Read an extract from Living and Loving in Diversity
Living and Loving in Diversity is a journey of discovery through queer multicultural multifaith Australia, with over sixty voices from across the spectrum of sexuality and gender.
The following narrative, as told to editor Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, is an extract from Living and Loving in Diversity. It is taken from Benjamin Law’s contribution to the anthology, ‘The Only ‘Dot Dot Dot’ in Your Village’.
Diversity isn’t justified by one accent. Every single person is like a myriad of things at any given time. And when I think of growing up in the suburbs of coastal Queensland in the 1990s, television was pretty white and it was pretty straight. Those two things make you very aware of what normal is supposed to be, so you really do feel apart. And growing up in an especially white part of Australia kind of amplified it. When you’re the only ‘dot dot dot’ in your village, sometimes you grow up with internalised racism or other kinds of minority phobias. You see white as being cool and you see straight as being cool and the way in which that can manifest is that you won’t want to engage in Asian cultural things. Or you’ll see camp people and you’ll think, ‘Well, I might be gay but I’m not one of those gays.’ And it took a long time to get that out of my system and realise that there’s nothing wrong with being camp and that it’s a judgement you’ve been taught by straight people who potentially hate gay people. So I now say, don’t kowtow to the straight or white idea of what has currency. You need to form your own identity on your own terms. And that can be really hard; but finding a community of other people like you helps.
Which reminds me of another thing that amplified feeling apart: dial-up internet was just coming in for our generation as I was leaving school. So, really, the main access point to the rest of the country, or to my idea of the rest of the country, was television. So when I’m asked about who and how I identified with other people, I think the simple answer is that I didn’t. I didn’t meet another gay person until I was an adult. Then I met some people online or talked to them in private, covertly. I didn’t have Asian friends or any non-white friends. If you were a non-white adult, you might not have been picked on or anything like that, but you really stood out. I would hear stories about Asian suburbs in big cities and I’d think, ‘Oh my god, there are Asian majorities in Australia?’ I had no idea of that whatsoever.
I think film and television are changing and I think people like Tony Ayres are at the forefront of that. It’s not like he goes into his meetings and broadcasts, ‘We’re going to put a show on about intersectionality.’ No one wants to watch a show with an agenda. The only agenda for making great art and for telling good stories is having a good story to tell in the first place and really good stories are about intensity and three-dimensional characters who embody intersectionality in some way. So what’s changed is that someone like Tony has been at the coalface of making his own work for so long, he’s now in a position of incredible influence and power. He is able to make those works. He is able to create the first Australian Muslim ‘rom com’ for the big screen. He is able to create The Family Law from my book, which is about a Chinese Australian kid who is watching his home fall apart and he happens to be gay as well. That’s not a classic Australian story, but in a lot of ways it is and should be.
So now we have ethnics and gays coming of age in the arts in Australia who are able to be the people in power that they had to approach when they were younger. It’s a game changer. For example, when I was younger, because I didn’t really see any Chinese Australian representation in books or on television or film, I went to a lot of American stuff. I read a lot of Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club author. And I discovered David Sedaris, whose father comes from a Greek background. He also came from a really big family, one of six siblings. And so there was all this resonance for me. Even though David and Amy come from a completely different generation, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I get what they’re talking about. That’s not my story but it totally is my story.’
We really hoped that The Family Law would resonate with Asian-Australian audiences and it has reached this kind of core audience. Not just Asian-Australian representation but Asian-Australian stories are difficult to actually get right. It’s one thing to be represented, that it will be a character who is part of an ensemble, but to tell the stories with Asian-Australian characters at the centre of those stories is new. So even small moments in the story, which we just wrote in because we thought they could be casual parts of a scene, become important without us intending them to be. For example, in series one there’s a scene where Danny comes into the lounge where his dad is watching a Cantonese soap opera in the very early hours of the morning and eating an apple. He gives Danny a slice and they watch together. We had viewers saying, ‘Wow, that’s my childhood. My dad used to do that. Watch those soap operas late at night. I’d come in because I couldn’t sleep, or I had to pee, and he would feed me a piece of fruit and then I’d fall asleep.’ And it was just like a moment in the script that seems to capture a lot of things for a lot of people. I think that was unexpected and gorgeous.
Every week, I do a column in the Good Weekend magazine for the Age. I try to very casually and hopefully funnily bring in different parts of my life, different experiences I’ve had. To me, it’s not that unusual that I’m gay and Asian, because that’s what I am every day. But we have to acknowledge that having a non-white weekly column in a major newspaper is still a weirdly unusual thing, considering that the last census shows that by some measures we’re more diverse than the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand. And yet, our mainstream media is just so far behind. I don’t write a column every week about being gay. Sometimes I mention that I have a boyfriend because it’s important in terms of how I tell the story. But some readers, especially when I started writing the columns, were like, ‘Why do you have to write about being gay every weekend?’ I got a bit self-conscious and I went back through my last dozen columns and I realised that I hadn’t mentioned that I’m gay in any of the last two months’ worth of columns. It’s just that I had mentioned I had a boyfriend that week, about something he might have said, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s banging on about being gay.’ Whereas I don’t think that Richard Glover, who is a weekly columnist, and one I really love, and who mentions his female partner in his weekly column, would raise eyebrows ever. So there is still a very acute double standard. And when I get feedback like that, I’m like, ‘Well then, I’m going to mention my boyfriend more, you fuckers. Now you’ve made me want to make a point of it.’
To the readers and emerging younger writers in this book, I want you to feel like you’re a part of a community even though you haven’t met some of the key players who are no longer sidelined figures. If you speak a language other than English at home you’re one in five Australians. If you weren’t born in Australia, you’re one of four Australians. I think the latest count is pretty much 50 per cent of Australians have at least one parent born overseas as well. Those numbers are substantial. And just because we don’t see ourselves involved in the mainstream conversation, I hope this book and this conversation show that we’re coming to the centre of things.
I’ve been called a disgrace to my race on several occasions. And I think this is one of the difficulties and challenges. I also think it’s a conversation that we should embrace. When there is so little representation and so few role models, whether it’s in arts or business or the media or whatever, you’re really expected to be a role model. The thing about writing stories, whether it’s for television or columns about my life, or whatever, I’m not particularly interested in writing characters who are perfect. I’m not interested in writing stories about role models. They have their place, absolutely. But I’m interested in telling stories that are complex and sophisticated, about Asian Australians who are gorgeous and flawed, who fuck up. Like everyone else. I want to be that person as well.
