Archer Magazine #11 - The GAZE issue (Dec 2018)

Trust your instincts: you deserve respect.

Sometimes, someone we love behaves in a way that isn’t okay.

If something doesn’t feel right, step up and step in.

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ISSUE ELEVEN CONTENTS

Editor’s note

5

ADOLFO ARANJUEZ

Q&A with Mojo Juju

8

ALAN WEEDON

Femme and the male gaze

14

MAHLA BIRD

Sex work as spectacle

20

GALA VANTING

Exotic Cancer

26

EXOTIC CANCER

Passing as white

40

SUSIE ANDERSON

Gender and language

46

KEIRA LEIKE

Trans body dysphoria

50

JULIAN MOLONY

In Broad Daylight

58

SHANNON POWELL

Ethical porn and submission 68

Dating and invisible illness

74

Reclaiming trauma 78

JESSIE NGAIO GEMMA MAHADEO BRODIE TURNER

Together

84

LUKE AUSTIN

98

AMAO LEOTA LU

Fa’afafine

Queer/GNC and medicine 104 MICHELLE LI LGBTQIA+ visibility 108 JACOB THOMAS

FOUNDER + PUBLISHER Amy Middleton EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Adolfo Aranjuez DESIGN + IMAGE EDITOR Alexis Desaulniers-Lea LAYOUT DESIGNER Christopher Boševski SUB-EDITOR Greta Parry IMAGE ASSISTANT Hailey Moroney ONLINE EDITOR Lucy Watson DEPUTY ONLINE EDITOR Roz Bellamy EVENTS CO-ORDINATOR Dani Weber EVENTS ASSISTANT Benjamin Harberts ONLINE EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Dani Leever WEBSITE DEVELOPER Mark Egan BOOKKEEPER Anh Nguyen

COVER IMAGE: Jossue and Ken Cabanas (photo: Luke Austin) Visit us online: www.archermagazine.com.au For advertising and other enquiries, email info@archermagazine.com.au

HUGE THANKS TO Kat Muscat, Broede Carmody, Chloe Brien, Elwyn Murray, Cathy Tran, Jessica Alice, the Aranjuez family, David Heslin, James Little, Fred Ward, Jess Desaulniers-Lea, Rocco, Kent Burgess, Nadja Pojo, Lucy Le Masurier, Lexton Gebert, Nigel Quirk.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Printed in Australia by Printgraphics Pty Ltd.

© 2018. 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.

LIFE IN THE MODERN WORLD is about seeing and being seen. This is especially true in the 21st century: with smartphones, social media and a multitude of screens, no-­one can escape the image.

But the notion of the GAZE goes beyond media. It also encompasses how we make sense of our bodies through the way other people see us. It’s about how our presentation to the world may be distinct from, or play with, how we identify.

It’s the way power expresses itself through imbalances in vision control: surveillance, objectification, fetishisation, gaslighting, abuse. It’s the way a systemic problem can be minimised when those with influence sweep it under the rug, or made worse because of visual distortion. It’s about the pressure to be palatable, to ‘pass’, and how this can marginalise already-­ marginalised members of our communities.

The GAZE, however, is also about empowerment and reclamation – seizing aspects of ourselves and celebrating them through art. It’s about broadening horizons, shining a light on inequity and injustice, and bringing them to the public eye.

Before its theatrical run, I caught the poignant film Boy Erased and became privy to the eventual public outcry it sparked within Australia that gay conversion therapy still happens. It was an Othering response, a complacent drawing up of us-and-them: how could Americans let this happen?

In no time, though, the media alerted us to the con­­ cerning reality that this horrific practice happens on our shores as well. Exposés and news reports soon ­followed; now, a government inquiry has taken place and repa­ rative legislation has been proposed. I am hopeful.

Elsewhere, we are witnessing attempts to erode ­LGBTQIA+ rights: An assault on trans* and intersex individuals through US President Donald Trump’s proposal for a strictly binary legal definition of gender.

A motion to outlaw homosexual acts in Indonesia, eventually rejected from the country’s parliament. Legally sanctioned homo- and transphobic crackdowns in Egypt, Tanzania, Russia.

Yet, this same year, India decriminalised consensual same-sex acts in a historic overturning of law enshrined during the Victoria Era, inspiring a similar push in fellow former British colony Singapore. And Taiwan’s recent pride march – the largest in Asia – saw over 130,000 attendees combining party and protest in the lead-up to a landmark referendum to ratify marriage equality.

Reportage of these cases certainly helps us comprehend the gravity and breadth of the battles facing our communities across the world. But, more importantly, they highlight the impact of visibility in instigating tan­ gible change. Tied to sight is the mental process of envisaging: seeing, in the mind’s eye, what possibilities lie in wait for us.

PHOTO: LEAH JING

Archer #11 opens with a Q&A with R’n’B luminary Mojo Juju (p8), who reflects on how her Wiradjuri and Filipino heritage has afforded her a unique lens through which to engage with the world. Following this, we’re introduced to the idea of the ‘male gaze’ (femme identity, p14), how it can go wrong (sex work as spectacle, p20) and ways it can be reclaimed (Exotic Cancer, p26).

We then tackle the relationship between the gaze and identity via bodies (passing as white, p40; gender and language, p46; trans body dysphoria, p50), as well as the ways in which bodies can be used to provoke and empower (kink in public, p56; ethical porn and ­sub­mission, p68).

From there, the issue dives into the darker dynamics of interpersonal relationships (dating and invisible illness, p74; reclaiming trauma, p78) and explores how images of intimacy can be rehabilitative (Together, p84).

And, lastly, we look to the future with articles examining the strides we’ve made in society’s acceptance of non-mainstream identities (Fa’afafine, p98; queer/GNC and medicine, p104) and a call-to-arms about keeping up the good fight (LGBTQIA+ visibility, p108) – because our collective struggle is not over.

Inherent in the idea of the GAZE is perspective: how our viewpoints are inextricably tied to our position in society – our particularities, our peculiarities. It requires all of us coming together to get a real, full, empathetic and transformative understanding of the big picture.

The world today is bristling with disparity and division, so let’s learn from one another and see things differently – see things anew.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Adolfo Aranjuez Editor-in-chief

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In September this year, the editors at The Sydney Morning Herald thought it would be a great idea to publish an article entitled ‘Where Are All the Great Aussie Protest Songs?’. Penned by veteran Australian music critic Jeff Apter, the article did what ­every little piece of spicy content should do: it made people angry – and, in turn, each vent meant more money for Twitter, Facebook and the advertisers at Fairfax.

‘Why,’ Apter asked, ‘do the musos of today, perhaps with such rare exceptions as Dan Sultan and Urthboy, seem more concerned with navel-gazing and their fragile broken hearts than weightier, more universal issues?’

Protest music still exists, but it has moved beyond speaking in ‘universal’ tongues. The personal is political. And there’s been no better manifestation of this than the work of Melbourne musician Mojo Juju.

Following her self-titled 2012 debut album and 2015’s Seeing Red/Feeling Blue, in 2018, Juju released Native Tongue, an LP that recalibrates historical familial trauma into stories of resilience and pride.

For Juju, a queer woman of colour with Filipino and Wiradjuri heritage, the idea that you could simply detach yourself from the personal to make art is laughable; this type of work is most certainly not “navel-gazing”.

At times polemical and at times tender, this ­album speaks to the dissolving of tradition – or, to be specific, of the dogmas upheld by incumbent ‘arbiters’ of taste, be they promoters, label heads or music writers. It is a rousing patchwork that screams: I’m here, and you’re going to listen.

Juju speaks to Archer Magazine about discovering the stories and learnings that came out of the writing process as well as getting comfortable with queerness and female masculinity.

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Around the time of your 2018 Arts Centre Melbourne performances, you told the ABC that you wanted the majority of the press around Seeing Red/Feeling Blue to focus on music. What prompted the shift away from that with Native Tongue?

It was meritocracy. I wanted to talk about the music. I wanted to be recognised for my work. I didn’t want to be tokenised and continually politicised, you know?

On my first record, I think it really occurred to people that I was a queer person. The conversations were: “Why do you want to dress like this?” “What are you saying [with] all these songs?” and “The way you talk about women”… And so, from that, I wanted to make a record where we could just talk about the music.

On my second record, I was think­ ing: Cool, we’ve got that conversa­ tion out of the way. Can we talk about music? And it wasn’t the case.

I got really frustrated and annoyed and went: Okay…we need to talk about this. I’m gonna do this, and I’m going to address all of these things, and then we’re going to have all of the conversations around that.

Because, obviously, we’re not at the point where someone who looks like me can just be judged on their work.

For musicians, album press cycles demand the divulging of deeply personal stories to the public. How do you manage this process on a regular basis?

It’s important for your mental health to have some stuff that you keep for yourself – to have a personal understanding of where that line is drawn, of who you actually are when you go home at night.

But all artists draw on their personal lives…And then inevitably, when people want to talk about

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your art, you’re going to end up talking about your personal life.

You have to be prepared to do that.

It doesn’t matter if it’s shrouded in fiction. You have to talk about what you know, for it to be in any way relatable – because, otherwise, it’s inauthentic. People know when you’re not being genuine.

“Obviously, we’re not at the point where someone who looks like me can just be judged on their work” One of my favorite artists of all time is Tom Waits. I think he’s an incredible storyteller and a brilliant poet, but I also think his identity affords him the luxury to do what he does…People accept that he’s just commenting on the ‘human condition’.

The record really treats the stories of your family with tenderness and care. Did you feel the need to rebel against your parents when you were younger?

I think I was a difficult teenager, for sure. I was very angsty. I was very alienated. I didn’t feel like my parents really understood that experience.

My father was a Filipino immigrant who had tried to come to Australia several times before the ’70s, and was rejected because of the White Australia Policy. I’m just speculating, but I think assimilation was really important for him.

I looked different and I didn’t fit in. I wanted my own identity to claim so that I had something of my own.

Speaking of that – whenever I meet a fellow queer member of the Filipino diaspora, I become curious about how they negotiated Catholicism. How did your queerness brush up against the Church?

I’m going to be candid and very honest – I reckon one of my earli­ est recollections of being aware

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of my own sexuality was watching Samson and Delilah [1949], starring Hedy Lamarr. Which is really weird because it’s a biblical story!

I was very aware of my sexuality at a young age and very aware that it was something that I needed to keep hidden or to repress. I knew it was something I ‘wasn’t supposed to feel’.

An interesting thing I remember as a teenager was my mum telling me…in the car one day that gays are an abomination and that they should be wiped from the face of the Earth because it says so in the Bible. I was so deeply hurt by that comment.

I imagine it would’ve been difficult going through high school in Dubbo, then moving to Melbourne at 17, without any ‘handbook’ to map out your early queer identity.

I was the only gay in the village, and I tried to keep that under wraps for as [long] as possible. I was actually outed; I didn’t come out.

It was difficult…I wasn’t out at home, but I was out at school. And I think I developed a pretty thick skin early on because I’d always been the new kid in town, with a weird name; I was the kid that didn’t look like any­one else. And then I became ‘the queer’ as well.

So I owned it. By the time I finished school, everybody just accep­ ted that that was who I was. And I left town the minute I could.

Before Melbourne, I’d never been inside any kind of queer space. And I was very tentative about that be­ cause – and this is probably down to, on some level, some really internalised homophobia – I didn’t iden­­ tify with the image that I had seen growing up of what those identities looked like.

I didn’t want to be perceived a certain way. I was afraid of my masculinity – or my androgyny – as well.

And gender was a very confusing thing for me: I didn’t ever feel like I was feminine enough, but I also

Q&A WITH MOJO JUJU

didn’t feel like I could be comfor­ table with my female masculinity.

Butch was something I didn’t like the idea of, but then I’ve found ways to accept that about myself, and I actually feel really comfortable about that.

There are precedents for this type of ‘female masculinity’ in music, though – I’m thinking of Tracy Chapman, who might not have even been overtly talking about gender-fluidity at the time.

One hundred per cent, and there was KD Lang. It does exist – it has existed. I guess I just…maybe I wasn’t ready, is more the point.

Missy Elliott also had such a fierce presence, for example. I admired her; I didn’t even think about her gender or sexuality…There was so much about Missy Elliott that appealed to me because she just seemed like she was in charge. She was very uncompromising about her identity: how she moved, what she said in her music, how she dressed. I could relate to what she was doing more than I could to others at the time.

Would you say Native Tongue is about interrogating not just yourself but also your family?

Yeah, I wanted to talk about my experiences growing up as a queer person of colour.

My bita – my dad’s mum – she passed away. Dad’s father had already passed away, and I saw how much that had hurt him, and I sat thinking about that. I also thought about how close I was to my mum’s parents; we’ve always been close. And I knew that my grandfather had been battling with Parkinson’s, so I decided I needed to tell their stories while I still have access to them.

I think it’s also interesting to look at my parents’ experiences: my dad as a Filipino immigrant; my mum as someone who is mixed race with Wiradjuri heritage, and as ­someone

who has come out as a lesbian as a mature person. There was just so much in my family story happening.

Was it cathartic trying to make sense of everything?

I don’t know – it was kind of chaotic and really emotional, and quite an immersive experience. I was writing while unpacking all of this stuff.

This album has all of your rich family stories embedded, and now you’re about to go on tour and tell those stories over and over again.

What does it feel like now that the stories in this album are, in a sense, no longer yours completely?

I guess that’s what I wanted to do in the short term, like with shows at the Arts Centre [Melbourne] and the [Sydney] Opera House, because I did give context to the songs by telling those stories.

The response that I’ve had from people has been so incredible and overwhelming. When I see how much people relate to the stories, I’m like: Okay, I didn’t really know it was going to be like that! I didn’t know how much other people would connect to it.

But now, I do think to myself: Fuck!

What it would’ve meant to me as a kid to see someone who looks like me telling that story on stage.

Have you had any Filipino or ­ iradjuri people come up to you W after gigs?

Yeah, I’ve had a lot of both. I love meeting all those people. It’s so nice.

Obviously, I recognise my ­Wiradjuri heritage, but it’s something that’s a little bit harder on me because I didn’t grow up in community, and there’s a lot that I don’t know.

Whereas I definitely identify as ­Filipino-Australian – though I never knew that many Filipinos…so that’s been really nice meeting a lot of Filipino people relating to my story.

It’s nice to know that there’s a lot of us.

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Have you had much pushback against your work?

I grew up admiring Prince, [David] Bowie and Michael Jackson totally because of their gender ambiguity – and, you know, how they broke down stereotypes of gender and sexuality. So I thought: Yeah, the music industry – it’s going to be an accepting place for me. I’ve since learnt the Australian music industry is a different entity altogether.

I was always very outspoken about my political beliefs, and I went through a period of time where I was writing music about that and people were saying, “Hey, that’s quite alienating – I don’t think people want to hear that when they’re having their five o’clock knock-off drink at the pub.”

Or: “The music that you’re making is alienating to your audience, and some people don’t really relate to that, so maybe you should try and not write so much political music.”

But I was writing [Native Tongue] while the [Australian same-sex-­ marriage] plebiscite was happening. So it tapped into all these different intersecting aspects of my identity, and how they relate back to my family, and how other people in my family experience their own identities. I wanted to tell those stories.

So often, important conversations are being had through the lens of academia. The humanity gets lost, and I want to restore some of the humanity to the con­ versation by saying: You can’t argue with this; these are perso­ nal experiences. This is how these people have navigated their ex­­ periences as individuals who are directly affected by the politics.

Alan Weedon is a writer and pho­ tographer from Melbourne. His work has appeared in VICE, The Quietus and LNWY, among oth­ ers, and currently, he’s the creative director of Swampland and a digi­­ tal ­producer at MPavilion.

FIERC

CELY MAHLA BIRD PHOTOS RACHEL LENA ESTERLINE WORDS

ARCHER MAGAZINE

Femininity need not be shackled by the paradigms and pressures of the male gaze.

I WAS AROUND 12 when I first thought that I was successfully ‘femaleing’. I was at the movies to see The Lord of the Rings with my parents and two brothers, wearing my favourite sparkly Lipsmackers lip gloss to celebrate the occasion.

Outside the cinema afterwards, I became aware of a man staring at me intensely. My mum took me inside to wait with her, and I remember asking why she’d led me in with such urgency.

It was a nice night; why couldn’t we stay out there?

I recall my confusion when she ex­­ plained the meaning behind the way that man had been looking at me. I was on the cusp of puberty, deeply unpopular (and so keen for any approval I could get), and felt a strange mix of pride and shame that this man was interested in me.

The thing is, I don’t feel inherently ‘female’, so I was never really sure how to go about female-ing. And I’ve always had a tricky relationship with identity. I grew up in a family of mixed cultures. I’m a scientist, artist and athlete. I’m attracted to humans of just about any gender.

I’ve also always been an overachiever.

So, naturally, when I was born in a body the world labelled as female, I wanted to do it right.

Growing up Jewish, I never believed in Santa Claus, but I knew I had to play along with the idea of him for the other kids at school or else it would make them upset. In retrospect, I felt s­ imilarly

about my gender. ‘Femaleness’ was something I had to put on when other people were around. While it didn’t really mean anything to me, I knew it meant a lot to them.

At the same time, my mother, being the incredible feminist she is, tried to shield me from society’s ideas about how I should perform gender. She got me overalls, not dresses; she gave me blocks, not Barbies. I owned almost zero pink.

This just made me more curious.

Growing up without restrictive gender roles at home but with an awareness of the world’s expectation that I would adopt them left me with so many questions. The world was telling me I had to ‘female’, and I wanted to do it well, so I tried to find avenues to do that.

I snuck magazines home. I stole my grand­mother’s lipstick.

As well as trying to learn to female correctly, I’ve always had a strong affinity with anything shiny. Mum considered these things gender-restricting contraband, so I would slide some glitter-glue into my secret make-up stash. I even stole lip gloss from a copy of Cosmopolitan out the front of a chemist while waiting to be picked up from dance class (contemporary, not ballet – ballet was for pale, pretty blonde girls who knew how to female).

SO MANY WOMEN I know have experienced what I had: like my encounter at the movies, they were first confronted with the reality of their ‘female’ identity after having been s­ exualised

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by (often inappropriately aged) men.

Feminist theory would say that this was our first time experiencing what’s known as the ‘male gaze’.

Having its origins in film studies, the concept comes down to the way women are depicted or seen to exist as sexual objects for the pleasure of male viewers.

Think of any movie in which female characters have little to no narrative purpose other than as eye candy and you’ve just had a crash course in the male gaze.

An important thing to note about the way the male gaze frames female sexuality is that it assumes it exists purely to please men. Rather than witnessing sexuality, it consumes it. Inherent in that set-up is an unequal power dynamic: since women exist to please men, men feel entitled to say whether or not women are doing a good-enough job of it.

Something I learned from this experience – and others like it, which would soon follow – was how to associate my engagement with feminine things (like shiny lip gloss) with attention from men.

Sometimes this attention was desired by me; sometimes it wasn’t.

Either way, What would men think? was soon as firmly planted a question in my mind as Is this jacket warm enough?

Suddenly, I had to do a whole lot of extra mental math about how noticed an outfit or item would make me. Whether I liked something for myself or for the attention it could bring me became intertwined and confused.

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My self-worth grew more and more tied to men’s approval. The pressure to perform was constant.

To add another layer of confusion, those same things that allowed me to express femaleness – that dressed me up enough to be interesting to men – were also often the first to be put down by them. The fact that I spent a re­latively large amount time in the forge at my grandparents’ farm, learning to make swords with my dad and brothers, has made me ‘cool’. My interest

“ What femme means and looks like for me is still a work-in-progress … It allows the parts of me that have felt in conflict to coexist” in costumes and make-up and shiny things has not.

These things make me ‘hot’ – more palatable, more fuckable, more easily consumable – but not more interesting as a person. The things I liked that matched up with my ‘correct’ gender were also things that would lead me to be taken less seriously.

MANY OF MY MOTHER’S generation of feminists found their way out of this duality by eschewing traditio­ nally feminine aesthetics and roles: if the choice was between femininity and being taken seriously, they’d take the latter.

I’ve never found the choice to be that easy. I’ve tried, but never truly succeeded at, shunning femininity from my life.

Training in fitness and performing in aerial arts have given me a frame that is more top-heavy than what’s considered feminine by society’s narrow confines of beauty. But I love it. The stronger I get, and the larger or more androgynous my body becomes, the more at home I feel in it.

It’s also the type of body that women are told to worry about if they lift too many weights. Refusing to heed these warnings has demonstrated, for me, how ready men are to maintain order when the male gaze is subverted.

While training at the gym one night, I swapped in and out of machines among

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a few men. Everything was fairly normal. When I finished my workout, I slipped into some more nightlife-­ appropriate clothing – and this is where things changed.

With my shaved head and baggy workout clothes, my proclivity for lifting weights was seen as fine. But, in a backless dress and with a pair of heels, I was regarded by two of the men there as an object worthy of yelled threats.

This is the danger of the entitlement that comes with the male gaze: if my existence is about performing gender for men, then a ‘failed’ performance means I need to be put in my place.

Similarly, working in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, my ‘look’ often led male students to assume that I was an assistant to a male teacher (spoiler alert: the teacher was me). I soon learnt that, the more dressed down I was, and the less lipstick I wore, the less frequent these events became. I was forced to internalise the misogynistic idea that, for people to know I was a ‘real’ scientist, I had to rid myself of the trivial trappings of femininity.

But what all of this did was make me feel as though I was cutting off parts of myself. I was into glitter long before I knew I was expected to be. I liked playing with face paint and make-up long before I knew it could make me hot.

THE FIRST TIME I WENT to a queer club, I dressed down completely.

No lipstick, no heels, curls pulled into a messy knot.

I didn’t have queer friends at this point, and I had no idea what to expect.

There was, however, one thing I definitely thought: if my femininity was something to be consumed by men, surely it would be irrelevant here?

Fake ID in hand, feeling uncomfortable in my lack of shiny paraphernalia, but sure that it would be worth it, I stepped foot in the venue. Then I saw her: an incredible, hyper-feminine woman wearing head-to-toe gold. She had glitter in her hair, metallic eyebrows, a slick lycra dress and gold-heeled boots. I was overwhelmed and completely enamoured.

FEMME AND THE MALE GAZE

But I was also envious. I didn’t realise that being female, queer, empowered and still so, so shiny was an option. Not only did I want to know her – I also wanted to be her.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my introduction to the world of femmes. I first heard the term when a close friend used it to describe herself.

It wasn’t until a few years later, though, when a non-binary friend mentioned it again in relation to their identity, that the penny dropped for me. At that point, I did what any good millennial with an internet connection would do: I turned to Google for answers.

With roots in the working-class lesbian communities of New York in the 1940s and 1950s, femme was initially considered the counterpoint to butch in sapphic relationships. These were women performing femininity, but not for men.

Since then, the identity has grown, mirroring the growth in inclusivity among

queer communities. Now, the term is often used for people of any gender or sexuality (or lack thereof) who embrace a feminine aesthetic or experience.

While it’s easiest to describe femme in relation to the things we can see, ‘femme-ness’ is not inherently tied to specific external markers. Flipping the script on how we engage with appearance is only one aspect of the much larger experience it enables. By emphasising internal self-expression, femme is a direct response to the male gaze – it is femininity that exists irrelevant to the observation of men.

or assumed to be up for consumption.

To entirely cast off the femininity I’ve worked so hard to protect feels just as wrong as being entirely defined by the gender I was arbitrarily assigned.

What femme means and looks like for me is still a work-in-progress, but there’s a peace in even just having a framework for expression. It allows the parts of me that have felt in conflict to coexist. It has given me tools to relate to my gender in ways that are playful and creative.

Femme has been a joyous identity to learn about, and to hold. Femme is queer.

Femme is powerful.

DISCOVERING FEMME identity has been revelatory for me. As a child, I didn’t inherently feel female. As an adult, there’s still a question mark where I feel like my gender should go.

Despite this, I have always been curious about, and held a deep love for, femininity – even when it has been shamed, belittled, dismissed as unimportant,

Mahla Bird is an artist, scientist, aerialist, author, costumier, queer body-positive fitness instructor and haver of a lot of feelings. She loves making work that blurs the lines between these roles and inspires hope. Mahla is based in Naarm (­Melbourne), currently writing from New York City. Pronouns: she/they.

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ATTENTION

WHORES GALA VANTING PHOTOS LAURA DU VÉ

WORDS

SEX WORK AS SPECTACLE

In the fight for sex-worker rights, there’s a crucial difference between being seen – as valid, as not victimised – and being made a spectacle of.

I’M WALKING DOWN King Street in inner-suburban Sydney with my headphones in, engaged in that detestable digital-age behaviour: scrolling through social media while walking.

I come across a video posted by Juno Mac, a UK-based colleague and comrade in sex-work activism. I’ve been watching her posts closely this week because she’s where I’d like to be: at the 2018 International AIDS Conference (IAC) in Amsterdam.

The video documents the direct action undertaken by sex workers at the ‘passing the torch’ ceremony, during which the Positive Flame – the IAC’s symbol for the global HIV response – is transferred to the next conference site. The significance of the protest is immediately clear to me, but won’t be to anyone for whom sex-work politics is off the radar.

It’s been announced that the next IAC will be held in San Francisco.

Immigration policy under the current American government makes it difficult for sex workers, drug users and Muslims – all of whom have a stake in HIV policy, advocacy and service provision across the world – to enter the country.

If they do get through the border, there are plenty of other legal and cultural liabilities that come with their presence on US soil. It seems the Positive Flame, which this year’s torchbearer describes as a “flame of inclusion” and a “beacon of hope and access for everybody”, also symbolises the exclusion of non-American sex workers from AIDS 2020.

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I watch as sex workers and allies, carrying the signature red umbrellas under which sex-worker-rights advocates stand across the globe, enter the event space together and begin to disrupt the proceedings. I see them swarm in from the sidelines of the seating area, silently forming a block of dissenting bodies.

A black American trans woman, whose familiar face I make a mental note to track down later (activist Ceyenne Doroshow – look her up), then takes to the stage and speaks a truth that’s been spoken a million times, at the gates of a million institutions for public health, public policy, legislation and human rights: “This torch is not being lit for us.”

She continues her booming polemic about just who the IAC has excluded with this move: Those who get but a passing mention in the research, and are often completely forgotten by service delivery. Those who don’t get seats at the big tables, whose issues are ghettoised even within the conference itself. Those whose lives have always been marginalised by global HIV/AIDS politics, even as they actively mobilised around it from the start.

THE VOICE OF DOROSHOW – and those of the other protesters, who drown out the suited white male MC as he interjects over the PA – flips a switch in me, and my rage, my grief and my waning energy become a resolve to keep fighting.

It’s been a tough week. Sex worker exclusionary radical feminist (SWERF)

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SEX WORK AS SPECTACLE

IMAGE: JUNO MAC

Julie Bindel keeps getting uncontested television and radio spots to proliferate her myopic carceral feminism. I’ve spoken to a journalist for two hours about potential stories on sex work, only to have him tell me how many of them weren’t stories. I’m already a bit on edge, and the video just takes me down emotionally.

It’s only during a later viewing of the footage that I catch something a Dutch man seated in the front row says to the sex workers circling the torchbearer.

Chastising them for their dissent, he delivers his incisive analysis of their intentions with a mocking, singsong tone: “because you want attention”.

Much as I’d prefer to skip right over Dutch Dude (DD) and his throwaway, dickhead commentary, his words are the most telling among all of those in the seven-minute video. On the surface, it’s a bit of a Captain Obvious moment: The protesters are, um, protesting. They are yelling, and holding up signs and symbols of their struggle. Congratulations, good sir, you are correct: they want attention.

But the attention that DD is accusing these sex workers of wanting is of a very different kind. It’s the sort that bratty children demand when they don’t get what they want. Or maybe the sort that he imagines the sex workers in Amsterdam’s windows are seeking: wanting to be looked at, to be validated by a ­desirous gaze.

I’m reminded of Melissa Gira Grant’s concept of the ‘prostitute imaginary’, from her seminal sex-work text Playing the Whore. Within this framework, sex workers are always working, even when we’re doing other things, like caring for our children or doing our day jobs. No matter what other identities we hold, we are always and already, first and foremost, sex workers.

The protesters may have been using different methods of communication to garner attention than they would have in the windows, on the streets or in their advertising, but for DD, in his prostitute imaginary, it’s all the same: they’re whores using their filthy bodies and filthier mouths to ruin a perfectly nice thing.

THE ‘ATTENTION’ sex workers seek – and that which is and has always been paid to us, whether or not we’ve sought it – is perhaps at the root of the discrimination, criminalisation, human-rights violations and deep stigma that we face.

We are some of the most utilitarian gaze-objects in existence. When you want to look at us, you get to choose how, when and for what purpose. When you don’t want to look at us, there are plenty of places to hide us away (sometimes our own internalised shame will even help you do it).

Need to think of the children? Better put us somewhere out of sight. Need to

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cause a scandal in the lead-up to a federal election? You know where we’re stored – just come and open the box!

This now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t way of framing us constructs mystery – and, thus, suspicion. Our clients want to know our ‘real’ names, or to get to know us ‘for who we really are’. I was asked by the first major publication I’d written for whether Gala Vanting is my ‘real name’, and was forced to have that name qualified in the byline.

Journalists want to ‘uncover the truth’ about us and our work, and create a perverse sort of tourism out of ‘never-­before-seen’ images of our workplaces. Undercover police book us for sessions, enlist our services and then arrest us.

We are ‘untrustworthy’. We are always ‘hiding something’. And it’s our essential character as ‘lying, cheating whores’ – not the fact that we are forced by state-sanctioned stigma to protect ourselves and our identities from all sides – that’s to blame.

Indeed, the gazes that fall on us are rarely the ones we’re after. And the ones we do seek are generally received in token quantities, or because they happen to serve another, concurrent agenda for the individual or group attending.

But the attention we actually need – decriminalisation of all aspects of our work; anti-discrimination measures and ease of access to social, health and

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employment services; protection from labour exploitation and access to safe working conditions, including as migrant workers; the ability to speak freely and in detail about our experiences as labourers and as people – is often completely out of reach.

To seek all of this from authorities is to disclose our criminality. And, as we are popularly viewed as having been incapacitated by our ‘victimhood’, we are precluded from taking meaningful action to fight for our own personal and ­collective needs.

As someone who’s always had an uncomfortable relationship with state powers and mainstream social institutions – thanks to my time spent in feminist, queer, anti-racist and pro-sex-work spaces – I’ve always found the attention that sex workers receive from those parties unjust and certainly injurious.

We are used to being fucked by the system without compensation. It angers me, but it doesn’t surprise me. It’s a dull, constant ache that I’ve grown used to living with.

THE PAIN IS A LOT SHARPER and more acute when the ill-directed attention comes from within the communities that I’m part of, or from those with whom I believe I share an identity or struggle.

When SWERFs make a spectacle of sex workers’ suffering in order to promote models of criminalisation that have been proven to make our work more difficult and more dangerous, it stings. It hurts, too, when they dismiss our positive experiences of sex work as little more than ‘branding’ for the sex-worker-rights movement, or appro­ priate the experiences of victims of human trafficking, labour exploitation or work violence to create ‘trauma porn’ for uncritical audiences.

These audiences lap up those arguments as ‘evidence’ that we need tougher, prohibitive or abolitionist

legal frameworks for sex work. These people, who self-identify as feminists, want us to perform the simplest and easiest story for them to understand, and they consume these appropriated images hungrily.

I remember going to my first Mardi Gras parade after moving to Sydney, expecting to see sex workers among the celebrations. I know we’ve been there before – I’ve seen the photos.

I know the history, too. Sex workers have always shared spaces of struggle and resistance with queer folk. We were there at Stonewall. We were – and are – there for HIV/AIDS, and have been leaders in the response, particularly here in Australia, where our work around prevention set global trends in the 1990s.

We were there for the ‘yes’ vote.

During Australia’s marriage-equality plebiscite, I ran my own ‘yes’ campaign using my sex-work persona, exchanging ballots for session perks for my clients.

All the while, I was aware that some of my fellow campaigners might not have taken kindly to my juxtaposition of sex work and queer family life at a moment when we were under the whole country’s scrutiny; we had to look sharp, wholesome, assimilated.

But sex workers weren’t in the parade.

I watched every Mardi Gras float go by, and the sex workers I knew who were marching were doing so under other banners. Integrated into other identities. Invisible as sex workers.

It turns out that we haven’t been there for a few years now. I’m not the sort of guy who gives too many fucks about what Mardi Gras has become, but I do give a few about how it began – and we were there. We paid attention to the queers’ struggles and made them our own.

Where are LGBTQIA+ communities in our fight to take our identities off the criminal record, in the same way that we fought to make their lives legal? How was their struggle for decriminalisation

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so seen by us, and ours so invisible to them?

I listen to my sex-work colleagues all over the world tell stories of their queer partners cashing in on the social currency of sex work within younger or ‘radical’ queer spaces. They get cookies from their social spheres for that logic-defying act of ‘loving a sex worker’, only to turn months or years later to use their partner’s sex work as grounds for a break-up, or use the criminal status of their partner’s profession as a form of control in intimate violence, or use the fact that their work involves sharing intimacy with strangers as evidence that they can never really commit to a partner.

I’ve been on the receiving end of all of these. I’ve had my work be “so interesting, wow” at the start of an intimate relationship, only to have it become the great crux of my moral character at the end of it.

IF THESE WAYS OF SEEING US are so utterly unstable, so wildly variant, so purpose-built, how can any of them be understood to be the truth about us?

How can we be this many things to so many people without the switch for their critical-thinking skills being flipped on? How can we convince them to be more suspect of the problematic stories and images that are spread about us by people who are not us?

It’s no wonder that sex workers often don’t want to be looked at at all. Putting ourselves in anyone’s purview, beyond what’s absolutely necessary for us to earn a living, comes with layers of complexity that – for so many of us for whom sex work is just work – aren’t worth navigating.

Gala Vanting is a sex worker, writer, educator and activist working to create critical dialogue around sexuality, gen­ der and their intersections with other aspects of social justice. She lives and works on colonised Gadigal land.

SEX WORK

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EXOTIC Q&A WITH FRANKIE

VALENTINE

CANCER

These illustrations by visual and strip artist Exotic Cancer strikingly portray the sisterhood of strippers and sex workers across the globe.

I worked in strip clubs in Melbourne for 12 years and have found that the climate around stripping has changed dramatically with the advent of social media. Do you find there is a broader social acceptance of ­s trippers these days as a result of this increased visibility, and how has that influenced your art?

I’ve been dancing for only five years, but even in that timeframe, I’ve noticed a huge shift [towards sharing our work] onto social media. It’ll be interesting to see what direction it takes another five years from now.

I’m not sure that the increase in acceptance and visibility has directly influenced the art that I put out. But it definitely influences the response that I get back from my audience because, if people feel accepted being a sex worker or relating to a sex worker, they’re probably much more likely to com­ ment and interact with my posts, share their experiences and support what I do.

Within weeks of opening your account, you had over 25,000 followers; this has since gone up to over 100,000 in the past ten months. How does it feel to have such an overwhelming response to your art?

It’s so lovely and I feel so grateful that this many people enjoy my art!

I’d have never guessed it would end up being this popular, especially not as fast as it happened.

I’m very thankful!

Your art is obviously heavily influenced by your work as a stripper. What initially inspired you to start this body of work, and how has that evolved over time?

I started this because I wanted to experiment with drawing digi­ tally and express myself as a dancer.

It’s different from my old art, and I didn’t want to post it to my ‘regular’ artist account because I have family following me – young cousins and such. I didn’t really want them seeing my stripper-­related art, so I made Exotic Cancer. It’s evolved for sure: if you take a look at the first few drawings I did, the lines are pretty messy! As far as subject matter goes, I think it’s been pretty consistent since the beginning.

One of the things I have loved seeing in the industry is the global community that has sprung up on Instagram that replicates and reinforces the sisterhood and soli­ darity of the locker room. I see artists such as yourself and Jacq The Stripper as being integral to the creation of that community. Is that something you set out to do?

I never set out with the intention of creating (continued on p35…)

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(…from p28) a community, but I’m glad it happened, anyway. It’s nice to know that I can create a place that reinforces the sisterhood. I actually had a girl message me the other day – she’d bought one of my ‘Fuck You Pay Me’ shirts. She wore it in public, then a random girl who also enjoys my art saw it and recognised it as my design, and they struck up a conversation.

It’s sur­real knowing that my art can bring people together!

You’ve given a voice, not to men­tion insightful and hilarious imagery, to thousands of strippers around the globe. How do you feel about the response you’ve had from fellow workers and the broader community?

It’s heartwarming, really. A lot of people message me saying it helps them in various ways, whe­ ther it be feeling less alone, feeling validated or giving them strength.

Or outsiders will get in touch to say it gives them an understanding of the industry, insight into what strippers go through, and helps them realise we are normal humans, too.

It’s very humbling knowing that my art has such an effect on so many people.

The colour palette of your work is very soft and beautiful, with skin tones taking on an almost ethereal quality that is sometimes in direct contrast to the inane and often offensive comments coming from the customers’ mouths.

Is there meaning behind these colour choices?

I’d like to be able to say that there’s a thoughtful meaning behind the colour palette, but there’s really not a whole lot other than that I just like pastel colours.

I do tend to [depict] the customers in more muted, dull colours because they are just that: dull.

The theme of body hair is strong in your work and elicits strong reactions. Why do you feel it’s important to portray strippers this way?

People seem to have this idea that strippers are some kind of non-human, perfectly hairless beings – and, while we are very good at giving that illusion, I think it’s important to remember that we do have body hair, it’s completely normal and it doesn’t make us any less desirable.

In your work, there seems to be recurring imagery of the face beneath the face, whether that be a cute little demon or a tired woman. As women, and especially as sex workers, we all have armour that we put on to withstand the male gaze. Is this what inspires these images?

Yeah. Often, at work, I am put­ ting on a facade; we all do it. I have to be all pretty and dolled up and kind and flirty and sweet…

Underneath all of the make-up and forced smiles, I’m just, like, not empty, but instead of genuinely connecting with a customer – which is what it appears to be from their perspective – I’m actually thinking about how much money they’re

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going to give me, thinking about my cats, trying to hold in farts, you know. They can’t see that.

Who am I really?

Sex-worker burnout is real! Your artwork has a scathingly honest humour to it in the way you depict customers. Does calling out their poor behaviour help you process and deal with the difficult aspects of the job?

I’ve always been pretty resilient in handling poor behaviour; it’s not something I let bring me down in any way. I love calling them out because I find that so many girls hear the exact same thing. It doesn’t matter where you are or what country you’re in – horny men all over the world say the same shit. It’s somewhat comforting because it means it’s not so personal.

I love the animation you recently did! The art you create lends itself so well to the form; do you have plans to do longer animations of your work?

I would love to do more animation but it’s a really time-­consuming process. I have so many ideas of things I’d love to animate, but finding the time to do it is hard lately.

I’ll definitely be making more anima­ tions, but it won’t be a regular thing.

See more of Exotic Cancer’s work at www.exoticcancer.com.

Frankie Valentine is a burlesque per­ former, writer, activist and producer.

PASSING SHADES WORDS

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SUSIE ANDERSON PHOTOS LEAH JING

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Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, especially women, continue to be Othered by white-colonial ways of seeing.

OUTSIDE REDFERN STATION, there’s a rotation. Uncle usually wearing his Rabbitohs rugby jersey with a cap, reading a novel. Or guitar-playing uncle, plucking at the strings while he has a yarn with somebody who’s dropped a dollar into his guitar case.

Most of the times I walk out of the station, I do what everybody else does.

Keep my eyes low to the ground, think about where I need to be next; I’m that disconnected from the saltwater, Gadigal country I’ve lived on for nearly four years. Freshwater woman, I keep my head down.

Other times, I take in the mural opposite the station and feel the strength of the place. Want to show we’re connected.

To work out how to pause the flurry of the commute.

AS CHILDREN who’d just learnt them in school or needed the stability of numbers to help frame identities, we used fractions to explain who we were. My friend was a quarter Dutch and three-quarters Australian. I was one-quarter Aboriginal, one-quarter Australian and the rest was English.

It never felt politicised – it was just another part of what made up me, the same way my friend’s Dutch heritage was a part of her story. And, anyway, we decided we didn’t even look that different.

Until I was about 13, this identity was purely mine. Eventually, it dawned

INDIGENOUS AND WHITE-PASSING

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on me that this was somehow crucial to something bigger than me – that people outside my family had opinions on whether I was Aboriginal “or not”.

Around this time, I developed heart palpitations and a language of distance about my Aboriginality. The more knowledge I gained, the more the fury grew.

I WENT TO A PANEL at the University of Sydney featuring Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane, African-Australian academic Kaiya Aboagye, Puerto Rican activist/writer Yadira Perez Hazel and refugee advocate Omid Tofighian. The event was titled ‘Exploring Bla(c)kness in Australia’.

Both Aboagye and Hazel deferred to their elder, Leane, whose moving poem reminded everybody that, unless there is proper recognition of Indigenous peoples through a treaty or something better, we cannot heal.

Tofighian shared stories from people interned on Nauru, insinuating that the Australian Government’s treatment of refugees follows on directly from its treatment of First Nations peoples over the past two centuries.

The panel agreed that for people of colour – Indigenous or not – living on this continent to find a modicum of peace, and to understand how we can all move forward, settler culture needs to lead by example and confront the genocide and lost land and culture that underpin the country known as Australia.

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During question time, an Aboriginal woman queried Tofighian’s contribution to the event. The pain in her voice was palpable as she asked why people’s choice to come to Australia was discussed in the same panel as the concept of bla(c)kness.

He responded that refugees he’d worked with feel connected to the histories of Aboriginal peoples, whose lineages have been connected to removals and imprisonment. Leane added that, to be welcomed on this land, those arriving here – under whatever circumstances – need to acknowledge the histories predating their arrival.

A white Bosnian audience member, who introduced himself by way of ex­­ plaining his connection to genocide in his own country, asked: “What can Australian Aboriginals learn from the Maori?” As the Aboriginal people in the crowd groaned, Leane professed that comparisons do not help the conversations at home. We applauded.

MY COUSIN TOLD ME recently that her art practice making possum-­ skin cloaks is her way of embodying ‘sovereignty’. This is a term Aboriginal people use to declare autonomy from the Australian colonial project.

Personal sovereignty is particularly important for Aboriginal women. As well as losing land, culture and langua­ ges to colonisation, Aboriginal women’s children were stolen from them, and their bodies used by men for sexual pleasure and put to work in the home of white women.

It’s no surprise that much of the work to be done around sovereignty involves rewriting narratives from early records, taking back ownership of the research written about us that either avoided discussions of oppression or ignored Aboriginal women altogether.

As Wemba Wemba artist and academic Paola Balla suggests, “the damages of patriarchy came together with the damages of colonialism”. The white gaze has always defined us: through systematic oppression and the docu­ mentation of this through the archive, who it chooses to include and exclude.

In Talkin’ up to the White Woman, Goenpul theorist Aileen Moreton-­ Robinson uses life writing to understand how literature can subvert one-dimensional representations of Indigenous women. She explains how Indigenous feminism is ‘talking back’ to the white woman by asserting our own subjectivity – that “we have never fallen into the hypnosis of believing that those representations were our essence”.

We know our true essence. Through individual sovereignty, we can reclaim our culture, land, and spiritual and physical selves.

So it meant something to have my cousin say those words. She practises culture and connection in a way that

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feels true to her. And it’s through my family context that I achieve my personal idea of sovereignty.

IN THE BAR, I LOOKED for my date. In real life, he was quite different from his profile picture. Not in a bad way – he’d clearly just had a haircut, which in its own way was a nice effort.

I was being my charming and flirtatious date-self, despite the fact he had elected to keep his phone on the table the entire date, with the sound on.

I heard the Tinder app ding more than once. I didn’t mind that so much; we’re all out here playing the field. I minded most that he kept looking at the television behind me.

PASSING AS WHITE

He told me he grew up in Sydney in a migrant Italian family. I can never tell whether I’m going to talk about my identity on a date, but that’s where this conversation had led us.

Australians with no experience of non-Anglo culture often don’t know how to receive what I’m saying to them because they immediately feel attacked and defensive. Given this guy’s Italian background, I figured he would be somewhat receptive.

It was also an attempt to breed us out.

Instead of strength of identity, we are left with a numbers game – ‘half-caste’, ‘quadroon’, ‘octoroon’ – which has resulted in a society of white Australians saying, “Aboriginal people aren’t real because they don’t make boomerangs; they wear clothes and they live in cities.”

We’re not “real”. Not compared to the thing they were getting rid of. But our ancestral ties remain strong because, on some level, we knew we had to pass as

“ Aboriginal women are constantly battling – whether, one day, a minor skirmish, or another day, a full-on war – the gaze of outsiders. We exist in opposition to the national identity of Australia” His response was along the lines of “Oh okay, you’re incognito, just like me.”

Not having many Italian friends, I’m not hugely familiar with what it means to be an ‘incognito’ Italian-Australian, so I couldn’t be sure how similar our experiences were.

But it was better than the complete blank that I got on another recent date, or the heart palpitations I get when I realise I’m with somebody who might not believe me or who would be made uncomfortable by me even saying the word Aboriginal.

MUM WAS BORN in the industrial north of England. Her sister visited me last year and we took the train down to the beach just south of Sydney.

I love my aunt – she’s very smart and interesting. But we were talking about “the Indigenous stuff” and how my little sister was “getting very involved” in it. She said, “Now the Apology has happened, can’t we just move on from there?

And look to the future?”

I thought of the way my community talks about the coloniser. How could I explain…

The assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Australia through projects like the Stolen Generations has resulted in countless people being disconnected from their language, cultural practices, family and country. This disconnection has served to strengthen settler entitlement to our land.

much down the line as possible. Otherwise, it would be lost.

The skin I’m in right now, I love-hate it because it’s the continuance of our culture. But there’s so much pressure on us, and the rest of the country doesn’t understand how crucial what it is we’re tasked with. Finding ways to further cultural practice in a society that just wants the last of us – who don’t even really act like “proper aborigines”, anyway – to stop making noise.

Why can’t we look to the future?

Because we have to make sure we don’t lose the past.

We are howling for our country.

I’VE ALWAYS ACCEPTED my j­uxtaposing identities with a wry acknowledgement of the irony of the coloniser meeting the colonised.

As with all complexities, my general line is that these things can coexist.

While, as an adult, I recognise that be­­ ing able to ‘pass’ as white is one of my privileges, as a child, I wanted something that would easily orient me within my family. My simple solution back then was: if only I looked different.

At family gatherings, I began to wish I looked more like my Indigenous relatives. Not only to fit in with them – it didn’t help that our dad was dead and couldn’t be that physical link between us and them – but also to help me feel more connected to something

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the outside world had started to be so interested in.

In late high school, I became aware that society wanted to put me into a box: tick this one to be this, tick this other one to be that. The teenage me knew one was easy and one was hard. We weren’t sure what to do with the fact that we had a choice – and that somebody was going to ask us for ‘proof’. We’d ask Mum and she’d say, “How do you feel?”

Wendy Brady, a Wiradjuri academic, has written that “as an Aboriginal person my life is lived on two levels in relation to sovereignty: one is my existence within a nation (Australia) that regards itself as a sovereign state”. In other words, we are still classified, to this day, using terms set by our coloniser. She continues: “and the other is [as] a functioning sovereign Indigenous being”.

Aboriginal women are constantly battling – whether, one day, a minor skirmish, or another day, a full-on war – the gaze of outsiders. We exist in opposition to the national identity of Australia, where, as Moreton-Robinson suggests, “white women occupy the key roles, constitute the norm and the ordinary and represent the standard of womanhood”. This standard, imposed on me from my earliest years, had shaped the way I thought I wanted to be.

Mum was right, of course: I know it’s all down to how I feel. And it has taken a long time for me to really embody my culture without a little voice wanting something different, or second-­guessing myself. I recognise that my ability to pass is a privilege, and this body of mine, a colonial success. All these things can coexist.

AMERICAN AUTHOR Ta-Nehisi Coates came to Australia on a speaking tour this year. At a Sydney Opera House event, he reflected on what a luxury it was to get to know new places. He said, “I never knew that there were people here who identify as black, who we would never consider as black back home.”

The whole room froze. I imagined the audience split – that his confusion would resonate for some and horrify others. We all exhaled as he explained,

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PASSING AS WHITE

genuinely, that he’d just learnt about what this means. How it’s part of travel to understand the context and layers of history in different countries.

Prior to Coates’ appearances, Nayuka Gorrie – a Gunai/Kurnai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta commentator – wrote that, in Australia, we often look to international figures of colour to help us untangle local race relations. She was intimating what Aboriginal peoples have voiced before: we are not respected for our inherent knowledge and experience of race in this country.

Coates was put on the spot, trying to reconcile his own experiences of violence, racism, oppression and the need for reparations in the US with those of First Nations peoples in Australia. I’ve talked a bit about this complexity with my African-American housemate, whose upbringing in south Florida was similar to Coates’. He’d never travelled internationally before moving to Australia, and had limited awareness of the distinction between black and blak.

Yes, there’s blackness and there’s ­blakness. Sometimes the two are the same; sometimes they’re different. It’s a bit to take in. But what is obvious is that they can support each other.

ANOTHER OF OUR housemates recently took part in a photoshoot for Australians who identify as black. She’s Ethiopian. She asked me where I sat in this conversation.

I said that I prefer other ways of des­ cribing myself – most strongly by my clan name, Wergaia and Wemba Wemba, followed by Aboriginal and, probably last of all, First Nations or Indigenous.

Blak is a term I feel most comfortable using when I’m among family or other Koori people, specifically in Victoria,

where my mob are known. The closer to country or family I am, the more at ease I am with myself: strong in cul­ ture and body.

I told my housemate that, ultimately, it’s part of my politics to use my privilege to elevate others who might not have access to opportunities like I do. As a white-passing Aboriginal person, I am innately palatable in white contexts. People around me forget I’m Aboriginal, and conveniently remember at moments when they need consultation or to meet quotas.

If I experience a gaze, it is a specific type: sceptical, curious, interrogative, argumentative. I will never know the experience of those unable to pass.

At the University of Sydney panel, Aboagye said that bla(c)kness is a politics of resistance against the colonial nationstate. So if there’s an opportunity to share platforms I’m given because of either my passing as white or my ­Aboriginality, I look for ways that I can share this with my community. If I can support them and amplify their experience, I will do what I can for them.

EVERYONE’S RELATIONSHIP to culture is different, even within families. My siblings and I are all at different stages with our relationship to Aboriginality. And that’s fine.

As an artist, I found it fortifying to hear my cousin affirm what, in my heart, I know to be true: making traditional objects in spite of the interruptions from settlers across the last 230 years is a radical act.

My way is through writing. Talking first with family. Sharing stories about what happened to those who came be­ fore me. Telling the story of my life, my dad, my aunts, our nana. Making our languages live again.

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It is an assertion of sovereignty to reclaim ownership of traditional cultural practices. We feel our ancestors through this reclamation. It’s embodied in physically imitating what they would have done – I can barely find the English words to say it.

To try to articulate it feels complicated. Everything is intertwined with the idea of country. For us, it’s a concept, like blakness, that strengthens culture.

I’m hesitant to give it such concrete terms, but, having grown up with this, I feel what I’m charged to do – and I’m more at peace with any gaze from the outside world.

My creative practice connects me to family, culture and country. To hear my cousin say that her art practice is a sovereign act made me feel I’m not walking this path alone.

APPROACHING REDFERN Station, I take out my headphones. Change from my morning coffee rattling around in my pocket. Menulog people flank the entrance, getting in the way of commuters.

Muscling my way past, I grab the change and say, “Good morning, Unc,” toss in the coins and move on through the crowd.

Susie Anderson’s writing reflects on the erasure of Indigenous narratives throughout Victoria and Australia, and attempts to reconnect within this fragmentation thread through non-fiction, reviewing and poetry.

Select publications include un Magazine, Artlink, Rabbit Poetry and the anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. She was a poetry ­runner-up in the 2018 Overland Nakata Brophy Poetry Prize.

THEY SPEAK

KEIRA LEIKE PHOTOS REBECCA-MARIAN IRENE WORDS

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ARCHER MAGAZINE

GENDER AND LANGUAGE

Words can be a source of strength for those on journeys of transition or translocation.

I’M LOOKING AT A SCREEN. I see a digital reproduction of a play that was once acted on a stage – itself a deconstruc­ted new version of a classic: There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were their well-acquainted friend.

It’s fascinating how people today react to the singular they pronoun. Over 400 years after William Shakespeare wrote The Comedy of Errors, conservatives are still busy conserving the systems of gender and politics that have put them in power, but not the communities around them, nor the planet. Even those on the side of social justice can get caught up in pedantry about how this pronoun use is ‘ungrammatical’.

Turkish, my mother tongue, has no gendered pronouns; all references to people in the third person use the word o, literally meaning ‘that’. When I first heard the English singular they, it was like a homecoming: a fine thread stretched from my country of origin to my country of choice, making a gentle little loop, opening up a new pathway.

When I was learning Shakespeare in high school, it did not occur to me that pronoun use, and language use generally, had deeper significance.

Reading his work in Turkish was well regarded within that society, but it was also somehow fruitless. My native tongue has its own assumptions and values about the world, and occasionally loses the nuances of English altogether, including the dynamics of gender that pronouns embody.

We think in language. Our values, emotions and decisions are shaped by

the meanings and subtext of the words available to us.

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, my grandparents often voiced their desire to see my mürüvvet as a special wish for them. It translates to something like ‘the joyful receiving of ripe life through grace’ – the best outcome, a ‘blossoming’, for each person.

But the concept is usually wrapped up in fantasies of power or marriage in the traditional sense. As neither of them travelled further than the city closest to their birth town, I assume my grandparents would have had a hard time getting their heads around my gender puzzle, even if Turkish prevented them from ever ‘mispronouning’ me.

My grandmother never experienced being a young woman; she was a child, then she was a mother – first to her brothers and, later, to children of her own. When I asked her about her past, she was bitter. She wanted to study but she didn’t have the privilege.

“I couldn’t live a life,” she used to say. I never knew what that meant for a woman until decades later. She died on some day I did not know; my family back in Turkey didn’t tell me when it happened, due to a complex about the disclosure of pain that runs in my nuclear unit.

My grandfather was a perfect Muslim.

He was absolutely committed to being a good man in his own heart and did everything Islam asked of him. It was not until I saw him shortly before he died that I discovered he was afraid of

LANGUAGE 47

the unknown. When he voiced his fear to me at the time, I found myself unable to comfort him despite having confron­ ted some of my own unknowns.

The culture built around this religion represented everything that held me back. To me, religion represents a lack of faith. It is upheld by people who cannot trust and love the planet that had brought them to life, instead holding onto a fantasy of coming from somewhere else, with the prospect of also going somewhere else after death.

And for the monotheistic believer, whether Muslim or Christian, the world is coded in binaries. There is good and there is evil. There is God and there is human. There is man and there is woman.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if my grandparents were still around. Would they embrace me as I am? Would I need to first struggle for acceptance as a woman, and then for my independence as one?

BECOMING COMFORTABLE with contradictions was how I finally broke free of the constant, underlying fear of death that I have had since my childhood. To truly live, to ‘blossom’, I had to become comfortable with surrendering.

Surrendering to my desire to live somewhere far away. Surrendering to new pursuits, like studying a subject that I was in love with. Surrendering to transition. To not transition would have been a betrayal not only of my womanhood, but also of my courage.

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Although I wasn’t sure what this meant, exactly, I knew that in order to live my life, I had to leave Turkey.

Looking back now, my optimism was rather ridiculous. Australia was going to be full of people who would love and appreciate me, but also people who would fan my flames. It took me years before I had the words to describe casual racism – though I am grateful for my life as a second-class citizen when it comes to race, as nothing prepared me better for my second-class citizenship in gender.

When I finally opened my heart to the possibility of transitioning, after months of Kindle and YouTube, the therapist I was seeing advised against my idea of using both she and they: “It will only confuse your colleagues.

Why don’t you just use she?”

My therapist was right. I underestimated many things at the start of my transition, and the general public’s

NON-BINARY PEOPLE who use they as their default signifier are constantly erased by both cisgender and transgender people’s normative narratives. People not attuned to the gender conversation are hesitant to use they, for it feels unfamiliar to them.

Something had to address this issue in a playful way. This is what led me to start ‘They Day’. With support from the government department I work at, I made a promotional video inviting people to use they pronouns for every­ one they refer to, one day every month.

What I imagined as a playful initiative brought in a firestorm.

On the third They Day, the people I filmed found their images on national newspapers and live television. A number of high-profile politicians grumbled things like “political correctness gone mad again” and “gender-bending nonsense”. A YouTuber who draws themselves as a sassy bear was excited for

“I sacrificed the combined they/she for an easierto-accept, more stable she. I am happy with she.

My non-binary identity and my womanhood are not mutually exclusive; they go together” need for simplicity in relation to gender was one. But I wasn’t a woman trapped in the wrong body. I was an authentic expression of a woman trapped in a limited society.

Early in my transition, I felt as though I was in open water. I had left the shore of he, yet I hadn’t landed on she. Many people misgendered me in myriad ways in those days; it was death by a thousand cuts. I needed to be seen as a person in transition, in motion, in change – not as the past or the future, but as the present.

I sacrificed the combined they/she for an easier-to-accept, more stable she. I am happy with she. My non-binary identity and my womanhood are not mutually exclusive; they go together.

She is my word of choice as I walk on this Earth. It is the closest English gets to communicating my authentic self, to capturing my essence, for those who don’t know my story. I feel alive and vibrant when someone refers to me using she.

a new vlog opportunity. The Australian, Herald Sun and even a trashy newspa­per from Geelong condemned They Day on their first three pages.

I knew that They Day was onto something from the number of troll footprints I saw outside my chateau.

New identities are evidently unboxing themselves in social life, which is so wonderful to see. Our rainbow community is like a M ­ atryoshka doll: once we can safely hold up what is visible, other, lesser known ways of being come out from where they have been waiting.

Humans are always new – all the energy within us has come in and out of existence in rapid succession, like all forms of energy do. Every single cell in our bodies moves, changes, grows.

New air permeates new lungs. New ideas form imprints in new minds.

The words that we use to make sense of all this change, too. They

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r­ epresents an opportunity to capture this ­multiplicity.

I’M NOT SURE my grandparents would have seen me living as my authentic gender, and keeping myself busy with experiments in art and social norms, as a mürüvvet, should they have lived long enough to have the chance.

There are yearnings that can never be fully voiced in human words, but by ­living lush, expressive and daring lives, perhaps we can come close to saying the unsayable.

In the cosmos I exist within, being and non-being, light and dark, matter and space, here and there all arise tog­ether.

A river is both the gentle stream under soft ferns and the cracking whip that shapes the hardest stones. Sometimes gushing, sometimes roaring, it flows effortlessly and ­without ­hesitation.

I needed to trust the river that car­ ried me across continents, across genders, and flow with it. Like the river, I am not a ‘thing’; I am a ‘happening’.

As a woman with a history of transition, I don’t have an agenda to destroy gender. I just want everyone’s journeys towards courageously becoming their truest selves to flow uninterruptedly, and to unfold without societal hangups. We can only let go in peace if first we can embrace our lives with passion.

Identities are forming with each mo­ ment, and the privilege of knowing them will be ours if we simply create safer atmospheres and recognise everyone’s worth without assumptions, projections and judgement.

As I smell the first jasmines at the end of every winter, I feel echoes of the summers past. This heady concoction of tired and new exists in the one moment: it is non-dual, non-explicable, non-binary.

Keira Leike is an artist and advo­ cate. She transitioned in Australia as a first-generation immigrant from Turkey. After film theory and screen production studies, she started an art career in Melbourne. Apart from They Day, Keira also hosts the inten­ tional gathering Naming Circle and co-runs the gender-inclusive mas­ sage studio Colourwaves Lomilomi.

BECOMING

WHOLE

WORDS JULIAN MOLONY PHOTOS MEGAN VAN DE

ARCHER MAGAZINE

It may take decades, but becoming comfortable in one’s skin is a journey that brings rewards in the end.

BY THE TIME MY SON was 12 and we’d moved back to Sydney, the gap between the two genders within me began to broaden.

I had come out to him and my three sisters as bisexual. I’d packed away my ‘girl clothes’, and cut my hair short to look masculine and scare away straight men. I enjoyed looking particularly unattractive to them.

At the age of 46, I went out with my first queer guy, who talked about how he felt very female and shared that he’d just started getting some counselling at the Gender Centre. I looked at the centre’s website and discovered its descriptions of all the categories within the gender spectrum; I recognised myself in the term gender-questioning.

That same year, I was told by a knee surgeon that I had worn the c­ artilage off my knees and that I’d never be able to run again. The time I’d spent controlling my ‘female body’ through exercise had come to an end.

This was probably the catalyst for my journey into seriously addressing my thoughts about the ‘other half’, my secret self.

MY THREE SISTERS often wished we had a brother. I didn’t think much about it, as I didn’t notice the absence of masculine energy. I’d been doing daily push-ups and held the unchallenged title of family arm-wrestling winner from the age of five.

I loved testing my physical strength and showing off my unusually large biceps. However, I was equally interes­ ted in designing costumes and exper-

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imenting with make-up, as that’s what I believed being a girl was about. For a while, I dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. I pored over books of famous prima ballerinas, studying their exquisitely costumed, lithe, powerful bodies and overly painted faces.

Our father – who had spent four years in the British Air Force – quietly wished for boys, so he was happy with our crazy, tomboyish, somewhat risky behaviour. Almost every Sunday, we would head to the Royal National Park, less than an hour’s drive from Sydney, where I would help Dad build the camp­ fire. My parents would make billy tea and damper, and throw potatoes in the embers, while my sisters and I went exploring for hours.

From the age of 11, I began working with Dad on his home-insulation business for some pocket money. A whole Saturday would be spent driving to a country town, lifting and moving large, heavy bags of paper-based insulation for up to five or six hours, then arriving home at dusk, covered in paper-dust and sweat.

Although the work was hard, being out on the open road with him made me feel like his son.

I WAS ACUTELY AWARE of my looks. My parents remarked often, from the time I was five or six, and in front of my sisters, that I was very beautiful.

I secretly began to study my face, wondering what they were referring to.

My mother loved to talk about the appearance and style of actresses from the 1930s to the 1950s, and I

TRANS BODY DYSPHORIA

wanted so much to be a mesmerising ­Hollywood-style beauty. At nine years old, I began plucking my eyebrows. At 11, I started shaving my legs all the way to the top of my thighs.

When I started high school, however, I was bullied by a lot of the boys in my class. At first they called me a “snob” because I had refused to go out with one of the popular boys, then “frigid”, a “prude” and finally, when I cut my hair short at 15, a “lesbian”.

Prepubescence didn’t feel too bad, as I appeared asexual and really masculine. I loved my muscular body, my broad shoulders, the long, blonde hairs on my arms, and my large, strong hands with defined veins. But puberty came in the form of my thighs expanding at the age of 14, and my breasts only began to slowly develop at 15. This made me feel as if my body wasn’t really like those of the other girls.

When I turned 16, I left school, des­ perate to get away from the western suburbs. I had gotten a job and moved to the inner city by the time I was 17.

Soon, I discovered the Exchange Hotel and felt that I found my tribe among the post-punk scene.

The girls all had short hair and wore cool boys’ clothes, while the boys wore eyeliner and jewellery. But these clothing choices were not necessarily indicators of gender identity or sexual preference.

There were no outward claims that anyone was gay, transgender or genderfluid; in fact, there were limited words for those kinds of identities.

We were all simply different from the rest of the world, and fiercely proud of it.

WHILE OXFORD STREET had become, in many ways, my home, it was also around this time that my gender expression, and how I was viewed by the wider world, began to become troubling for me.

Still fairly new to the scene at 18, I didn’t know of anyone else who was going through what I was feeling about myself. I looked in the mirror every morning, studying my face with frustration. I saw it as masculine, al­ most androgynous, and believed that I needed make-up to convince others that I was a girl.

Yet I didn’t quite feel like a girl.

I knew I was born with a ‘girl body’, something I was finding hard to like.

I looked at men on the streets, more jealous of their bodies than attracted to them. Or was it more that I was attracted to their bodies, but also sad that I hadn’t been born with one like theirs?

My friends – all gay boys – were fin­ ding love and sex, but I was just a ‘fag hag’, a ‘handbag’. They all told me how stunning I was, but none of them wan­ ted me. I became attracted to some of them, and felt guilty and lost about it.

I tried being with straight men; however, my attempts at being intimate with men who read and touched me as a woman felt foreign. It was hard to respond with authenticity, and I found myself performing the moves and sounds that I believed a woman was supposed to make. I felt almost no pleasure in sex.

Around that time, I was introduced to someone I was later told had had a

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“sex change”. He was heavy-set and tough-looking, dressed in black leather.

Images of surgically made neo-genitalia crossed my mind for a moment, but I knew better than to ask.

Drag queens I met called one another “she” and “her”, but then many of the gay boys I knew did that, too. A couple of the drag queens had had breast implants, and one was on hormones to become more feminine.

These were the only variants in gender that I encountered until 30 years later.

I MOVED TO BONDI BEACH in my early 20s while I was studying fine art. There, straight men were all around me, and I became obsessed with looking perfect – like a typical ‘Bondi girl’.

Through my sunglasses, I would scan the streets and notice that almost all the men who passed by me checked me out. I became addicted to it. I knew I was attractive, but I didn’t feel right, so their affirmations told me that I was acceptable – that I looked as good as, or better than, the other girls around me.

As soon as I got home, I would check my body for muscle growth around my arms, legs, back. I wanted rippling muscles that matched those of the men who looked at me.

The desire to be admired – to perfectly and completely fulfil the image of the sex siren, or maybe to be the most graceful, witty and stylish woman – plagued me daily. On good days, I felt beautiful (depending on how flat my stomach was, and how muscular my thighs looked).

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“As I hadn’t heard the word transgender, I thought I was the only person in the world who felt this way about their body. I quietly called myself a ‘masculine woman’”

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TRANS BODY DYSPHORIA

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On bad days, when my body dysphoria screamed at me and I stared at my thighs, stomach or the back of my arms with anger and stomach-churning disgust, my thoughts would spiral into self-hatred and begin to wander into self-harm and suicide. I worked hard to keep my abdominals defined and became obsessed with the food I ate.

I felt as if I was watched and judged daily by the world around me – not only by people, but by the dominant images in advertisements that I saw in passing at bus stops, on billboards and at magazine stands. The body I saw in the mirror was huge, sloppy and dimply. I saw it as ‘pathetic’ and ‘useless’ simply because of its gender. I felt as if the world expec­ ted me to be a beautiful, stylish, sexy female, and that this in itself was seen as a great goal worth attaining.

I believed that the love I felt for my ‘masculine’ parts – arms, hands, shoulders – were just part of my secret self.

As I hadn’t heard the word transgender, I thought I was the only person in the world who felt this way about their body. I quietly called myself a ‘masculine woman’, unable to explain my obsession with my muscles and my growing competitiveness and resentment towards men.

I thought that, somehow, I had been born with a strange genetic mismatch between body and mind. I began to be­­ lieve that inside my ‘girl parts’ – chest, hips, butt, even genitals – were actually, maybe a couple of millimetres beneath the skin, ‘boy bits’ that had gotten mislaid when I was being put together as a baby. I had become a one-off freak of nature, and I couldn’t tell anyone about it.

I GOT MARRIED to a conservative Australian man in the early 1990s. He tried to convince me that my role as a woman was defined by being a homemaker. He was surprised when, on asking me if I trained to look good for him, I responded with, “No, it’s for me, of course.”

But it was more than just my attitude towards my body, or the way society viewed me physically and aesthetically.

The masculine in my mind was also clearly dominant. At times, when I was thinking hard about a problem, I imagined the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ parts of me working it out together.

When I found out that I was preg­ nant at 33, the reality of having a female body was more than a shock. I’d been trying to control and change my body for so long: struggling with body dysphoria that bor­dered on anorexia in my late teens, then getting into long-­ distance running, weights and gymnastics in the following years. I’d worked so hard at increasing my upper body and reducing the size of my butt and thighs that I was afraid of what my body was going to do to me.

I was really happy to see my baby growing well inside me, but I didn’t share my fears with anyone as my body morphed into what I saw as a huge ges­ tational sac: I gained 25 kilos.

When I gave birth to my son, and was shown how to breastfeed, I felt really glad that my breasts finally had a purpose. To retain my masculine shape, I immediately resumed training and ran my first half-marathon when my boy was six months old.

Being a mother felt strange. I didn’t go to mothers’ groups. I focused on finishing my degree, then my Honour’s year at university. Despite having birthed a child, I was determined to prove that I was just like a man in my artworks, my ambition and my physical strength.

When my son was three, I’d begun my Master of Fine Art and moved to New South Wales’ Hunter Valley with my husband. Within two years, we’d split. I felt as if I was running a race against men, and against time, trying to prove that I was, in all things, both man and woman.

IN MY LATE 40S, I met a transgender man with whom I immediately felt a connection that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. After some time, I had the opportunity to ask him a few questions in private, and he discussed things that I’d previously thought didn’t exist in anyone else’s world.

I felt like exploding with joy at the fact that there was someone who identified

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with all of the things I’d kept hidden from those around me, even from my­ self. I booked an appointment with a counsellor at the Gender Centre and, for the first time, began addressing my gender dysphoria. By the second appointment, I was asking about how soon I could access testosterone.

I came out to my son and sisters as a trans man. Within a few months, my father passed away; I didn’t get to tell him about my journey, but I finally told my mum when she asked me, suspiciously, if I was taking steroids. By that time, I’d settled in to the realisation that I wasn’t strictly transgender – I saw my­ self as genderfluid.

I’ve now been on testosterone for al­ most five years, and my face still looks a lot like a ‘girl face’. I’m okay with that.

Five years ago, I had a hysterectomy, and just this year had a bilateral mastectomy.

My ‘girl bits’ are finally gone, leaving me with a fresh way of seeing myself.

It no longer matters to me what men (or anyone, really) sees when I pass them on the street or talk to them. I don’t think I look very ‘male’ unless I were to grow a beard, but I don’t want my appearance to distance me from my teenage son – I think I’d just look like a bearded lady from a sideshow.

I now welcome the female part of me. I like looking pretty, even though I have some stubble on my chin. I wear make-up, and my hair has grown to my shoulders. When I’m at certain public places, I prefer women to read me as female, as that may allow them feel safe.

I also enjoy the feeling of being read as male in certain ‘straight men’s spaces’, like the hardware store or timber yard.

My friends sometimes get pronouns mixed up – calling me “she”, “they” or “he” – but I don’t really mind. I leave the door open to descriptions, as it took me so long to claim my true identity, and I may still have more to learn about myself. I like to think that I’m two halves of a whole. I am many things, and I love that about me.

Julian Molony is a Sydney-based interdisciplinary artist, curator and ARI director.

LGBTQIA+ MEDICAL SERVICES

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MODELS LIA, CYNTHIA, PENN, JOSH

I

D A O R B N PHOTOGRAPHY

SHANNON POWELL

HAIR AND MAKE-UP HELENA REGINA SMYTHE EEVIE LA VOLPE

DAYL

T H IG

STYLING AND CREATIVE DIRECTION EUPHEMIA RUSSELL

I had the honour of doing the creative direction for this shoot, and wanted to portray what Archer Magazine so aptly captures in its tagline: Sex is weird for everyone. What, then, is kink, if there’s no ‘normal’ to deviate from?

Although ‘kinky’ adornments have increasingly been adop­ ted in mainstream fashion over the last few years, these still often appear in a particular way – black, red, latex, leather, collars. Moreover, media depictions of kink are often rife with stereotypes and hypersexualisation.

But kink doesn’t look just one way, nor is it just a specific group of people or identities or a particular set of outfits or tools. I wanted to capture this complexity for the shoot, so I did a callout for people who wanted to share their individual expressions of sexuality. I was joyfully overwhelmed by the candid 63 responses I got from people recounting their myriad experiences with their bodies, identities, kinky practices and sexualities.

I ended up choosing four incredible people, whose stories we have channelled in this shoot. For Josh, kink “focuses on the dismantling of gender stereotypes that prevail in the community”: “My expression isn’t necessarily about ignoring these roles, but instead understanding how to recreate and embody them to suit personal expression with kink and fetish.”

These sentiments are echoed by Lia: “In a society that por­ trays Latinx people as hypersexual, and a kinky community that portrays exploration as serious business, I enjoy floating outside of the restrictive guidelines that tell me I can’t be silly and sensual at the same time. I love making people laugh and feel something in their bodies at the same time.”

Penn describes kink as “healing and transformational”: “Eroticising pain and humiliation allows me to process complex emotions and trauma on a deeply subconscious level. It’s less about sex and more about connecting with my body.” And, in reflecting on their own relationship with sexuality, ­Cynthia beautifully sums up the significance of kink: “My expression is a hybrid of gender-fluidity, art, culture, style and sensuality.”

It’s vital that we undo our damaging assumptions and perceptions, dismantle oppressive structures, and have regular, healthy conversations relating to sex. Authentic representations of the spectrum of sexual identities and experiences – like this shoot – point our gaze in the right direction and help us to achieve all this.

Writing, styling and creative direction by Euphemia Russell of @sex.iwishyouknew / www.iwishyouknew.net.

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LIA WEARS

@M0RTABELLA SACRED MUZZLE $189 @PASSIONFRUITSHOP 60CM SPREADER BAR $130

PREVIOUS PAGE:

CYNTHIA WEARS

@SELF_PERFORM SAMPLE ROBE (NFS) @FASHIONCHELSEA RUFFLE COLLAR (ENQUIRE) @PASSIONFRUITSHOP CHROME HANDLE WHIP $140 @SELF_PERFORM SAMPLE UNDERWEAR (NFS)

ABOVE LEFT:

PENN WEARS

@VINTAGEGARAGE JACKET (ENQUIRE) GABONA LEATHER HEADPIECE (ENQUIRE)

LIA WEARS

@FANTOMWEAR BLACK MESH HOODED LONG-SLEEVE BODYSUIT $125

role play WORDS AND IMAGES

JESSIE NGAIO

ARCHER MAGAZINE

The desires to perform for the camera and for a Dom partner are comparable – and complicated.

NAKED, ADORABLY CHUBBY and covered in white body paint, I turn to the camera and shout, “I think it’s time for a spaghetti shower!” The footage jump-cuts to show my 24-yearold self pouring canned spaghetti over my trembling body while screaming, “Spaghetti shower! Aaah, I’m gonna get so clean!”

This continues for several manic ­minutes, and the video fades to black.

My Dom, sitting on his red velvet couch, looks up from his laptop. He’s perturbed. “That was weird and funny.

But I found it upsetting watching a hot girl trying her hardest not to be hot.”

Then he orders me to strip.

Lest you confuse this for surrealist erotic fiction, I should explain.

IN MY MID-20S, having recently completed my Master’s degree in fine art and working in a supremely disheartening call centre collecting credit-card debt off old ladies, I made a Facebook post crying out to the internet gods: “Why can’t I have a job that lets me eat chocolate and watch porn all day?”

The gods were in an unusually charitable mood. Within two weeks, I landed myself a gig as a video editor for a local ethical porn company, on top of contributing to their websites as a performer and weirdo.

What is ‘ethical porn’? That’s a complicated one, and it depends who you ask.

For the sake of this article, let’s say it’s a subset of the porn industry that treats

performers with respect and offers fair payment and transparency. It may also show alternative sexualities, a range of body types and so on.

The idea behind ethical porn is that it can be empowering for both performer and consumer. In reality, my experiences have been more complex.

The company I worked for promoted itself as presenting ‘natural’ women.

This meant we were encouraged to not remove our pubic hair, not wear make-up, nor behave in ways that might be read as performative.

As a filthy femme with an exhibitionistic sexuality, I actually found these constraints uncomfortable. For me, the guidelines to be ‘natural’ became a pressure to contrive my image and sexual expression so as to fulfil a particular male fantasy. I soon also discovered what was popular on the site: generally, the more conventionally attractive women still claimed the majority of attention and repeat work.

So, while the company claimed to subvert the dominant paradigm, it seemed that capitalistic and patriarchal forces were still strongly at play.

I also got pussy fatigue. Look, I’m a big fan of the vag – a favourite pastime of mine is to bury my face in labia. But when you’ve been staring at close-ups of female genitalia all day, every day, you really start to crave the sight of a good, solid cock.

However, the upsides of the work were priceless and, though I had to leave for

70

unrelated health reasons, I would never change my experience.

I met free-thinking creatives and sex workers who remain collaborators and dear friends to this day. I also became very familiar with the language of the camera as an erotic tool, and engaged in some deep explorations in self-­ representation and bodily autonomy.

A most profound example of this was the time I documented my masturbatory habits over the course of several weeks; attempting to capture ‘authen­ ticity’ while the camera was rolling was a challenging but rewarding exercise.

Finally, once you’ve brought yourself to orgasm on screen a few times, you lose a lot of pesky inhibitions. I’m convinced that this has helped me level up as an artist and become less afraid to ask lovers for what I desire sexually.

I’VE GOT TO HAND IT to my old boss at the ethical porn company: he really let me push right up against the rules and boundaries of his websites.

Which brings us back to that spaghetti shower video. When I made that weird erotic vignette, I had grown frustrated with my intimate acquaintance with male desire, so the video was an exercise in irreverence.

I suppose my Dom’s response was evidence of the video’s success. His unease about a hot girl going out of her way to disguise or subvert her hotness was underpinned by the entitled idea that a woman owes it to the world to

Still from a porn film art-directed and performed by JESSIE NGAIO alongside erotic filmmaker HELEN CORDAY

be attractive. At the time, I ignored my discomfort with his comment because love and lust always turn my brain into paste.

A few weeks after I showed him my ‘porn’, my Dom sent me an SMS: “This is probably going to be the most offensive thing I have ever asked of you, but I would like to order you to start dressing hot. You’ve got an amazing body but you don’t dress like it, and if you did, I think you could be a goddess.”

Offensive? Maybe. Compelling? Yep. See, I have an erotic affliction: an emotional masochism that means the less I like something, the more it arouses and intrigues me. I’ve always been sexually adventurous, and it’s hard to guess where these desires come from, but I’ve had to admit to myself that the hottest thing in the world to me is when I am being dominated, humiliated and objectified.

So there I was, an arty queer weirdo in abrasively colourful op-shop clothes, being asked to let my Dom dictate what I would wear – altering the very way I presented my identity. I consented.

I’LL NEVER FORGET our first shopping trip down inner-suburban ­Melbourne’s Chapel Street, the haunt of slim young humans who spent much of their disposable income on spray tans, manicures and chia pods.

Together, we traversed territories previously unknown to me with names like Wittner, where he bought me heels that cost more than I had in my bank account; Mac, where a nice lady showed me how to make my eyes smoulder; and American Apparel, where we invested in the shortest of skirts and the whitest of knee-high socks.

That afternoon, we returned to his apartment and, excitedly, he ordered me

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into one of the outfits: a white tank top and a skirt so short you had to squint to see it.

He then decided to take me for a walk around the neighbourhood. I remember my feelings of acute awkwardness as I stumbled along in heels (I had never owned a pair, my mother declaring that heels were a conspiracy against women) and tried to keep the blue skirt from revealing all my secrets.

When a neighbour congratulated my Dom on my short skirt in the comradely tone of a fellow chauvinist, the deal was sealed – my Dom was delighted!

My transformation into s­ omeone resembling a ‘barely legal’–style porn star became a major part of our dynamic and brought him a great deal of joy, only intensified by my internal conflict. It was a potent brew for his sadism and my masochism.

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ETHICAL PORN AND SUBMISSION

Soon, I was expected to dress this way for most of our encounters – even out in public, where I might be seen adopting this identity that was not mine, but rather a projection of one of his fantasies and his desire to make other men jealous. I was, he said, his trophy slut.

On one hand, I was never completely comfortable with engaging in this type of male-fantasy fulfilment, which was about transforming myself into a simu­ lacrum of a more youthful woman.

But, on the other, I discovered I liked aspects of it. I liked the alchemy of using make-up and clothes to take on an alter ego – and, for the first time in my life, I felt hot. And powerful.

Eventually, I stopped worrying about what my outfits might have said about me and began to revel in the rebellion of it. Yes, I’m a hot slut, but you’d better fucking respect me.

UNFORTUNATELY, OUR relationship began to fall apart in ways that were the dramatic stuff of emotional abuse.

Towards the end, his treatment of me was nasty and cruel, and utterly broke my heart. It destroyed the deep trust that is required in a Dom–sub relationship, and disconnected me from my libido for quite some time.

Had our entire relationship been abuse in disguise? Sure, it had turned me on so much, but was I a fool for catering to his desires so completely?

Had I betrayed my feminist sisters in doing so? I felt I had handed my identity to him, and now I was lost and broken.

Several months after I ended things with my Dom, still reeling from the trauma of it all, I was approached by a friend who was starting her own feminist porn project. It was called Post-­Reverie and she asked if I would

like to be a part of it. I would be given a Handycam for two months and complete creative control; my friend would then take my footage and edit it into a film alongside those by others. Hell yes.

So I decided I would shoot a montage of my different selves. In one scene, I was with my girlfriend, our bodies painted, coating one another in black goo before mashing our faces into each other’s spaces. In another, I danced naked in my backyard among dodgy, surrealist set pieces, masturbating coated in ­rhinestones and slime.

The scenes felt like rituals within which I was inhabiting ugly, strange, untamed aspects of my sexuality.

Instead of performing for the audience, I was simply allowing them to be my witnesses.

The most intense scene I shot was one in which I dressed in that first outfit my Dom had bought me, with the collar he had made me wear. I slapped my face the way he used to until I was howling with rage, then clutched my clit and brought myself to cathartic climax.

Dubbed over the footage, I read a piece that described the shifting outlines of my erotic landscape and unpacked the grief of broken love.

Making these segments for Post-­ Reverie reignited my passion for creating porn and finally filled in the pieces that had been missing. I wasn’t performing my sexuality for a male audience; instead, I displayed my sexual self on camera without denying all the comple­ xities that come from being human.

I was able to reclaim myself and take power from my experiences. I found glory in my exhibitionist streak and femme power, and affirmed my love for explicit porn and slut pride while not denying the damage that had come from trying to explore my own desires

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in a male-dominated world. I wasn’t ‘­natural’ but I sure as hell was ‘real’.

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN AFRAID to speak about my experiences, lest kink-negative and anti-porn advocates use it as evidence that porn and kink are inherently harmful. They’re not. Like every other thing in our complicated culture, they have the capacity to be both damaging and tremendously empowering.

Through working in porn, I gained more complex ideas about what erotic self-expression might look like. Through catering to the fantasies of my Dom, I was able to discover a previously hidden desire within myself to be a hot slut.

I’m now working on my own art porn website, through which I want to capture the same radical honesty, hotness, femme filth and violence that forms the core of my sexuality and my identity. It’s going to be good. Like I said in my film for Post-Reverie: My collision with that man who I loved caused a nuclear explosion, and the effects were devastating and almost fatal. But now, strange new flowers are growing in the altered landscape of my self-perception, and their scent intrigues me.

I am beautiful, ugly, monstrous, feminine – and lately, as I hold up every single part of myself with curiosity and pride, I feel like maybe I am really fucking ­powerful.

Jessie Ngaio is a visual artist, per­ former and pervert. Her achieve­ ments include a filthy musical the­ atre production, Slutmonster and Friends; a hyper-coloured comedy web series, Trying My Best; and ­performing in a documentary on kink and intimacy entitled Love Hard. She also makes creepy paintings, sculp­ tures and porn.

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GEMMA MAHADEO IMAGES MIRANDA MILLEN

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DATING AND INVISIBLE ILLNESS

Dating is a minefield that becomes even trickier when a person is living with chronic illness – especially when it’s invisible.

OD I’D READ A BLOG POST where a wheelchair user explained the various disappointments she experienced while dating. Ableism generally sucks, but this was next-level shit human behaviour: some dates left when they saw she was waiting at the agreed meeting place in a wheelchair.

I remember thinking afterwards that dating when you have a chronic health condition is so hard. Depending on how much of your daily life is affected, you reach a point where you end up having to disclose significant details if you want to be a decent human to potential lovers.

It’s slightly different with ­invisible illnesses. Loneliness, being alone, sex­ ual desire and human connection are difficult enough for people without a history of trauma or mental-health issues. Imagine having your brain constantly make you interrogate yourself in the moment: Am I dateable? Am I long-term-relationship material?

I’VE USED TINDER on and off over the years because I feel it’s a good way to practise being social around non-creatives while living with two mood-affecting conditions.

The first is major depressive disor­ der, which had been labelled ‘treatment-­ resistant’ after various antidepressants and mood stabilisers ‘pooped out’ since my diagnosis at 18. The second is premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), which I was only formally diagnosed with earlier this year.

PMDD symptoms hadn’t been obvious until 2012, around the time I began electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatment for my depression. A week or two before my period was due, I would notice that there’d be no identifiable trigger for my mood dropping to concerning levels.

I never seemed to get replies or dates through same-sex dating apps, but was encouraged to try Tinder by the fact that more people on it have begun mentioning ethical non-monogamy. While Tinder is generally considered a dating cesspool, I thought it was stubborn of me to insist that everyone on it would be terrible. Stop being so insular, I would tell myself. Try harder.

Admittedly, this mindset was dismissive of the extra care that dating demanded when you have chronic mental-health issues. But, because ­emotional labour can be draining for those living with them, I see poly­ amory – and the way it disperses that labour – as a potential source of emotional cushioning. There’s safety in being able to ‘give back’ lovers to their primary partners, and taking time out, alone, to prioritise mood-stabilising.

I still struggle with confidence in my ability to be a satisfactory primary partner to anyone, and some of this is also due to past experiences of trauma and abuse. So I almost always mention that I have depression when getting to know someone. It’s such a large part of my day-to-day life that to not mention it feels like lying by omission.

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Plus, having been publicly outed as mentally unwell by an ex-partner years before, I rationalised that strangers couldn’t make me feel any worse about myself than supposed friends and exes did back then. You’ve got nothing to lose.

THERE’D BEEN A FEW matches, a lot of chatting and some mention of dates or meeting in person. But this past year has seen me make more of a commitment to not keep dating someone if I sense that doing so would interfere with managing my chronic illnesses.

I once had a lover who was polyamorous and had mental-health issues. We had loads in common, but his wife had a pattern of making it difficult for him to keep seeing other lovers long-term. The rollercoaster of breaking up and making up was not something I could sustain while staying mentally healthy.

I met more polyamorous men who only talked about their own lives and primary partners. I will always envy their confidence and cluelessness.

I dated a monogamous man who mansplained anxiety to me via email when I broke up with him. He called grown women “girls”, was socially isolated and was cagey about when he needed to take his anti-anxiety medication.

I wanted to give him a chance, thinking my initial reservations about him were hasty, but couldn’t reconcile with his sense of entitlement, and didn’t want to be with someone who wouldn’t take full responsibility for their mental health.

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He insisted that, if I knew more about his past, I might view him differently.

Prior experience in emotionally abusive relationships made this sound like a warning to get out and stay away.

But there have also been rare occasions of self-acceptance. After being discharged following a psych-ward admission, I met a guy I just wanted to sleep with. My brain wasn’t bombarding me with persistent thoughts about how physically unattractive I was – you often don’t realise how distorted your thinking is until after you’re discharged.

This guy – originally from Perth – was gorgeous and creative, but didn’t want any intimate involvement with people with depression. I guarded my local knowledge from him, convinced he was using me to find cool spots to take others on dates to, and moved on.

It was a relief not taking sexual rejection so personally. Is this what it’s like being neurotypical? Managing chronic health issues is a full-time job. I’d made the mistake of putting partners before my health in the past, and didn’t want to put up with that bullshit again.

WHEN JEFF* ASKED ME OUT, I said yes, ignoring that nagging voice at the back of mind: You’re not well enough for this.

I really wasn’t. I was having a rough PMDD week, and knew I wasn’t really equipped to socialise with people I didn’t already know well. But I was still hung up on trying harder to alleviate my mood drops before my period was due.

To keep PMDD in check, I came up with a pre-date gameplan: get to the meeting place early, drive rather than commute, drink two pots over several hours, drink a pint or more of water, drive home, take a night antidepressant, bed. Boring, but sensible.

Jeff seemed fascinated by my crea­ tive endeavours. It was a bit of an effort to pipe up with questions about his life when he raised so many about mine. He asked about my poetry and upcoming writers’ festival appearance; I shifted focus onto his part­ ner and work, and what brought him to ­Australia.

Perhaps cynically, I was anticipating what sort of date this would turn out to be: His enthusiasm in shared interests makes him look like ‘one of the good ones’.

I also made judgements: Jeff seems like a very specific type of white male, complete with a tertiary-educated primary partner and first-world woes and causes to champion. He’s the sort who chases dates and locks in metamours.

Why do you keep meeting polyamorous men who reinforce relationship hierarchies and expect non-primaries to accept their supposed subservient place? When they learn you’re not seeing anyone else, they assume it means you have more time and energy to devote to them.

I’d drunk too much to drive home; it also felt like it’d been ages since someone enjoyed my company.

The bar closed up, and we walked around the block to his bike. He asked if he could kiss me.

“Um, you should probably know some stuff before you ask that…”

Don’t lie by omission. The self-hatred mind radio was cycling through its countless variations on the you’re worthless theme.

He’ll think you’re a loser once he finds out where you live.

“I live with my parents.”

The disgust was instantly palpable. He’d gone from warm, funny and articulate to detached, clinical.

“Oh, that won’t do. I’m not allowed to have ­people over because I live with my partner.”

I tried to catch an Uber home, but several drivers cancelled on me en route

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so I decided to set off for the nearest train station. With feigned friendli­ ness, Jeff hugged me goodbye, and hoped Brisbane went well for me.

“That’s not till the end of the month,” I replied disdainfully.

I missed a train and waited longer than my commute and walk home would take. I loathed that I’d wasted time over someone so… typical.

I WAS PREPARED for Jeff’s beha­ viour. After all, a hallmark part of my chronic condition is catastrophisation: I leap from zero to holy fuck, this is the worst thing that could ever happen! in just a few mo­ ments.

But it still stung for days after – typical of PMDD. You know this sort of thing might not upset you outside of the premenstrual week, but rejection can feel vivid for longer than usual. Didn’t it occur to him that some people might not want to sleep with someone the day they meet them?

When I got home from the date, my dad was in the front room, practically waiting at the front door as I tried to get

DATING AND INVISIBLE ILLNESS

in. I’d never played up as a teen because my mother was so strict, yet, at nearly 40, I was sulkily removing my Doc Martens and ignoring him for beating me to open the door.

I was angry at myself for not being able to conceal a disappointing social interaction. And, while I’m grateful my parents always find the means to make sure my healthcare costs are met and I’ll never be homeless, they’ve also never shown interest in my aspi­ rations or relationships outside the family unit.

I’m doomed to be here forever. I’ll never make enough to move. No-one will take me as a

housemate. I’ll never be well enough to apply for enough regu­ lar work, so I’ll stay depressed about being nearly 40 and living with overbearing, infantilising parents.

Who in their right mind would date some­one with two chronic mood disorders?

I IMed a close friend, who told me loads of folks still lived with their parents, and that it was gross to be considered undateable on that basis. I texted

my best mate, who lives in Sydney, and told him I wished he was around to give me a hug. He didn’t once crack a joke like he usually does when we’re sharing random shitty things about our days.

Messaging them always reminds me that I’m not alone, and that I’m fighting harder to get unstuck from some of the undesirable parts of my life, which I often worry I don’t do enough.

I deleted Jeff’s mobile number, beat him to unmatching on Tinder and went to bed. My best mate checked on me the next morning. I still felt miserable, but knew PMDD would mean I’d feel this way for a few more days.

Just get out of bed, get an Uber to the car, drive it home, then go back to bed. Come on, Gem, you can do this much today.

WHILE UP IN Brisbane before that writers’ festival I told Jeff about, I got plenty of time alone, sick in bed with a sinus ­infection.

I missed my cat so much, and felt so lonely.

Once the festival started, though, this dissipated. I read poems about mental health and my healing cat companion to a warm, receptive audience. When I returned to Melbourne, I started a new job, continued to write and had no time to think about dating.

Despite the disappointments, there have been obvious benefits to having boundaries about dating. This is the first year that I haven’t been hospitalised for

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depression or needed ECT. Continuing to write and perform has also helped me make peace with heartache and with the memory loss caused by ECT. I’ll never stop being honest about having at-times debilitating m ­ ental-health issues – even if they might cost me dates. It does feel like a cop-out to avoid dating when my mood drops, but why?

I wouldn’t tell my mates to “harden up”.

Why do I let that voice in my head tell me that?

Prioritising self-care has become ­easier when it involves me enjoying work. I also no longer feel guilty about needing to spend an entire day weekly in bed to rest, having time off from socialising, or attending regular health-related appointments.

As a poet, I should know better: rejection is rarely personal. You can insist that no-one sees your ‘creative vision’, or you can still be discouraged but take it as an opportunity to examine what’s not working, edit where necessary, then submit again, and again.

Could this apply to romantic connections, too? Failure, change and adapting emotional intelligence are surely part of interpersonal relationships, their disintegration and strengthening. Having lifelong ‘emotional works-in-progress’ feels less shameful.

I need to be honest with myself about how much romantic rejection can af­ fect my mood. It’s not something I can change, though it can vary in severity. Why do I still struggle to openly admit this, or that I sometimes miss intimate connections?

I haven’t completely banished the ­possibility of dating; it’s just on hold.

This is a healthier mindset – for now.

Gemma Mahadeo is a queer Mel­ bourne-based writer and musician whose family came to Australia in 1987. Before that, she lived in Eng­ land and the Philippines. Her work has appeared in both online and print journals nationally, and she blogs semi-regularly at her online home: eat, drink, stagger. *Names have been changed for privacy.

WORDS BRODIE TURNER PHOTOS DANIEL PURVIS

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Art can be a tool for empowerment in the shadow of sexual trauma.

“YOU’RE SO BRAVE,” she said, “to get up there and take your clothes off like that.”

Brave. Not potent, or poignant; not intimate or intense; and certainly not hot. Brave. As though, by revealing my body, I’ve said too much, spoiled some mysterious secret my clever modes of dressing kept discreet.

After I was raped, I started getting an impulse – usually during the work day at my office job – to scream at the normality, the adherence, of it all. I’d be overcome by an urge to tear my clothes off and gyrate naked on the conference table, flinging espressos with my feet and wrists, singing Pink Floyd at the top of my lungs to my colleagues.

Being raped swiftly wove and welded a prison for my sexuality. Over nearly a decade of rattling and bashing at the bars, gaining an indignant and kinetic energy, I knew my sense of sexual self would eventually destroy me if I did nothing about it. So I don’t feel brave when I bare my skin on stage, because it took many years of cowardice to come to that point.

With every item of clothing that comes off during Burlesque by Force, I am recalling a dark and startling secret.

That’s real bravery to me: telling the truth about what it takes to be you.

“I THINK I NEED TO GO to hospital,” I said, “but, if you need to get to Redfern, let’s go there first. If I eat something, maybe I’ll be alright.”

I was in Sydney’s Circular Quay, surrounded by restaurants, knowing my body was crashing from not having eaten properly in likely weeks. Still, feeding myself was so low a priority; I refused to do it until I was convinced that my colleague wouldn’t be inconvenienced.

That’s when I knew I had a problem.

I was ordered off work for a week and strongly advised to rest and stay home – no pressure on my mind or emotions.

Advice I dutifully ignored after two days. Having concealed my collapse from my close friends, I felt slightly better and decided to go see a show – only to miss

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it because I was so mentally scattered, before getting very drunk on both sparkling wines and the attention of the men buying them for me, then falling into bed with someone I barely knew (and adding another mid-sex panic attack to my tally).

Rape is rarely transactional. I’m often plagued by the thought of whether I’d be as sexually timid if I hadn’t been raped.

I believe I would be, because long before my body was violated by someone I trusted, I had been thoroughly, systemically convinced by social stigma and homophobia that the sex life I would seek as a gay man would be shameful, painful, infectious and scary.

So I don’t blame the men and women who abused me physically for how I am now, sexually. It’s a bigger, more complex picture than that.

WHEN I DISCLOSE TO someone that I’m a rape survivor, I’m talking about two instances.

The first was when someone I loved and considered a trusted friend made his best attempt to fuck me under false pretences – too stoned to use protection or lubricant or hear me asking him to “wait”. When he sobered up, he expressed anger about how he believed I must have tempted him in some way.

I don’t look back at that as violent or threatening, but my body knows better.

I live with a chronic physical injury as a result and have been prone to panic attacks during sex ever since.

However, I couldn’t acknowledge that was rape until the second instance, when a lover physically restrained me and threatened to rape me because he felt I had coerced him into bed, only to refuse unprotected sex. I couldn’t call the rape what it was because I couldn’t bear to think of my friend as a rapist, because the stereotyped image of rape didn’t compute with him the way it did with the second abuser.

From what I understood, rape survivors were women who had woken up in alleyways with their underwear around their knees, knots in their hair, bruises

“ Being a rape survivor has divorced my outward sexuality from my inner … to the point where every aspect of life in which I am sexualised or otherwise sexually politicised becomes performative” BURLESQUE AND TRAUMA

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on their forearms and 20 missed calls on their phones.

Four years after the fact, a psychologist looked me in the eye and said, “You didn’t say ‘yes’, and even if you had, you would not have said ‘yes’ if you knew the full situation. And he knew that, and he persisted when you said ‘wait’. I know you love him, but that is rape.”

Rape is rarely linear. It’s reassuring to categorise survivor and abuser as victim and villain, as innocent and evil, but the reality is that our society has not made available a language of intimacy – verbal and non-verbal – that lets us communicate with our partners on how to engage sexually for everyone’s enjoyment and fulfilment.

My preconception of what rapists and rape victims look like, and how they behave, clouded my ability to believe myself, and corrupted my compassion for a community I was now involuntarily part of.

Others’ preconceptions play into it, too. When I tried, and failed, to tell my friends about what our pal the rapist had done, they were thrilled because they knew I had feelings for him and “we saw you talking to him all night!”

Actually, when I disclose to some­ one that I’m a rape survivor, I’m talking about more than just those two instances – I’m talking about a number of different infractions against my body and right to sexual safety, when I’ve been harassed, degraded, drugged, pressured or dismissed.

More tragically, I’m talking about the times I decline, or forget to keep my body safe because my mind is built to believe that, if I set no boundaries, then they cannot be breached: on massage tables, in doctors’ offices, nightclubs, networking events, and absolutely during sex.

THE IDEA OF WRITING OUT my agonies and anxieties was one several people had raised with me before, when I’d cracked open a tiny space through which my most trusted friends could see in. These were missed opportunities, but you can only do the thing you need to when you’re ready.

Being a rape survivor has divorced my outward sexuality from my inner; they were quite literally torn apart, to the point where every aspect of life in which I am sexualised or otherwise sexually politicised becomes performative, becomes a dicey dance routine, becomes a tease.

To this day, I feel like life is one giant burlesque routine of artifice and intrigue. So my sex life has mostly been an exercise in keeping men interested in sleeping with me, but never getting there until I believe they’ll survive the jarring plummet from the seductive, well-­rehearsed entertainment I’ve presented, and the very real, very scared and vulnerable person panicking at the prospect of penetration.

When I finally sought support from psychologists and doctors and nutritionists and naturopaths and masseurs and physiotherapists and recruitment consultants and books and songs and shows and sayings and starving and spending and flights and fleeing and further and further and as fast as I could – although I couldn’t imagine doing it previously – I knew the only way to go from surviving to thriving was to write about what I had gone through and stage it.

I needed to step into my own story and let it lead me out of smiling and pretending I was like everybody else.

I wanted to share, to be seen, to matter, to make an impact.

The fear of letting vanity overtake my virtue, and of playing my last card only to still lose, had always stopped me. Until there was nothing else I could do: it was either the gamble of the truth or the unimaginable, unsafe roads that were calling out to me.

So began a process of exposure as closure. The show was my last shot at not living a life of ricocheting between convincing myself my decisions were purposeful and despair at knowing, somehow, deep inside, that I was only running either away from or towards something that wasn’t true to who I was.

IN THE FIRST DRAFT of Burlesque

by Force, I wrapped up every horror I thought I couldn’t consider bringing

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RECLAIMING TRAUMA

forth from the deepest, darkest corners of my memory, in the candid off-stage ramblings of a burlesque performer.

I wrote it in 2016, when consent was feminist commentator Clementine Ford’s word, rarely applied beyond ­medical or legal contexts. Rape was not a talking point for men and, as this was before #MeToo, it wasn’t a talking point, really, at all.

By then, only a select few people knew what had happened to me, so the first challenge was telling the truth to people I cared about: my parents, extended family, friends, even workmates. I then promised myself that I would tell the truth about what I was doing, the message of the show, the experiences I’d had, whenever it came up – even with strangers. At first, it felt like freefall, but over time, I found a way to tell people that left me feeling empowered, and like I was standing up for myself.

At some point, I felt able to draw a line between my personal journey and what I had written, so I called someone I knew could help turn my scrawled soliloquy into something relatable, real, worth seeing. That someone was performer and director Marissa Bennett, whose choice advice when we started working together was: “This is a show, not you doing a TED talk in your underwear.”

Every question she asked me, every challenge she set and every point she pushed me on was not just a creative adjustment, but a personal one, too.

I had to renegotiate how I cope and reconsider my every choice that led me to what I’d written about. What emerged were intense realisations about my fear, my sexual appetite and even my gender identity.

Making Burlesque by Force with Marissa was intoxicating. I use that term purposely, because it was fun and addictive, but it was also draining and dizzying, especially when life imitated art.

Marissa helped me understand the change we were fighting for in producing a piece of theatre that opens up conversations around consent and the queer experience. We were exploring how sexual trauma can be complicated and

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compounded by societal and internalised homophobia, religious prejudice, lack of sexual education, body-image issues, liminal sexual spaces, and pornography.

Ultimately, Burlesque by Force became an opportunity for exposure – not just because I expose myself, but because we expose the audience to the harsh revelation that there are so few differences between ‘me’ and ‘them’. The more I could inspire them to picture themselves as stars in my story, the bigger the chance for change – and the fewer tragedies like mine to tell.

THE SHOW PREMIERED at Feast, Adelaide’s queer culture festival, in 2017 on the same day it was announced that over 60 per cent of Australians had voted ‘yes’ to marriage equality.

That was intense for all of us – the audience included. Watching perfect strangers connect after that first night, I looked back to discover my saddest memories were now somewhat obscured by a foggy sense of peace.

In 2019, Burlesque by Force will be scaled up. We’ve partnered with Circus Oz’s Melba Spiegeltent and Midsumma to produce Consent Festival, a full-day program of events exploring how the consent conversation impacts people in the queer and arts communities, as well as intersections therein. Beyond-ourwildest-dreams-type stuff.

Sex, to me, is still a mountain, an obstacle I’m figuring out how to climb.

That may be the case for the rest of my life. I still question my every move. I still fear the moment I get the balance wrong, and fall into the trap of commercialising my trauma for its own sake.

The point of the pursuit is the progress and the purpose, not the perfection.

Brodie Turner is an emerging writer, performer and advocate for con­ fronting sexual violence in queer and artistic communities. He is the creative producer at MEAN Projects, which produces socially conscious theatrical work and community en­ gagement events. He holds a Master’s degree in cultural and creative indus­ tries, with a thesis on consent.

Toge

ether PHOTOGRAPHS LUKE

AUSTIN

Q&A WITH HAILEY MORONEY

Your imagery and body of work as a whole is inherently inclusive – not only of the gay community but of the LGBTQIA+ community at large. Is this a result of your experiences or a reaction to what you want to see in the world?

It’s a reaction to what I want to see more of when I scroll Instagram.

There are far too many accounts with huge followings that focus only on white men with muscles.

In saying that, though, I don’t go out of my way to create a diverse collection of male portraiture.

I’ve always just photographed the men around me – my friends, men I meet at events and parties and online. It definitely became more diverse when I moved from Sydney to Los Angeles five years ago, which is great.

You’ve developed an aesthetic that is recognisably yours – incredibly sharp images combined with soft overtones. Do you think your personal experiences have helped cement this aesthetic?

I think my style has slowly evolved over the years and, without really thinking about it, I’ve always photographed men in a soft way: vulnerable, sometimes with gentle, more stereotypical feminine gestures, with flowers, etc. People have always said that portrait photographers are really taking portraits of themselves, and I tend to think that’s true.

What draws you to shoot outside?

I actually shoot mainly indoors with window light. If it’s outdoors, it’s for a specific project. I like overcast days.

Early morning or 5pm LA light is pretty amazing.

There is a lot of queer iconography in your photographs – cowboy hats, pastel hair, harnesses. Is your work a deliberate attempt to challenge the mainstream, heteronormative gaze?

For the Together project for Grindr, I wanted to show as much of the LGBTQIA+ community as possible. For my main portraiture work, I just want to show off the softer side of men and sometimes that includes a combination of tough and soft.

There’s also a lot of intimacy – hugging, touching, leaning. Is this a protest against macho culture and ‘toxic masculinity’?

So those images were for a book called DUO, where I wanted to show the intimacy between gay couples.

I wanted to show the complexities but also the softness between the couples.

Have you found that not formally studying photography early on has altered your approach? If so, in what ways?

I still don’t know how to answer this question, and I often wonder if I’d be making the same work if I had studied. Some say you don’t need it if you have the eye and passion for it, and some say you do need it to be able to know why you photograph the way you do.

I do love when I put work out and someone says it reminds them of so-and-so’s work, and I look

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them up and it’s a photographer I’ve never heard of. Over the last 15 years, my knowledge of the greats continues to grow – and I’m always learning.

You originally started out pho­ tographing on a Kodak film pointand-shoot. Is releasing a book of your early images something you’d ever consider?

Oh no, the Kodak days were me super young and just photos of my family and outings as a kid – nothing worth showing. But my mum was always taking photos and I enjoyed it, too. But, through school, I was more focused on painting. I began really focusing on photography when I bought my first Canon digital SLR in 2004.

Do you plan to continue creating work based on your own, and the wider community’s, gaze and experiences?

Always. I’ll continue to take thoughtful portraits of the men around me, and I’m currently ­playing around with turning portraits into objects/sculpture. So it’ll be interesting to see where that goes.

Find out more about Luke’s work at www.lukeaustinphoto.com.

Hailey Moroney is Archer Magazine’s image assistant.

ALL HAIL THE

QUEEN AMAO LEOTA LU AS TOLD TO BOBUQ SAYED PHOTOS JADE FLORENCE

FA’AFAFINE

Western constructions of gender and sexuality can be restrictive for individuals who are Fa’afafine, whose identity goes beyond the binary.

ANXIETY LEVELS FOR trans and gender-diverse people are high. It used to be about sexuality stuff, but people still don’t have their heads around what it means to be trans or non-binary. Then again, the public isn’t paying my bills or getting me housing, so I stopped worrying about what they think.

And back when I was at school, I used to wish I was white. It took me a while to own my colour. Today, people of colour (POC) take ownership of our identities.

There’s still a lot more work to be done – for people with disabilities and intersex people, for instance – but things are better. We’re not necessarily in big organisations, and that is why visibility and stories being told from our own perspectives are so important.

I wasn’t initially sure about the label ‘queer elder’, but now I love it.

Young people call me ‘aunty’ and I say with humour, “Yeah, but I look younger than you.” I tell them I prefer to be called ‘younger cousin’ because I’m b ­ etter-looking than they are, and we laugh.

Sometimes I’m so off-put by some of the older LGBT lot because they’re so stuffy, and I think, How are you going to be warm and welcoming so that younger people open up when you’re gatekeeping?

There’s such a big intergenerational gap here, and I think that’s a big problem.

When I’m with my POC, though, the barriers aren’t there. Especially younger queer and trans people of colour (QTPOC) – y’all are my babies, hello. I’ve been there; why would I want to make it any harder for your generation when I’ve been there? Young QTPOC respect their elders, and I’m encouraged and inspired by them. They’re so political,

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opinionated and a lot more outspoken, and I love that.

We weren’t able to be political back then; we were whitewashed, we were co­lonised and we didn’t know any better. The younger generation understands that queerness is about more than sex – there’s climate justice for sea levels rising on the islands, or the reality that trans women of colour are being killed at an extreme rate. The next generation is going to look even more different.

I MIGRATED FROM New Zealand to Australia around 1982, when I was about 12.

When I was growing up, Australia was so white-dominated. My school was mostly Europeans – there were Greeks and Italians – and some Lebanese. Evolving into who I am today involved lots of challenges. I struggled with my identity because I came from a place where there was a big Polynesian community.

Everything seemed different here.

The pace was a lot faster. I never realised what designer labels were. I was hanging out in my black slip-on karate shoes, which I still love and which were two or three dollars from the markets.

My family is from the Pacific island of Samoa. Where I come from, people don’t have a lot, but they make it work for themselves. Kids are so judgemental, and trying to figure out where I fit in took a while. I battled the fact that I was a bit different for so long.

Church for Islander people back in the day – and even today – was like a community centre. They saw it as a healing space. There were no Pacific Islander support groups, so we had to make do.

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My family life was centred on church, and that I struggled with. It was almost like a yo-yo effect: I went to school and lived in one world for a moment, then came home and had to switch gears completely. It was about assimilation: trying to find a middle road where I could feel accepted and be happy.

That was a challenge for me. The God and church stuff was especially hard because it was hammered into me – the coloniser’s religion. You had to adhere to Samoan responsibilities to do with being from a good churchgoing family, and then navigate the other, Western social rules, which are so different.

ONCE UPON A TIME, she wanted to be Kylie Minogue. But then there was Janet Jackson.

I found good company in two goth Pacific Islander cisgender girls, and they never made a big deal about my mannerisms. They never questioned anything; they just accepted me.

We would get stuck into their parents’ alcohol. These two girls in military gear and black Doc Martens boots loved R&B and hip-hop music, and they were just out there as outsiders. Without them, I would’ve felt lost and lonely, with few or no friends to hang out with.

Everyone else was still making jokes about gays and stuff, but I never struggled with school itself because I was a good student. I had good friends, and it helped that my classmates were afraid of my cousins in the area.

While I never was open about it, I had also struggled with sexual abuse. That was a big part of my being unable to find myself and not feeling good about myself. That’s already hard to do when you’re young, but it’s even harder when you’re trying to process abuse alone. It’s overwhelming, and it created big periods of my life where I was totally lost.

Once I left school, personal relation­ ships were tough – until I evolved to become Amao. I left home and go in­­volved with someone 20 years my senior, who physically abused me a lot.

Because I was so in love with him, we eloped, and for a while it didn’t matter.

I didn’t realise that I was receiving some

of the same abuse I had encountered as a child.

It took me so long to clock on to the fact that the love I’d made up in my head was not the love I was receiving.

I so desperately yearned to be loved.

In those days, we didn’t have community-health organisations to help with counselling and pathways. After going through physical abuse, I just wanted acceptance and to be loved – and I had to make sense of that all on my own.

That’s when I first got introduced to nightclubbing and the gay scene in Sydney. We would go to local clubs and to Kings Cross to feel at home. It had a real openness; your eyes were open to everything. It was a real educational experience – you had strippers, drag shows and people brawling outside – and that was my reality.

But it was also very white. I guess, for me, it was a catch 22. It was good to party among a community, but there

there are no medical means for you to change your gender – the West puts so much pressure on trans people to affirm their gender in certain ways.

I decided to go on hormones here as a personal choice.

There was also the fear of being judged within the trans community I knew: it was either you were on hormones or you weren’t. If not, you were not considered trans. So there definitely was the added pressure of assimilating within Western trans beauty standards.

Being away from Samoa meant it took longer to own my Fa’afafine identity. One of the beautiful things about Samoan culture is that, within it, I’ve never had to explain where my gender sits in society.

And my family supported me either way because the way a F ­ a’afafine expresses their iden­tity depends on the individual – you can still be feminine and dress the way you want. I never had a coming out; I just evolved to become Amao.

“One of the beautiful things about Samoan

culture is that, within it, I’ve never had to explain where my gender sits in society”

weren’t any people of my culture or colour, with similarities to who I was.

During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, there was an ad that was playing on all of the TVs – a bowling ad with the grim reaper in it, basically scaring people into abstinence – and it was a heavy thing to go through as a community. For many of us, there was already no being open about gender or sexuality. We became even more secretive because we were afraid of being attacked; that scare factor was huge.

All this stuff made finding the parts of myself that were real even harder.

FA’AFAFINE IS A LAYERED term, and it’s non-binary. In Samoa, it was seen as a third gender and, to a certain extent, it still is. We also have a new term, Fa’afatama, which is for trans-­ masculine people.

Binaries are such a colonial way of thinking, and – unlike in Samoa, where

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That happened after a good friend passed away in New Zealand. Something changed. I woke up and I thought to myself, What would make you happy?

At that time, I was still living as a boy.

I told myself: You have this other person living within you, you are happiest when you are them, and you’re angry when you’re not. It was a touch-and-go situation, but I decided to make a break for it and embrace my identity.

In American Samoa, they have a different medical system: trans girls can travel to Hawaii or the mainland US and get procedures done or go on hormones.

But you can’t just get on a plane and travel anywhere you want if you’re from mainland Samoa, like me. It’s only when we move to places like the US – because we’re competing with every other trans person – that some Fa’afafine individuals succumb to the medical pathway.

Growing up in New Zealand and Australia, I remember older trans people

FA’AFAFINE

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telling me that you’re either a gay boy or a trans girl; there’s no in-between.

That’s what I was brought up with here: non-binary was frowned upon.

People still have a long way to go in educating themselves, especially outside of LGBTQIA+ communities.

If I was in Samoa, it probably wouldn’t have happened.

I SCORED A JOB through an em­­ ployment agency working in high schools in Sydney. They couldn’t see me when they interviewed me via teleconference, and I think that’s how I got the job. The main woman interviewing me knew about my gender identity, but she let it fly.

I did a 360 into full femme, and that worked out for me. I would go down the Hume Highway for work and people would toot their horns. That was so liberating for me – you put your high heels on, your blouse, your skirt, you do your hair and make-up, and you just do it.

I would sashay to work, and getting toots from the middle of the motorway made me realise I must be doing something right. I didn’t give a shit. There were housing blocks full of Lebanese immigrants who’d look out at me and I’d sashay for them, doing my Janet Jackson nasty.

When I look back on it, I don’t know how I did it – but I was getting money, had stable housing and could afford medical stuff. Those three things made such a difference for me; not many trans women of colour have that.

Years later, though, when I was unemployed again, things started looking different. Suddenly, my gender status became a problem for employers, and opportunities were much more limited.

That’s when I came into sex work. It was never something I thought I’d get into, but I just had to do what I had to do to survive.

That was a real eye-opener for me.

A housemate I lived with had taken me to the Cross and had taught me the ropes. I quickly learned to be strong and very focused, and how to hustle. You’re being judged for the way you look and, sexually, you’re made vulnerable.

The money was good, but some of the mental challenges and the people you met on the street, or even privately, were challenging. There was such little support for us, and it was so rare for working girls to seek help. You became your own counsellor, and you had to learn very quickly how to juggle that.

There were a lot of positives – the luxuries of men and money – but there were negatives, too, like guys who insisted on sex without condoms or would come in while on drugs. But options were limited.

I wasn’t entitled to Centrelink and got tired of job rejections.

COULD I HAVE DONE this journey any other way? No. I’m so proud to be Fa’afafine. It levels me out, especially because I’ve fought so hard for it.

In my own culture, I’m so embraced.

There is a place for me historically, and it’s still there. My parents migrated to make life better for us, but sometimes I wish I had grown up in Samoa because I wouldn’t have struggled so much with some of the mental challenges I’ve faced.

But it is what it is. I’m so grateful for my support networks, which I’ve had to fight for. As a Fa’afafine person, you have to push a lot harder. Looking at the whole picture, and seeing where and how my experiences fit with those of other trans and gender-diverse people across the world, it’s humbling. Our struggles are real.

We need to let people know that it’s okay to be brown and trans. We don’t have statistics about trans women of colour murders like they do in the US, but it’s happened here, too. In 2014, an Indonesian trans woman, Mayang Prasetyo, was murdered in Brisbane; she was a friend of mine. Her partner not only beat her up and killed her, but he chopped her up and boiled her body parts on the stove.

It’s a frenzy when it’s a white person who’s murdered, but, when it’s a brown or black person, no-one seems to care.

The situation becomes even more ex­ treme when you’re trans. The media

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found photos of Mayang on her Facebook and ostracised her as a ‘monster’ because she was trans.

It was so devastating for me. I had thought about visiting her and, about a week later, I learned that she was brutally murdered.

When I think of my own Fa’afafine community back in Samoa, I feel a real sense of community. We laugh at everything – we’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you. I get so inspired by my Fa’afafine sisters who are kicking up a fuss on a global scale.

I remember watching some of them at a conference in Hong Kong a few months ago, speaking up to leaders of the United Nations about taking our data. We should be able to control that; people have been telling our stories for too long.

The engagement in advocacy work keeps me going. If people like them didn’t exist, I would still be that naive 15-year-old with no idea of who I was and where I come from – and I would fail to exist and would continue to remain in silence.

Resilience comes from bad life experiences; that’s how you grow. It’s a matter of survival. As someone who was sexually and physically abused, did sex work and wasn’t entitled to anything, I needed to push to survive. And I never really complained, because I knew there were people out there for me.

As self-reflection, I say: Haters don’t pay your bills, so you don’t need to worry about them. And still, we rise!

A proud Samoan Fa’afafine / trans woman of colour, Amao Leota Lu is a public speaker, performer and advo­ cate who has worked in the fields of education, the arts, employment, health and community services both in Australia and overseas. Her talks and performances centre on identity, Pacific culture, self-expression, gen­ der and intersectionality.

Bobuq Sayed was Archer Magazine’s co-editor and deputy online editor.

SEX WORK

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THE RAINBOW REMEDY

MICHELLE LI PHOTOS GINA CAWLEY WORDS

QUEER/GNC AND MEDICINE

Seeing a doctor can be daunting (and sometimes dangerous) for members of the LGBTI community, but widescale change is afoot.

MY DOCTOR’S OFFICE sits on the corner of two tree-lined streets, in a neighbourhood where I would baulk at the cost of a coffee – let alone an appointment with a gynaecologist. I’m praying that she’ll bulk-bill me, a professional courtesy among doctors treating other doctors.

She’s in her 50s, still in blue hospital scrubs. There was an operation that ran late, she explains, and she hasn’t had a chance to change. She runs through the protocol – “I know you know most of this already” – and we sort out the paperwork. I’ll need to go into hospital and be put under sedation for this pro­cedure, during which they’ll place a small contraceptive device called a Mirena into my uterus.

“You’ll need to come off the pill from today, so, in the meantime, I suggest you and your partner use condoms.”

I laugh nervously. Her brow furrows as I pick my next words. “We won’t need to worry about condoms,” I say.

“You aren’t worried about pregnancy?”

“Well, not— My partn— I mean, I don’t think she’ll— It’s not a problem for us.”

She blinks a few times, jaw falling slack. “Oh. Oh!” Some papers are fussed about on her desk. “Well, uh, I guess that’s something you’ll never have to worry about. Hah.” “No, I do— I was with a man before her, and I don’t know if there’ll be someone after.” A beat, then a pause.

“Oh, so you’re…?”

“I’m bisexual.”

Her eyelashes look geared to take flight. Silence stretches between us,

until a passing tram chimes its bell and shakes her from her stupor. “Right!

Right, okay, of course… right… right…”

She trails off and I stare out the window, willing my eyes to stay put in their sockets.

MEDICAL SCHOOL has a way of perpetuating stereotypes about queer health. When I started my studies almost a decade ago, there were two exclusive contexts in which LGBTI health was brought up: depression and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Both are important subjects, heavy with the weight of their histories, but are also taught in a way that feels in­ credibly tokenistic – we sat down for a two-hour-long tutorial on each, and then we were done.

At the time, I was still coming to terms with my own sexuality. There were moments when I would walk home from lectures, tired and burnt out, the same message playing itself over and over in my head: being queer seemed to be a terrible thing. This was the only narrative that we saw in medicine. This was the only narrative for me.

I came out midway through my studies. A small string of health problems also saw me frequent the general practitioner’s office that year. Each time, my newly discovered sexuality wasn’t relevant, but I felt on edge – waiting for the question that never came.

One day, it did. I’d been taking blood from a patient in the emergency dep­ artment when the needle slipped and pricked my index finger. They ran tests on both of us to check for hepatitis and

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HIV, then clumsily ran through the risk factors of each. Even though the risk is most relevant for men who have sex with men, they asked me if I was gay. They laughed a little, apologetically, as if they assumed the answer would be “no”.

But it was an irrelevant question, and it made me angry. My sexual identity wasn’t the punchline to some poor medical joke, nor was it a condemning fact.

I began to see medical school’s ‘doomed queer’ narrative for the damaging stereotype that it truly was.

This isn’t to say that queer and gender-­ non-conforming (GNC) persons aren’t at high risk of mental or physiological illness. We are, and we fight against the social drivers of stigma and discrimination every day.

But issues relating to our sexuality or gender identity are by no means the only circumstances in which medical help might be sought. Flu vaccinations, elective surgeries, a new diagnosis of cancer, infertility – all situations in which sensitivity, kindness and an open mind are required, but not always offered.

FOR PEOPLE WHO don’t identify as cisgender or heterosexual, there can be a lot of hesitation around accessing medical services. The reasons behind this can be quite general, or they can be very personal.

At its core, it can simply be the wish to avoid a deep feeling of discomfort within what should be a professional relationship (I’ll never go back to that gynaecologist again, and nowadays I seek out doctors with rainbow flags on

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their windows and ‘LGBTI-friendly’ on their websites). It doesn’t help that it’s also common to be misgendered – doctors aren’t taught about preferred pronouns, let alone how to ask for them.

The binary nature of almost all of our forms isn’t useful, either. Much of our work is built on old ideas of ‘male’ and ‘female’, and changing this means unlearning one habit before learning another – or, at the very least, teaching it differently from the start. Because this is the way it’s always been done and those in power are hesitant to ‘politicise’ medicine, such a change is slow to come.

As a result, for LGBTI individuals, medical visits can often feel less like navigating a minefield and more like walking determinedly through one, with no option but to get through each hit along the way.

There are concerns that disclosure will lead to poor outcomes, refusal of treatment or, in rare circumstances, even abusive behaviour. Most of this is anecdotal, as the literature is limited: not all incidents are reported and, for those that are, data collection is subpar as some feel unsafe identifying as LGBTI. I’ve been told of a case where a friend’s symptoms were dismissed and blamed on their hormonal treatment, only to be rushed to emergency surgery hours later. I’ve heard a much more senior doctor ‘joke’ about pulling a person’s life-­saving therapy if they didn’t change their ‘­lifestyle choices’.

While every doctor has, at some stage, sworn the Hippocratic Oath – to do no harm, to help those in need – there is no ignoring the fact that we are inescapably human, and come with the whole spectrum of attendant biases, too. But, rather than continue to apologise, it’s time we learn to do better.

WHENEVER I ENTER a room, there are three things I make sure I do: introduce myself, ask for the patient’s name and ask about who’s with them (my first time will be my last time confusing a person’s child for their partner).

It can be a scary experience to be unwell and in hospital – and, as in any

other situation, having a loved one by your side goes a long way towards making you feel safe. However, when I’m meeting someone’s same-sex partner for the first time, I can sometimes feel a hesitation, a withholding, a subtle emphasis on the sentence, “This is my friend.”

It’s a difficult cognitive dissonance.

How can a person who knows some of

my girlfriend). Let me ask someone I know who works at that hospital (my girlfriend).

A part of me was afraid of being ostracised on the wards, or of receiving poor references from disapproving consultants who could make or break my career.

None of this was irrational. I’d heard of it being done before, in both medical and non-medical workplaces.

It took someone else talking openly

“ People both within and outside the medical institution are recognising the need to change the way we speak about and cater for the LGBTI and GNC communities in medicine, and are doing incredible things to see this change through” the most intimate details of your life, and who has seen you at your most ­v ulnerable, not be trusted with the nature of your relationship?

I say it like it should be easy, but I know it’s not. Trusting someone with your sexuality can be harder than trusting them with your medical history.

In my first year of working, I was in a relationship with a female-identifying doctor at another hospital. My family didn’t know; neither did my colleagues.

Nearly every day, I found myself holding my tongue: Oh, I went to Dark Mofo festival last year (with my girlfriend). Yes, I’ve heard about that coroner’s case (from

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about their same-sex partner for me to start feeling at ease; in time, I started to consciously model that behaviour for my own junior staff. When the instance inevitably rolled around that I started seeing a man, the conversation with my colleagues about bisexuality was a lot easier to handle.

But I was lucky. They had heard our easy disclosures and developed an understanding of bisexuality through one of the other nurses, who, earlier in the year, had stuck a ‘B’ on the IDAHOT (International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia) poster on our office door.

QUEER/GNC AND MEDICINE

When the conversations are already being had, it isn’t so hard to build on them.

AUSTRALIA IS SEEING a groundswell to boost accessibility and change queer narratives in medicine. On a systemic level, certain states are leading the way: the Victorian Government set up the LGBTI Taskforce in 2015 to “ensure policy, programs and services

are inclusive of LGBTI communities” and appointed its first commissioner for gender and sexuality, Ro Allen.

I was fortunate enough to be part of one of the taskforce’s working groups, whose campaign has meaningful impacts. One example is the launch of resources like the Rainbow eQuality guide, which helps health and community services to adopt inclusive strategies such as developing anti-­discrimination policies, running consultation sessions with relevant community representatives, and training staff to respectfully facilitate disclosure.

Another is advocating for appropri­ ate LGBTI data collection on the Australian census. Currently, adequate demographic information about the LGBTI community isn’t obtained, but population research is important as it ensures proper evidence is available to inform, and provide a baseline measure for, research or policy.

Most notable, for me, was the Rainbow Tick accreditation process, which recommends hospitals based on six LGBTI-­ inclusive standards including ensuring the safety of LGBTI clients and staff, safe disclosure and documentation, and a sense of accessibility. As a doctor who rotates through up to four different hospitals a year, I found it exhilarating to see one of my rural workplaces d ­ isplaying

the rainbow flag, running focus groups and writing inclusive policies.

It was also great to read about similar moves in other states, with advocacy, conferences and statewide training workshops facilitated by groups like the National LGBTI Health Alliance and ACON in New South Wales.

The next generation of health professionals are likewise taking a stand.

Tired of the inability to fit much-needed queer-health education into a medical curriculum already bursting at the seams, students and professors have started to take the situation into their own hands.

Student-run societies, such as the Queer Health Collective at Monash University, have been established to provide support and resources for young people willing to learn. Supplementary workshops are run in conjunction with organisations such as Transgender Victoria and Minus18. Independent teaching

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modules, created by university staff or external freelancers, about terminology and referral pathways, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and caring for older LGBTI adults are being released online.

People both within and outside the medical institution are recognising the need to change the way we speak about and cater for the LGBTI and GNC communities in medicine, and are doing incredible things to see this change through.

I’M WORKING ON the cancer ward at a hospital in the city. The hours are long, but the people I work with make it bearable. One day, we’re in clinic and I hear a knock on my door.

It’s Emma, a junior doctor in her early 30s. She graduated a few years ahead of me, but was re-entering the workforce after having a baby. “Do you have time before your next patient?”

“Sure,” I say. Another five minutes isn’t much when you’re already 30 minutes behind.

“I wanted to ask you something.”

She closes the door behind her, then hesitates; she seems unsure of how to proceed. “My next patient… well, I’ve read the notes, and there’s something in there about being a transgender man.”

This is unexpected. We haven’t spoken about LGBTI issues before, not even during the national postal vote for marriage equality.

“Anyway,” she barrels on, “I thought I’d talk to you, because you know about this. Is that the right term to put in my notes? How do I know what pronouns to use? I want them to feel comfortable and I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

I feel a smile breaking across my face.

“I’m glad you asked.”

Michelle Li is a Melbourne-based writer and doctor. She is an advocate for equitable and accessible health­ care, with a focus on education and youth engagement. Alongside com­ mittee positions with several medical and women-led organisations, she is the deputy executive officer of Chalk Circle, a not-for-profit gender literacy foundation.

PINKTINTED

GLASSES

WORDS JACOB THOMAS PHOTOS LOLA FLASH

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LGBTQIA+ VISIBILITY

We may have marriage equality, along with representation in media, but is it really ‘equality’ when some members of our community are left behind?

“IT’S DONE! WE DID IT,” a colleague of mine tells me in the tearoom.

I know what he’s referring to. Two days prior to this exclamation, it was announced that 61.6 per cent of Austra­ lians voted ‘yes’ to legalise same-sex marriage (SSM). Eyes beaming and shoulders relaxed, he says we can finally move on and be seen as equals by the dominant population.

I, however, have a very different feeling to this cis white gay man who thinks the battle for equality is over.

In a deep state of exhaustion and loathing, I explain that the war is not over. That it won’t be over for some time. What proceeds is a quarrel bet­ ween me and him – an all-too-familiar cannibalisation between LGBTQIA+ community members due to a political move implemented by straight people.

Me, trying to get him to understand what it was like for trans and gender-­ diverse communities to be thrown under the metaphorical bus by the ‘no’ crowd, and to not be rescued by the ‘yes’ team.

Him, telling me that I need to have perspective, that everything comes with time, that I need to wait my turn.

I’m so tired by this point that diplomacy escapes me. I tell him to fuck off.

I grab my bags, storm out of my workplace, and go home to cry and pack for my flight to Johannesburg.

I fly out that evening, heading across continents for a week of work with activists from Africa and Asia ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. We’re trying to get their rights

affirmed, working towards ending criminalisation in (at the time) 36 countries and increasing protection laws across all 53 Commonwealth member states.

I’m self-medicated on airport wine and painkillers, flicking through the week’s agenda, excited and optimistic that we can make some kind of headway for their rights. But all I can think about is how many members of our community, like this guy I told to fuck off, will stop fighting now that SSM will soon be passed in both federal houses in Australia.

He got what he wanted. He’s going to be eating cake. He’s going to be saying “I do”. He’s just like everyone else now.

THE JOURNEY TO VISIBILITY is a lot like coming out.

It’s that constant exercise of making people aware that you’re not, you know, straight. It’s getting people to use your pronouns correctly, and arguing about grammar. It’s putting a part of yourself on the line, ready to field questions that, at best, come from a place of blissful ignorance. It’s being on red alert, hoping that it will be okay afterwards.

When we come out, we put our trust in others in the hope that they will ac­ cept us, love us, respect and protect us without question. Similarly, visibility – which is more vast and public-facing – is a yearning for unconditional love.

But, instead of it involving our nearest and dearest, we put our whole selves out there in the hands of strangers.

In Australia and beyond, we have seen an uptick in members of our com-

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munity in advertisements for destinations to get married, holding hands while donning white lace or matching suits, and dancing surrounded by loved ones.

Corporations showcase their employees in front of rainbow banners to sell their wares during the peak pride season of the region their offices are based in.

Craft stores hire drag queens to sell sequins, and workplaces frantically give out lanyards with their logos embossed over a flag that means so much more than allies will ever understand. Big-budget films now have same-sex-­attracted protagonists, and characters we know and love are retconned as queer.

I feel thankful that we have this chance to see ourselves in lights. My eyes well with joy that, finally, we are being seen as something, as someone, wholesome and worthy. I often click the ‘share’ button on Facebook and write, in all caps, that I’m “SO PROUD” to see my friends, my communities, our trailblazers being celebrated in moments of elation and passion they fought so hard for us to get.

But that pride dissipates when I read online comments that we should be “killed”. That we are “faggots” and “dykes”, “trannies”, “freaks” and “paedo­ philes” who “corrupt children”. We might as well be told we are witches that lure kids into our gingerbread houses.

In these moments, I’m reminded, again, that we are not equal – that the respect we’re given can be revoked, and that there’s still so much left to fight for when I have very little fight left in me.

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Both images from Lola Flash’s surmise photographic series, featuring models Kerri (previous page) and Miss Kimberly (above)

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LGBTQIA+ VISIBILITY

THERE’S NOTHING empowering about one part of you being visi­ ble when the rest of you is targeted, shamed and threatened. What does it matter if some of us are visible when our collective LGBTQIA+ community is still surrounded by intolerance and hate?

I appreciate that it takes time to change the world, to change people’s minds. I understand that we need faces, placeholders and names for positive role-modelling and to build empathy among the powerbrokers in mainstream society.

This isn’t about us celebrating our whole selves, however. This is about trying to prove to the public that we aren’t a threat. This is about trying to appease those who have hurt us so they will say that we’re good enough.

In equating our struggle for liberation with the struggle for marriage – a pinnacle of traditional cisgender, hetero-

and murdered, with no support from the police or their governments.

Within Australia, our communities still suffer. Suicide rates are abysmally high – around 35 per cent of trans individuals and an estimated 19 per cent of those who are intersex have attempted to take their lives. Same-sex attracted people generally are up to 14 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts.

Less than half of us feel safe being out at work. LGBTQIA+ people experience homelessness – including being kicked out by blood families – twice as often as heterosexuals. Forced sterilisation and conversion therapies still happen.

Even having bisexual, intersex, asexual, and transgender and gender-diverse people seen as legitimate is a hard-fought battle, both inside and out of our acronym. Having ‘marriage equality’, we were told, would mean that we are all safe, that we’re secure, and that our rights are

“If we are sharing the acronym, we must share the pain so we can share the victories. We must work together to enshrine dignity for everyone in our community” sexual life – or for appearances in ads or movies, we are telling the majority: we’re just like you.

But fitting in to what the majority expects of us is changing ourselves to suit them.

Participating in the traditional sys­ tem of marriage doesn’t make us trai­ tors to our communities. But expecting everyone to follow suit, to alter our wants and behaviours so we aren’t punished for standing out, is b ­ ullying and manipulation. When it’s still illegal for us to exist in several countries across the world, perhaps we should direct our energy beyond just pandering to the mainstream.

I see my friends overseas fighting ferociously to gain the legal and social privileges we have here in Australia.

They’re not marching the streets calling for marriage. Their nightclubs and homes are being raided. They’re being whipped and caned in public. They’re seeking asylum to avoid being raped

grounded forevermore. Instead, what we’re seeing is the mainstreaming of the most ‘palatable’ members of our com­munities at the expense of others.

The implication of safety, security and equality under law promised by mere visibility is a fallacy. It allows those who have oppressed us to profit off our suffering: they raise rainbow flags for corporate gain to attract the pink dollar, and use us to rack up diversity points in a system they have rigged to benefit them.

Worse still, it’s made us believe that we’re gaining dignity in the eyes of the straight world, when all it’s done is force us into another box that perpetuates the same systems of oppression under a different name. In seeking to see more of ‘ourselves’ in large-scale platforms, we risk leaving behind our fellow queers who are ‘too hard’, ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’.

If we are sharing the acronym, we must share the pain so we can share

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the victories. We must work together to enshrine dignity for everyone in our community. We cannot become complacent in visibility alone.

VISIBILITY MAY OFFER validation, a sense of warmth and pride, but it’s also a trap. It can make us forget those who came before us and who we’ve abandoned. But these people fought and suffered so we could have a freedom they didn’t have access to.

And that – freedom, rather than just ­visibility – is a battle we are yet to win.

We need to look at our histories, both the ones behind us and the one we are creating, to understand where we need to go next. We must not lose focus on unity.

We need to make space for our least visible so they can speak on their own behalf. We must sit with them, be allies to one another and use what power we have – much like we did at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting – to ensure our gains are their gains, too.

When one of us loses, we all lose. When one of us wins, we should all win.

If being visible means having opportunities afforded to us because straight people think we’re finally ‘good enough’, all while forcing us to still deal with the need to survive outside of that limited ‘generosity’, then we don’t have to accept it.

That just co-opts our pain so that allies feel better. That puts conditions on the love, respect and dignity we receive, which is nothing short of an insult. We don’t need fair-weather allies, or allies who use us for their own symbolic gain; we need accomplices who will work with us to dis­ mantle the hate that kills us.

Nothing about us without us – and that includes all of us. None of us are free until all of us are free.

Jacob Thomas is a non-binary queer living in Melbourne by way of Shepparton. They are a humanrights advocate and 2016 Queen’s Young Leader. In their spare time, they are a drag artist, designer, actor, researcher and mentor to young queer activists across the globe.

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