Ten steps to nanette, p.14
Ten Steps to Nanette, page 14
I’m sure the shock had everything to do with the anaesthetic and major surgery I had just emerged from, but as I lay there shaking uncontrollably, chilled to the bone and burning up all at once, all I could think of was the look of terror on the nurse’s face. The nurse did not hold it against me, and without hesitation she began wrapping me up in a foil blanket and saying all the comforting words in very comforting tones. She was soon joined by others, and I found my shaking freezing hot self suddenly surrounded by very serious, very caring, very concerned adult people who were all actively invested in my well-being. I kept apologising through the chattering of my teeth, and a young, softly-spoken man bent down and gently took my hand and told me it was the furthest away from my fault as is humanly possible. I had never known the like. He kept holding my hand, and I passed out.
The procedure went only marginally better than the enema. The gallbladder is supposed to be the size of your thumb, but mine was about as big as a pear and ready to burst. The keyholes were abandoned in favour of a three-inch incision, through which my gallbladder and its eighteen stone babies were removed. My digestive capabilities have not been pain-free or entirely effective ever since that operation, but I didn’t know that was to be the unfortunate case way back in 1994, so I was pretty happy with the outcome. Why wouldn’t I be? I had a great big scar, a jar filled with gallstones, and a really great story about shitting myself in hospital.
Mum has her own story as to why she mistrusts doctors and is angrily sceptical of ill health, but it’s not my story to tell. Suffice it to say, Mum had plenty of her own painful demons to deal with, and I truly believe she did the best she could. That’s not to say that her best was always enough, but it was still her best and that is all you can ask. I was not so mature in 1994, and I mined her guilt mercilessly. Every time she told me off, I would deftly remind her that she’d almost killed me. In fact, to this very day I can still use the “great gallbladder neglect” card to fill my mum up with instant guilt. That it can still so reliably wound her is all the proof you need that she really did do her best, and that she knows all too well that it wasn’t always enough. Which in and of itself, is enough.
Mum’s small-town claustrophobia was hitting a suffocating peak in 1994. She was done with Smithton. It was too small for her, in terms of both physical size and mindedness. Next to drinking, the two most popular pastimes in Smithton seemed to be gossip and misogyny—and the pursuit of these hobbies, especially when combined, could never reasonably be characterised as casual. My mum was not afraid of a drink or two, but she had something of a zero tolerance for misogyny. In terms of gossip, Mum didn’t exactly teetotal—she had a lot to say about other people—she just tended to serve it up right-smack-bang in their face. Which is not the best tactic for a not-local to take in a town like Smithton.
I don’t want to gripe about a town that a good many people are happily inhabiting as I write (and, I can only assume, as you read), but I couldn’t live there as an adult human either. I was struggling enough with the place as an adolescent in 1994, by which time the bubble of blissful ignorance of my childhood had long burst and so, like my mum but for very different reasons, I could barely breathe.
I didn’t understand my sexuality on any kind of conscious level, but I understood that there was something wrong with me. I’d witnessed Smithton’s intergenerational rumour mill in action my whole life, and I’d seen all the ways it could be a very bad place to make a mistake. Forgiveness was rare, and forgetting was rarer still. I understood that it would be catastrophic to be a mistake in a small town like that.
We were not alone. Even I could tell a lot of people struggled to flourish in Smithton. Over the years, Mum had taken to mentoring quite a number of outliers. They were usually young people, friends of my siblings who found her to be a kind and open-minded confidante who encouraged them to reject shame and feel pride in who they were, especially the parts of them that were the very reasons they had drifted to the other side of belonging. It was not lost on any of her own children that this openhearted mentoring was not at all the same spirit she applied to parenting.
I remember, when I was really little, Mum had taken to helping an old lady I will call Daisy. This is not her name but it suits her. I don’t remember much about Daisy except that I loved her. I was the only kid not yet at school, and so Mum would pay Daisy to clean our house and watch over me every Monday while she went to clean the golf club. Like all empathy-driven endeavours, it wasn’t a financially savvy arrangement. Daisy would bring me a small packet of out-of-date and very stale chips—which I loved—and I would follow her around and chat to her the whole time. I always looked forward to seeing Daisy, and then one day she just stopped coming. I was bereft. I was also very confused, but Mum never offered me a reason. In fact, she never spoke of Daisy again, so I assumed it must have been something I said. I said a lot.
Years later I learnt that Daisy had become suddenly ill and died shortly thereafter. I pressed Mum: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well,” Mum replied. “You were only four years old; I didn’t think you were ready to grapple with traumatic things like death and disease.”
To this day I don’t understand her logic. Death and disease are facts of life, and as such can be explained, even to a child. Or, she could have lied. Kids can swallow a lie! But a sudden disappearance of a friend left completely unexplained? How could any child hope to wrap their head around that without rising distress?
Like most tiny children, I did not collect many correct facts about Daisy. For a start, Daisy was not old. She was younger than I am now. She was impoverished. She was an alcoholic. She drank methylated spirits and she was the mother of her own father’s child. But she was so kind and gentle and I loved her, and I love my mum for the dignity she offered the woman I will call Daisy.
In 1994, Mum was providing support to a young woman who, at a guess, was somewhere around my oldest brother Justin’s age. I will call this woman Lilly. It was clear, even to my untrained eye, that Lilly had a problem, a very big life problem, and my mum was helping her through it. Every Friday night, she and Mum would talk and talk for hours, drink lots of wine, then sherry, inevitably eschewing dinner for all the cheese and kabana Dad could serve up to them.
I liked Lilly a lot, but she wasn’t elderly enough for me to be able to talk to. I had no idea what she and Mum were on about, and if ever I got too close to them, they would suddenly turn the conversation into something benign and Mum would eventually tell me to go away, at which point I understood that I was not welcome.
This was frustrating because I was obsessed with Lilly. I was so drawn to her, and I would watch her like a hawk every time she visited. Before long, I had decided that I wanted to be like Lilly in every way. She wore jeans, a belt and, invariably, a checked shirt tucked in. Her hair was pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail, and she had a big watch. There was little hope for me to take on her look, given that Mum was in absolute control of what I wore and the cut of my hair. I pestered her for a brief time, but I gave up as Mum deftly ridiculed the idea. Even the simple act of tucking my shirt in was mocked, and as I was as sensitive as any teenager, it felt too dangerous a point to rebel against. And I couldn’t wear my hair in a ponytail, because my mullet was not yet long enough.
The only thing I had control over was to try to be like her. I loved the way she sat: she would cross her legs, not knee to knee like most women, but more like a bloke, ankle over her knee. I began to do it myself whenever I’d go over to Nan and Pop’s after school. I tried to communicate like her, talk with my hands, jump out of my seat to laugh with my whole body. But, ultimately, I felt my attempts fall pitifully short. Sure, I could sit like a bloke, but I couldn’t seem to mimic Lilly’s energy. She had the kind of vim and vigour that was at complete odds with the sluggish life force that was animating my body at the time.
It was decades later before I got the clue to the riddle of our opposing levels of intensity—beyond genetics and age, which were clearly a factor. Lilly was coming out of the closet whereas I, with barely a conscious thought behind my decision, had just pulled the closet door shut tight and locked it thrice from the inside. Lilly was experiencing distress, anxiety and grief, all the feelings that come with the blow of a profound rejection. I know those feelings. I would go through my own cocktail of that trifecta of woe seven years later when I came out to my own family. But unlike Lilly, I didn’t have someone like my mum to help me navigate the pain of it.
STOP! CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TIME!
In May of 1994, the same month that Nelson Mandela was sworn in, Tasmanian gay men began turning themselves in to the police with details of their illegal sexual activity. They were drawing from a tactic pioneered by Sydney gay activists in the early 1980s as a protest against the raids on gay sex clubs—the idea was to highlight the hypocrisy of the anti-homosexual laws and try to embarrass both the federal and state governments into either enforcing or repealing the laws.
The potential twenty-one-year jail sentence was clearly laid out in the criminal code, but it was not the risk of serving time that made the Tasmanian gay law reformers so heroic, it was the risk of the outright and often hostile withdrawal of love and safety from the communities into which they had been born. Coming out often meant facing unmitigated rejection from their families, or harsh ultimatums, such as being sworn to secrecy, committing to conversion therapy or, at best, getting themselves a one-way ticket to the mainland. In the unlikely event that their family did stand behind them without any qualms or conditions, it often meant the whole unit would be subjected to a merciless community shaming.
Fortunately, as testament to the prolonged bravery of the activists and their supporters, public opinion in Tasmania was starting to shift in 1994 in favour of gay law reform. But if there was anybody in my world who supported the reform, they didn’t speak up within my earshot. Ever. Not even Lilly or Mum.
At school, a pamphlet began to circulate promoting the “Say No to Sodomy” campaign and was met with the general attitude of “As if we needed to be asked!” Although it didn’t seem to galvanise the anti-gay sentiment amongst my peers, it did encourage an uptick in general expressions of homophobia—ranging from the “playful” to more blatantly horrific and violent rhetoric. I made my own contribution by telling my story about the enema in a way that downplayed my own humiliation and emphasised the supreme grossness of all things butt-related. I knew what I was doing.
In June the “Say No to Sodomy” rally was held at the Burnie Civic Centre. If I ever knew anything about it, I don’t remember, but apparently it drew a crowd of about seven hundred people. As something of a veteran of touring in regional Australia, I can report that this is a massive turnout, especially when the only talent were the not especially charismatic homophobes of the likes of George Brookes and Chris Miles. The reasons they, and other speakers, gave as reasons for saying “no to sodomy” at the rally were similar to those outlined in the pamphlet: the real gay agenda being the complete removal of the legal age of consent, which is the classic tactic you should now be very familiar with: equating homosexuality with paedophilia.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that when the Sydney Mardi Gras Parade hit Tasmanian television screens, it quickly became less of a cause for celebration and more of a destructive and divisive event. The little bits of footage I saw of the parade didn’t work to awaken my repressed sexuality, it all looked like a very foreign spectacle, but the debate that it ignited all over Australia was incredibly confusing to me, because until then I had been operating under the assumption that everyone on the mainland was cool with the whole gay thing, and Tasmania was the last refuge of the dumb and stupid homophobe.
But apparently, seeing the Mardi Gras on television had roused a lot of feelings for a lot of people. Naturally, ABC Radio callback was flooded with opinions. My dad listened to talk-back radio, and because he did, so did I. I was by no means a savvy consumer of the media in 1994, but even I understood that talk-back radio was a pretty gross universe. Sure, it offered a platform for isolated voices to connect to a wider world, much like Twitter does now, but really, it was, and is, just like Twitter, used far more consistently as a way to elevate and disseminate toxic and hateful ideas. Because, for some baffling reason that can only be explained as an evolutionary backward step, we human beings just love, love, love to fling and eat our own shit in the name of entertainment.
This was most likely the time that all the classic homophobic catchphrases were burnt into my easy access lexicon. They included “Flaunting their lifestyle,” the infamous “[insert pejorative term] gay agenda” and the ubiquitous and, to my mind, most destructive defence of homophobia in the history of the English language, “Think of the children!”
The barrage of negative “talk-back” included this gem from a federal minister, Wilson Tuckey, who told ABC Radio’s AM program with all the pizzazz of the Tasmanian Criminal Code: “I just think it’s an outrageous situation that the ABC should select this time to promote a Mardi Gras which is out encouraging people, basically supporting something that is an unnatural act. I don’t want to give the children of my electorate the thought that it’s all a great idea and their great chance to be on TV is to be homosexual.”
STOP! MOTHER TUCKER TIME!
Charles Wilson “Ironbar” Tuckey was a deliberately antagonising and hateful figure in Australian politics. Just so you have the measure of the man that is Tuckey: in 1967, prior to his political career, when he was a thirty-two-year-old hotelier, Wilson Tuckey was convicted of assault and fined fifty dollars. Just so you have the measure of Australia: Wilson Tuckey had beaten an Aboriginal man with a length of cable—an “ironbar,” if you will—and on top of his conviction and feeble fine, he continued to be reelected as a federal minister in the Australian Government for thirty years. I don’t know why adults don’t ever seem to want quality humans doing their bidding in government. Perhaps it’s because of our fondness for the flinging and eating of our own shit that pushes us to so recklessly conflate leadership with “entertainment.”
STOP! MARDI GRAS TIME!
Closer to home, the talk-back radio homophobic whinge-fest fallout from the broadcast of the Mardi Gras merged with the furious grassroots backlash in North West Tasmania that had blossomed after the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee’s unanimous decision that Tasmania’s laws breached their international agreement on human rights. Above the fray of talk-back, Tasmania’s attorney general at the time, Ron Cornish, had his own take on the ruling:
The law cannot make people sexually pure, but it can restrain sexual perversity. Even if it cannot restrain such perversity, it ought to try. Further, even if it can do nothing else it ought to identify evil for what it is.
In a letter to the Mercury newspaper, the religious group HALO asked, “Can the UN prevent God’s wrath falling on those who reintroduce the practice of Babylon?” Good question. But it is doubtful that the editorial board of a regional newspaper could hope to answer that question with 100 percent accuracy. The UN’s ruling set an important international precedent; but this wasn’t the end. We are talking the UN here. They make toothless recommendations all the time.
The decision required that either Tasmania repeal, or the Commonwealth government override, the specific laws. Spoiler alert: The Tasmanian laws were eventually changed. But the process was not swift—three more years—nor was it graceful, or respectful—it involved an even greater slew of hate and bigotry, in high and low places alike. And sadly, the toxic debate was met with a considerable and sharp rise in suicide rates of young gay men, particularly on the North West Coast.
In October, the decision was made by the Tasmanian attorney general that it was not in the public interest to charge all the gay men who had turned themselves in. A decision which pretty much rendered the anti-gay laws about as useful as an infected gallbladder. This was around the same time that Mum, after years of lobbying, finally convinced Dad to put in a request for transfer out of Smithton.
While I’d understood my fear about leaving town very early on in the uprooting process, I didn’t feel anything I could honestly call sadness. To be fair, I couldn’t identify any of the emotions swirling about me as we sent Ronnie Barker to stay with my grandparents and packed up the house for the big move to Launceston—Tasmania’s second largest city a few hours away. Completely stripped of our furniture and the guts of our life, my old home had warped into an alien landscape. My empty bedroom felt like a stranger’s shell, and there was nothing left to mark my life save for the loathsome brown carpet and all the mouldy green stains left by the stack of old sandwiches we’d discovered behind my wardrobe. Even the locket I’d invested in had been unceremoniously consumed by its blue crystal jewellery-boxmate.
I was borderline cheerful at the prospect of leaving until the moment I heard the familiar sound of the latch catching on Nan and Pop’s garden gate as it sprang shut. That’s when it finally occurred to me that I did not know if or when I would ever be drinking tea with them again. I had not known a time without the comfort of their reliable company. The grief hit me like a psychic shovel, and with the shock of it I made an involuntary, sharp, hiccup-adjacent sound. I guessed it was a sob. But it was just one. A little one, a baby. And that was it.
I paused before crossing the road back home and turned back toward Nan and Pop’s house. I began scanning it for all of its familiars so I might be able to bring it to mind whenever I needed, and that’s when I saw Nan framed by the white sill of the little diamond window by the laundry. I waved, and she waved back to me with one hand. She was holding the other one over her mouth. I could see the cup of her palm and I knew that hidden beneath it was the tissue she’d been using to dab away her tears while I chatted away, telling her all about the next exciting chapter of my very amazing life while we slowly sipped what would be the last cup of tea we would share as neighbours. Of all the wonderful details I stuffed my memory bank with on that last visit, the most precious by far was the sound of Nan’s teacup finding the groove in its saucer.[*14]
