My best friend came out to me as nonbinary. They were up in Sydney for a birthday, and told me in a passing moment at Poor Tom’s over a G&T. That evening, after the formalities, we went to the Imperial in Erskineville and I watched them cut loose on the dancefloor. They’ve always been able to cut loose like that, but to watch them that night, dancing with their partner, was to watch someone who had set themselves free. They were lighter somehow, certainly happier, the same person I’d known forever and yet somehow different.
We were at highschool together. Their partner and my fiance did the same degree at USyd. They set me up with my fiance. We’ve always had a great relationship, although we’re often accused of copying each other. We started getting tattoos at the same time, planning to go 1-for-1, but I ran out of money well before they did. I brought a colourful jacket, and it looked good so they went out and got one. They got their nose pierced, and it looked good, so I went out and got it done. It’s never been about simulacrum, but rather an opening up of frontiers. Parts of our families and the areas that we grew up in are very conservative, so when one of us broke down a barrier, mental or otherwise, we broke it down for both of us. Through all of that, here they were, finally unencumbered from a lifetime of baggage I had no idea they were carrying. I went home, had a little cry for the joy of it all, filed all of this in the back of my mind, and went drunkenly to sleep.
Some months later, I was at a baby shower, upstairs at a pub. All of a sudden, the sister of the mother-to-be decreed very loudly that all the straight men had to leave the room. I have a complicated relationship with my queerness, as my partner does with hers. We both have found our forever people, and that makes us appear outwardly hetero. That’s okay though, and when participating in organised fun upstairs or watching the footy downstairs with a beverage are the options, it was easier to put any internal debate on the shelf and wander to the bottom bar. As I watched more and more people, not straight, not male, sneak downstairs rather than participate, two things occurred to me.
Firstly, as I watched the mighty South Sydney Rabbitohs get up and Alex Johnston score yet another try in his remarkable career, I thought about what I had been taught implicitly about masculinity. I thought about how straight forward it seemed. George Burgess takes the ball under one arm and runs straight into the teeth of the defence. It’s the tough metres like this that pay off late in the game when the defence becomes fatigued. I loved playing when I was a teenager, but I hated all the fights that my team used to start. I was captain of that footy team for years, but lost it because I refused to throw a punch in anger and that meant I didn’t have the “boy’s backs”. I resented that. I hated the banter at training. I hated the bristling bravado that came with going to an all-boys public school, that came with the job sites I worked on, that came with the late night chats with uncles and cousins at family barbecues. Yet, on the surface, I fitted in at all these places. I thought, as I watched the Bunnies get up, that masculinity has always felt uncomfortable to me, like wearing somebody else’s shoes, but if you stand still enough in it, nobody really notices.
Secondly, I thought about my best friend at the Imperial. They’ve always been able to dance, and yet this was more. And for all our similarities, I’ve never been able to dance. I think too much. My brain starts to work over and it feels wrong. People notice when you stand still in this context, but as I get older, it bothers me less and less. I think that I’ve learnt to stand still and blend in. I don’t think I want to do that anymore. That frontier has been broken, and I want some of that unencumbered freedom that my best friend had, even if it means something different for me. At the risk of sounding like I’m copying them again, I think I’m genderqueer.
