra Trashbags.

With lips that could launch 1000 dicks.

An embrace of all the things they didn’t like about me, and some that I didn’t like about myself.

Good years followed, so I won’t bother going into detail. No one wants to read a happy story. And now I live in a small town again. Alice Springs. Smack bang in the Red Centre.

How I dreaded the thought of being back in the closed-minded countryside when I first moved here. Feared the prospect of falling victim to discrimination and violence again.

But the NT is far more accepting that I ever could have imagined. I’d be more comfortable kissing my boyfriend at the local watering hole here than in half the bars in Melbourne. And Prince Pout regularly treads the boards in Alice Springs, Darwin and Adelaide to acclaim.

My big, lop-sided lips are a constant reminder of past vitriol though. Vitriol and lingering regret.

I wish I’d been braver back then. Been someone who had paved a blazing trail and stood up and spoken out and made life easier for those who came after. I just couldn’t see how the world would ever accept me, how it would ever accept any of us, so I hid.

But attitudes towards homosexuality clearly aren’t static, and Australia is progressing as we make ourselves known. As we permeate the artistic and cultural landscape of the nation.

I love being a part of that now. Being unapologetically gay.

Where once I was silent, now I tell my story. Wear my scars on my sleeve.

And so far, people seem to be enjoying it.