The Family Law (23 page)

It starts like this. If one in ten people is homosexual – like you've been reading in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
's ‘H' volume – that means that when you grow up, you'll have
10
per cent of the entire world's population as potential romantic candidates. Because there are roughly
6
.
7
billion people in the world, this equates to
670
million people at your disposal. That's a lot of people, you figure.

However, half of those
670
million people will be female: gay women who are more colloquially known as ‘lesbians' (also according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
). That cuts the number in half. You now have
335
million homosexual men in the world. At this stage,
335
million still seems like a giant number, a number that remains on the comforting, ginormous, impossible-to-comprehend scale.
335
million is excellent; the odds that you won't die alone are favourable.

Still, you neither want to be a pederast nor the victim of paedophilia. Factoring in age of consent laws and boundaries of good taste, you narrow your pool to homosexuals from the ages of eighteen to, say, a generous thirty-five. Now, if average life expectancy around the world is roughly sixty-five years – and you get this figure by looking up the CD-ROM version of
Encarta –
your preferred age range accounts for only a quarter of the world's population. You're now left with
83
.
75
million people who may want to love you, and whom you may want to love back.

But the ‘love you / love you back' part of the equation is where this mathematical formula becomes more complicated, and begs the question:
Who do you find attractive?
This is difficult for a twelve-year-old boy to know. But judging by your schoolyard crushes so far, those people would include your friend Gerry, who has the most sculpted, handsome face you've ever seen on a prepubescent; and David, who already has visible and bulging pectoral muscles, though he is only six months into puberty. You also realise there are traits in boys you definitely
don't
find attractive. For instance, you cannot stand long nails.

Hair cannot have dandruff, even though you are prone to this condition yourself, especially in winter when the air becomes dry, making your scalp itchy and flakey.

What else? Deformities. You're reminded of a boy in your gymnastics class, Martin, who had a condition whereby his big toe was fused to his second toe, which basically made it one giant toe with two toenails attached, and you clearly remember the moment during floor stretches when you realised that Martin would never be able to wear thongs on the beach, and you began to dry-retch. Which is a shame, really, because everything else about Martin you found quite physically appealing. Still, fused-together toes will need to be ruled out.

You start thinking about other physical deformities – not just fusion of the toes, but gigantism of the face, or dwarfism of the hands, and realise you won't be able to handle any of this. Disabilities may be okay, though. If they are deaf, that will be fine. Your cousin is deaf, and she lip-reads and talks, and has taught you some sign language, which you think is quite a sophisticated and
performative
language. In fact, maybe you'd even
prefer
a deaf guy as a partner. You surprise yourself by thinking mental disabilities might be okay too, but it would depend on the severity, of course. If disability were ranked on a scale of one to ten, one being the mildest, maybe a ‘three' would be acceptable as a potential partner. Especially if they were handsome. Would you go out with a blind person, though? It's difficult to know.

Goddammit, you are one
choosy
faggot, aren't you? And what's with the arrogance? Hell, it might even be preferable that they be blind, because right now you are developing terrible acne, a violent rash on your face that is becoming so invasive you're not sure it'll ever completely disappear. Having a partner with poor vision might help your chances: if they can't see you, you feel confident you could win them over with witty banter.

It's hard to keep up with the maths by this stage. You're pretty confused. But let's say you find a fifteenth of all the world's available homosexuals attractive, and that a fraction of those – say, a twenty-fifth (this is generous, you know) – will find you attractive in return. That's about
2
.
23
million homosexuals left. But realistically, there will only be so many countries you'll be able to visit in your life, and only so many places you can be at once. It would be impossible to encounter all of these homosexuals in your lifetime. Divide them by an arbitrary number – say sixty-seven.

In the end, that leaves
33
,
283
people. And although that seems like a lot, you are also lazy. Those
33
,
283
people could be anywhere: Nepal or Idaho, Stockholm or Bosnia. Where would you find the time and money to meet these people and make them your boyfriends?

By this stage, it becomes clear that you'll die alone, after all. Oh, it's sad, isn't it? Coming to the end of this equation makes you weep into your BMX pillow – but you cry softly and silently, because your brother, with whom you share a room, might wake up and tell you to shut the hell up. But weep you must, because it's unhealthy to keep those feelings in and it feels good to cry, doesn't it? No one understands you; no one will ever understand the pain you feel. Jesus Christ, you must be the saddest person in the world right now, and you begin to pray that it's somehow possible to train yourself to become heterosexual. Perhaps you will write a song about how sad you are. Perhaps you will write some poetry, start a journal. Maybe you will compose a mournful song with your plastic Yamaha clarinet, even though all you can play right now are major scales and ‘Watermelon Man.'

As you shed tears onto your pillow, you realise that you're actually quite enjoying this, and that it's the sort of thing that might win you an Oscar some day. You get out of bed, tears fresh on your face, race to the bathroom and close the door. You turn on the lights and examine your tear-streaked face. If you can summon tears on cue, you might make something of yourself as an actor after all. With the right lighting, these tears streaming down your cheeks might look cinematic. If only you could do something about that acne, though. It really does look fucking awful.

 

C
OMMUNITY
Years later, when you leave home for the first time, you become really, really gay. You get an eyebrow ring; you start ordering pornography on VHS; you borrow gay-themed books from the library and attend rock concerts where the drummer or bassist is a lesbian, and this feels edgy at the time. Because you recently won a gold pass to an independent cinema chain and are entitled to free movies for a year, you've now seen the movie
Jesus' Son
five times solely in order to stare at Billy Crudup's face. You watch the gay British coming-of-age drama
Get Real
over and over again, even though one of your friends said she found it ‘overly earnest.' This offends you a little, because at this stage of your life, you're nothing
but
earnest. Gay jokes aren't funny anymore. The suppression of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-gender-and-intersex community is
real
. Everything is serious, and the stakes are high. This is not a drill; this is really
happening
.

At university, one of your writing assignments asks you to profile a person or organisation from a minority community. As a newly minted homosexual yourself, you decide to profile the country's longest-running LGBTI radio program, which happens to be located in your home town. All that history right on your doorstep. You take this as some sort of sign.

The community radio station broadcasts from a small hub around the corner from an adult shop that sells vibrators and assless leather chaps. You had expected people in punk T-shirts and mohawks, but the radio volunteers more or less look and smell like you: ripped-up cargo pants; piercings in their face; lack of deodorant. Peeling concert posters are papier-machéd onto the walls, and stuffing pokes out from the sofas. This all strikes you as very authentic; very real.

You talk to some of the volunteers. The place, you discover, is full of political dissenters, and has a long history of resistance and socialist protest. This station has been the headquarters of ‘some fucked-up shit,' they tell you. However, someone adds dryly, the thing about anarchists and socialists is that they think changing the toilet paper is
bourgeois
– and this is why, on some days, the place smells like an open sewer. No one laughs at this, so you aren't sure whether it is a joke. But she is right: the place sort of stinks, at least tonight.

The three men who run the radio program are friendly, and you watch them present the show from a seat in the studio, which for some reason smells of eggs. Even though they are at least ten, twenty, maybe thirty years older, you feel as though you've finally found
your people
. On the show, they talk about upcoming LGBTI events, read out accommodation notices and play an interview with a local bisexual man who makes pop music in his suburban bedroom. The music is awful, pretty much unlistenable, but you don't say anything because you don't want to be mean-spirited.

Afterwards, you all have coffee together so you can interview them for your assignment. During the interview, one of them tells you that closeted men and women from all over the state have written to him, saying that they regularly drive for kilometres to the outskirts of their local shire, just so they can pick up the station's signal and listen in.
If I didn't have your
show
, they write to him,
I would have committed suicide by now
. This strikes you as heartbreakingly sad: people driving in their cars at night to the middle of nowhere, killing the engine and listening, alone in the dark.

The radio presenters tell you about all the hardships queer people suffer in your state, such as how the age of consent laws render you a criminal in your own home. When they ask for your age and you tell them you're seventeen, everyone leans in conspiratorially. ‘So, did you know,' they ask, ‘that you wouldn't be able to have anal sex …
right now
?'
What?
, you think,
You
mean here?
No, you did not know that, you say. After you finish the interview, they say they're impressed by your journalistic skills. The presenter tells you they need volunteers –
young
volunteers, especially – who can speak to the city's queer youth. It would only be one evening a fortnight. And because you are interested in the ‘community' and all the hardships you face together, you accept and say
yes
.

Everything on the show must be gay. You find this out quickly. The music you play must be gay, even though at this stage, you only know about Morrissey, Elton John, k.d. lang and Rufus Wainwright. You do not want to play Melissa Etheridge. Once, after you play a P.J. Harvey song, the announcer asks you on air what P.J. Harvey has to do with the gay community and you can't muster a response. ‘She's gay-friendly?' you mumble. Even if someone or something isn't gay, this announcer will
make
it gay. Once, while interviewing Elliott Smith, one of your favourite singers, he asked Smith how his sexuality had influenced his music career. ‘Dude,' Smith eventually replied, ‘I'm
not
gay.'

You are not good at panelling the show, and you sometimes leave dead air because you are nervous and freak out. At one point, the presenter intervenes and, in a flash of irritation, calls you ‘unprofessional' on air, which is sort of humiliating. He is a very earnest and serious man sometimes. The relationship becomes tense. One night, when you and another young presenter share a glib, good-natured joke about anal sex, he cuts in and says without warning, ‘And of course, we all know it's very important to evacuate one's
bowels
before engaging in anal sex.' There is silence for at least five seconds, which is a very long time on radio. As you cut to a song you realise right there, at the age of seventeen, your community spirit has died, before it even had a chance to develop.

 

L
OSING
I
T
As soon as you turn eighteen, you rally a bunch of friends and head directly to the Beat, the city's largest gay nightclub. In the past few weeks, the place has lost the ‘B' from its flashing neon sign, so passers-by simply see the word ‘EAT,' which everyone jokes is far more appropriate. The club has been described to you as everything from a ‘meat market' to ‘a goddamned cock buffet,' which makes you slightly ill, since you've never really liked buffets – all that food. Your friend Romy later tells you that after leaving this club one night, she found a slug of semen inexplicably on her shoulder.