I’m very proud to be an ambassador for minus18 in 2012. They’re Australia’s largest organisation for same sex-attracted and gender diverse young people and they’ve just launched OMG I’m Queer, a street magazine/resource guide for GLBTIQ youth in Victoria.
You can listen to an interview I did on Joy FM about the magazine here.
They asked me to write a few word thingies for the first edition of the magazine about growing up gay in Warrnambool and coming out and such. It’s reproduced below. I hope you like it.
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It’s pretty amazing how good you can become at fooling yourself, after a while.
You hear someone talking once about how everyone goes through a phase of thinking about people of the same sex. It’s just normal and it happens to everyone. That’s puberty for you; your balls are so keen to get involved in SOMETHING, they don’t know WHAT they’re doing.
Sure, I found myself becoming emotionally and sexually attracted to some of my best friends and tried desperately to perceive their platonic friendship as something more and sure, I was masturbating on a regular basis over the idea of having sex with guys and I had little to no interest in girly lady girls…but surely I wasn’t gay???
Only gay people were gay.
I think it was around Year 10 when I really started to notice it. I was a pretty chubby kid, very academic, hopeless at sport and, perhaps unsurprisingly, never been kissed. Pretty much all of my mates went along to discos and music gigs and had “pashed” or “picked up” or, in some racier circumstances, “fingered” the females of their choice, proudly bragging after the fact around school about their prowess.
I convinced myself that I was better than these callous thugs. I just hadn’t met the right girl. When I had my first kiss, I wanted it to be special, just like in the movies, with heaps good emotions and Dashboard Confessional playing in the background and stuff.
In the meantime, I took the time to admire my fellow young men in the school change-rooms and to listen intently at sleepovers when we all talked about jacking off and to fantasize about a handsome prince riding into Warrnambool on the back of a mighty steed to take me away from it all, so that we may live together happily in some magical, mystical, faraway place like Melbourne.
I secretly researched everything I could about what it meant to be gay and famous gay people and good and bad gay people and slowly but surely tried to put together in my mind a hypothetical world in which I (potentially) might not be 100% heterosexual and where maybe that was okay perhaps maybe a little bit perhaps.
Growing up in a regional, footy-loving place like Warrnambool, I was pretty regularly given the message that gay = bad. Heck, just being a little bit different in any way was often frowned upon. Goths, emos, theatre enthusiasts, fat kids, ugly kids, poor kids – they all had a hard time trying to get by in the patriarchal monoculture that is high school. But at least they were acknowledged as existing. I clearly remember that the very idea of being anything but straight being seen as ridiculous, really. The word “gay” became synonymous with “shit”, and every time I heard one of my best friends casually spit out the word to describe a test or a song or a piece of clothing, or call one another “poofta” or “faggot” as if it was the worst possible insult, I winced, and the pressure inside me just went up a notch or two.
I felt alone for quite a long time. I was supposed to be the smart, busy guy who did lots of things and did them pretty well and wasn’t any trouble. I’d always been fine, I took care of myself, I couldn’t really picture me asking anyone for help. Plus I’d had so many conversations with people about the girls I, er…“liked”. How could I go back on that? Did I want to be a gay liar, is THAT what I wanted????
Finally, it all just became too much and it was evident to me that this was my lot. I was a homosexual, a poofta, a faggot, a queermo, a woolly woofter, a shirtlifter, a fudge-packer (though I didn’t actually know what that involved, exactly). I was gay. At the end of my Year 12 year, I wrote a letter to my cousin Lucy and poured my heart out to her. I remember crying as I wrote the words down, overwhelmed with fear and sadness and relief.
It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do.
Luckily, Lucy was lovely. She told me that she didn’t love me for my sexuality, she just loved me for the person I am. As did my mum and my dad and my brother Gavin and my best friends Jeremy and Daniel and Caleb and Zacc and Liam and David and Luke and Michael and Alex and everyone else, and my other cousins and my aunties and uncles, all of them coming to the table and accepting me for who I am: a big ol’ fairy.
I’ve been extremely lucky. But perhaps my story is a testament to the way things are changing for people who are GLBTIQ. The world is getting better and there are amazing role models out there and there is no reason – absolutely no reason – why being something other than heterosexual should stop you doing anything you want to do, as Oscar Wilde and Graham Chapman and kd Lang and John Gielgud and Bob Brown and Elton John and Missy Higgins and David Marr and Freddie Mercury and Simon Amstell and Harvey Milk and so many others have proved.
I love my life as an openly proud, gay man. I get to talk on the radio and do comedy and travel the country and the world and go on TV sometimes and make people laugh. I’m not a gay comedian; I’m just a comedian who happens to be gay. If I make someone laugh, they don’t give a shit if I fancy penises or vajim-jams; they just like me the way I am.
And honestly, if someone judges you or dismisses you or belittles you because of your sexual orientation or gender identity, they are, quite simply, not worth knowing. They are on the wrong side of history and if you ask me, you don’t need ’em.
Whether you think you might be gay, lesbian, straight, bi, transgender, intersex or just queer in some way, you are beautiful and you are important and, best of all, you are alive. And that is a stupendous thing that needs to be celebrated, every single day.
Coming out was tough for me. For some people it’s a lot tougher, for others it’s easier, for some people it’s a non-event. I wouldn’t change who I am or what I went through for the world, because it is all fundamental to the guy I am today. And, while that guy should eat less cheese and be nicer to some people and read more books and not steal his housemates’ milk all the time, he is, I think, on the whole, a pretty good person.
Even if he is a bender.