Archer Magazine #17 - The HOME issue (July 2022)

ISSUE Nº 17

A MAGAZINE ABOUT SEX, GENDER AND IDENTITY

HOME

SAFETY + SELF-CARE • QUEER MOB • MIGRANCY + BELONGING HOUSING + HOMELESSNESS • CHOSEN FAMILY • STRIPPING + SEX WORK + Q&A WITH MELISSA FEBOS

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QLife provides anonymous and free peer support and referral for LGBTIQ+ people in Australia wanting to discuss sexuality, identity, gender, bodies, feelings, and/or relationships. Connecting with community can be a hopeful and encouraging experience.

You can call, webchat, or access online resources and referrals for yourself or someone you care about through the Qlife service.

Dedicated peer supporters are on the other end of the conversation ready to listen, guide you to other helpful resources, and provide information about local supports you might like to reach out to.

Call: 1800 184 527 Chat: https://qlife.org.au/

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‘Captures the longing, the wounds, and the joys of growing up queer and working class in 1980s Milan.’

Jennifer Down, author of Bodies of Light 20

CONTENTS ISSUE Nº 17

PAGE.8 Q&A with MELISSA FEBOS: ANNA KATE BLAIR p.14 Putting down roots: Bridget Harilaou p.20 Losing my religion: Sharon Angelici PAGE.24 WONDRA

p.40 Rethinking the housing system: Anonymous

p.46 OutRage: Latoya Rule and Dominic Guerrera p.52 Migrancy and belonging: CB Mako

PAGE.56 THE HUXLEYS FASHION SPREAD

p.74 How to masturbate in Campbelltown: Candy Bowers p.80 Queering repronormativity: Bree Turner

p.86 Slut faming, sex work and belonging: Kay Esse PAGE.92 US

p.110 A new foundation: Marcus Hough p.116 Safe and sound: Bo Bickmore

p.124 A place to exhale: Chris Cheers

FOUNDER + PUBLISHER Amy Middleton EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Roz Bellamy ART + DESIGN CURATOR Alexis Desaulniers-Lea LAYOUT DESIGNER Christopher Boševski SUB-EDITOR Greta Parry IMAGE CURATOR + DIGITAL SPECIALIST Hailey Moroney ONLINE EDITOR EK Lewis DEPUTY ONLINE EDITOR Dani Leever EVENTS CO-ORDINATOR Dani Weber

COVER IMAGE: Rona Bar & Ofek Avshalom (Fotómetro) COVER PHOTO: Anastasia Skorodumova and Andy Ptashka Visit us online: www.archermagazine.com.au For advertising and other enquiries: info@archermagazine.com.au HUGE THANKS TO: Karen Field, Ali Hogg, Nerida Nettelback, Nigel Quirk, Rachel Chapman, Jess Desaulniers-Lea and the healthcare workers around the world who have cared for all of us during this pandemic.

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land that we live and work on, and pay respect to their Elders past and present.

Printed in Australia by Printgraphics Pty Ltd. © 2022. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission from the publisher. Views expressed in Archer Magazine are those of the respective contributors and not necessarily shared by Archer Magazine.

Archer Magazine is presented in partnership with Drummond Street Services.

Photo by: RACHEL CHAPMAN

EDITOR’S NOTE HOME IS A COMPLICATED CONCEPT for many of us in the LGBTQ+ community. For us to thrive, we need to feel safe and comfortable – physically and emotionally – and to live freely and openly. This isn’t always possible.

Home and humanity go hand in hand, but unfortunately politics and cruel policies prevent many people and communities from accessing their basic needs and rights.

Issue 17 takes this complexity on, rather than shying away from it. It celebrates queer mob’s resistance, survival and community love. It follows a journey of migration, along with pressures to assimilate. It explores queer chosen family and belonging for those who grew up without a sense of safety. It delves into unsafe housing, family violence, homelessness and activism around housing. It acknowledges that for some of us, our best lives are lived outside of convention and tradition.

There’s comic relief in Candy Bowers’ piece about trying to masturbate in her family home. We hear from psychologist Chris Cheers on how to build self-acceptance and soothe ourselves when times are tough. Award-winning writer Melissa Febos reflects on her experiences in a range of different homes. There is gorgeous artwork from The Huxleys (and this issue comes with a poster featuring one of their images), Wondra and Fotómetro, among others. The front cover is a striking image of Anastasia Sko-

rodumova and Andy Ptashka, a couple photographed in their home for Fotómetro’s series Us.

Our design and images team – Alexis Desaulniers-Lea, Christopher Boševski and Hailey Moroney – have done an incredible job of commissioning and sourcing art that encapsulates all the nuances of home and what it means to different people. I am also filled with gratitude for my publisher, Amy Middleton, and sub-editor, Greta Parry, for their support with shaping the beautiful words in this issue so that all these vital voices are heard.

I hope you read this issue somewhere that is safe and comfortable for you, even if you don’t live there, and that it brings you feelings of cosiness, pride and belonging, wherever you are.

Roz Bellamy, Archer Magazine’s editor-in-chief, has been a member of the Archer Magazine team since 2018.

Roz is also a writer and a PhD candidate. Their memoir, MOOD, is forthcoming with Wakefield Press in 2023.

Roz Bellamy Editor-in-chief

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Issue Nº 14

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ISSUE Nº 15

I’m here for you.

Let’s talk about it.

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SAFETY + SELF-CARE • QUEER MOB • MIGRANCY + BELONGING HOUSING + HOMELESSNESS • CHOSEN FAMILY • STRIPPING + SEX WORK + Q&A WITH MELISSA FEBOS

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MELISSA FEBOS Q&A with: ANNA KATE BLAIR Images: SANDRA L. DYAS

Melissa Febos is the author of Whip Smart, Abandon Me, Girlhood and Body Work. She has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Lambda Literary Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and her books have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Melissa’s work explores subjects including addiction, sex work, psychoanalysis, family, sexuality and romantic love, considering what it means to inhabit a gendered body in a patriarchal society.

Melissa is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, known for her dedication to students and commitment to the transformative possibilities of personal narrative. It’s difficult to formulate questions for Melissa because she interrogates herself, relentlessly, through writing, and I’ve found so many answers in her essays. She shows characteristic generosity in her responses to the questions that I finally pose, expanding on her relationship to the concept of home for Archer Magazine.

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last two years.

So, while I love cohabitation, especially with my wife, I need a room of my own in order to work and wonder and drift in the way that awareness of another person’s needs and affect can prohibit. I like to be able to see leaves from my windows. I like to cook giant pots of soup and eat it for days and days so that I can feel nourished and also spend the least possible amount of time cooking and cleaning up each day. I am a secret raccoon, which is to say, my spaces look very tidy, but there are piles of shoes in the closet and I’m known for eating out of the trash without a second thought.

ANNA KATE BLAIR. You moved to Iowa relatively recently, I believe, with your wife, Donika Kelly. Does Iowa feel like home yet? If not, where or what does?

MELISSA FEBOS. I was worried about leaving the coast, because I’ve been able to smell the ocean for my whole life, and to stand at the shore and experience the marvellous existential shrinking of standing beside something that feels infinite.

Like, would I be lost to the horrible feeling that I am at the centre of my life without that rescaling? Thankfully, I have found the sky here to suffice in its infinity. The sky here is so big! It does feel like a kind of home. As do the big, rustling trees, the swarming bugs, the quiet nights. I grew up in a place that was green and lush and quiet and dark and where the dirt feels clean the way the dirt here feels clean, so I think I’ve been able to feel at home here pretty quickly, despite having been in New York City for so long before coming here.

AKB. What qualities do you look for in a home? What is your relationship to domesticity?

MF. I think I would have had a different answer for you before the pandemic, and before I moved here.

New York is a place where so much of life is lived outside of one’s home; it’s designed to be that way, to centre public spaces. But here there is a different allocation of space. And I’ve spent more time indoors than ever before in my life. My life is usually punctuated by travel, but less so the

AKB. I think, often, of relationships to childhood and adolescence in terms of the phrases ‘you can never go home’ and ‘you can always go home,’ which I find are recurring refrains across twentieth-century literature and music. Do you think your own relationship to your youth tends towards one of these positions or lies somewhere between them?

MF. One of the reasons that I love personal narrative and memoir is that it offers the option of creating a space to go back to. I think of memoir as a kind of diorama of the past, a theatre of memory that I can return to with more agency than I had as a child, in which I can revise my understanding of and relationship to what happened, and to my past selves.

AKB. Often queer people have fraught relationships to the idea of home due to growing up in hostile environments or with families who don’t recognise, or reject their queerness. You’ve written, though, that your mother is also bisexual, and your own relationship to queerness doesn’t read as one of rupture; queerness isn’t sensationalised or presented as novelty in your descriptions of youth. Is there anything about your upbringing that you now consider as distinctly queer?

MF. Well, as you said, my mom is queer. My family is also biracial and multi-ethnic, and I have multiple stepparents – all of which feels like a more

general kind of queering of traditional notions of family, at least nuclear, heterosexual models. My upbringing was mostly queer in the sense that I was able to identify myself as queer as soon as it occurred to me to do so and it was never a point of contention in my family or household. What a tremendous gift. I knew it was at the time, and my gratitude for that space to grow and develop my own identity only increases over time.

AKB. You moved out of your mother’s house just before you turned 17. How do you think this shaped your perception of home as a concept?

MF. I moved out as a teen more because my town and school didn’t feel like the right home anymore. I felt very bonded to the home I grew up in, that house and landscape and my family. I do think that leaving so young and moving into a different space, one that was largely defined by queer community, allowed me to expand my concept of home from that of a geographic or domestic space to one of a community space – a home that resides in individuals, sure, but also in a web of care and connection that transcended individuals, that stretched beyond my network into a hypothetical space.

I started to understand that I could belong among queer people everywhere, not just in Boston, or New York, but anywhere that queer people were. Later on, I had a similar experience of getting sober and being part of a sober community.

AKB. There is a clear sense of place in all your books – the claustrophobia and small spaces of New York in Whip Smart; the sense of oceanic space in Abandon Me; the streets of New England in Girlhood – but this isn’t something that I’ve seen you asked about often. Could you talk a bit about how place informs your relationship to yourself and to your writing? Is psychic proximity and distance shaped by geographical proximity and distance or do they operate independently?

MF. These are inextricable to me. I think it’s impossible to connect with a place, a physical environment, and not have my psyche begin to see the images and sensory details of that place become symbolic for my experience there, and elsewhere. The water and rocks and trees and animals of the place I grew up are infused in my mind with the feelings of my childhood. I think that’s why so many folks have hard relationships with their places of origin, or cannot leave those places.

When I was a much younger writer, I devalued this phenomena in terms of my art. I put the idea of invention at the top of the hierarchy of creativity, like, it was always better and more impressive to use images far away from one’s own experience, like it would be taking a shortcut to use the images already embedded in my consciousness. It’s ridiculous to me now, clearly a symptom of growing up indoctrinated to a white coloniser’s perspective, the perspective of so much of the Western canon of literature. I was effectively cutting myself off from my greatest wisdom. As soon as, and

only when, I yielded to the systems of images and landscapes that were my own, that had shaped me, my writing started to get good.

AKB. What kind of relationship do you have to the places where you grew up? In Girlhood, I think, there’s a clear divide between the sites of youth and the sites of adulthood. Are these places representative of the past to you or have you developed a different relationship to them in adulthood?

MF. I’ve had a continuous relationship to Cape Cod, where I grew up, for all of my life, so that relationship is layered the way any long relationship is: my memories and associations are piled up and in conversation with each other. I will say that first impressions are often the strongest, or have the strongest pull. So, I will always feel those oldest feelings first when I cross the bridge over the canal, that particular mix of sorrow and sweetness that I associate with home. I will always feel as though I am returning to my youngest self, the rattle of the smallest nesting doll inside me.

AKB. You dedicate Body Work to your students and I’ve seen you note elsewhere that you wrote the book that you wished that you could give to your students. I’m curious about your relationship to university settings, which are often difficult places for queer people, for feminists, for most marginalised groups. They’re often particularly difficult places for students who fall into these categories. Do you feel at home in the university? As a lifelong feminist and queer woman, what’s your own relationship to these institutions like?

MF. Yes and no. I am a nerd and I like constraint and structure, and the structure of school at the university level has been a really safe place for

me, and a fruitful one, though I hated school as a teen so much that I dropped out. As a queer woman, I will always have an ambivalent relationship to it, to any institution of the State in particular. It wasn’t built for me! It has exploited me in the past, and will do so now if I comply too much with the pressure to give it my best energy.

I also stand to benefit from it quite a bit at this stage in my career. So, I try to take what nourishes and leave the rest, and that’s what I tell my students, too. Let it be a site of work we might not do otherwise; let it be a resource that supports us in our work, but let us not get distracted by the (very understandable) urge to transform the institution. It will always exhaust us before we change it. You know, I’ve definitely spent a lot of time trying to do equity work at the institutional level and mostly what it has taught me is how entrenched our institutions are in the hierarchies and structures that shaped them. I find I am more effective at making my classrooms radical spaces where my students and I can rethink our relationships to work, art and institutions, and strategise how to cultivate a sustainable practice of art that takes into account the many forms of justice we want for this country [the United States].

AKB. You write, in Body Work, of art as religious, “a form of work that is also a form of worship”.

If writing occupies this space in your life, as something sacred, an act of making experience divine, what is it that occupies the space of home, of something that’s grounding, earthly rather than celestial?

MF. Oh, it’s also writing, of course. It is that work and worship that grounds me, that helps tether me to the past and present and keeps me available for my relationships with other people. My experience of the celestial is that it can be the most grounding – it reminds me where I am in the cosmos.

ANNA KATE BLAIR is a writer, art historian and Aries. Her work has appeared in publications including Landfall, Meanjin, Litro, The Appendix and Reckoning. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and currently lives in Narrm.

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PUTTING DOWN ROOTS Buying a house with a friend is a unique way to subvert cis-heteronormative monogamy and the nuclear family.

Words: BRIDGET HARILAOU Images: SUZANNE PHOENIX

“SO YOU two are, like, together?”

My usual response is, “As much as I’d love a girlfriend, alas, no.”

So why are my very-much-platonic straight best friend and I often assumed to be a cute lesbian couple? Well, we recently bought a house together.

It usually doesn’t occur to people that two best friends (and staunch feminists) could subvert monogamy, marriage and the nuclear family all on their own.

IT’S NOT THEIR fault for assuming. We have all been saturated with the capitalist love story of our time: get married, buy a house and have kids – in that order! And only with your One True Love. Any deviation, like single parenthood or polyamory, is stigmatised.

While the fight for marriage equality was a huge win for queer rights, showing an incredible shift towards LGBTQIA+ acceptance and liberation, it still enshrined monogamy and the nuclear family as the pinnacle of personhood. Queer theory offers answers to the political question: What makes queerness so threatening to conservatives?

The true power of queerness and transness is in our ability to live, grow and thrive in a flourishing community that exists outside the confines of the nuclear family. This trait of queerness reminds me so much of my Pappou’s garden – an unruly yet aesthetic plot in the inner city, so different from the surrounding suburban backyards.

Many Greek migrants who settled in big Australian cities took their urban, concrete environments and turned them into carefully tilled and tended mini-farms, olive trees and horta taking root, mironia sprouting up through the cracks in the homemade concrete paths. Queers tend to the concept of family in much the same nurturing way.

Chosen family fills the void left by our refusal to reproduce family and labour in a heteronormative way. In contrast, the institution of marriage has always served an economic function.

Women were (and still are) traded and sold for dowries or land. Their virginity and fidelity safeguarded the inheritance of wealth to male children. Today, the nuclear family still serves to prop up industrialised urban centres.

The unpaid domestic labour of women facilitates the reproduction of the working class, and these women often suffer greatly from poverty after divorce or the death of a spouse.

Women live on less superannuation in retirement due to time off from the paid workforce as carers (for both children and the elderly), and older women are the fastest growing cohort of homeless people.

This prospective future horrified me, and so did my relationships with men, particularly as I grew into my queer identity. Slowly but surely, I felt myself gravitating away from the narratives of monogamy and the nuclear family and found myself as a polyamorous queer person.

I have never wanted to move in with a partner or change the dynamic of my independence, and I continue to feel alienated by mainstream discourse around romantic relationships. None of my romantic partners have had even remotely similar financial goals or savings, and my romantic relationships have never been central to my life goals. I have ended three relationships over the years, all for the same reason – one of us was moving countries and I didn’t want to do that together.

My friendships and chosen family are much more central to my life. They are my systems of support, the people who know who I am without explanation. As a survivor of family violence, I had to keep my biological family at a distance for many years.

I spent large portions of my childhood dodging blows and objects, and eventually emotional and verbal abuse too. Now I know my brother was experiencing the symptoms of undiagnosed and untreated schizoaffective disorder, but the lack of protection and support from my parents resulted in a trauma and betrayal that many of my romantic partners have replicated. In my experience, partners come and go, but my real friends have stayed constant throughout it all. They have stood by me in ways that partners and my biological family have not.

THREE YEARS AGO, after a conversation with one of my best friends about housing prices and our mutual goal of buying a home, it

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seemed only natural that I send her a tentative message afterwards: Wouldn’t it be cheaper if I moved to Melbourne, and we did this whole thing together?

So we did. We trialled living together for six months, signed a Cohabitation Agreement that detailed all the terms of our shared home (we call it our house prenup), and had various meetings with our mortgage broker, conveyancer, banker and building inspector. We went to a few auctions and, in the end, bought our house online for much cheaper than we thought – probably because none of the boomers knew how to log in to Zoom.

It was an unbelievable moment for me. I was only 26 and had been fired after the first wave of Covid-19. For my entire life, up until then, my family had been renters.

GROWING UP, after the only mortgage they ever had almost sent them bankrupt, my parents always told me to hide the fact that we rented our house.

The dire state of my family’s finances had been kept from me until I was a teenager. I still cringe at the concept of debt from that vivid first conversation about just how much trouble we were in. It was only then I realised how much my childhood was built on keeping up appearances rather than our actual finances.

I have saved obsessively since that conversation, from my first job teaching piano at the age of 14 until the day the bank took the deposit for my house.

It was a moment of sheer relief for me when, after seven years on the priority disability housing waitlist, my family were finally able to move into a small public housing unit that was accessible for my mum as a wheelchair user. Suddenly, all the money that I’d been saving to pay for their rent in retirement was no longer necessary.

Now they had escaped the private rental sector, they would live comfortably on their pensions and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

It was only then I allowed myself to think about what to do with the money. It was all supposed to be for my parents, but for the first time, it was mine. It was the money I had made teaching piano as a teen. The few thousand dollars my dad gave to me when he set up my first bank account, which I knew would have been incredibly hard for him to save.

My Centrelink payments and the wages I earned at a tutoring centre while I was a student. My scholarship money from university. Exactly half of all Maybe it’s Chinese-Indonesian culture or the way I was raised, but there was never a question in my mind of who would take care of my parents when they were elderly. I would make sure they were looked after. The fear I held of my parents’ situation as pensioners with no super, no savings and no home gave me the only financial motivation I have ever needed: save them from homelessness.

I still remember how my mother cried every single time she saw me after I moved out of home because my brother needed their only spare room.

I didn’t want her to have to face the devastation of not being able to provide housing for our family ever again.

Thoughts of their housing situation weighed on my mind. What would they do if they could no longer afford Sydney’s skyrocketing rents? How would they survive?

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my wages for the last five years, from full-time jobs in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

I had never spent anything on myself other than what I needed to survive, moving every year to a new city, following my career wherever it took me. I indulged in one international holiday every year, because travelling is the one thing I love doing that costs a lot of money.

Not everything went into my savings. I paid for my mum’s medication and a trip to Perth for her friend’s wedding. I was always generous with my community. I paid off car fines, bought people tickets to see Lizzo (back when music festivals were a thing) and shouted endless coffees and lunches. When my friends needed money, I just sent it, and never asked for it back. When the pandemic first hit, I set aside $500 to give to people in need. Through my work with the Anticolonial Asian Alliance, which builds relationships of solidarity between Asian and First Nations communities, the money ended up going to a First Nations family.

I’m not writing this as a selfaggrandising treatise about my spending habits. I want to explain that the way I spend money is shaped by my experience of familial poverty.

My trauma response to poverty was to save my house deposit.

Everyone’s coping mechanisms and responses to trauma are different – not everyone becomes a super-saver with a home to call their own. In fact, many people experiencing trauma or poverty are funnelled into prison, without access to the mental healthcare or housing support they need.

Saving on its own is not a solution to poverty, nor a possibility when living in poverty. It would be a capitalist lie to share this story as though it were.

Poverty is not a choice – I know that to my core. Property prices continue to rise to such extremes across Australia while wages stagnate, and our workforce becomes increasingly casualised. Public housing units continue to be sold off all over the country and turned into luxury apartment blocks for millionaire investors to profit from. The working class continue to struggle through this pandemic as rent steadily increases and government pandemic support for workers and the unemployed remains laughably minimal.

THIS IS NOT a rags-to-riches, hustle-culture think piece.

I am a trans person of colour and a survivor of family violence. My family home was a war zone in which I constantly awaited another barrage of attacks. In one of the last emails my brother sent me before he passed away from cancer, he fondly remembered how we learned to solve Rubik’s cubes together. It breaks my heart to say that Rubik’s cubes only remind me of the time he threw one so hard at my head that when I avoided it just in time, it shattered into dozens of pieces, leaving behind a dent in the wall.

It took me years to realise how unsafe my childhood home had been, and many more years of therapy to finally experience the emotions I had buried to survive. Living without a safe place to rest and grow, with no financial safety net, is a trauma that will always be with me.

It is a stark truth to me that people need permanent, safe, free homes.

To thrive, everyone deserves the reassurance that they won’t end up homeless in their old age, or be forced to live in a volatile, violent place. They need to know that their gender identity and their culture will be respected at

home with people they have chosen to live with. I just happen to be one of the lucky few people to have found this reality for myself.

THIS LUNAR NEW YEAR, I forgot to organise anything. There were over 10,000 new cases of Covid-19 that day, my family was interstate and time had lost all meaning. I was only able to gather, at short notice, my housemates and some takeaway food. When I got home with an inordinate amount of dumplings, my best friend had decorated our little dining table with red paper aeroplanes.

“They’re not exactly traditional, but they’re the only red thing I had.”

It was a delightful touch to an unplanned Lunar New Year celebration.

It gave me the sense that this home had more to offer than I could ever have imagined. A place to feel emotionally secure and tethered. Space to grow, as a person, as a family, in whatever direction I like. Somewhere both physical and emotional, both present and future.

I guess I’m finally putting down roots in one place instead of getting ready to jet off to some new city like I do every other year. I am reminded again of my Pappou’s garden: a beautifully cultivated veggie patch surrounded by flowers, with vegetables growing in perfectly plotted rows.

Trees that have been cultivated for years in order to fruit regularly. A tiled patio surrounded by re-used household items masquerading as flowerpots – gumboots, a motorcycle helmet, a fish tank.

All acquired in different parts of life, by different people, with a renewed purpose. It’s all still there, thriving, in a new light.

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BRIDGET HARILAOU is an agender freelance writer living on Wurundjeri land. They write extensively about politics and race. You can find more of their work in The Age, SBS Voices and Overland.

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LOSIN MY RELIG

NG Church might be a home and community for some congregants, but for others, it’s a source of heartbreak.

GION

Words: SHARON ANGELICI Images: ANNIE SPRATT

I WAS FIVE years old the first time the Catholic Church crushed my soul.

My mother worked for the church, and I spent most of my afternoons with the parish priest when morning kindergarten classes ended. I loved him. He taught me how to be Catholic, and when I told him I wanted to be a priest like him, he broke my heart with the truth: “Girls can’t become priests.”

The image of him and the way he said those words are etched in my memory. I cried because being myself wasn’t good enough for the Catholic Church.

I’ve spent the last 48 years trying to come to terms with the rejection I felt. I tried to be good enough by following the rules and playing along. I tried to teach my children that loving a higher power was the key to feeling balanced, but I’m not sure I ever believed it myself.

IN 2015, THE SUPREME COURT of the United States granted marriage equality. I celebrated with my queer family members, while at the same time struggling in silence with my own bisexuality. I never spoke to anyone about being queer. It didn’t fit the expectations of a Catholic wife and mother. My 20-year marriage to a man didn’t remove my attraction to women.

I went to church the first Sunday after the announcement, overjoyed by the Supreme Court ruling. I kept thinking of my found family who were finally able to get married.

The priest preached about his disgust and encouraged us to fight against the decision to let gays marry. He urged the congregation to use their voting power to challenge the decision and overturn the ruling. I wiped away tears as my husband leaned over to console me. I felt like that five-year-old child again. It felt like every moment of my devotion to the church was suddenly erased because I am queer.

I realised that day that I was never going to be good enough for this patriarchal institution. By no choice of my own, I was less than. I was born a girl and I didn’t choose to be bisexual. I’ve never questioned the way I am, but again the church told me I wasn’t enough.

I LEFT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH and didn’t attend a service again until my mother’s death in April 2018. Her fight with cancer was short and intense.

I spent most of her last days in the hospital and nursing home advocating for her care.

Mom was a member of the same church for over 60 years. No-one from the parish came to see her. I had to call for the priest to anoint her and I had to request ashes for her during Lent. The faith group she’d dedicated her life to abandoned her.

I prayed with Mom every time she asked and many times when she couldn’t. Her belief was humbling, and in our quiet days together I came to terms with a faith journey separate from the religion of Catholicism. Recognising that I didn’t have to follow the church’s precepts helped me let go of a lifetime of rejection. Being queer and identifying as a bisexual woman is who I am, and I realised I could be happy without the church.

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Mom died in the early hours of 21 April. She passed in her sleep. I was with her until the funeral director wheeled out the grey and black printed body bag. I didn’t want to let her go.

I spent the next few days planning her funeral with my family. We knew exactly what she wanted for her funeral mass.

I returned to the same church building that once echoed with my five-yearold giggles and dreams. It was a hollow building, and the absence of God’s love was palpable.

When we met with the church staff, we were sure that the service would honour Mom’s devotion to Catholicism. It did not, and my five-year-old self was crushed again.

My mother had the terrible misfortune of dying during Easter season. We were told that all the readings that she loved couldn’t be read in May because it was outside the correct liturgical season.

My parents helped build that church. My mother was the director of religious education for over 20 years. She would have fought for everything she was being denied in death.

We weren’t allowed to eulogise Mom during the service. We couldn’t put up her picture, display articles of faith or sing the songs that celebrated her life, because the church is more concerned with rules than souls. I wanted to go rogue and break every ridiculous restriction.

The funeral mass was dictated by the priest and his minions. The parish director held the service hostage until we wrote cheques to pay the priest and the music director. No-one cared who she was or how much she’d sacrificed as a Catholic woman – they just wanted to finish the business of dying.

We were allowed to say a few words before the mass began, and every person in that church heard from me and my sisters how incredible Mom was.

I wanted to call out the church for treating us like nothing. I didn’t think it was possible to hurt more as a Catholic. The absence of love from the priest and the parish director would have broken her heart.

My niece and uncle sang the farewell songs during the funeral mass. The priest left the church before the final song was played. I guess he had something more important to do than honour this part of one of the seven sacred sacraments.

Mom’s death was just another business transaction, and he’d already been paid.

I know that my mother wasn’t a movie star or a political figure, and in the wider picture of the universe she was just my mom, but she had faith and devotion.

She deserved the music she wanted and a biblical reading that summarised the life she lived.

CHURCH WAS MEANT TO BE a home and a community – but not for me, the straight-passing person, the bisexual married woman and the devoted daughter who wanted the best at the end of an extraordinary life.

The home of the church has conditions for entry, and I wish that five-year-old me wasn’t eternally on the outside wishing to be good enough to enter.

SHARON ANGELICI has been writing works of fiction, short stories and poetry since childhood. Her first published short work, Dear Kane; what I wish we would have said, is an exploration of the impacts of hatred and bigotry and has been used to start conversations about suicide and depression. She writes queer fantasy romance, including three books in the Maker Series published by Write With Light publications. She is based in the United States.

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Photography series by

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Q&A with DADDY DOE

Wondra (they/them) is a non-binary, unapologetically queer photographer currently residing in Southeast Portland, USA. Their passion is meeting new people and creating ethereal, thought-invoking and empowering art through photography. A firm believer of strength in vulnerability, Wondra loves creating a raw and emotive viewfinder between two realities while making humans feel beautiful and seen. Primarily, their photoshoots take place out of their home studio and spacious backyard, and they are able to create a unique world through their dream-like images. Their work has been featured in Vogue Italia, Pornceptual, DSCVRD, Stereogum, Gothesque Magazine, The Mighty, Causette, Our Culture, Marie Claire, Enorm Magazine, Femme Rebelle Magazine, Elegant Magazine, Dark Beauty, IMIRAGEmagazine, Girlgaze, Feminist and more.

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trip to Minnesota, where you grew up. Tell us about the connection to home that is woven through your work.

W. Minneapolis will always feel like home away from home to me. I miss my friends out there so much, and visiting always feels bittersweet.

Home has a different meaning for everyone, but for me, home is the people I love. Home also feels like the connection I have to myself and my body, though it doesn’t always feel that way. My hope is that this is translated into my self-portrait work.

DADDY DOE. Photographers rarely get in front of a camera.

What inspired you to take selfportraits and what do you get out of taking them?

WONDRA. Self-portraits are some of my absolute favourites since they’re actually how I began my photography journey. At 15 years old, I was a pretty shy kid and felt intimidated to ask other people to model for me, so I learned how to use the self-timer and photograph myself. There was this antique lamp that I liked to play around with in my photos; I remember experimenting with shadows from that lamp and the window in my childhood bedroom.

Since then, my self-portraits have really evolved into a special way for me to heal and explore so many parts of myself. I’d highly recommend that any photographer give self-portraits a shot.

DD. How do you find a way to connect with people you’ve just met when you’re photographing them?

W. I love getting to know people and photographing them in a way that they’d like to be perceived. This can indeed be challenging to do with someone I just met! Something that has helped me through this process is inviting a conversation around why they are wanting a photoshoot, what themes they like and what about my work they were drawn to.

DD. Do you have any artistic rituals for yourself before a shoot?

W. I think rituals outside of photography are very important to me before going into a photoshoot during the day. Waking up, drinking some coffee and then lifting or going rock climbing for an hour in the morning feels really good for my brain. Doing things with my hands and moving my body tends to put me in the right headspace to create and be artistic.

DD. How has your journey with self-exploration and identity evolved over time through your photography?

W. Constantly evolving! My self-portraits help me explore my identity, but meeting, creating and connecting with other queers does too – tremendously.

I find that I’m always learning more about myself through photography and this community.

DD. You photograph self-portraits and photographs of others in your home for a lot of your work. Most recently, that included a selfportrait series taken during your

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“Home has a different meaning for everyone but for me, home is the people I love.

Home also feels like the connection I have to myself and my body, though it doesn’t always feel that way”

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DD. I’m a queer person of colour, and exploring my eroticism, sensuality and kinks in a safe space has been hard to do, so I’m selective about who I explore those things with. The comments from the people you work with indicate that you collaboratively explore these spaces, safely and respectfully. Could you tell us about this process?

W. Communication is so incredibly important – for all photoshoots really, but especially for the more kink-related ones. For these photoshoots, I will talk with the person(s) I’m photographing about what activities they will be doing during the photoshoot, so everyone involved knows what to expect and there are no surprises. It’s crucial that everyone involved knows that anyone present at the photoshoot is able to stop at any moment – for any reason.

If I’m photographing someone who is modelling solo, I will usually suggest they invite someone close to them to the photoshoot. I think bringing a buddy is good practice for anybody at any photoshoot with any photographer.

Also, it’s really great to research photographers! If you’re wanting to shoot with someone you haven’t worked with before, reaching out to models they’ve photographed can be really helpful and insightful.

DD. You have an incredible talent for capturing a moment in your photography. How do you know when it’s the right moment?

W. Such a compliment! Thank you!

Movement is one of my favourite ways to capture an image. I offer as much or as little guidance as my model wants or feels comfortable with. This can involve them moving around freely, or I might pose them in a more exact way and then ask them to make smaller, more localised movements like moving their fingers, arms, head, etc.

DD. We’d love to hear about one of your most fulfilling collaborations.

W. My work with Trista Marie McGovern, most definitely! Trista is a good friend of mine from Minneapolis who is a disability advocate, writer and photographer. I had the privilege of doing a series of photoshoots with her that she coordinated, exploring disability and sexuality. She compiled them all into a book paired with her writing and prose and it’s absolutely beautiful. Her book is called Where Shame Dies.

DD. What is the message you hope to share with people who experience your work?

W. It’s important to me that people feel the queer love and joy in my work.

It’s also important that people are able to see themselves in my work. I don’t photograph one certain type of person and I want that to be reflected in my portfolio. I want people to feel included and welcome to work with me.

DADDY DOE is an artist, performer and mentor with over 10 years experience in her fields.

Her passions are activism, movement, art and erotica. When Daddy is off the clock, she ends up working on creative projects because she just can’t help it, constantly trying to find the balance of artist to self.

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Rethinking the h

Words: ANONYMOUS Images: HAILEY MORONEY

housing system The current housing system fails to meet everyone’s needs – especially gender-diverse people, women, people with mental illnesses, disabilities and chronic illnesses, and people escaping family violence.

I HAVE BEEN long-term homeless and have supported many others along my journey.

In my experience, the current housing system doesn’t provide access to safe housing for homeless people, people living in unsafe or unstable housing, or those escaping family violence.

I often reflect on what it would mean for our housing system to become more caring, supportive, inclusive and safe for all homeless people, disabled people, gender-diverse people and victim-survivors.

I grew up in this system and it has never led to any stable or safe housing for me, because I have too many housing needs related to my disability.

A common sentiment in my disabled homeless community is that animals are kinder than humans, because animals don’t judge you for your disabilities, and they treat you better than most humans do. Erasing disability discrimination in the housing system and private rental market so that we are not excluded from vacancies would be an act of kindness and fairness towards us.

IN MY EXPERIENCE, many types of housing are too unsafe to live in, and are more dangerous than sleeping rough.

I would like to see the government implement more 80:20 safer housing models, with 80 per cent home-owner residents and 20 per cent low-income housing tenants. Nightingale Housing and the Summer Foundation, which run specialist disability accommodation 80:20 models in Melbourne, have both worked on fostering community connections in their housing.

Safety and quality security modifications are important to traumatised tenants coming from homelessness into housing, so that they do not vacate because they are in danger or have conflict with abusive neighbours.

This can help prevent recurring cycles of homelessness.

Cooperative housing is another great example of building community, friendships and teamwork within housing. In cooperative housing, everyone contributes what they can, working together to run the housing.

Common Equity Housing Limited is the peak organisation for all housing

cooperatives in Victoria. Wurruk’an is a sustainability housing community in Gippsland, where residents live off the land and teach people in wider communities how to build their own tiny homes and earth-dome homes.

Kids Under Cover builds tiny homes for young people escaping family violence.

I hope future housing options have more inclusive resident connections and community building, including more community gardens, peer-support programs for mental health, and community connections programs.

MANY PEOPLE I know have applied for hundreds of private rentals – for some women, it’s thousands – but they get discriminated against and continuously rejected by agencies and landlords due to low-income discrimination.

I hope to see further investment in accessible National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) low-income private rental properties, and the development of an accessible NRAS vacancy database.

Legislative changes and quotas need to be developed to change the ableism, racism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia and low-income discriminations in the private rental market, including from landlords.

Reforming tenancy acts could also address affordability, disability-targeted abuse and other forms of discrimination.

If the government could be our rental guarantors, create more head leasing programs (where a private property is rented by a legal entity, such as a government agency, which then rents it out to a disadvantaged tenant), and provide incentives and benefits to landlords to house us, this would also help reduce discrimination.

EXCLUSION FROM private rentals forces many into illegal arrangements and exploitation, leading to abuse, slavery, violence and unsafe housing. It becomes a vicious cycle, exacerbated by the health impacts of rough sleeping, and the fact that it is too cold to survive sleeping rough in the winter.

I have been forced into illegal arrangements in warehouses and caravan parks where I have to do all the cleaning; into rooming houses where

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no-one cleaned except me; into illegal sublets; into sublet rental arrangements; into rental arrangements involving sexual harassment and abuse; and into garages and illegally run rooming houses. I’ve camped in backyards, and slept in sheds and water-damaged, flooded rentals.

All of these situations make homeless people more disabled and more mentally unwell. Some become so unwell from all the trauma and sleep deprivation that they can’t engage with the housing system, which can be like banging your head against a wall.

Many can’t use their National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) funding because they don’t have safe housing, or are staying in uninhabitable and highly dangerous housing. These situations can include continuous police call-outs, murders, sexual assaults, break-ins, drug dealings, stabbings and gang violence.

A lot of my peer-support work is a result of the way the current system operates. It involves crisis response, crisis resolution, support for mental health emergencies, help getting food, help organising Centrelink and NDIS, connecting people with services and advocates, and providing people hope that one day they will get stable housing.

I encourage them not to give up on finding safe housing and a better future.

THE ONLY HOUSING I have been offered that is accessible is in group homes and institutions, but these are not safe for my autoimmune conditions, as I cannot share housing due to chronic infections and viruses.

Our government has no practical roadmap to get young disabled people out of institutions and nursing homes, and keeps making false promises.

The majority of supported independent living (SIL) NDIS providers in Victoria only provide group homes rather than selfcontained housing, even to severely immunocompromised and ill tenants.

They discriminate against us because they can get more money by housing as many as possible in one home.

MOST DISABLED PEOPLE

don’t get to choose where we live, or with whom. One of the main goals

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of the NDIS was to get people out of institutions and into the community.

You need to have 24/7 support needs to get specialist disability accommodation (SDA), and according to NDIS reports, only 6 per cent of NDIS participants receive SDA. This is unfair, because many more people on the NDIS who are homeless or in inaccessible housing need SDA. In Victoria, where the majority of private rentals are not accessible, trying to find an accessible rental with a landlord who will rent to someone on the disability pension, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I have 15 major disability modification housing needs, and SDA is the only type of housing provider that will allow the modifications I need.

Many people who are homeless and severely disabled are falling through the gaps in this system and other systems, such as the Forgotten Australians services.

The NDIS told me in writing that their policy states they won’t fund disability home modifications if you’re renting in low-income housing. This policy results in mainstream housing providers discriminating against and refusing to house disabled people who need multiple major disability modifications, and refusing to fund modifications for existing disabled social and community housing tenants. This is also happening in public housing.

People not having the modifications they need results in low quality of life and for many, including myself, repeated falls, further permanent injuries and more chronic pain. For others it can lead to brain injuries from falls, and multiple other issues.

The lack of access means that the housing can be so unsafe and impossible to survive for disabled people that it forces them to vacate and return to homelessness, which has happened to me repeatedly.

I’m allergic to mould, and can’t breathe when around it because of my asthma, so housing providers refusing to fix previous tenants’ water damage is a big issue.

It’s extraordinarily hard to find affordable rentals that don’t have water damage, or where the landlord is willing to fix it.

REFORMS ADVOCATED

for by the human rights organisation Office of the Public Advocate are urgently needed for disabled people in institutions, who are too scared to go outside of their rooms due to all types of abuse.

Both the NDIS and the government are lacking a practical or accessible emergency response to bushfires, cyclones and floods, and the long-term homelessness, toxic mould poisoning, lung disabilities and complex health issues created from these.

Homeless people with disabilities or chronic illnesses are at high risk of dying during these times of emergencies, but they get left behind as they’re too unwell to engage with the system, and the system has no disability support to help them escape natural disasters.

I HAVE SEEN organisations repeatedly failing women and genderdiverse people by not providing any housing to escape family violence, which forces them to return to their abusers.

The system doesn’t even have enough refuge vacancies.

Many victim-survivors have had the system fail them completely and have become severely disabled as a result of family violence.

Housing needs to come first: safety is the most important thing for trauma recovery, and no-one escaping family violence should have to choose between violence on the streets and violence in their homes – this is not a choice.

Many homeless women I know, including myself, have been forced to return to dangerous housing or abusive relationships because there is nowhere less dangerous to go, and they can’t afford Airbnbs.

Some have become pregnant while sleeping rough, or have escaped into homelessness, fleeing family violence after becoming pregnant.

Women, gender-diverse people and disabled people are at higher risk of sexual violence, gang violence, transphobic violence, homophobic violence and being murdered while being homeless. There remains no gender-diverse crisis accommodation in Victoria, and many gender-diverse people are excluded from mainstream refuges, crisis accommodations and

women’s housing.

In all the tenancy act reforms that have happened to date, Australia-wide, there has not been one reform relating to disability or chronic illness, or any improvements to make things safer for gender-diverse people. This is despite my ongoing advocacy in Victoria to the Make Renting Fair campaign, the tenants’ union and the government.

Within services, people with complex needs are often dumped in the ‘too-hard basket’ and continuously referred on.

Having to retell their stories over and over again is retraumatising and makes people want to give up; it often pushes them to become suicidal.

OLDER WOMEN remain the fastest growing homeless population, and the service system is failing them. Many are scared of ending up institutionalised so do everything they can to avoid the system entirely.

This is why peer-support groups are so important – they offer a space free of judgement, and don’t pose any threat of having the police called to force people to go to hospital or psych wards.

From my own experiences caring for my nana and my mum, there are major issues in housing systems for older people and in aged care, including institutionalised abuse and neglect, poor nutrition, and negative social environments that make residents more unwell.

Many older women don’t want to go into retirement villages or nursing homes just because they can’t find any other housing.

There needs to be stronger investment in more accessible, safe and longterm housing in the community, as we have an ageing and disabled population.

The government policy to fast-track people from hotels/motels into public, social and community housing is also leaving homeless people in the NDIS and other institutionalised systems behind. This includes those who have complex needs and cannot survive longterm in the hotel/motel system, and those who cannot get hotels funded due to the assumption that other systems will house them.

HOUSING PROVIDERS

should be required to intervene in safety

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issues, and providers who are failing in this area should be held accountable; there need to be consequences.

Some of the worst providers are highly abusive to their own staff, which compounds opportunities for reform, as many staff I know who quit working at these organisations are terrified of retribution from whistleblowing.

Housing cannot be inclusive or foster any sense of community and social connection unless it is safe. Even police believe certain housing should be shut down due to being so poorly managed.

The quality and responsiveness of housing providers and management often determines whether the housing succeeds or fails. How do they manage safety issues and respond to and prevent violence and abuse? What are they doing for Covid safety and outbreak prevention, and how do they respond to outbreaks? How do they address social isolation and improve community, neighbourhood and resident connections and friendships?

How do they make their housing safer for children, young people and visitors? How do they respond to drug dealing and crime? Do they invest in rectification works and ventilation to stop toxic mould poisoning?

Many people in unsafe housing are too scared to complain or speak out, in fear of retribution and of losing their housing. I have been punished for speaking out and for challenging disability discrimination and abuse in the system – to the point where no-one will house me.

IT IS GREAT TO SEE that the government is finally supporting my long-term calls for the establishment of a social housing regulator. I have advocated for a regulator to act as a watchdog that is fully independent from the housing system, workforce and government. I hope it will accept and investigate anonymous complaints from residents, staff and homeless people, and that it will be given legal jurisdiction to intervene immediately when people’s health or safety is at risk.

The regulator should hold accountable housing providers, head tenants and landlords who are not managing their housing in safe and inclusive ways. They could help approve

disability modifications when housing providers don’t agree to them, and hold providers accountable for repairs, maintenance and safety issues.

The regulator could also help international students in illegal arrangements, where multiple students sleep in living rooms and fear being kicked out into homelessness if anyone speaks out about the leaking gas stove that never gets repaired despite requests. I have had to intervene in multiple situations where students are being blackmailed, and make reports to prevent explosions.

Many people in my peer group help each other. It’s beautiful to see the sense of community among homeless women and gender-diverse people, which I actively try to build, because we are safer and stronger when we support each other.

THE WOMEN and genderdiverse people in my peer group are highly intelligent. Their sense of humour in the darkest times, their courage in fighting for a better future for themselves and their children, and their advocacy work to try to change the housing system, really motivates me to keep going with this work even through the hardest times.

More lived-experience housing advocacy and peer support is urgently needed. We want to be given stable housing, so we can improve our health, have stability, and work, given that homelessness robs us of our careers.

Many of us want to contribute to reform work to change the housing system.

Some women in my group want to go to Parliament in Canberra, and I want to set up a healing sanctuary for homeless women and gender-diverse people one day. It is a privilege and honour doing this work.

Seeing someone become housed after waiting their entire lives for stable and safe housing, and seeing their lives being transformed because they finally have stability, is the most rewarding aspect of running my peer group.

I do my work because everyone deserves safe housing, and because of those I have lost to homelessness and unsafe housing.

The author (she/her) founded and facilitates a peer-support group for homeless women and gender-diverse people in Melbourne and regional Victoria. Most people she supports have disabilities, mental illness and/or chronic illness, and many have escaped violence. She is disabled, a member of the LGBTQA+ community and a social work student, and works as a disability advocate. She has made lived-experience resources to assist others to find housing in the mainstream system and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) system.

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OutR OutRage is a photo series that celebrates being Blak and queer. It captures continued resistance, survival and community love that recalls the excitement of being out and raging. This occurs alongside being outraged during two global pandemics across 2020: Covid-19 and ongoing state violence against racialised bodies.

Q&A with BEXX DJENTUH-DAVIS Words and Images: LATOYA AROHA RULE & DOMINIC GUERRERA

Rage

Violet Buckskin (She/Her), Aboriginal Nation: Narungga, Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna

Throughout the pandemic and the lockdowns occurring across 2020, Drummond Street and I (Bexx Djentuh-Davis) had the privilege of providing project support and funding to two people whose community and advocacy work we admire. Latoya Aroha Rule (they/ them), a Wiradjuri/Māori person, and Dominic Guerrera (he/him), a Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri and Italian person, both led and produced OutRage, a photographic series representing local south australian Aboriginal LGBTQ+ people outside their homes, ready to emerge from lockdown and celebrate again. I sat down with Latoya and Dominic and asked a few questions about their project.

Simone Miller (She/Her), Aboriginal Nation: Mirning/Wongatha

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BEXX: I’m so excited to talk to you both. Can you tell me how OutRage started?

LATOYA: I saw your post on social media about some funding that was available for community projects through Drummond Street Services. I reached out to my close friend Dominic who is also a Blak and queer person and living on his own country – on Kaurna Land/adelaide1, where we both grew up.

Usually we had collaborated on justice issues that solely related to Aboriginal communities that we are part of, but I wanted to work on something with a specific queer lens.

We both wanted to work on something that showed more of the personal, that related to different parts of us and our community that aren’t always seen. Also, we just wanted to do something that was fun for them and us.

We started thinking through our project and reflecting on our own personal experiences.

We chose the title OutRage as this relates to going out ‘raging’, which is part of what we say in our communities when we are going out partying and having a good time.

We wanted to capture the beauty and sheer sexy (I’m thinking of Andrew Birtwistle-Smith in his leather 1 The de-capitalisation of words throughout this article symbolises the critical narrative that is decolonial Blak discourse; a purposeful decentring of colonial institutions that in their existence diminish Blak personhood.

here) of who we are when we’re feeling ourselves. We chose photography as both of us have an interest in visibility and seeing visible Blak queer bodies, and while this method was new for me, Dominic already had experience in this field.

The project is also a response to events in 2020 like BLM [Black Lives Matter] and policing and prisons; the feeling of Black-rage equally supports the title in this case.

How our communities have responded with our bodies and voices during a time when we are expected to be publicly invisible – and are literally being invisibilised through state violence – were reasons for us to pursue this project.

Thinking back over histories of what Aboriginal people’s resistance and survival in the early colonial era looked like, there were always queer ancestors on those frontlines. So we really wanted a project that encapsulates survival, and characterises our fun and diversity, while sparking ongoing discussions around surveillance of Blak bodies particularly closer to home in south australia.

DOMINIC: We always felt there wasn’t much representation of Aboriginal queer people from south australia, so we wanted to create something that was local to share.

Just like every other corner of this continent, there are Aboriginal queer people who are contributing to their communities, who are fabulous, beautiful and deadly. We felt a responsibility to share local stories.

With the constant policing of us as Aboriginal queer people; with racism, homophobia and transphobia; and then adding in another layer of Covid – this made us want to create a space with participants so they could be expressive and feel free and beautiful in who they are.

At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, lots of well-off white people kept saying, “This is the great equaliser.” It’s not! Racist social and economic hierarchies continue to exist and are being reinforced.

When Covid eventually spread into our communities, particularly the rural and remote, there was a lack of response from australian governments

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and non-Aboriginal health services.

The responsibility fell on our already underfunded and under-resourced community controlled services. It’s still happening as the virus continues to spread and new variants form.

BEXX: Can you tell me about the time spent preparing, photographing and editing these images?

DOMINIC: We sat for a while and discussed our boundaries, and how the project would interact with mob. We spent time prepping ourselves because of cultural protocols, and it was a sensitive time.

LATOYA: south australia didn’t yet have the same lockdown restrictions as other states, so it did make it easier for us to travel nine hours to a remote Aboriginal township just outside of Ceduna and take photos of Simone Miller, for example, but we were very aware of Covid nonetheless.

Having the privilege of taking the photos at participants’ houses identified the lived environments that they navigate daily; the meaning of home is a pinnacle of this project because all Land is sovereign Aboriginal Land, and this is where Aboriginal people belong.

Aunty Polly Sumner (She/Her), Aboriginal Nation: Ngarrindjeri, Narrunga and Kaurna

Driving into Koonibba Aboriginal community, the mission outside Ceduna, to meet Simone, and being taken down to photograph at the waterhole, means that we were immersed in her community context and culture. Quite literally, every street is named after a family group rather than colonisers. We’re immediately told a story of community pride and honour. That stunningly staunch and lovely character of her community resembles who Simone is, and this is seen in her photos.

Being invited into the homes of all our participants, sharing meals and cuppas and time with each of them, was not only about ensuring mob were comfortable, but it’s part of who we are, our relationality, how we show up for each other and the genuine love that underpins this project.

DOMINIC: This is visual storytelling and our participants got to contribute in a way where they had control over how they looked and felt, and where we took the photos. They had control over their story being told.

The early photographs that were taken of our people were predominantly by colonists and anthropologists. I love looking at those photos and seeing my people’s faces, but to me they don’t feel warm. Their purpose was often to capture images of the dying race, during a time we were being prepared for our extinction.

Simone Miller (She/Her)

We didn’t want to bring that white gaze approach to the taking of our photos – we wanted Aboriginal people to be photographed on our own terms.

We also followed in the footsteps of other Aboriginal photographers who have reclaimed the power of how we are photographed: Destiny Deacon, Aunty Polly Sumner, James Tylor and Colleen-Ara Palka Raven Strangways come to mind.

LATOYA: Also Tamati Smith, Michael Cook, Aunty Barbara McGrady and Travis De Vries.

DOMINIC: We learn from them, and their work taught us how to challenge the process we took in putting this together.

LATOYA: We wanted (most) of the photos to be bright and we wanted them to show colour.

There are a lot of narratives around the doom and gloom of Aboriginal people; we’re often seen in the media and news discourse as disenfranchised and impoverished. Our photos are usually edited with greyscale, to make them seem so sad, desperate and victimising. I’m over that! I’m over being edited this way myself!

BEXX: Tell me about your favourite part of this project.

LATOYA & DOMINIC: Working with mob was our favourite part – seeing these incredible people shine.

We chose people that we not only admire, but who have strong local standing in their communities. Aunty Polly Sumner has been working in leadership roles within Aboriginal health for four decades. Andrew Birtwistle-Smith is the CEO of an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service in rural south australia.

Sasha Smith is his niece, a proud sex worker and emerging filmmaker who is heavily involved in language revival of her people, the Boandik people. Simone Miller is a proud Sistergirl living on her

Sasha Smith (She/Her), Aboriginal Nation: Boandik/Meintangk

country. She’s a manager for the social and emotional wellbeing team at her local Aboriginal medical service and has spent years advocating for Aboriginal trans people. Like Simone, Violet Buckskin has contributed so much locally for mob, especially those who are LGBTQ+, including being involved in Moolagoo Mob & Blak Lemons.

We are privileged to see these Blak LGBTQI people across magazine pages.

This body of work speaks to why we must continue to think critically about representation, and what it truly means for our survival.

Together, Latoya and Dominic will continue to work on two more cycles of photographs taken of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQI mob living within the colonial borders of south australia.

BEXX DJENTUH-DAVIS (she/her) is a Ghanian/Māori woman from Aotearoa. She’s currently the senior practitioner for queer youth programs at Drummond Street Services, and is living on Wurundjeri Land/melbourne, australia.

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Andrew Birtwistle-Smith (He/Him), Aboriginal Nation: Boandik/Meintangk.

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THE WAY

Migrants don’t have the easily categorisable journeys that stereotypes suggest, and this author has had to forge their own path – physically and emotionally.

FORWARD

Words: CB MAKO Images: JENN BRISSON

IMAGINE A SLOW-MOVING, three-wheeled cargo bike. It’s like a tricycle but with a large box in the front. The cargo bike’s box is made of the sturdiest wood, able to carry two kids or a full-grown adult – and is coated with shiny red paint. Two 24-inch wheels support the wooden box, and a similar third wheel supports the slow, pedalling cyclist. This particular cargo bike is called The Christiania and was created and built in Denmark.

Next, imagine the cyclist of this cargo bike is a person of colour with brown, sunburnt skin. They are a chubby person, barely 150cm tall, with Asian features, and they are wearing a helmet, which looks like a wide-brimmed hat used by the diggers in the First World War, the rim curled on one side to hold a high-definition cylindrical camera and a similarly shaped LED light.

This cargo bike moves very slowly on narrow, suburban streets. Other vehicles overtake the slow cyclist, with loud shouts of “Get off the road!” or “Go back to China!”

When cubbie moves onto the footpath, to safer cycling – in the blatant absence of bicycle infrastructure in the west side of Naarm, the stolen lands of the Boon Wurrung and the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation – pedestrians also shout at cubbie for being a “reckless parent” and to “Get off the footpath!”

They are judged by what people easily see: skin colour.

Race. However, people don’t see that cubbie and their child are non-binary and disabled people of colour. All cubbie wants is for the world to #StopAsianHate during the global pandemic.

white man reduced them to a single story.

According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete…

The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

This is even apparent in the cycling community, which needs to adapt to the rapidly growing Australian population and become more inclusive.

AT A COMMUNITY PROTEST in West Footscray to improve bicycling infrastructure in the west of Melbourne, after Melbourne’s third ‘circuit breaker’ Covid-19 lockdown in February 2021, cubbie is among a few people of colour and one of only two cyclists with three wheels.

Uncomfortable among the sea of white cyclists, cubbie suddenly feels overwhelmed and overstimulated after the prolonged lockdown. Signalling the organiser, cubbie leaves the protest rally and goes straight to a cafe that they consider to be a safe space for people of colour.

Aptly, the cafe is called Migrant Coffee.

WHEN CUBBIE WAS THREE years old, they had to cross a very tall pedestrian bridge to get home.

At the foot of the staircase, cubbie refused to climb the steep stairs. Their mother refused to carry cubbie.

What their mother didn’t know was that cubbie couldn’t see the steps. Despite cubbie’s pleas and cries to be carried, cubbie’s mother flatly refused and promised retribution for cubbie’s indignant and embarrassing display of emotion.

Sobbing, cubbie stuck their sweaty palms towards the concrete stairs’ side wall – they were too small to reach the railing. Then they sat on each filthy step, trying to feel with the tip of their shoes where the next step would be, as their tiny hand continued to scrape the grey wall of the concrete stairs.

Eventually, their parents found out that cubbie needed glasses. Their lenses were as thick as the bottom of a glass bottle.

Older students ridiculed the only kindergarten student with glasses. Every recess, older students hollered “Hey Lola! You’re a grandma!”, which echoed around the quadrangle space where students loitered with their snack boxes. cubbie was barely five years old, yet the taunts called them an old grandmother. The shaming was as old as time; ableism in a country that had been colonised for 500 years, where only the fit and able-bodied survived to become slaves to Spanish sugar barons in the southern islands of the Philippines.

ON ANOTHER CYCLING TRIP, cubbie parks their cargo bike in the gentrified suburb of Seddon.

A white man on a two-wheeled bicycle with a child in the rear seat moves out of the parking spot in front of cubbie’s cargo bike.

His child asks, “Dad, what’s that?” while pointing at cubbie’s cargo bike.

The parent looks at the cargo bike and then looks at the person of colour. With a smirk, he tells his offspring, “It’s a tuk-tuk,” as he prepares to wheel out of the bike rack.

“It’s not a tuk-tuk!” cubbie blurts out, annoyed. They are surprised by their own boldness; cubbie usually doesn’t speak out. Perhaps it is the summer heat.

Perhaps cubbie is hangry and eager to refuel with a decadent cup of coffee at the nearby cafe. Whatever it is, cubbie clarifies: “It’s a cargo bike.”

The father of the boy shrugs sheepishly and pedals away with his kid strapped firmly into the rear seat.

Once they leave, cubbie sits at the outdoor seating of their favourite cafe, confusion filling their head. Briskly pulling out their mobile, cubbie searches the internet: “What is a tuk-tuk?”

When the images of tuk-tuks come up, cubbie realises what they are. They were called trisikels in Manila.

“I should’ve mentioned that my cargo bike is made in Europe,” cubbie grumbles between sips of soy latte.

As cubbie finishes their coffee, they wonder if the

OWNING A THREE-WHEELED cargo bike became cubbie’s first rebellion. It pushed people’s buttons, annoying both the motorists and the lycra-clad cycling community on social media.

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Empowered, cubbie wondered what else they could question among mainstream narratives. As Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings, the invisible hegemony of whiteness is unchallenged.

Surely cubbie was not a part of the single story – the model migrant following the migrant creed1 who, like other Filipino migrants, is a carpenter ant of the service industry2 and prefers to assimilate3.

babaeng bakla.

Moreso, when every person assigned female at birth (AFAB) was required to wear make-up from hired Avon Lady make-up artists for the annual concert, the highborn mestizas would snicker behind cubbie’s back. cubbie’s regular haircuts were at their favourite barbershop. Sporting a buzz cut, unladylike and brash, loud and unstable, cubbie spoke directly without filter.

Eventually, this brazen behaviour was brutally beaten out of cubbie in some form of abuse or another – at home, school and in the workplace – but no-one realised that that cubbie was already showing signs of autism.

The abuse continues to this very day under patriarchal structures, in their very own household. The coercive controller expects cubbie to be the quiet, little Asian.

WHEN CUBBIE WAS in Year 6, after an era of dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos, their Social Studies teacher encouraged students to read the new broadsheet newspapers, which were popping up like daisies thanks to the new freedom of the press.

Instead of reading the headlines, cubbie pulled out the Lifestyle section and went straight to the comics page. However, there was one Lifestyle columnist that piqued cubbie’s curiosity. Looking back, cubbie wished they kept a particular column by Jaime Licauco, hoping they didn’t imagine it all this time. But this column stood the test of time, and seemed secretly buried in cubbie’s frayed brambles of memory. Licauco wrote something about symmetry and about when two souls fused in one body. cubbie is completely asymmetrical from head to toe.

From their eyebrows, ears, eyes, lips and chin down to their knees, feet and toes. Each pair of asymmetrical body parts can be explained, of course. cubbie had eye surgery when they were seven years old. Under full anaesthesia, doctors took out multiple styes under cubbie’s eyelids. At 12, cubbie scraped their knee when they persistently learnt how to ride a two-wheeled bicycle and ended up with a deep gash that took months to heal.

In Manila, this asymmetry had a different name. By the time cubbie was a university student, furtive words floated in the air: cubbie, a babaeng bakla – a girl who looked like a boy who looked like a girl.

The beautiful mestizas4 in the prestigious and extremely expensive university cubbie attended – thanks to cubbie’s music scholarship and, as the only violist available, being sorely needed to form a string quartet for the university orchestra – thought cubbie was a

BY 2017, CUBBIE REALISED it was finally safe to come out as non-binary, while raising two AFAB children as non-binary, too. Their children have a choice – a choice cubbie never had under traditional, religious and strict binary structures.

And unlike migrants who continue to stay within migrant communities, cubbie burnt bridges (an autistic trait) by not following first-generation migrant religious expectations. The migrant community wanted cubbie to follow the norm – go to church, buy a house, have multiple cars parked in the giant garage and have healthy, beautiful children with top grades in school – because Asian? Duh. But cubbie is not your single story. cubbie forged their own path. And in this journey, in a new home, in a different colonised land, cubbie is a non-binary parent with late-diagnosis Level 1 autism spectrum disorder or Asperger’s syndrome. cubbie is hard of hearing and wears hearing devices in crowded venues and public places. And, finally, cubbie pedals slowly in a threewheeled cargo bike.

1 Gabrielle Chan, ‘Race and the Golden Age’, Meanjin, Summer 2017.

2 Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings, Profile Books, 2020.

3 Pilar Mitchell, ‘Why Filipino Food Isn’t More Mainstream in Australia’, SBS Food, 31 May 2021.

4 Mestizas in the Philippines is a feminine name to refer to people born from mixed marriages between the Spaniards and the local native people. Mestizas were easily identified because of dominant fairer skin and European features.

CB MAKO is a founding member of the Disabled QBIPOC Collective and is one of the contributors of the Growing Up Disabled in Australia anthology. Winner of the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition, shortlisted for the Overland Fair Australia Prize and longlisted for the inaugural Liminal Fiction Prize, cubbie is also a contributor to Liminal’s Collisions: Fictions of the Future anthology.

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Photography series by THE HUXLEYS

PLACES OF

‘Burning Up’

WORSHIP

Q&A with FRENCHIE HOLIDAY

‘Moonage Daydream’

The Huxleys’ Places of Worship photographs explore the fading magic of supernatural worlds in which performance and visual artists Will and Garrett Huxley cast themselves as exquisite outsiders. As queer people growing up in suburban homogenous places, The Huxleys felt isolated, alone and different. Their photographs express a sense of safety in isolation – the natural world is non-judgemental, beautiful and precious, and it needs protection. These photographs invite the viewer to find a similar beauty in explosively queer bodies, yearning for difference to be marvelled at and worshipped.

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‘Vulnicura’

‘Nervous Wreck’

FRENCHIE HOLIDAY. I have a weakness for sequins, and the two of you have inspired me as a queer creative. Where did you find inspiration growing up in suburbia, at a time when there weren’t many openly queer artists being celebrated in pop culture?

WILL HUXLEY & GARRETT HUXLEY. Growing up queer in the ’80s and ’90s, in the suburbs of Perth and the Gold Coast, we had no-one in our worlds that was visibly queer.

We accessed this world through art, magazines, film and music. There was so little queer representation that you really had your work cut out for you trying to find it.

Discovering John Waters films starring Divine was like finding a

whole new language, which only you had spoken up until that point. Artists like Leigh Bowery, Keith Haring, and Robert Mapplethorpe often appeared in magazines i-D or The Face. The queer visibility of their creative work saved us. Pop stars like Boy George, Pete Burns, Sylvester, Marilyn (a British gender-non-conforming singer), Annie Lennox and Grace Jones were blurring the boundaries of gender stereotypes – they were like beacons for us, showing us the way out. Glimpsing clips of Prince and David Bowie on late nights on Rage and Countdown gave us a future to dream of where you could find people who seemed just like you.

FH. Humour is a large part of your work and performance. Did you find it hard to have people take

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your art seriously because it was also humorous?

WH & GH. We often say we are scared of being taken seriously. We always have to make ourselves laugh first; that’s how we know it’s working.

Our humour is often surreal or absurd, and we love coming up with new and ridiculous ideas, looks or costumes to achieve – the more impractical the better.

Humour is a great way to invite people in, and once they are engaged, they will hopefully see the other layers in the work.

I think that some people think what we do is frivolous or just camp, and that’s okay, too. You really can’t control your art once it’s out there. Growing up being bullied or hassled taught us that

‘Distress Signal’

if you could make someone laugh it was like an instant way to defuse conflict; it helped us survive. And we don’t believe that the art world has to be so serious – it needs to bring in joy and magic.

Humour is such an important part of that. Laughing at yourself is essential.

We know better than anyone else how silly we can look. The only thing for us to do is to take silliness as seriously as possible.

FH. When I’m conceptualising a film or photo, my most unique ideas are inspired by the unexpected, like the odd things I spot throughout my day. Do you recall the strangest or even funniest place you’ve found inspiration from?

WH & GH. One of our favourite

sources of inspiration is drawing. We’re both terrible drawers but we give it a go anyway. Our sketches of costumes are very childlike and basic. We get such a thrill out of seeing the initial idea on paper compared to the fully realised work. We call it ‘from page to stage’.

We often take inspiration from nature – things like flowers, extreme birds, sea creatures. The colours and details of the natural world are endlessly inspiring.

Sometimes our work is inspired by anger at the world.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated we were so disgusted, particularly at his language and treatment of women. We decided to create our work Born to Be Alive, a giant 4m inflatable vulva – a part of the body that we worship and are born from. It

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was a celebration and tribute to the joy of women, femmes and feminine energy.

When the postal survey on marriage equality happened, we were so saddened and disgusted that our lives were open to such unnecessary scrutiny that we created a performance dedicated to all the NO voters. We performed a choral version of ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana and changed the lyrics to ‘fuck you’. We performed it at a charity event for Minus18, which is a beautiful charity for young LGBTQIA+ people. The crowd loved it and were singing along in solidarity. It was such a powerful and fun way to channel that hurt.

When the tragic bushfires happened at the end of 2019, we were traumatised at the loss of the native flora and fauna.

‘Great Barrier Grief’

We designed disco koala costumes and matching babies. We used them initially to perform at a charity event raising money for WIRES wildlife.

FH. Your costume art is spectacularly wacky and magical! Does that spill into the spaces that you call home?

WH & GH. Our home resembles part library, thrift shop, garden centre and art gallery.

We surround ourselves with everything we love and that which inspires us. Like everything we do, it’s the opposite of minimalism.

Somewhere within the overcrowded chaos there is room for two humans and some animals.

We love the quote from Vivienne Westwood, who once said, “minimalism is for those without taste”.

We love to live alongside art as it is a constant source of inspiration and joy. There is actually very little room to even cook in our house as most surfaces are used to display our evergrowing collection of art and plant life.

FH. When I think of home, I think of it as a feeling of security and safe space. What does home mean to you?

WH & GH. As queer people, home is often a complex place and there have been times when your actual home doesn’t feel like the most welcoming or safe space.

We have created a queer wonderland through our art and creativity. And we surround ourselves with people and things that bring us comfort and joy, and that is home for us. The creative space is home.

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FH. Having found your creative calling and being established artists, especially here in Melbourne, how does it feel returning to your hometown/s and how are your performances and art perceived?

WH & GH. We both moved to Melbourne years ago (Garrett 23 years ago, and Will 19 years ago) from environments and times that were often homophobic.

We were nervous about some of our first gigs leading us back to our hometowns, but thankfully attitudes have changed for the better.

We were walking down a street in the Gold Coast – where in the past we would get heckled and called “poof” on a daily basis – and were stopped by a very normal-looking young man who said he loved our outfits.

‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’

‘Melting Moments’

We now love going to smaller towns or places that may not be used to people like us – it’s where the most change can happen. We often say the most important work is going places where people may not want to see you!

That’s where you can try to change opinions and attitudes.

FH. Your series Places of Worship featured some intriguing rural locations. What were your connections to the specific locations and what were their importance to the series?

WH & GH. The rural locations were chosen in relation to where we thought the costumes may have been in their natural habitat. We wanted a sense of isolation, away from humanity. It helped create new worlds within the

series. We wanted to select locations that spoke to the costumes and makeup and demonstrated our physical connection to those places. Nature is so important to us, and we wanted to connect to the rare beauty of these places with the way we looked.

FH. When shooting these locations, did you visit them simply as visitors or did you feel a sense of connection to the land?

WH & GH. Visiting these places, we felt a really strong connection to the environments we were in.

On each shoot we would have five minutes of silence where we would record the natural sounds of the place.

We would listen and dream of the magic and story of that environment.

We used these sounds to create a

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vinyl album that corresponds with the imagery in the series.

If we encountered people in the environments, we would always try to connect with them, and often they were rather taken aback by our physicality! I think it was a pretty rare and special occurrence.

FH. I read the title Places of Worship as looking after our environment, accepting it as it is and nurturing it. Does it have a parallel meaning about marvelling at differences, androgyny and queer identity? What does the title mean to each of you?

WH & GH. Places of Worship is about the importance of looking after our environment and having the same reverence for it that some people have

‘Worlds End’

for religion or business. It is also about accepting nature as it is. Nature is so complex – it’s beyond the boundaries and binaries that we have created for ourselves, and there is freedom in that. Freedom is what we are seeking through our work and lives as queer people – a respite from this world we grew up in – and nature can give us that. We consider ourselves a part of nature. We sometimes remark that in nature it is often the most flamboyant, colourful and rare things that are praised and celebrated. But as young queer boys growing up, all those things were seen as weaknesses. We were told to hide the brightest, most outrageous parts of ourselves. And with this series we are inviting people to see the same reverence and beauty marvelled at in nature in explosively queer bodies.

FH. How did it feel to express your sexuality, art and queerness in these locations?

WH & GH. As unnatural as we look in society, it felt normal to look that way in these natural environments.

We felt a part of nature rather than against it. Like a flamingo, nudibranch, snowflake or a cow.

Nature is unjudgemental and perfect, and we felt a real sense of freedom. We work alone so on most of the shoots it was just the two of us. It’s only when other people come around that you start to feel self-conscious.

FH. Are androgynist, sexual and loud costumes accompanied with humour in your art a way for you to remedy prejudice to

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queer identity and the fear of difference? If so, could you tell us a bit about how?

WH & GH. I think we are so visibly queer because of what was denied to us earlier in life. When you get bullied and harassed every day, and are told that being queer or gay is bad, you are either destroyed by it or you become so queer that you become your own superhero. When you haven’t had something, like queer rights, you don’t take it for granted once you get it.

There’s a feeling that it could be taken away from you again. We saw it happen to Russia in 2013. So queer visibility is so important to us – it’s carrying the torch from our brave predecessors and also passing it on to the new generation. Visibility is so important.

‘Stallac-Fright’

We will always share our love and our queer story as you never know who is listening and who you might help.

FH. Since becoming The Huxleys, how has your work evolved and where do you see it going?

WH & GH. Our artistic union and becoming The Huxleys has been a natural evolution of our love and creativity. We have taught each other things and pushed each other to take things further than we ever dreamed.

We often say too much is never enough!

Garrett is naturally more introverted and shy, so creating together has helped

him explore a more outrageous side and push through personal boundaries.

We believe in each other and don’t have anyone to tell us “No”.

We don’t really know where it’s going other than bigger wigs, higher shoes and lots of queer love. Our two dreams are to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale or Eurovision – happy to take either!

We are just happy to be able to make a living as artists in this country. It has been a long struggle to financially survive in a country that doesn’t value the arts nearly as much as it should.

We’ve done a lot of bad jobs over our

time to get to the stage where we can practise our art full-time!

FH. You’re both performers, designers, makers, photographers, singers and filmmakers. Are there any other avenues you’ve both wanted to explore? What’s next for The Huxleys?

WH & GH. We’d like to go holographic so when we’re older we could send out holograms to work and dance. We would love to perform with Grace Jones one day! We would love to make a whole disco album, too.

FRENCHIE HOLIDAY is a photographer, illustrator and stylist whose work can be described as a vintage euphoric dream with a touch of drunken surrealism. Frenchie’s work is experimental – no outlet of expression is out of bounds, which sees her occasionally use performance, animation or film in her work.

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‘Supernature’

‘Pink Noise’

THE HUXLEYS – WILL AND GARRETT HUXLEY – are Melbourne-based collaborative performance and visual artists. With a visual assault of sparkle, surrealism and the absurd, The Huxleys saturate their practice with a glamorous, androgynous freedom, aiming to bring escapism and magic to everyday life. The Huxleys have performed, exhibited and participated in numerous exhibitions and events in Australia, and internationally in London, Berlin, Moscow and Hong Kong. They are represented for fine art by Murray White Room.

‘Places of Worship’

Masturbation is about self-exploration, selfcare and pleasure – even if it takes place in your childhood home.

HOW TO MASTURB CAMPBEL

Words: CANDY BOWERS Images: JESSICA D’CRUZE

BATE IN LLTOWN

CHEAP INSTANT COFFEE,

Weet-Bix, Coles-brand full-cream milk and sweetener for Mum; oats, expensive paleo mix and banana for me.

“And how many men have you had?”

Mum blurts out over breakfast.

I assume my request for privacy before 9am and the faint buzzing sound coming from my room alongside Kanye’s latest album in the mornings has led to this interrogation... Oh and that dick pic that briefly flashed across my phone when I was showing her a reel on Instagram.

“Why are you only counting the men, Mum?” I laugh. “I’m not going to give you a number, Lynn.”

Her eyes bulge. “You should have gotten married and had children.” She looks at her bowl. “Children would have made your life-” I interrupt.

“How many hetero relationships are still together in this family?”

Mum’s twice-divorced hand shakily moves towards her breakfast. Her bowl, her mouth and her spoon are just centimetres apart and still I clench wondering if the mush will make it.

“Not many,” she replies, grimacing.

The pain could be her back, her hip, her infection due to a poorly inserted catheter, her frozen shoulders, her childless daughter or any combination.

“You know what I wish for the women in this family, before they die?” I shouldn’t have said “before they die” but I speak my subtext, a fearful child watching their greatest love deteriorating in front of their eyes.

“Excellent orgasms.”

She swallows.

“Wonderful, deep, loving, freeing, fucking divine, awesome orgasms. You don’t even need a partner for that, Mum.” She snorts and takes the last shaky spoon of Weet-Bix to her lips; she can’t move her arms without great pain.

“Well, I guess it’s too late for me then.”

SOME DOS AND DON’TS

on how to masturbate while waiting out Covid-19 in your childhood home during a stinking hot January, with an ailing mother who is growing increasingly disabled in every sense except her hearing: *DO establish boundaries, i.e. no busting into the guest room before 9am.

*DON’T expect these boundaries to be adhered to. *DO ensure a quick hidey-hole for your vibrators in case your roommate busts in unannounced before 9am (I suggest a double pillowcase). *DON’T forget to thoroughly wash your hands after said roommate indicates the need for a back rub using Tiger Balm or Vicks VapoRub, just in case you decide to finish your original task (unless you’re into that sensation). *DO try to find a loud electric toothbrush so afternoon releases can occur without too much inquiry. *DON’T forget to drop into conversation that you’ve become very conscious about your dental hygiene in recent times. *DO play loud music sporadically throughout the day so the link between masturbating and playing music isn’t so obvious. *DON’T focus too much on your location or who your roommate is. *DO remember that you’re an adult who has permission to pleasure themselves and relieve stress even if the guest room is your childhood bedroom and your roommate is your mum.

I HAD PLANNED TO visit Campbelltown for two weeks in midJanuary, but the shock death of a friend from high school brought me to Sydney a month earlier than expected.

I shifted my dates so I could stay for an extra week – and then Mum and I contracted Covid.

Five weeks in my mother’s house.

Five weeks in the house I lived in from my last year of primary school until my last year of high school.

I hadn’t been in my family home for more than a weekend in over 20 years. It was fucking surreal.

The virus hit me pretty hard; my throat was on fire and the fever consumed my body whole. I slept and sweated through my sheets for 48 hours before I heard Mum coughing.

On the day I sent her to hospital, she busted into my room and lay down next to me. She was burning hot.

I jumped up, drenched a towel in cold water and lay it over her body. Her oxygen dropped.

I texted a mate who had been working with elderly folks throughout

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the pandemic for advice and then rang the Covid-19 hotline for more advice, while getting Mum iced water, ibuprofen and Strepsils.

When I came back into the room, she’d managed to stack my pillows under her head and my dildo was hanging out of the pillowcase, about an inch from her temple.

I was filled with a visceral mix of horror, deep shame and ticklish glee.

A question shot into my mind like an enflamed arrow cutting through the battlefield: has my mother ever had an orgasm? The conversation over breakfast whizzed through me and a deep sadness arose.

I had been so worried about giving my mum Covid that I did rapid antigen tests every other day, even if I’d just gone for a walk. I had been very careful, but not careful enough.

pneumonia had taken more lives and that only people with underlying issues were at risk.

“Which is my mum, dude,” I squawked from the hall, that goddam Covid throat making me sound extra emotional. “Your argument for NOT taking her doesn’t take into account her osteoarthritis, diabetes, bowel dysfunction… shall I go on?”

I lost my shit, y’all. Then I cried on the female-presenting paramedic’s hazmat shoulder in the kitchen.

Little did she know that it wasn’t just the virus blowing my adrenals to smithereens; I was shook by the thought that Mum might die without having had an orgasm.

Anxious, afraid and feverish, I waited on hold for an ambulance, catastrophising and fixated on this new revelation. The intersection of the medical and metaphysical gave me the sensation of lava – volcanic lava rising up to my chin.

A vague memory of reading a page from a book on her bedside table when I was about 13 infiltrated my thoughts.

“He threw her onto the sheepskin rug and thrust his maleness deep into her…” It was a passage from a Mills & Boon romance novel and it sounded unpleasant and dangerous to me at the time. My mum was a voracious consumer of revamped early ’90s softporn and the whole back wall of our garage – I’m talking ceiling to floor – held volumes of Mills & Boon novels.

A multitude of sensations rocked through my nervous system that morning.

“FUCK YOU, Candice.”

For the record, my mother did not want to go to hospital.

When the paramedics arrived, she was cursing me out pretty bad but swung into the voice she uses for white people quite swiftly as they asked her questions and took her vitals.

The paramedics were dressed in low-key hazmat suits and I stayed at a distance, listening in the hallway, as instructed. Two young, seemingly white Aussie kids in their mid-to-late twenties strolled into Mum’s bedroom. The malepresenting person did all the talking. He kept using the phrase “my dear” and his arrogance switched a knot in my gut.

“I don’t think your stats are too bad, my dear. If we take you to hospital, they’ll just send you back, my dear.” He went on to say that Covid-19 wasn’t as deadly as folks were making out – that

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MOST PEOPLE NEVER want to think about their parents having sex, let alone masturbating, let alone orgasming. In this moment it was all I could think about. The absence of sensual pleasure in a body that had endured so much pain hit hard.

When I was in my twenties, I found out that Germaine Greer and Maya Angelou were married to the same person at different times in their lives – a white man named Paul du Feu. He was a Welsh carpenter who shot a centrefold for British Cosmopolitan and he was pretty dang sexy. My young heart was content thinking about Maya Angelou with a good lover, forget the rest… get it, mama.

Later, when I read Audre Lorde’s work, all I wanted was to find Black queer love and live in it forever. Alice Walker and Tracy Chapman type love, Lena Waithe and Alana Mayo type love, Niecy Nash and Jessica Betts type love.

Like the majority of people socialised as women, let alone coloured girls from conservative South African households, it took me a minute to discover that my orgasm belonged to me.

There were almost zero depictions of sexual Black women on Aussie TV when I was growing up. There was Grace Jones, and maybe Jennifer Beals, but nothing consistent, no Black Sex in the City, no Black Samantha.

I’d never had a partner who could satiate me. I thought there was something wrong with me. I asked different doctors if I was dysfunctional, whispering, “Am I a nympho?”

“You like sex. In fact, you love sex, and there’s nothing wrong with that!” my cousin Judith told me. Judith lived in the Caribbean, she was in her fifties, and she was the first person I knew who practiced ethical non-monogamy.

“Find different playmates and play with yourself, Candy.”

My first vibrator changed my life.

I took myself to the highest heights, multiple little deaths, slow gratification to reincarnation.

My sexual imagination and sensual intelligence circled in spirals of self-love, softness and fire. Satisfaction was sweet and so fucking powerful.

MUM WAS ADMITTED to hospital, and she stayed for eight days.

I found myself in my mother’s home, alone… and… well, it had been a really stressful week.

The marathon started with a daydream about a guy at Campbelltown Bunnings I’d clocked before I got sick.

Maybe non-binary? Curly hair, spacers in their ears, tanned. Then the older masc Lebanese lesbian (I’m guessing) who served me at the coffee shop and probably gave me Covid. Mum’s gardener – I hadn’t seen him at all, no idea how he looked, but I pretended he looked like Pharrell. Pharrell with an Aussie accent. The biracial couple on Feeld who disappeared after I said I got Covid. The depressed filmmaker with the massive cock. The Filipina woman with the heavy lashes at the pharmacy. The bogan white kid with a mullet and tattoos on the train.

Teyana Taylor in Kanye’s “Fade” video clip. Teyana Taylor’s husband. Teyana Taylor’s husband’s basketball team, but I benched the white guy. The clean-cut Italian boy who asked to see my asshole on Snapchat. Jessica Betts. Jemaine Clement. Tessa Thompson. Black men eating pussy on the internet. Lesbian orgies. Erika Lust movies.

I rode out the virus alone in my mother’s home with two sex toys, a

tonne of vitamins, Hydralyte icy poles and my iPhone.

I also decluttered her linen cupboard (50kg to charity, 50kg to recycling and 50kg kept) – I’d say along with Mills & Boon my mum survived her sexless marriages with a fierce tablecloth fetish.

IT’S POSSIBLE THAT MORE

orgasms happened in that house in the month of January 2022 than in the 32 years Mum has lived there.

I hadn’t totally understood how important self-care and pleasure are to me until this brutal trip.

I’ll say this, particularly to people who have been socialised as women, brownand Black-skinned, possibly living in the suburbs, possibly in monogamous relationships, possibly heterosexual: whatever you do, don’t rely on your partner for pleasure, and don’t wait another second.

Your body holds myriad soulful, loving, earth-shattering orgasms.

Explore yourself by yourself, with yourself, for yourself. Masturbate for fun, masturbate for stress relief, masturbate for mental health, masturbate for connection, masturbate for no good reason – just please masturbate often. Even if you’re a grown-ass woman visiting your conservative South African mum in Western Sydney, you gotta masturbate.

Release the oppressive sex-negative crap, gaffer tape the door shut if need be, lube up and love thy holy trinity: in the name of the clitoris, the vagina and the holy vulva – amen. … And that’s how you masturbate in Campbelltown.

CANDY BOWERS is an award-winning mischief-maker, writer, playwright, TV creator, actor, director and lyricist. Born of South African political refugees, she has created an extraordinary cross-disciplinary body of work that shakes and tickles audiences in equal measure. Host of the Multi-Hypho podcast, she is currently developing an original TV series, Bottlo2560, and writing her first feature film, Elastic Tribe.

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QUEE

RING P E R

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Queer p e social e ople in straig h xpecta tions to t-appearing r ela reprodu ce. This tionships face author is resis ting.

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I DON’T WANT KIDS.

I don’t want to get married.

I’m a bisexual cis woman in a monogamous relationship with a cis man. As we appear straight, the societal assumption (expectation) is that I should want these things, especially kids.

I grew up thinking I would have children, that I would want them. In my early twenties, children were a part of my fantasy – an extension of lust and love for partners, whereby I could imagine a mini version of ‘us’. That faded to apathy by my late twenties.

Suddenly I was 30 and having conversations about fertility and the clock ticking, and it all became so practical. “If I want to have more than one child I’ll need to start at 33. Okay that’s three years from now, so how much will I need to save? And where should we live?” And none of it felt good or right. It felt hard, it felt suffocating, it felt like compromise.

REPRONORMATIVITY IS THE CONCEPT that all humans want to, and should, reproduce. It is deeply subsumed within heteronormativity, and is rife in popular culture. It also significantly impacts our health care.

Since coming to the realisation that I don’t want children of my own, I have connected with other child-free-by-choice people and have been exploring the concept of repronormativity. It has been an exercise in self-education, understanding and acceptance, and it has revealed the pervasiveness of repronormativity and how harmful it can be.

To borrow from bell hooks, as a queer person I often find myself at odds with everything around me and I look for ways to create, speak and live that honour my identity/ies. I may resist repronormativity because it is bound with heteronormativity, though I don’t believe that’s the whole picture.

I don’t believe that wanting children or marriage is heteronormative; queer people can and should do whatever the fuck they want. Repronormativity, however, often dictates who can and can’t do what.

Let’s look at repronormativity as it relates to heteronormativity in popular culture.

We’ve all seen the scene in the film where someone comes out to their conservative parents as queer, and the parents tearfully respond, “We’ll never have grandchildren.”

The assumption appears to be that because many queer couples don’t have the compatible baby-making equipment, they cannot have children. Maybe a more progressive aunt or sibling will gently offer, “They can always adopt,” as though in order for a family to be complete it must have children, even if they are seen as ‘consolation’ children (not biological).

But for queer people, chosen family can be everything, and never a consolation.

Through socialisation and popular culture, I’ve learned that a typical heteronormative timeline looks something like this: Boy meets girl, they fall in love, and after months of fighting over whose house they’re going to sleep at, they decide to move in together. They save some money and get a little help from their parents to buy their first home. Then one day, as the final lick of paint has been applied to their freshly renovated home, he surprises her by getting down on one knee. With permission from her father (that he secured earlier), he asks her if she’ll make him the happiest man alive. She responds ecstatically, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!” A year of wedding planning passes and finally they marry. It’s the happiest day of their lives. They squeeze in a honeymoon before settling down and, what do you know, they’re pregnant! Nine months later comes the Instagram announcement: “And then there were three.” A couple of years later, when they have their second child, their caption reads, “Our family is complete.”

Life in five easy steps: find a relationship, obtain the seal of approval from family, buy your first home, get married, reproduce.

Queer people who pursue this narrative will often experience barriers and obstacles.

Navigating gender identity and sexuality may be the first barrier. Many queer people may never be accepted by their family. Statistically speaking, queer people are more likely to live in metropolitan (read: expensive) areas and rent their homes. Sadly, many queer people are also in insecure work, making home ownership near impossible.

Marriage equality only became legal in Australia in 2017 and there are still 69 countries

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around the world that have laws criminalising homosexuality.

As for having biological children (for partners who don’t have a penis and uterus, respectively), it’s not impossible, but it is by no means easy. There is a lot of red tape and bureaucracy to navigate and the financial aspect is out of reach for most. Throw in a pandemic and a hold on IVF in Australia and many people will have missed their window. Adoption isn’t any easier – only 264 adoptions were finalised in 2020–21 and it’s unclear how many of the adoptive parents were queer. Adoption by same-sex couples has only been legally available in all jurisdictions of Australia since April 2018.

If I were single, or in a relationship with someone who had the same reproductive organs as me, the question wouldn’t be when I would be having children, but if and how. The assumption often is you either can’t because of the aforementioned barriers, or your lifestyle couldn’t possibly be conducive to raising children, therefore you’re not afforded that desire. Many queer people have thrown out the rule book, though, and in doing so have carved new pathways to creating a life for themselves, conceptualising new family models and ideas of home.

IN MY LATE TWENTIES I started to picture my life in a sliding doors kind of way. One life was beautifully wholesome with one or two children, breakfasts in bed, dress-ups and face paint. Maybe my kids were well-behaved, and we could still go out for dinner and travel. The other was all of those things, minus children, and if we were lucky, more travel, more dinners out, more money, more time for us or me.

At 30, my partner and I had a chat. He said, “I don’t think I’ll be ready to have children at 33,” which was my personal deadline to begin trying. I said, “Okay, when do you think you’ll be ready?” To which he replied, “I don’t think I will ever be ready.”

I thought I’d feel sad, or scared – disappointed at least. I felt none of those things.

Instead I felt free: I felt younger even though I wasn’t, I felt like I got my body back even though I’d never lost it, I felt richer even though I didn’t have any more money. I gained more in that moment – more than I’d lost.

I absolutely adore children – they’re so inspiring and funny and curious and intelligent and genuine in a way only children can be. I want children in my life. I want to hold them while my friend finishes their breakfast. I want to look after them so my friends can do whatever they want to do child-free. I want them to run away to my house because I’m cool Aunty Bree and their parents just don’t get it. I want to help them write their first CV or let them and their friends stay at my house while I’m away so they can get their first taste of independence. But I don’t want children of my own.

I’M IN THE fortunate position of being able to choose not to have children of my own. Heartbreakingly, there are so many barriers to queer people having children when they really want them. I wish every person who wanted a child could have one.

The flipside of that is I hope that people who don’t want children don’t have them. No child wants to feel unwanted, or burdensome. Parenting is hard work – it’s one of the hardest jobs in the world with the longest tenure – and let’s face it, not everyone is qualified for it. I used to work for a global sexual and reproductive health organisation that is unapologetically pro-choice. I know the impact of choice for those who have it, and especially for those who don’t.

I grew up in regional Victoria, raised by a single mother who worked hard just to scrape by. American author Sarah Smarsh writes, “Poverty makes motherhood harder and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.”

I think another reason why I don’t want children of my own comes from what I witnessed growing up: single motherhood and uneven labour division in households.

Even if the parents were together, the fathers were mostly absent.

I feel relieved to have made it through high school without getting pregnant, knowing the cycle of poverty that would have perpetuated. Many of my peers left high school to have children. In the region I’m from, some doctors refuse to administer contraception or provide access to medical abortions for fear of backlash. Access to safe and affordable health care in regional areas remains scarce. This lack of access and choice is at the core of repronormativity.

Having children is the norm – you should want them and you should have them, no matter the cost.

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I signed a petition to have IVF reinstated in Victoria in January 2022, adding my signature somewhat hastily because the friend who shared the petition recently conceived a baby via IVF. I want people like my friends to have the family they want.

However, re-reading the wording used in the petition, I was critical of its messaging that describes infertility to be “as stressful as a cancer diagnosis”, that it “increases anxiety and depression” and that “childless women are at higher risk of suicide and 13% of women going through IVF experience suicidal ideation”. This, to me, reads like infertility is a death sentence, which it is not. If we replace the word ‘infertility’ with ‘disability’, that logic is ableist.

Though an infertility diagnosis would no doubt be devastating, and the impact on a person’s mental health significant, infertility and being ‘childless’ should never be conflated in this way. More needs to be done to support alternative pathways to familymaking so that people don’t feel as though they are lacking or have failed. I would argue that one of the reasons why an infertility diagnosis may lead to suicidal ideation is not the infertility itself but the societal pressure for women to conceive lest they be seen as worthless.

THERE ARE MANY moving parts to why I choose to be child-free: a rejection of the heteronormative, my feminist discomfort in taking on more unpaid labour, my

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own childhood traumas, climate change and the very real possibility that we may not have a future for our future generations. I also think that a big part of me choosing to be child-free is me saying to myself, I am enough – a message I haven’t heard a lot in my life and one I struggle to accept. Popular culture, family, friends, colleagues and strangers online consistently tell us we must have our own children in order to truly know love or feel fulfilled. The message we receive is that if we don’t, we will go without. Life for ourselves will never be enough; it’s selfish.

We have been sold a narrative that doesn’t serve or represent everyone. But we have the opportunity to rewrite it. What might it look like to queer repronormativity? I don’t have all the answers yet, but in the pursuit of living my life, and building a family, community and home that honour my identity/ies, I’m hoping to create ways that make me feel less at odds.

BREE TURNER is an Australian social researcher, writer and theatre maker currently based in Paris. Her research and creative practice often explores gender and sexuality, digital cultures and performativity, with the aim to produce work that provokes, educates and advocates for social change. Her forthcoming podcast ‘Repronormativity’, with co-producers Sam Wilde and Amruta Nargundka, is due for release in late 2022.

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SLUT FAMING SEX WORK AND BELONGING

By redefining the word ‘slut’, we can find power after others have tried to take it away.

Words: KAY ESSE Images: WONDRA

THEY CALLED ME a slut before I’d even had my first kiss. With my pleated skirt rolled high and my eyes rimmed with kohl pencil, at the school in the prim British town where I grew up, nonconformity wasn’t the badge of honour it was elsewhere.

It rolled off their tongues before anything had rolled off mine. Slut. As I became accustomed to running the gauntlet down the school corridor past my hecklers as they spat the word, phlegm-coated, into my bleached hair, it gradually lost its sting and I assumed its power. The catcall intended to make me feel shame coloured my emerging sexual identity, as I took pleasure in playfully redefining it.

I had always loved experimenting with words. Writing was my safe haven. If I could offer advice to the owner of the hand angrily scribbling into reams of journal all those years ago, I would tell her to hold fast and stay strong – don’t let them steer you off course and don’t stop shaking your tush when you walk.

A label thrown at me was mine to own and reinvent. Slut, that forbidden apple that had been steeped in vitriol and used to ostracise me, became something I grew more curious about redefining and shaping the power of within. I realised I had the power to change its meaning. To weaponise it as a battle cry.

I wore my reputation proudly like a fresh tattoo – like the juicy cherries I got etched on my arse. Guided by the light in the darkness, I broke through their paradigms of shame and smear.

Why was pleasure and self-expression something to shy away from?

I realised that if I had to keep my mouth and legs closed, I didn’t want to belong. My sense of belonging was my sense of non-belonging – as the slut, I was at home.

Sambuca shots distort the memories, swirling in a mix of stomach acid and electric-shocked hormones. A dress made of stocking fabric for the debutante ball, my fresh new nipple piercing winking defiantly through the mesh. Walking home through the school grounds at midnight, pulling my new experiment in through the open window of the room where we took art class and straddling him on the desk. A drive in the darkness to smoke joints,

the thrill of four hands all over me, intoxicated by the heady smell of sweet smoke and the salty taste on my lips. It was more fun than playing by the rules.

Perhaps the fact that everyone had a problem with it made it even more tantalising. I’ve always had a fetish for things you aren’t allowed to do.

My sexuality was not something I was going to shy away from. I couldn’t fathom why sluttiness was a bad thing or something to be quiet about. My tormenters’ definition of that salacious slut sobriquet was completely different to mine. I was happy to roll with that.

A positive by-product of being ostracised and othered is that you don’t stick around the people who do it to you. You carve your own niche and make your own home elsewhere. Home for me had to be shaped from within, a safe space fed and nurtured in myself, before I could make the geographical leaps of discovery that would allow me to unleash her, wild and untamed.

During my teens, I had come to realise that awareness of one’s own sexuality, and the confidence, curiosity and self-discovery that came with it, was a gift. I was also blessed to be comfortable with my body and how to explore it. I was at home dancing alone, far from the madding crowd.

I HAD ALWAYS been at home on the stage. I loved to dance. I had just stopped ballet and theatre on Saturdays to concentrate on getting the grades for the university I’d chosen.

I saw an advert in a newspaper: “Dancers wanted: must have open mind.”

I didn’t have to read between the lines to know this wasn’t Swan Lake.

It wasn’t in my provincial town, either. It was in Leeds, the city where they spoke as hard as they swaggered.

In a cloud of Britney Spears Fantasy and gaudy daubs of Rimmel Sun Shimmer, I found a strange new sisterhood in this weird microcosm of society: the mean girls, the geeks, the goths. I was smack bang in the middle; we were at home together in our nocturnal enterprise. I assimilated the girl-next-door persona as comfortably as I slipped into my first pair of perspex goldfish-bowl Pleasers, like the ones I’d seen in the girl-on-girl DVDs I frothed so hard over.

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Some people say they are uncomfortable being naked. So long as I can wear a pair of seven-inch stilettoes, I am in my element. Realising I could flirt and tease for a living made me feel so liberated.

My little city club was just the beginning. One of the girls told me about an audition at a stripping super club in London, and I took a punt on it.

As it turned out, my A-level French paid its dues: they thought I’d be better working at the branch of the club in the French capital. My first road trip in a G-string and heels took me much further afield than I’d imagined: on the Eurostar to Paris.

For a blistering hot summer in Pigalle, I lived on the same street as the Moulin Rouge, dancing for one of the largest adult brands in the world at the age of 19.

I took a gap year from university and went to Hong Kong to work at an expat members club, and to Guam, where I crawled along tipping rails making doe eyes at American sailors.

Busboys swept my tips off the stage with a broom and bundled them up into hundreds.

My favourite time of the day was always dawn after working, my body aching from bending and flexing, my sunglasses obnoxiously large – the surreal time when most people are starting their day but your brain is still wired with from the hustle and the curious nature of what has just happened. I realised I belonged in the shadows.

Some dancers may be reading this thinking I’m looking back with smudges on my rose-tinted specs. Of course, there were jerks and creeps and bitches. But during this job, I learnt to filter them. If they weren’t my vibe, I walked away; I stopped dances, and later bookings, if they so much as said the wrong thing. Often, I gave them enough rope to hang themselves, playing a game of cat and mouse with those who deserved to have their tail trapped and sliced, the bait always beyond their grasp.

I never hated men. I realised that they were there in their worst state, tanked up, egged on by friends to be their most masculine and rowdy.

Sometimes the intimacy of the situation even enabled me to expose a softness or a vulnerability in a client

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that extended far beyond their ability to open their wallet.

Stripping had built in me a strong filter and a keen radar for bullshit. It gave me more satisfaction and a sense of fulfilment to have an experience that left neither party feeling regret or anger. Sometimes I wanted to get deeper, to know who they were, to hear their problems and what made them tick.

STRIPPING INVOLVES such a cross-section of society.

I’ve spent my life hunting for diamonds in the rough. The breadth of the lives and the window I got into them was a curious person’s dream.

It’s amazing how much a person will open up to you just because you are naked. They share things with you that they probably wouldn’t share with anyone else.

I’d always been an uncharacteristically good girl when working for clubs.

I enforced the no-touching boundary because I liked the space, even if that space was the length of my eyelash. I liked the power it gave me and restraint it put on them. But I wasn’t afraid to remove that boundary later in my sex work career.

A very abusive ex-partner made me stop stripping. I had told him what I did from the first moment we met and that I was proud of it and enjoyed it.

He lied when he told me he was cool with it, and then tried to erode the confident self I had created, brick by brick. It was like returning to my school days. He attempted to take my power and pride away by trying to make me feel shame. He asked me if I had ever had sex for money. I said that I hadn’t, but told him that I most definitely would.

It was many years after this relationship that the opportunity came along to explore what happens when you remove the no-touch barrier.

My experience in sex work was, for the most part, really positive. I approached what I did ethically, for myself and my own mental health, but also with a view to understanding the clients and their varying behaviour.

I enjoyed the longer bookings that allowed me to find out who my client really was, removing the stigma for them as well as me.

“Slut, that forbidden apple that had been steeped in vitriol and used to ostracise me, became something I grew more curious about redefining and shaping the power of within. I realised I had the power to change its meaning. To weaponise it as a battle cry”

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If you have an issue with your back, you go and see an osteopath. If you would like to recover from past trauma, you go and see a psychologist.

I strongly believe that if you want to have the best sex, or explore a specific kink in a safe space, you should enlist an expert.

MAKING THE SERVICE I offered feel natural and acceptable – removing the shame for the client as I had removed it for myself – underpinned the way I worked, when I could.

I believe the toxic masculine energy comes from fear; it was certainly true for my abusive ex.

It became increasingly apparent that she who was branded ‘slut’ could use her sharp, flickering tongue and smutty brain to emancipate, both physically and mentally.

Imparting wisdom, enrichment and comfort to the right client, allowing them to enjoy what they were doing in a safe space without guilt or judgement, and feeling empowered by cultivating their sense of belonging as well as mine, didn’t give fear a third leg to stand on.

I also felt a deep satisfaction in exploring kinks in a safe space with someone who didn’t know how to unlock that door themselves, offering them a sense of belonging or home that it was okay to ask for, and letting them know that it was okay to feel pleasure for unconventional things.

I did not want a client to feel guilty or empty after they had engaged my services, leaving a trail of shame in their wake once the door had been closed and the glow of pleasure had been extinguished. I wanted them to know that what they were doing was not wrong.

Yes, sometimes it was just a root, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes there was no breaking through. Sometimes I didn’t want to. Sometimes it was animal, filthy hate sex with zero connection, which was also cool.

The common denominator, though, was that I was always working and defining what I was doing on my terms.

You have to have a defined sense of self to do this work. I found that I had to be impassively secure and at home in myself. I needed an impenetrable resilience and unwavering self-respect.

I developed my sense of self by deconstructing language and labelling to reimagine an identity that others had weaponised to debase me. I nurtured an overarching love for my mind and body as vessels of positive sexual expression, and together they formed a place where I belonged. And I regret nothing.

KAY ESSE is a word fanatic who gets her kicks slinging stories and typing truths. She’s a retired sex work/stripping veteran, widely published music writer and badass button-pusher based in Naarm/Melbourne. You can read her interviews and opinion pieces on her website Melbourne Royalty.

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Photography series by RONA BAR & OFEK AVSHALOM

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Q&A with JESS DESAULNIERS-LEA

Rona Bar and Ofek Avshalom are a photography duo (aka Fotómetro). The 27-year-old artists are based in Tel Aviv, with plans to relocate to London. In their work, they strive to integrate storytelling through unique visuals, striking colour palettes and different lighting techniques. Their commercial work focuses on fashion, PR and portraiture while their personal projects aim to explore concepts including the human form, emotions, gender, identity and individuality.

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project, it was obvious for us that this title represents what this project is for us, which is a celebration of our own relationship. Fun fact: we both studied music for a couple of years. Today, our photography is very influenced by it, and a large part of our commercial work is with musicians.

JESS DESAULNIERS-LEA. This series beautifully represents the diversity of different relationships.

Was this intentional when you started Us? RONA BAR & OFEK AVSHALOM. From the very beginning we aimed to photograph real-life relationships.

We wanted to show diversity and represent couples you don’t often see in mainstream media.

For many years, we’ve all been taught that the default ‘normal’ kind of relationship looks a certain way – usually heterosexual, same race, same size, etc. The truth is that real-life relationships are far more colourful and diverse than this. And they deserve far more representation.

It’s exciting to see the progress that has happened, especially in the last few years, and it’s important to talk about those subjects.

JD. The series collaboration is ongoing. What continues to be personally fulfilling about how the series is evolving?

RB & OA. We believe that no matter how many couples we portray, each couple will naturally bring a different story that someone will be able to relate to, so we feel thankful for each couple that lets us into their world and shares their story with us.

JD. Your work reminds me of photographers like Nan Goldin who have explored the rawness of relationships in home environments. How do you think home influences intimacy and connection?

RB & OA. That’s such a big compliment; Nan Goldin photographs were some of our inspirations for this project. We wanted to give an authentic feeling to the project, and we felt like people would be most comfortable in their own space. We also feel like the couple’s space can reveal a lot about their personality and add another layer to the story.

The connection between the couples is one of the things we wanted to focus on. We wanted to capture the intimacy and togetherness of the couples. We tried to simplify the setting and styling.

The look and feel of the project is mostly warm and natural.

We also wanted to show skin. By doing that, it’s very obvious that this project is about humanity and not about fashion, for example.

JD. How did you go about choosing the couples to photograph? Were many of them part of your community already?

RB & OA. Our first couples were people we knew. Slowly, after that, we started to expand to strangers and we also received messages from couples that wanted to participate as the project took off online.

We actually became friends with some of the couples and are still in touch with them.

JD. I’ve read that the series title was inspired by the Regina Spektor song ‘Us’. What meaning does that song have in relation to this series? Was music part of the shooting process?

RB & OA. That’s a good question.

We started working on the project in May 2020. After working together professionally for about a year we became a couple, so this project is also heavily influenced by our own relationship. We started our relationship just when the pandemic started and we had the chance to be isolated together and fall in love while it was only us in our world – there was no-one else to disturb us.

“Us” by the incredible Regina Spektor was a song that actually inspired our own relationship at first, so when we started our ongoing

JD. For me, there’s a romanticism in these images. Did you find unexpected romance in the familiarity of day-to-day life while shooting Us? RB & OA. We are both romantic people, but mostly we’ve tried to create an image that tells the story of each couple and is sometimes deeply revealing about them.

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This project has some documentary vibes in it, but it’s actually considered a ‘staged portrait’. We asked the couples to pose for us, while trying to create the most authentic and storytelling image for each couple.

JD. The rooms in which you chose to photograph the couples really complement the powerful presence of each couple. How did you go about choosing locations within their homes?

RB & OA. That depends. We always ask beforehand for some photos of their house or apartment, just to be prepared, but usually that doesn’t help because we can only get the real essence of their relationship when we arrive at the couples’ homes.

We usually try a few different spots, using natural light and some ambient light, but when we sit down to choose the images afterwards we almost always know immediately which one is the one.

they have kids and they are living in a big house together – they’re super comfortable with each other. And in the afternoon, we shot a couple named Yarden and Max, who’d known each other for a month and had just moved in together in this tiny apartment. It was amazing to see the different stages of the relationships and the magic in each one.

Shooting Yarden and Max was also a highlight for us. Yarden is a transgender woman, and we were completely surprised by how the couple let us into their home so comfortably, sharing this new relationship. They understood the project and trusted it – it was really special for us. We love the image that we made for them, and we think it reflects their story perfectly, in a very simple way.

JD. Relationships were such a hot topic during the pandemic – some couples were unintentionally living together and falling in love, while others experienced breakups and heartbreak. What was the most surprising thing you learned about relationships in the confinement of the home and isolation of the pandemic?

RB & OA. That all we have is each other.

JD. Tell us about one of the most memorable experiences shooting this series.

RB & OA. One of the most interesting experiences was this juxtaposition between two couples that we shot on the same day. The couple in the morning, Karin and Rami, have been married for more than 25 years.

He’s a doctor and she’s a therapist,

JESS DESAULNIERS-LEA is an arts and culture photographer, writer and image editor based in Canada who has worked with VICE, Cirque du Soleil, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and a variety of music publications covering international musicians on tour.

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A NEW

FOUNDAT

Words: MARCUS HOUGH Images: SULAIMAN ENAYATZADA

Chaos used to be a normal state for this author, until they found a new way to live.

TION

IN THE DRUG and alcohol and housing sectors, ‘lived experience’, ‘intersectionality’ and ‘traumainformed care’ are very commonly used terms. While I chose to work in social/ community services to help people, in some ways the field chose me.

I’ve spent countless hours helping people go from the streets into homes, always carefully considering my clients’ trauma and societal barriers, yet until recently I took little time to reflect on my own trauma. I took even less time to acknowledge that I was allowing others to traumatise me using using the same oppression I was fighting.

While those terms – ‘lived experience’, ‘intersectionality’ and ‘trauma-informed care’ – are rooted in theory, trying to understand how they exist in my life and where I belong is a different story.

For me, the process of finding my home wasn’t something that could be summed up in a training workshop or course, and it wasn’t something I could case-manage my way to. I had to learn it, feel it, and live – no matter how hard it was to reflect on.

As a non-binary, pansexual African American living abroad, who is also a recovering drug addict, much of my identity is based on what academics would describe as living on the margins of mainstream society.

While I was writing this piece about the concept of home, I was moving house. Moving made me realise me that my home, my safe place, was the chaos of transition and the familiarity of discomfort. I never tell any of my clients that this concept of home is healthy – do as I say, not as I do.

Although I think of chaos as home, it’s not as if I come from a broken home full of violence and trauma.

My parents are kind, loving, non-traditional people. They are an interracial couple in a white, conservative town. My father is a Hendrix-loving, peace-love-andunderstanding hippy, and my mother is a family-violence shelter manager who practises spiritualism. Kindness and love are their tenets of how to live life.

I know I will always be accepted and unconditionally loved by my parents; they will always welcome me with open arms, regardless of the circumstances.

With that said, as someone ‘othered’

by society, while I could run from the crosshairs that are the intersections of oppression, the bullet it delivered me was trauma, no matter how much love was in my childhood household.

I GREW UP in small-town Pennsylvania, an hour north of Pittsburgh. It’s a deeply conservative place with as many churches as pubs; a town of abandoned buildings and rusted ghosts of a once-bustling steel industry. What was once once a vibrant middle-class community is now one lost paycheck away from poverty.

That’s part of my family’s story. As one of the few black families in the town, poverty was only compounded by race. Generational wealth was not for us – there was no such thing as falling back on savings or selling the house.

In my final days of school, my mother’s job loss meant that we were evicted and homeless. I spent eight weeks on the basement couch of a wrestling-team buddy.

It came at a time when we only had one income. We survived on a single income because my father had quit his job to help support a family member who was grasped by addiction.

My relative had had made the brave decision to get her life back by undergoing almost a year of drug and alcohol rehabilitation. My father stayed at home to look after her two children.

The long period of being a carer meant that re-entering the workforce would be challenging for my dad, particularly because he did not have a secondary education.

My mother lost her job shortly after my relative was reunited with her children, when we were already stretched thin.

At the time, 17-year-old me began to fill with a lot of anger – a lot of everything that I was not able to label, let alone handle.

This was supposed to be an exciting and rewarding time of my life: I was about to graduate from high school, and I had been accepted into an excellent university, yet I was in chaos.

I was angry that my parents lost everything after doing the right thing.

THREE MONTHS LATER, at university, I felt like I needed to hide everything about myself.

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The school was full of people from the upper crust of society, and from the moment I stepped on campus, I was determined to be in the in-crowd.

I was going to cover up my queerness, my blackness and my poverty, to not only be accepted but revered by the upper-class white students who inhabited this little bubble on a hill in rural Ohio.

Feeling the need to hide my true self at university would lay the groundwork for more transitions and chaos in my life.

I was starting to realise that I was queer in both sexuality and gender.

However, I was a gridiron football player from a conservative town, so I tried to repress and suppress in the hopes that my feelings would go away.

I dismissed them by involving myself with a group that was the complete opposite: the football team and the yuppie fraternity where members identified as conservative Republicans.

I also started misusing any substance that I could get my hands on.

The fraternity I joined was filled with the future businessmen of the world, aspiring titans of industry. It was a social space where progressives were called ‘pinkos’, everything that was disliked was referred to as ‘gay’, and a person who was disliked was a ‘fag’.

In this community, I needed to hide my authentic self. But I was unable to hide it from myself. I drank and used drugs to run away from my true self.

I felt like complete shit – probably because I was acting like complete shit.

I had drunken debates with the liberal kids who were trying to find common ground on gay marriage. My closeted queer self was really out there making talking points for things like social unions instead of marriage equality. I was trying to be as heteronormative as I could.

In my third year of uni, my fraternity was kicked off campus. I took a year of leave to recover from a football injury and when I returned to campus, most of my ‘friends’ from the last few years were gone.

I was no longer affiliated with a group and didn’t latch on to another group. I was alone.

At this point, I thought that I would run a little experiment – let’s see what happens if I let just a glimpse of myself

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out. Remember, I have a constant need to be uncomfortable; it’s my home.

I became friends with the fraternity that my fraternity brothers and I had called “loser queers”.

In spring that year, I attended a basement party known as the deb ball.

I had never really known what this was, but I found out that it was a party of queer folk and allies all dressed to the nines.

I went in with a full face of makeup and a revealing outfit, and I was able to dance with girls, boys and everyone in between. It was amazing. I was free.

It had been the first time that I was dressed outside of the gender binary since my favourite Halloween costume as a kid: a Southern belle.

Then the night ended, and I crawled back into my familiar cave.

LATER DOWN THE track, my addiction became out of control. I was out of control. My normal home, of somewhat organised chaos, had to be burned down. I needed a dramatic change or I risked losing my life.

I stepped out of my comfort zone and made changes to create a stable, normal life.

After years of treatment and maintenance, a couple of detoxes, rehab, counselling groups and more twelve-step meetings than one could count, I ended up meeting my wonderful partner. I ended up moving to the other side of the world.

I was able to help myself overcome active addiction, and I was going to help others: people who had been homeless, people who struggled with drugs and alcohol, people on the margins.

I was excited about this new life. And I was coming to grips with coming out – I was now in the progressive city of Melbourne. It was all happening.

I LANDED MY first job. It was with an international organisation that had a religious affiliation and a track record of not being the most accepting of members of the LGBTQ+ community. I needed a job so I gave it a shot.

I began to throw myself into work.

I loved working with clients, but I quickly realised I could never present my true self at this organisation.

I worked for a boss who treated men and women radically differently.

He once whispered to me in a private setting that a client was gay, as if it was something shameful. Homophobia and transphobia were widespread.

I left that part of the organisation to work at a completely different site that was in a completely different program.

I assumed it had to be better.

When I first met my boss, she looked and acted like the boss I had wanted.

She was young and progressive, and said all the right things. I saw a couple of red flags, but I was willing to overlook them because the culture was way better than at my previous gig.

We discussed trauma-informed care, having a person-centred approach, and intersectionality.

Yet something was off. I started to realise it was all a facade.

An employee wore a shirt that was obviously offensive about the LGBTQ+ community. I brought it up with the managers, but they all said that they hadn’t noticed.

I was allocated a new client and, in his file, it said he only wanted to work with a male. I went in to speak with my boss and tell her that I didn’t identify as a male, and I assumed they would reallocate the client, but I encountered resistance. I read between the lines – the other workers at my site were cisgender women and and I was the closest to ‘male’ of the social workers at that location. Clients were rarely allocated to social workers at different locations, for convenience. My gender identity was ignored for convenience.

To be agreeable, I told my manager that I would work with this particular client. But I requested that if any future clients asked to work with a man, I would be taken out of consideration.

Yet it happened again and again. I raised it constantly, and was told the needs of the client have to be balanced with the needs of the worker but they don’t always mesh. I was given the example that women often want to work with women.

My experience there – the disregard for my gender identity, and a couple of racial microaggressions – gave me clarity. I was being re-traumatised – by my clients, who would refer to people as “poofters”, and by my management.

I was back in the place of toxic frat

parties and every football locker room.

I was frequently leaving work in tears.

I was tired. I was done. And I was as lost as ever.

FOR SOME REASON, the chaos, the transitions and all the BS that I had put myself through for over 20 years, which was so familiar to me and usually something that made me feel comfortable, was now unbearable.

Fortunately, I now had all the tools, all the theories and a bunch of lived experience behind me.

I remembered the anger I had felt as a teenager when my family became homeless. I was finally at the crossroads where doing what I had to do and doing the right thing met.

I was dying for the feeling I had at the basement party where gender wasn’t an issue but a celebration.

And like every child that grows up and leaves home, I was leaving mine.

I resigned; not only from my job, but from the notion that my only home was a chaotic one.

I was a bit concerned about what my next path would look like, but I was moving to a new home in a place that understood me.

I wrote cover letters and went to interviews where I explicitly said “This is who I am: take me or leave me.”

I applied for a job that I thought was out of my league, only to find out that I was on a shortlist of one. They wanted me not only for my skills, but also for my life experience, my story and my point of view.

I remember going into situations, so many times, afraid to be seen, hiding in my cave of discomfort. I would take a deep breath, pause and put on a show. I now go into those situations a bit differently. It still starts with a deep breath and a pause. I still put on a show, but now I do it my way – with a hair flip and maybe even a check of my nails.

I RECENTLY MOVED into my new physical home and my new spiritual one. This new home is one of acceptance – not only from others, but of myself.

This new home is built on a foundation of trusting and appreciating myself for who I am.

Now, I only work with crisis – I

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no longer live in it. I get to take my experience, strength and hope every day to work, and it is valued.

My new role involves me making educational materials for alcohol and drug workers, with the directive that it is relevant to people from all walks of life, and especially those living on the margins of mainstream society.

I have a loving partner who helped me get to this point and continues to bring out the best of me, as well as a couple of senior adopted pets, because every creature deserves a loving home full of delicious food, warm blankets and streaming marathons of LGBTQ+ reality television.

This new home is one of truth, and maybe a bit of glitter.

MARCUS is a queer, non-binary African American living in Australia who works to improve the lives of those struggling with addiction, among other issues. They enjoy coaching American football, woodworking, adopting senior rescue animals, and raising chickens.

SAFE

SOUND Words & Images: BO BICKMORE Opening Image: J. DAVIES

AND D

After a childhood that involved domestic violence, abuse, mental illness and self-harm, this author learnt that home can be a place to grow and heal.

I HAVE TWO HOMES inside me. Built parallel to one another, they house my before and after: the place I am now and the place I left behind.

My childhood home is a patchwork house, mutated and morphed – it is all of the houses I grew up in, merged.

My memories haunt the closets and cupboards, all of the shadows and corners; ghosts of domestic violence, fear and shame. My mother lives inside, still dancing and drinking, singing and crying.

For a long time, that was the only idea of home I held for myself. It took years of being away from it for me to be able to formulate a new idea of what home could be; years growing and healing, years feeling the euphoria of finding my Queer1 family and community, years of replacing old memories with new.

It took leaving for me to really believe home could be something of my own making, that it could be different from what I had known.

Now, home looks like my partner’s kiss bookending every day, Queer dinner parties and dancing, my books in every room and his art on every wall, and our best friend making music in their bedroom down the hall.

I no longer hesitate before opening the front door and walking inside.

I no longer wait for the house to empty before I don my gowns and pearls, my lipstick and my heels.

WHEN I WAS TWO years old, my father was killed by a brain aneurysm, leaving my mother with five children and a grief that transformed her.

From the age of six until I was kicked out of home at 18, there were few times we were not also living with a monster – men who stain my memories and turn them into nightmares. There is one who never left, who attached like something cancerous and willed himself to spread. Abusive and constantly drunk, he moved in with us and fed on the frailty of my mother’s pain, her addictions and insecurities.

Violence and alcoholism ran like clockwork for years in our house. Friday and the weekend were the worst, always.

Monday was often a day we missed school or arrived hours late. Tuesday to Thursday were spent dreading the arrival of Friday as it circled back again.

Some of my earliest memories of our home are of Mum being thrown across a room, and of my brother being pushed through a window. In the next home, it is memories of overhearing yelling and glass being smashed, consoling my teenage sister while she shits herself in fear next to me, and cleaning up spilt blood before any police arrive.

There is no easy way for a child to walk away, to leave their home or family. Despite the hardship of home, I loved my family and mother.

I knew my mother was safer if I was there to protect her, that she needed the piece of my dad she saw inside me, the reminder of him in the shape of my face.

By the age of 10 I was comfortable calling the police and making a statement to an officer when they arrived too late.

Who would do that if I was not there? Who would change 1 The capitalisation of ‘Queer’ highlights my reverence for queerness and all of its multiplicity, as a further act of reclamation and to signify its omnipresence in my identity.

my mother’s sheets after she had been raped? I knew the details to leave out when child protective services came to school, and told them that they could not take me away and that my mother was not to blame. I was scared of foster care and being separated from my sister. I had already lost my father and knew I could not lose my mother, too. I knew all that she had lost and I could not be responsible for taking the last of what she had left.

Living with domestic violence as a child brings so much internal friction and confusion.

I knew that what I was living through was not okay, that home was supposed to be a safe place. But even when it is not, leaving still feels so wrong – your home is still home, the only shelter that you know.

I still felt my mother’s love and my need for her. I told myself to find whatever comfort I could in the familiarity of our broken home rather than face the uncertainty of the unknown, of what could come if I were to leave her alone.

We tell children to speak to the authorities, to welfare teams and counsellors, and to do so as if they do not know the separation their words will bring and the fears they will have to face.

I felt I had to stay when I was a kid, for my sisters and brothers, for my mother and her protection.

I will not tell someone that they must wait and that things will get better, but I also cannot tell them to do what they have to so they can leave, as if that is ever something easy or simple.

I stayed longer than I deserved, willing myself to be the brother and son that was needed for as long as I could, staying until I could not take anymore.

When I was 18, I was strangled, verbally abused and threatened by my mother’s partner.

In the days following, I told my mother I could not live like this anymore, that it was him or me. She chose him – chose to kick me out our door.

I MOVED IN WITH my best friend’s family. They took me in for two years and did their best to make room for me in their home. I survived that period of potential houselessness because of them.

It was an act of friendship for which I will never be able to express my gratitude. It was there that I was able to begin planning my life; I began to realise I was looking for my community, that I was Queer and that I needed to find and create myself a home.

I found work in a bookstore in the city. I packed all of my things and moved into a household of Queers and creatives I did not know.

I left the first idea I had of home behind and began carving a new one of my own.

Home is supposed to be a lighthouse, a landing strip – our safe haven and safe harbour. When we are well looked after and supported, comforted and safe, our potential to grow multiplies tenfold.

I could never have anticipated the ways I have expanded since home became a place where I feel protected.

The first blooms of gender fluidity and queerness I was taught to stamp out are now a well-loved garden, overgrown and thriving, robust and resilient.

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When you are a child burdened with the weight of your mother’s survival – when you have grown to associate weekends with police visits, and the smell of bourbon with fear – you are left with no room to focus on the parts of yourself begging to flourish.

I think often about the Little Bo I used to be, about the ways I would have cared for them and kept them safe. I think about the dresses I would have bought them, about the beauty of their body – its fatness and its overflow – and how I would have taught them that every inch of them was an inch worth loving.

I cannot give that version of me, back then, what they deserve, but every day I am grateful for how they held on; for their ability to get through all that they did.

I owe the bravest and best parts of myself to the child version of me who kept fighting, who held onto the seeds I was told to stamp out, and the hope that someday I could re-plant them.

I TAKE SOLACE in knowing that the home I live in now is not only for me – that the Little Bo I still carry inside is exploding with joy, proud of both of us and all that we have become.

I know that when I pull on a skirt, today, they are pulling one on, too. They paint their lips red in the mirror alongside me, sit on the side of the bathtub and squeeze too-big feet into borrowed heels, as I do.

They feel the joy that I feel, and they see all that they were waiting for has been realised.

I remind myself every day that I am living for both of us. I refuse my fear and live proudly, outwardly Queer and anything but definable. I no longer swallow the words rising in the back of my throat when asked about my gender, my body, my past or my sexuality. These elements of myself I once hid are now badges I wear proudly. I know that largely this is because in the last five years I have had the chance to live with people who look like me, people who believe in what I do, people who are unapologetically Queer and who saw and loved that I was too.

There is so much beauty in living with people who reflect who you are. I watch my limp-wristed housemates and partner, hear the queerness in their voices like it is a language of its own, like it is a language that I know. I listen to them speak of revolution and revolt, their faces painted, dressed liked queens from head to toe. It took seeing and loving shared qualities in other people to realise I deserve to love those same things within myself, too.

I left home and fell in love with my friends and housemates. I let loving them teach me how to love myself, too, and I finally do – more now than I ever have before.

I could not have become the person I am without them, without moving away and redefining home for myself.

THERE ARE SO FEW chances for us to heal and grow when we are surrounded by violence, when we do not feel safe or valued.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I saw psychologists and welfare teams, and spoke to doctors and mental health organisations. I was depressed and anxious, could not sleep and could not stop harming myself.

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“I will never be able to forget or completely leave behind the home I come from, but every day a part of it is healed by the home I exist in now, this home of care and compassion, of brazen queerness and support”

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A part of me, then, already knew that despite medication and therapy, guidance and appointments, I could not get better when I still lived in a place of grief and abuse.

I recognise, now, that living there and trying to deal with my mental illness was like wanting a scab to heal but picking at it daily. I was still hurting because there were constantly new wounds blossoming over gashes yet to heal.

Walking through that front door meant walking into fear, sadness and shame. It was so heavy in the air it was as if the house was built from it, as if the mortar between the bricks was my mother’s pain hardened, the carpets stained by memory, the door hinges all ready and waiting to be slammed. My body and mind were the same – tense and anxious, afraid and desperate. We internalise the environment we live in, and I could not rid myself of that while I was still there.

There were days when I lived with my family that I would stay in my mother’s parked car after school, spending hours in the limbo of the driveway, not quite home because I had not gone inside, waiting as long as possible before I had to take any of it in.

Now when I finish work, I feel myself rushing, eager and excited to go back to my home, to my partner and best friends, to this place that never hurts.

IN THE SAME WAY that moving created more opportunities for me to appreciate myself, it also offered the sanctuary needed for me to recover and mend.

In a secure, healthy home, the parts of ourselves that have been hurt are safe to emerge, to be faced and dealt with, mourned and forgiven.

I know that I should not have had to wait for this healing to happen, and that I should not have had to recover from a past like this in the first place.

It is an uncomfortable and painful reality that some of us have no option but to tolerate and withstand, to grit our teeth and persevere – to wait for tomorrow before we can focus on ourselves.

It feels so trite to tell someone that they simply have to wait, that things will change – so dismissive of the reality they are currently in. I rolled my eyes at the people who told me that things would improve eventually.

I know there is no real comfort to be found in hypothetical futures and the imagined potential of a better life, but it is the only solace I have to offer.

I left home and found a whole world of people waiting for me. I found more than I was able to dream possible for myself. What I know of home now is that it is where I am constantly growing, that it is where all of me feels seen and valued; it is the place that my body feels most at ease, where there is no part of me that is too much or too big, too Queer or too feminine.

Despite this, I know that for anyone still living somewhere they are not safe, the idea of a better future is not enough, that you want something tangible and real, something now. I know that each day it gets harder to wait, but I also know that no matter how much we want to leave, there is always something forcing us to stay.

What I can offer is this: if home is a place of hurt – if you want to leave, but you know you have to stay – remind yourself daily of the world you are going to build, of tearing down your first idea of home and re-creating it on your own. I promise that it is coming, that it is possible, that the narratives you have imagined for yourself are possibilities you can reach, that they are so much more than just dreams.

No child or youth living in domestic violence has the same story, or the same way out, and I am too familiar with the years we have to withstand. I can’t write a pathway out or a guide to finding home, but I can testify how possible it is, and how beautiful the other side feels.

If you are someone who is waiting, you are not waiting in vain. There are people waiting at the finish line to hold you in their arms, to show you a home in which you feel cared for and valued. There is a place where you have the room to grow, to find new versions of yourself and get to know them. They are not going anywhere – they will be waiting for you no matter how long it takes.

I will never be able to forget or completely leave behind the home I come from, but every day a part of it is healed by the home I exist in now, this home of care and compassion, of brazen queerness and support.

THERE ARE TWO HOMES inside me, built parallel to one another. I exist within and because of them both.

As more time passes, I am defining myself less by the place from which I have come, and more by this place I have created on my own, and the places I am yet to go.

BO BICKMORE (they/he/she) is a Queer writer, producer and bookseller living and working in Naarm. Bo has worked as a bookseller for over nine years now and is currently writing their first novel. They are the producer and curator of the multi-artform exhibit, show and spoken word event, Taking Up Space: Love Letters to our Queer Bodies.

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Words: CHRIS CHEERS Images: MIKE NGUYEN

A PLACE TO EXHALE Listening to your body and your needs is key to developing a sense of selfacceptance, comfort and safety.

DEEP IN ONE of the many (many) lockdowns in Melbourne last year, a friend worked out that if we watched one episode of Sex and the City each day, the lockdown would be over by the time we got through the entire series. So we watched. And while watching the show through the lens of today revealed that it was not quite as progressive as we remembered, there was something about watching Miranda, Samantha, Carrie and Charlotte brunch that felt familiar.

I’ve since discovered that during this time of lowlevel, long-term stress, many of us turned to something from our past to make us feel good, like a favourite film, the music of our adolescence or food from our childhood. While Freud and his friends, psychologically, might describe this as regression, I think something else was happening. At a time in our life when we were surrounded by uncertainty, we were returning to things that felt safe, known and predictable. Things that felt like home.

But for some, especially those from the LGBTQIA+ community that I support in my work as a psychologist, home may not be a place of safety or a place that brings up memories of support and acceptance. For too many, our homes are not places that bring comfort, but memories of pain.

The lucky ones find a relationship or a chosen family that creates a home – a place to exhale.

Feeling safe, able to be vulnerable, and truly accepted has very little to do with bricks and mortar, and all to do with people. But what happens if you do not find these people?

Over the last two years, our ability to find our people, or connect with the ones we already know, has been interrupted. We have been forced to isolate. Although we were alone together, so many were still alone.

So this is a message in a bottle to anyone who is feeling alone right now and struggling to find stability within the uncertainty. Can those of us who don’t have a sense of home make a home for ourselves?

First up, I want to acknowledge that what I am about to suggest may not be possible for you because of your specific circumstances. This may be especially true for people from marginalised communities. So often, a focus on ‘self-care’ can be unhelpful if it does not include an understanding that the capacity for self-care is a privilege, and that factors exist beyond our control that may make behavioural change difficult.

As you read through these ideas, take what is helpful and leave behind what is not. Small changes can make a big difference to your mental health and wellbeing, but can be hard to implement.

default. You brain has evolved to focus on threat. To put it simply, people with brains that focused on happy thoughts were less likely to survive than those with brains that focused on looking out for threats. Just think, who is more likely to survive: the prehistoric person who was staring at the flowers or the one looking out for the lion?

This is why your brain seems hell-bent on selfcriticism and judgement: it’s trying to protect you. Your brain has become like an over-protective parent at home, one that never lets you do anything because everything is a risk. Just like this over-protective parent, you can learn to accept your child just as they are.

Try to notice the difference between judgements on your behaviour and judgements on yourself. Try to challenge the self-critical thoughts that tell you that you should be able to do more or cope better. Focus on selfcompassion. What would you say to a loved one in your home? Can you show this same kindness to yourself?

FINDING SAFETY

Our nervous systems yearn for predictability and our brains look to an unpredictable future with a focus on threat, not optimism. This may offer some understanding as to why everyone is so troubled by uncertainty right now.

Our brains aren’t built for hope – they are built to think about all the possible bad things that will happen, and then do everything in their power to prevent that prediction from coming true. In order to challenge this anxiety and feel safe in the face of uncertainty, we need the same things that make a home feel safe: structure, routine and ritual.

Perhaps you have noticed this during times in your life when you have committed to a routine. Over time, you feel better. Your wellbeing improves. Even if you are surrounded by an uncertain world, everyday routine helps your nervous system settle and helps your brain feel safe.

Although we desperately want the instability and uncertainty of the last two years to end, what may be more helpful is focusing on what is in our control and finding stability through our own actions.

For you, this might look like sticking to a consistent sleep routine, or introducing a wake-up ritual such as having a coffee, exercising, walking or writing a journal entry. It might be ending the day with something soothing before bed, like putting away the phone or computer and reading a book instead.

Adding routine and structure to the day is not easy, because we are often talking about changing well-worn habits. We set a goal, and then life happens and we just don’t follow the plan. Then the spiral begins: perhaps anger with yourself, guilt and shame. We can start to criticise ourselves, thinking, I am such a failure, leading to a mindset that makes behavioural change even harder than when we started.

This is completely normal. This is what behavioural change looks like. It’s hard. It takes time. And it never goes to plan.

FINDING ACCEPTANCE

Home can often feel like a place of acceptance, a place of refuge – a place we can return to, where we can put on our tracky dacks, relax and let it all hang out. But is there a way to feel this same level of acceptance in your own body – to feel a self-acceptance and a sense of comfort even when not at home?

Unfortunately, self-acceptance is not your brain’s

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“Just as the people in a house can create the sense of safety and acceptance that makes a home, your actions can create a sense of safety and acceptance for yourself”

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So how do we get through it? We must spend far less time thinking about achieving the goal and far more time thinking about how we will treat ourselves when we don’t reach it. Try these steps and see how it goes:

aren’t ready, there is something wrong with you. Try to notice these expectations from others but know that your worth is not determined by your productivity, what people think of you or how often you socialise. You are worthy no matter what you do today so let your actions be guided by your body and needs. And remember, rest is an action and may be what your body needs.

A house is not a home, much like your body is not who you are. You create your identity through the actions you take every day.

Just as the people in a house can create the sense of safety and acceptance that makes a home, your actions can create a sense of safety and acceptance for yourself.

And in times of uncertainty, this may be exactly the home you need.

1. Think small. Write down an action you could introduce to your day that would offer you a sense of routine or structure. Nothing big – think ridiculously achievable, and something you could do tomorrow.

2. Check in. How motivated are you to achieve this?

Give yourself a score out of 10. Less than 8 out of 10?

Then it’s not likely to happen. Try a different goal that feels more meaningful to you and more achievable.

3. Achieve it? Reward yourself.

4. Didn’t achieve it? Be kind and carry on. Remind yourself that you are not the problem; the goal was. Set a new goal and try again.

SOOTHING OURSELVES

When we are stressed or anxious, our first instinct might be to seek reassurance from others or to return home. This can often lead us to become overly reliant on others and can put strain on our relationships.

The alternative is to learn ways to help soothe yourself in times of stress. This will require you to check in with your body and what you need, and then make it happen.

Sometimes this might look like a meditation, a nap or deep breathing. Other times, you may need vigorous exercise or to go for a walk to complete the stress cycle.

When we take the time to listen, our body is often communicating what it needs.

The harder part can be taking action, which requires setting boundaries, going against the expectations of others, and putting yourself first. It requires you to meet your own needs, even if they impact others, and to remember that uncomfortable emotions – yours, and others’ – are not an indicator you are doing the wrong thing. Emotions are a normal part of living a meaningful life.

There is so much beyond our control right now that it can feel like the only answer is to just keep doing what you are doing and push through. However, this may mean you miss the opportunity to make changes that will improve your mental health.

When we are not in control of a situation, we are challenged to make changes to our own behaviour. These changes will come from tuning out the expectations of how you should be living and refocusing on actions guided by your values and needs.

You may feel a pressure at work, or in other parts of life, to get back to normal. You might feel that if you

CHRIS CHEERS is a psychologist and educator with a focus on elevating mental health in the arts and LGBTQIA+ communities. Chris is a university lecturer in psychology, a member of the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health and is studying a PhD at the Centre for Alcohol and Policy Research. Chris is passionate about bringing psychology out of the clinic room and into the real world, and does this on his social media and in the media.

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