I picked out a number of quotes, and these span a number of important topics: on growing up; desire; backlash and bullying; isolation; religion; coming out; bi-erasure; race; relationships; conforming to queer stereotypes; and on growing older.
Full quotes below.
On growing up:
Few people grow up queer in Australia: we're not allowed to. Heterosexuality guards its supremacy. [114]
(More on growing up):
Some things I wish I’d had, growing up queer in Australia: clothes that fit, less acne, wavy hair like the local hot white surfer boys, queer role models, stories that spoke to me, gay porn. Those last three things—queer people, stories and depictions of queer sex — proved much harder to find, and I craved them with a desperation that bordered on hunger. [i]
Growing up queer for me was fear: fear embedded so deeply it felt natural. It’s taken me years to peel back the scar tissue, to find out what was there in the first place. And I’m still scared. Do I get to belong now? [84]
On desire:
Alone, words are dangerous, terrible things. [29]
(More on desire and media):
This is something I still struggle with as a 36-year old! Do I just wanna look like them or fuck them?
Honestly, I will say this: across the board, I’ve never felt like I fit in to one place, ever. That includes my bisexual identity. [157]
It doesn’t start with a kiss. It starts with a look and your stomach going back flips. You don’t need to kiss someone to know that you are attracted to them. [269]
Call Me by Your Name is interesting in that it takes male queer desire and wanting, traditionally associated with violence, corruption, infection, and monstrousness (if it was depicted at all) and places it within the language of mainstream feminine desire. [279]
I thought how nice it would be to talk to something, to be in conversation but not have someone talk back. [277]
Among other things, the Hays Code had decreed that homosexual relationships not be coveted as happy, healthy, or successful, so for decades there were only four ways for a gay relationship to end: murder, madness, (straight) marriage, or suicide. It took until the 1980s for a film about lesbians to have a happy ending. [270]
There’s a scene of gay sex in that movie that formed—still forms—part of my sexual fantasizing.
Isn’t it so interesting how that stuff imprints?
Exactly. [160]
On backlash:
You don’t want to be the thing people tease you about.
Exactly. Over of the other things I was scared of was that friends of mine would say I told you so. The shame that other people knew this thing about me before I knew it. I hated that. [149]
(More on backlashes and bullying):
One of the homo-police ground my hand into the asphalt with the heel of his shoe, another attempted to use the back of my neck as a lemon squeezer, kneading shattered glass into my nape. There was no fight. There was no flight. Only pure submission.
Feelings on worthlessness and humiliation reigned supreme. The tone the bullies used when they inflicted that word on me made my heart tighten. I figured that if I felt like scum whenever they used that word on me, I must be scum.
I am a fag. [265]
If your body is different to other people’s, then by some weird logic they own it. They get the right to speak about it. I started school as a fat boy and that didn’t change. But in any other context than school, this would probably seem ridiculous. I look at photos of myself from high school and I don’t look fat at all. Just not athletic. [180]
I remember driving down Stirling Highway in Perth and it clocked in my head, this sudden realization. And it felt like realizing I had cancer. I was driving and crying, because all of a sudden there was a thing inside me. I didn’t choose it, I couldn’t get rid of it, I couldn’t control it. [149]
I have never heard the word queer. I have heard these words: gay, poofta, faggot, homo, lezzo, dyke. They are used to cut people. No one I know is queer. They must all live on the city, gathered by the coastline like shorebirds; winged creatures. [53]
On isolation:
I had not a single clue that gays and lesbians even existed. I’m part of (hopefully) the last generation of kids to grow up thinking they were the first, or indeed the only ones to be attracted to the same gender. It was a profoundly lonely experience. [268]
(More on isolation):
As a reader, I look for self recognition in other people’s stories. For queer people it’s especially important, because while other forms of prejudice — like racism —can make you feel just as alone and isolated, ethnic minorities like me go home to families and communities who share our backgrounds and experiences, and affirm who we are. Queer kids growing up typically don’t have that. I didn’t. [xi]
As a child I had always wanted a friend. [300]
By fifteen, I had become a textbook, first-generation academic overachiever. My world turned grey again. [64]
I didn’t mind being nerdy. I avoided sports and the gym, because I told myself I could never be or have anything like that—glimpsed is bodies and snippets of locker run banter posed a threat I couldn’t yet name. [304]
On religion:
The school chaplain had already been pursuing my soul for years, hammering on about sin and salvation. I wasn’t convinced. There didn’t seem anything worth forgiving, until sex came along. Uneasiness at thirteen was turning to shame at fourteen.
(More on religion):
First shame then forgiveness. You don’t have to be a young queer for this to work. There’s a trace of self-disgust in most of us that can be worked up into shame. But a young homosexual is particularly easy pickings, fearful of himself, his family, and the disapproval of his world.
Where does shame come from? I look back to my childhood and can’t remember anything being said. All I heard from the pulpit were grim hints. [7]
On coming out:
I resented the idea of coming out. It wasn’t that I was introverted, or that i felt like my romances were shameful, but that I loathed the idea of being pigeonholed. The social narratives around homosexuality had always left me with the impression that coming out was more than a courtesy. It was an expectation: like taking a ticket to join a queue or picking up litter; it was the responsibility of every good citizen to keep things neat and tidy. [229]
(More on coming out):
On a September morning three years ago, Appa called me, crying on the phone. Appa sobbed. He asked why I was choosing this.
I choked on the silence and pain, unsure of where to take the conversation. No amount of YouTube videos and queer think pieces prepared me for this moment. But I was not naive enough to think they would. It does not get better. It just gets lost in communication. [128]
But this white, western LGBTIQA+ discourse didn’t anticipate the reaction of a Catholic Vietnamese woman. It didn’t anticipate that, for some minorities, the closet might be the better place to be. That the closet is a safe space, a tactical move, and even a powerful, fluid space for some. That the imposition of western queer values on a person whose non-white culture left them unprepared for coming out ritual can cause pain rather than liberation. [67]
Movies and TV don’t much show what it’s like coming out to a non-white mum. There was no sympathy or an everything is going to be okay moment. There was shock, confusion, denial. [65]
On bi-erasure:
To some gay people, being bi seems easy. We have the supposed luxury of being chameleons, the privilege of choosing from the entire buffet rather than being confined to a corner table, as if sex were simply a smorgasbord and falling in love a matter of calculated odds.
The truth is, being bisexual means being invisible, especially if you are in a monogamous relationship, whether you paint yourself like a rainbow or a white picket fence. [230]
(More on erasure):
Mum couldn’t understand why I bothered to tell her I was bi—I was in a relationship with a man, so why did it matter? At various points in the relationship, I alternated between thinking I was a lesbian and thinking I was asexual. [18]
I soon realized that being queer is a full time job: having to correct people’s assumption that you had a boyfriend; being presumed to be straight; overhearing flip and degrading comments about you; having to censor affectionate behavior with your partner to avoid the leering off certain men; pulling up friends when they were thoughtlessly negative or dismissive. [318]
“I think who you end up with determines your sexuality.” Cue me opening a discussion on romantic, sexual, and gender spectrums. [68]
On race:
Coming out to me was both coming out as being gay and coming out as being gay and Chinese. Those two things can’t be separated. They cannot be untangled from my experience of the gay world. It’s a complicated issue because nothing triggers gay men more than the accusation that they’re racist. [146]
(More on race):
I dream of creating space and having a queer presence within the Tamil community. I am tired of resisting to be represented.
However, I am nervous. To fully embrace my Tamil and queer identities, I need to make myself visible. I need to be visibly Tamil in queer spaces, and dare to be visibly queer in Tamil spaces. I don’t want other people to have authority over my Tamilness or my queerness. I know this community has not been made for me.
But I am not going to apologize for being here. I am not going to apologize for existing. [130]
Racism only hurts when you actually want to be part of something. I remember going to this gay bar in Canberra... over two hours, no one would look at me, no one would talk to me.
Which makes you question your worth and attractiveness; all of that stuff.
You’re constantly second-guessing. [146]
When I was growing up, even I had that feeling: I don’t find other Asian men attractive. But that changed when I went on this long trip to China and found myself surrounded by other Asian men. They stopped being Asian men and they started just being men. [147]
On relationship and family:
Romance is a narrative of power. Falling in love with Paul meant that what I wanted (him, his attention, his affection) subsumed my own needs (agency, independence, self determination) so completely that I allowed a relationship to develop with the power differential skewed entirely in his favor. [231]
(More on relationship and family):
A lifetime of hetero conditioning had set me up for relationships based almost entirely on conflict, yet this was pleasant, comfortable, easy, nice. I didn’t know what to do. [233]
‘How do you know you love me?’
‘I don’t, I just do,’
‘And you’re okay with that? That not knowing?’
‘Sure’ [281]
Despite my mother’s protestations that she had no idea I was a lesbian, she quite obviously had suspected something and had conspired with this other woman to throw their two ugly duckling queer kids together in the hope of creating the beautiful swan of heterosexual mariage. It failed. [271]
Until I started writing this essay, I had never reflected on how important queer people are to keeping families functioning. [20]
It is possible to despise and fear the thing you pity. It is possible to understand that what my stepfather said and did to me as a child came from a place of utter weakness. [220]
Romance and baby-making for same sex couples are not necessarily connected. Less like hot sex, more like worming the cat. But it did get the job done. Twice. [107]
It’s a long way to Madrid, and even there i won’t be home. There’s still so much more unpacking to do. But despite the uncertainties, we’re optimistic about our future. In either world, or in both. [298]
‘You’re not special,’ my sister reminded me, ‘just because you have HIV. It’s an epidemic.’ [226]
Because I was afraid of HIV, I saw it everywhere, and engaged with it nowhere. [224]
On conforming to queer stereotypes:
There are two main, acceptable versions of your story: 1. It is awful here; I’m really struggling; please help me get out of here because I obviously couldn’t do it without your incredible, glitter-shitting self. And 2. It was awful there. I really struggled. I’m so glad I am out now and that I’m allowed to shit glitter almost anytime I want.
These stories are not necessarily lies. They’re just oversimplified. [111]
(More on queer-conforming):
I didn’t want to dress in ways that announced queerness, and for that I suffered the judgement of some prouder queers. I was considered, in those circles, ‘not gay enough’, which was confusing. [3]
Ten years ago, I would probably have written this as a fairly standard growing up gay in the country story. 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 recognizable, rather than being something that was in itself interesting. [177]
So I hung around instead with the freaks and geeks, goths and punks and pixie and nerds, because with them I felt more often than not that my sexuality was just another dimension of me: not a flag to fly, or an aberration I had to justify, or something I had to think about all the time. [230]
‘Look, I just don’t know,’ I said. ‘In a room full of gay people I feel straight. And in a room full of straight people...’
‘... you feel like vomiting?’ my friend finished helpfully. [86]
On growing older:
There’s a freedom in being able to enjoy yourself, unapologetically, regardless of your age. I too find myself becoming more playful the older I grow. Worrying about others’ expectations means less when you’ve already announced who you authentically are. [317]
It’s the week after the plebiscite. Despite the confident lesbian life I am living now, I was still carrying around an 80s-kid view of Australia. Believing that outside my little protective bubble the great masses disapproved, thought I was abnormal, lesser, sinful, wrong. A perv and a lemon. I hadn’t dared hope that my country had moved on from homophobia to affirmation. [169]
For queer people, adolescence often stretches beyond teenage years. Most of my queer friends, in their twenties, live life with the fervent excitement of delayed adolescence, of ascending to yourself long after puberty has passed; of needing to regress to progress, to go back to your adolescence in order to grow up, telling the story correctly this time. [39]
It is one of the great oddities of life that as you grow older, you realize the past is not fixed, that ripples of various historic events are still moving through our culture. [270]
I don’t believe, necessarily, that people are born queer, or that I was born trans. I think I was born free from anything and then the stories accumulated on me and some of them turned out to be incorrect. I made my own attempts to write convincing stories too. None of these stories was objectively true, then or now, but the more I learnt the more I had at my disposal to understand myself. [39]
I always knew, but I didn’t have the words. Because when I was growing up, queer was not included in the acronym. It has not yet been reclaimed by the people against whom it had, for years, been leveled as an insult. I don’t remember when and how I first came across it, only how well the word seemed to fit: it was, and is, a word without expectations, with undiluted difference, a word the can be everything and every way. [186]
A word can be a wonderful thing. It can be a container. A mirror. It can click everything into place. [186]
I want to tell people all the time: there is no deadline for growing up, no submission date for your life’s narrative. You can work it out now or later. You can reveal yourself in parts, or as a whole, and make revisions. For better or worse, sooner or later, life conspires to reveal you to yourself, and this is growing up. [37]
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