Terence Jaensch
DR: How long have
you lived in Castlemaine?
TJ: I think it's coming up to 12 years in September. I moved here September 2010, from Melbourne. I grew up in an orphanage in Ballarat from about three ’til 10. Then I was placed in what they were calling family group homes at the time – in the early ’80s. They’d put five kids in a normal house with a couple looking after you. I was there for about three to four years and then went to live with my grandmother in Kerang in northern Victoria, which was a big change. Completely different landscape, much more isolated, a smaller population. I was in Kerang for my teenage years from about 13 till I finished high school and then I was in Melbourne for about 20 years or so. When I was about 20 I went to America and studied acting for a couple years in New York.
DR: Did you enjoy that?
TJ: Yeah, I loved it. I first went there for a couple of months to check it out and locate a school I might go to. When I moved there, I’d just turned 21. I’d never been on a plane before.
DR: So brave.
TJ: It was terrifying but it was something I always wanted to do, and it was the best experience. I was just so incredibly shy. And growing up in institutions you’re not properly socialised either, so it takes a long time for you to work out how to navigate even just everyday relationships and stuff like that. It's interesting that dichotomy of being so shy and terrified, but at the same time feeling an absolute compulsion towards something that just pushes through that on some level. It doesn't mean all that fear and anxiety disappears by any means. It’s still very present every step of the way, but the other thing just pulls you through, it seems.
DR: Did you pursue the acting afterwards?
TJ: I loved it – I loved the craft of it, and often found rehearsing more interesting than the actual performance because that’s when you discover the most. But I got back here and it's a little harder here. It's harder to get good agents, whereas over there, you've got trade papers so you can just access information about auditions and show up, by and large. It's not the same here, you have to have an agent. I got an agent but not a very good one.
The other thing for me was I kind of resented the lack of control you had over anything as an actor. You’re often auditioning for things that aren’t really stretching you in any way, or utilising most of what you know, and you're always at the mercy of everyone else. I’ve always been writing on some level and I just thought, maybe I'll concentrate on the writing because I have more control over that. So that's what I pursued. It's interesting because all the acting stuff informs what I write and how I write, in terms of the questions I might ask, or the subtextual elements of what I'm writing.
DR: In what way?
TJ: Its funny because I don't know that I've ever properly been able to articulate what it is exactly. I think there's a highly intentional aspect in all my poetry – as in thinking about what I'm saying, who I might be talking to, and what I might want from them – which kind of directs the course of what I’ve written. In acting, that intentional stuff underlies the dialogue you get to speak, so it's the thing that drives the dialogue – these are the words with which I'm going to say this thing. You can do that in poetry as well, it's just that you might have to make it a bit more explicit in some way. Because if it's completely buried in some kind of subtext, it might not be evident in the poem at all – so it’s a bit of a balancing act. As much as I write poetry for the page, I'm also thinking about it from a performance point of view. I don't mean a really explicit kind of theatricality, but just – again – knowing what you're saying, why you're saying it, who you’re saying it to, what you want. That kind of driving the course of things.
I do both writing and performing, but I really like the reading experience because it's different from the writing experience, and I do get to employ some of the other skills that I've gotten from studying acting. I get to employ them in a more explicit way, but not high theatricality by any means. Often poetry readings are small and intimate, so that kind of over-the-top or amplified presentation isn't always appropriate. For me it's more that I like talking, I like to feel like I'm having a conversation with the people I’m in front of – I often look at them as well. I don't pretend there’s some kind of fourth wall between us. It’s a kind of intimate exchange, that is more than just a recitation of something.
DR: How old were you when you moved to Castlemaine? And what's it been like living here?
TJ: I was about 40. It's been good. It’s funny because at the moment I really like being here, but at the same time, I could go. Maybe I'm just at an age where I feel I need to stimulate or re-stimulate or reinvigorate my life in some way and moving can do that in a big way. But in terms of living here I’ve really enjoyed it. It's an interesting mix in the town, so you feel that you have engagement with people that are like-minded, and with art stuff as well. But at the same time you're in a town where there are people with differing views and positions on things. That can be a frustration sometimes, but I actually think it's good to be reminded of that fact, because it exists wherever you go. We can minimise our engagement with particular views or behaviours, and we can lessen its impact on us, but I don’t think we can escape it completely. So like anything in life I think you just have to negotiate the best way to be in it.
DR: What about in relation to the LGBTQIA+ community? What's that like, living here?
TJ: There’s certainly a number of queer people in town, but I have to say, until I did ISH [Queer Ideas, Activism & Arts Day Castlemaine], I didn't really have any significant engagement, other than basic social interaction with people that were gay. One of the reasons I did ISH, to be entirely honest, was because I thought maybe I’d find a boyfriend.
DR: Oh really. That’s a lot of work to …
TJ: It didn’t work, I made new friends – new queer friends which was important too. But one of the reasons for doing it was that I was just like, how do I meet anyone here? There's no queer social space, so it will be through friends of friends of friends kinda thing – but that wasn’t happening that frequently. It wasn’t until ISH that I got to see how much bigger the queer community was here. There are a lot of pockets – like The Alluvians that have been here historically and congregate every so often – but I wasn't really part of that either. It would be remiss of me to suggest that that is only a circumstantial problem, it’s possibly also my own shyness and self-consciousness. But then there's another part of me that has actively tried to cultivate that kind of engagement as well. It’s very similar to that thing of being terrified of the acting stuff but feeling absolutely compelled at the same time.
DR: Do you identify with a particular part of that community?
TJ: No probably not. I don’t know whether I really believe in community at all. I think people can come together and energy can kind of accrete around a social issue or whatever, but I think a lot of people think of their community as a static thing – a thing that doesn’t shift and change. But these things do shift and change over time.
So what community am I part of? I don’t know – possibly many, in a way, and none in some respects as well. I'm not very good at being beholden to a group. I just feel like it somehow … I don't know whether diminishes me is the right phrase. I just feel at some point I need to go away from the group and do my own thing. If you belong to a group or a community and stay there, it can mean a sublimation of yourself to the overriding needs of the group. Maybe I just don’t feel comfortable with belonging.
A friend of mine told me a couple years back that they’d put me in their will. I don't care about money but I said to her, what is really meaningful for me about it is that it makes me feel like I belong to someone. It’s hard to say that without crying. But that's not belonging to a group, that's belonging to an individual, so I guess that's the distinction. It’s funny because this person is not gay, or lesbian, bi or trans, but I wouldn't necessarily identify her as heterosexual or heteronormative. This is why I use the word queer a lot, because it's less about sexuality and more about a particular way of being, doing, or seeing the world that's not heteronormative in essence. So I don't know whether I contextualise my sense of belonging to her as belonging to an idea of queer community, or just belonging in a friendship sense.
DR: What do you think of the term LGBTQIA+ community? And do you feel a part of that community?
TJ: I was very much part of that during the marriage equality stuff here with the local council. I drove a bit of that myself, and got some other people activated along the way. I was really engaged in that space. The marriage equality stuff is a case in point. I couldn't care less about marriage, and I couldn't care less about the equality campaign. I just thought they were trying to control the narrative too much, and not really addressing the homophobia or queerphobia that was being thrown at people at that time. That needed to happen, so I was involved and engaged but I wasn't part of the dominant movement in that space, which was primarily about marriage. I actually resented that framing of our rights, because it’s fairly limited being subsumed into a hetero-norm. No one should have to be in a certain type of relationship to have their rights. So, I just thought it was a bit reductive. I was very engaged at that time because fundamentally it is about equal rights. I think people really didn't clue into the limitations that framing it in terms of marriage put on it – in terms of a broader perception of what we were really fighting for.
There was a councillor here that was very supportive, and before we finally got the flag up on one of the flagpoles here in the main street for IDAHOBIT [International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia] one year, and just prior to the event, he stopped me on the street and we were chatting – and he said, you know I just want it to be unremarkable, for it to not be a thing to raise the flag or for you to get married. I think it's interesting the language that’s used to support us sometimes, you know – I just wanted it to be nothing. Ultimately that’s the goal, but you can’t get to unremarkable without doing this middle bit – which is seeing us, supporting us and affirming us.
I’ve thought about that often, and if people say that to me, particularly if they’re heterosexual, I say, well you know the way to make it unremarkable is to affirm us, validate us, support us every second of every day, in the same way you have been validated. That is why you are unremarkable in this space, and that's how we will get to be unremarkable as well. That's the thing that they miss, they think that we just have this moment where we fight for something and then it's all over. The work that actually needs to be done is on that everyday social level, so that every space I go into is a space that I feel seen and affirmed in as a queer person, in the same way that heterosexuals walk into that type of space all the time.
DR: So, what would that look like, or what doesn't it look like?
TJ: Well, it doesn’t look like marriage. Or not marriage alone. It looks like what the world looks like for heterosexual people, I think. They're not confronted every day with the same challenges to who they are. Marriage Equality has also been a failure in understanding that being equal doesn't mean that we have to be the same. We always talk of sameness when it comes to equality, about it being the unifying thing – shared experiences and all that kind of stuff. But you have got to flip it on its head and say that difference is the thing, difference is the commonality we have. That’s a better starting point for ensuring that people's difference is acknowledged, and that people are still treated equally. I think the way we look at it is sometimes completely wrong, because we shouldn't have to be the same. I actually think difference is the one thing we have in common – everyone is different to everyone else in their own ways.
DR: Going back to how you feel when you walk into a space and you’re not affirmed or seen, can you talk about how that manifests in people's behaviour?
TJ: You often hear that casual kind of homophobia when things are said when there's absolutely no consciousness about you being in the room.
As I get older, I don't know that I feel more safe or secure in the world being queer. I feel very unsafe. Maybe because of all the stuff that's swirling around, like the stuff that's happening in America that’s starting to encroach on the progression of queer rights. Even here, just having political leaders that think it's okay to espouse their religious underpinnings as though that's relevant to their roles. I think it’s really quite alarming. The religious discrimination bill is at the point here where discrimination could be legislated against us. It's just a bogus kind of bill that shouldn't occur at all – religious groups are not fundamentally persecuted against here. There might be one or two religious faiths that are targeted, but it's certainly not the faiths that are pushing for this discriminatory bill. It's just a kind of bullshit argument. To go through all that shit with the plebiscite and then have the government give a concession to the people who lost is just bizarre. And all the trans discrimination crap that's going around now, and the policing of young people's bodies, all of that is a bit frightening.
I think in a way it can be healthy to shut off from it as it can make you feel quite unsafe in the world. I think it’s that sense of being othered or being an outsider on some level. For me I think that it’s probably also tinged with having grown up in an orphanage where you are literally outside of society.
That’s not to say that I feel unsafe here necessarily, but I just feel that the world is still pretty hostile when it comes down to it. When you're in relationships you’re buffered a bit more from that. You can retreat into your relationship and you have support there. It gives you a sense of safety. So maybe it's just, as a single person in the world, I feel a bit vulnerable to the vagaries of all those phobias.
DR: Have you experienced that hostility here at all?
TJ: I have experienced it when trying to garner support for the council to raise the flag.
Just some pushback from people. Nothing overly overt, just trotting out homophobic tropes and things like that. There were a couple of letters in the paper around that time that were very ill-informed which I responded to in the opinion section in the local paper.
It was basically around the marriage vote and all that kind of crap. So I wrote responses to different people which was really fun. I did it with humour because otherwise it just becomes a drag having to be super serious all the time. I was putting factual information in there but trying to undermine or show the stupidity of people’s positions with humour. It's interesting, what happens a lot of the time in those opinions things is that it ends up being a huge back-and-forth because other people responded in the paper as well. I responded because I just thought, okay, what if a young person reads this or somebody that's vulnerable, and they don't see anyone countering it? I don't do it because I want to have an argument or a debate about it, because the position is totally wrong – it's not a debate. So I don't continue the conversation, it's just one letter and that’s it. I'm not on Facebook but there was a fair bit of stuff playing out there, during the plebiscite and council fight – some people sent me screen captures of it. But I just deleted it because to me it’s just noise – it’s not worth engaging with.
DR: What did you do to drive the activism around the raising of the rainbow flag in Castlemaine?
TJ: When we were about to do ISH, which was in the week of IDAHOBIT, I approached the council about it and I actually got an email back saying that it had been approved. But when I checked back in, it hadn't been approved. So I went in to talk to them and basically had a conversation that went nowhere. I said, well next year I’ll be coming back again to ask you. And I did that again and they said no again. I’d sent the request in an email because they are obligated to respond that way. But it was a basic no, the justification being that we don’t generally put up other flags – blah, blah, blah. So then I started writing to councillors and the Mayor, just trying to encourage them to support the LGBTQIA+ community. Saying that raising the flag was the thing that we would really like to see, because those symbols are really important and have a significant impact.
I ended up having a meeting with the mayor where it became very clear that it wasn't something they were going to do. So I started to go forensically through the council’s website and there was only one thing on there that mentioned LGBTQIA+ and it was a flyer for an event that somebody else had organised. There was actually nothing in their official documents that mentioned that cohort. What I tried to highlight in my response letter was that, when you talk about community in your plans and policies, you are talking about this group too, even though they're not explicitly there. They didn't seem to understand that there were LGBTQIA+ members in their community, and they may not identify themselves as such when needing something from the council – whether it's a flag being raised, or a road being fixed, it's still potentially an LGBTQIA+ person asking for it. I think the best thing to do when approaching councils is to look at what they've got written up about their obligations to community, and then articulate how you, as a cohort, or an individual community member, would be covered by the obligations they’ve outlined that they have to deliver on. So I just tried doing that. Look, it's really exhausting as well.
DR: It must have been so much work.
TJ: It was quite a bit of work, and I was really sick of doing it by the end, but at the same time I have to admit I really love the forensic nature of it – making a considered argument to advocate for things.
DR: What gave you the energy to do it?
TJ: I was really angry that nobody actually stood up to challenge the notion of a plebiscite in any serious way. Like, why isn’t everybody angry about this? You can get into this space when you're passionate about an issue where you have an expectation that everybody else should be up in arms about it as well. It’s not a very realistic expectation because that is hardly ever the case, so I’ve tried to adjust my thinking about that. I'm over here focusing on this issue and putting my energy into it, but somebody might be over there focusing on another issue that's really important but that maybe I don't give as much of my energy to. So there’s a kind of understanding that people are investing their energy in the things they can, and all those things are good, as long as someone is doing something in all those spaces. That’s better than just getting angry because nobody is speaking up.
DR: What happened in the end – did they put the flag up?
TJ: Eventually we got the flag up in 2018, but they developed a flag policy during that time. It's a stalling process where they develop a policy that says if you want to put a flag up you have to apply to council – you have to do it within a certain amount of time, it has to fulfil certain criteria, it has to be specific measurements … There’s all these protocols around flags, particularly on council flagpoles. I’ve seen this happen a couple of times where there was no flag policy until someone asked for the rainbow flag to be put up. I think the flag raising now might be embedded in the council’s annual calendar so people don’t have to request it anymore, which is good.
It’s funny that it never seems to happen easily. There's this idea of risk in anything that's LGBTQIA+. I don't think it's justified, by any means. I often think organisations create more of a problem for themselves if they don't clearly say, we're for equality and we think this is a good thing. When you let a vocal minority have space, you ultimately amplify their voices by not saying unequivocally that you, as an organisation, are for equality. Rather than saying, this is no problem for us, it's consistent with our desire for people to be treated equally and supported. It’s a very simple thing, but people are just terrified to say this unequivocally in certain contexts, particularly organisational contexts.
I found it exhausting by the end, emotionally and mentally. What the people at the other side of the table sometimes don't understand is that when you go into those meetings, those spaces, what you’re experiencing every time are the effects of culturally ingrained homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. You’re a queer person in that space. I don’t want to suggest that I’m overly sensitive, or that other queer people in the room were, but that’s what we were faced with, and the people on the other side of the table have no consciousness of the intolerance, the discrimination and the culturally ingrained queerphobia that’s in the room. Because they’re not subject to it.
DR: So what was the behaviour of the councillors like towards you?
I think there was one councillor that was particularly supportive – even though I think he was maybe a little bit ignorant as to the complexity of how we were being impacted by the whole thing. I do think he was genuinely supportive, and the rest I thought were just going through the motions of appearing to be supportive. To me the most telling thing was that they suggested we could set up a roundtable which was not something that anybody had asked for. We just asked for the flag to be raised. I felt this was their way out of doing the thing we actually requested, but we engaged with it because you've got to in a way, and we had a couple of meetings, for the roundtable, where we were talking about terms of reference and that kind of stuff.
At that first meeting we talked a bit about the council staff having put up rainbow flags in the window to show their support. I said that I was very aware that they had queer staff, and they must be suffering in this context as well, and I hoped council was doing something to support them. They said, yes, yes, yes that’s happening. And then the very next day the staff were all directed to take down those rainbow flags from the windows.
It just exposed how much of a performance that meeting was, it wasn't genuine. I think, the roundtable was created to placate and create a sense that everything was okay. So I decided I wasn’t going to be a part of it because I didn't think they were serious about using it to achieve anything – often roundtables are places where things go to die. Just a lot of talk and no action. In the terms of reference there wasn’t any commitment to actioning anything. That may be different now. At one point at that first meeting someone in the group said to the councillors and CEO, why are you doing the round table? And they couldn’t answer, they hadn’t even thought up a bullshit answer to present to us. That was really telling.
My feeling about it is, we spent a lot of time talking with them, they haven’t really moved much and they haven’t done much – so let’s just take that as a given and direct our energies somewhere else, somewhere more productive. And then if they eventually come on board – fine. That’s the other thing I learned from that experience – that sometimes it’s important to have that really full-on public moment that disrupts, creates awareness and catalyses action for a lot of people. You keep at it in those moments, because with disruption there’s an opportunity to move things along, but I think when you see that things have stopped moving significantly, you have to acknowledge that part of moving anything is … time. You can have the big moment, but the impact and the effect of that might not be apparent until a couple of years later, in terms of changes in behaviour or understanding. Personally, I didn’t want to stick around for those two years – banging my head against that wall. There’s a kind of organic absorption that occurs over time and that’s been reflected in LGBTQIA+ awareness-raising by others who stayed on the round table and the number of queer events that have popped up since then.
DR: So something positive has come out of it.
TJ: Yeah, Sherene Clow is quite involved in the roundtable and community and she’s great and Martyn Shaddick at Community House too. The other thing I realised is it goes back to that notion of community as well, and the idea that sometimes communities are a monolith. I was very conscious that even though we were all driving toward the same thing, we were all driving in different ways. Sometimes what can happen, and what did happen in that space, is that people start to direct some animus at each other for not pursuing it in the same way, rather than just accepting that they might be better investing their activism energies elsewhere. You have to accept within the space where people are fighting for the same thing, that doing it in different ways is not a problem. I think having a range of people around the table pushing a range of buttons is actually a really good thing, and it’s good not to see that as a potential threat or an imposition on somebody else’s preferred way of moving something along. They all actually work together, but sometimes that sense of things is lost in the moment.
DR: It does seem to be happening more and more – the trans conversation you were talking about earlier comes to mind.
TJ: The trans stuff at the moment is horrible. But in terms of discrimination, it's just a continuation of what's always been there. It comes fundamentally from religion and faith, which is to my mind where most queerphobia comes from. I’ve got a great dictionary called the Dictionary of Homophobia that’s an A to Z of homophobia, and it shows clearly that in a lot of places where homophobia, biphobia or transphobia exist in the world, it's a result of two things that follow each other – colonisation and the bringing of, more often than not, Western Christian faith into a particular location. Often into places where there has previously been a tacit acceptance of homosexuality within the community, or the notion of a third sex, or trans.
What often happens, when the establishment lose one argument against the push for rights, is they recalibrate and rebrand and focus their attention on it in another way – and in this instance it’s trans people. Toilets have historically been a site for civil rights battles. The suggestion that trans people are a threat in these spaces is bullshit. Statistically, there is a lot of data that shows that trans people are more likely to experience harm in these spaces than anyone else – because of ongoing transphobia.
There’s just so much more to know – all of this has been a high learning curve for me, because I really had to educate myself about lots of things that I wasn't fully aware of. I started reading a lot.
DR: What were you reading?
TJ: Things like the Dictionary of Homophobia and a lot of books from queer activists in the past. I obviously read a bit of queer literature. I also listen to queer speakers and activists, particularly ones that step outside of narratives that are fundamentally heteronormative, and really don’t want to address us – really just don’t want us to exist. How do we argue for ourselves in that space, when all that language is about not addressing us – not treating us as valid or equal? The perfect example is biblical arguments. Some people argue that the Bible says this, and then others say, yeah, but it says you shouldn't eat shellfish either, or whatever. And I’m like, why are you even having the argument? It doesn't matter what the Bible says, it's got nothing to do with anything. That may be relevant for a person of faith because that's what they've chosen to believe, but it has no bearing on anything else. So to use it to counter what's being argued by the person of faith validates the Bible as an authoritative text. People fall into that space really easily and we just end up stuck there. We're not really stepping outside of seriously problematic framing of our lives and unashamedly asserting our right to exist in the world, to be treated fairly.
DR: Can you talk about the flag and Pride and the idea of community?
TJ: It’s hard because there is a dichotomy. I understand the flag as being a really important visible symbol – it makes me feel immediately comfortable if I see it in a business or shop window. I know I can walk in there and I’m not going to encounter any whatever, but I do think it’s become a kind of Disneyfied, family-friendly presentation of who we are – and kind of sexless as well.
We never talk about the fact that we actually have sex or the sexuality component of being queer, because that's the thing that really bothers people and that's the thing they can't get over. I don’t think hetero people really have a hard time with the idea that we love people of the same sex. And if they do, it’s because they’re seeing love between us as sex. The flag has become, as a result of equality and Pride campaigns, aimed at ‘changing hearts and minds’, a kind of sexless, family friendly representation of us – safe and non-threatening to hetero people. We are not just one thing, and there’s a whole lot of value and learning that can be got from the fact that we’ve lived in different ways and we behave in different ways. I don't think that should just be thrown out the window in this march towards marriage or any other hetero ideal.
The other thing is, the colours of the flag traditionally don't represent lesbian, trans etc. Historically, they are things like sensuality, sexuality … I can’t remember them all off the top of my head. But because people want to see themselves represented, you've now got the addition of trans colours and colours of different cultural groups. That’s really good, but at the same time it misses the fact that historically the colours do not represent a particular group but express a range of possibilities for a whole bunch of people. It’s happened really quickly, this addition of colours to the rainbow flag, and I just wonder if there is a failure to understand the history of the flag. To me that reflects – like the marriage stuff – a failure to understand what we're giving up of our own history and experience in order to just run like mad towards this hetero ideal of relationship.
DR: There’s the ‘love is love’ mantra as well …
TJ: Yeah, don’t you find when you say that, it’s almost meaningless? It really says nothing.
DR: Yeah, and even with ‘Pride’ – you have to remind yourself what ‘pride’ actually is.
TJ: That’s the thing, its benign, which to some extent renders us benign. And I think that's been the goal – to knock the perceived ‘difficult’ edges off of us. And given this, what do phrases like ‘love is love’ mean when you’re not seeing us in all our complexity? And not to reduce it all to sex, but I don’t think love is the issue for people who don’t like us, I think sex is. Certainly, that’s the impression you get from them.
DR: That’s such a good point.
TJ: But you're not going to trot that out at your family-friendly thing. ‘Sex is only sex’ is true, of course, but you just don’t hear it.
Reading lots of stuff about activism has really shown me that we do have a significant history, not only of activism but courage and resourcefulness. Some people either don’t know about it or want to run away from it very quickly to be in that safe space – which is ultimately a compromised space as it's currently presented I think.
DR: Can you talk a bit about gender?
TJ: I think about gender a lot. I don’t want to be gendered. I don't want any of it, and this is something I’ve only really been able to articulate in a very clear way in the last five or six years with shifts in language – new awareness of pronouns, that kind of stuff. Since I was a kid, I’ve always felt particularly strongly that the notion of being male, or being a man, is like a straitjacket. I've always had an aversion to that. I even remember little things as a kid. We used to go to my grandfather’s for holidays, and whenever we met people, particularly men, we had to shake their hand, which I really hated doing. It was always so aggressive – If I didn't squeeze hard enough, they’d squeeze mine harder. I’ve never really worn a watch, because I remembered my father gave me a watch when I was younger, and I didn't like it because it was so big and chunky. And without sort of being able to articulate it, I think that gendered sense of an object didn’t sit well with me.
So, I just feel like if I had to use a term at all, what I would use is agender. To say, I don't identify as male doesn't mean I identify as female – I wouldn’t ascribe maleness or femaleness to any of my behaviour, because my feeling is that if it's in me – and yes, I’m biologically male – then it’s human behaviour as opposed to gendered behaviour. So the logic that you’re behaviour is male or female doesn’t work for me. There are often these kind of stereotypes – like men are withdrawn or unemotional or not able to express their emotions. I can think of a number of women who are exactly like that, so who does that behaviour belong to, which gender? I think behaviour is just human behaviour, and we’ve ascribed a sense of maleness or femaleness to it. I think that’s a kind of a straitjacket for everyone. I just don't want to be straitjacketed.
I remember at work I was searching for something and couldn’t find it. My boss found it and said, oh, you were having a man look. This is the casual kind of gendered stuff you get all the time. And I was like, no, I just couldn’t find the thing. And then there would be times when she couldn’t find something. I’d jokingly say to her, I love it when you gender me, which she knows I don’t. So people become conscious of when they are doing that, even just casually. I think when you gender somebody else pejoratively with a stereotype, in that same moment you gender yourself in a way that's constraining too, because in a binary context you are saying, I am not this set of behaviours, I am the other set of behaviours. Which in traditional terms means male or female, and the associated behaviours we’ve applied to these categories. I really don’t think people realise that they have also narrowed the parameters for their own expression in moments like this.
People would probably say I'm cis-gendered, in terms of presentation, because I present as male. But you have to acknowledge also, then, that we’ve gendered these pants as male. I wouldn’t say these shoes are male or female necessarily. Once you let go of that, what are my clothes saying about me? Ultimately nothing really, they’re just clothes. I really try not to gender other people as well, by applying some reductive gender stereotype to them. I don't necessarily want to encounter people as men or women, male or female because I think that's not a good way to start with people. I totally accept that some people want to be gendered and have specific gender identities, and I'm very happy to honour that as well, but I'm not into it myself.
DR: Is there a point where you crystallised these ideas?
TJ: Probably in the last five or six years more pointedly. There was a period when I was operating within the binary, and aligning myself more with a sense of femaleness, because I felt there was probably more room for expression in there than there was in ‘man’ for me. But now I think both those things are straitjackets. I was at a training session once with Safe Schools and I actually asked them, do you think we will ever get rid of gender? And they said no. It’s so ingrained.
It's interesting because gender is not innate. You’re not born gendered. I mean you’re born male and female, intersex, yes – in terms of biology – but everything else is something we pile on. To me it has an interesting correlation with another constraint that I also believe is not innate – religion. You're not born religious. You are indoctrinated into a faith, often from birth, so you come to think that tenets, propositions, dictates of faith areinnate. But they’re things that are taught. I think what this moment is showing us very clearly is that they can be unlearned as well, and that’s really frightening to lots of people.
I also think marriage equality was an opportunity for hetero people to really stop and think about what kind of relationships they want to have and see as valid, beyond marriage. But that didn’t occur. We just went, Yep, we will take what you have thanks, and that’s enough for us. With the gender stuff it's the same moment again, in a way – people who operate in that traditional binary can actually stop and think, What does it mean for me to say I’m a man or a woman, in gendered terms, and does that fit me properly? All those associations or connotations of behaviour – are they good for me? Are they truly representative of me? I understand why people don’t do it because it can be very frightening, but when you have an experiential sense of being different in the world, that consciousness is already in you. You know there are other possibilities so maybe it's not as difficult to be open to those possibilities, or broach them. I think about it in terms of being gay as well.
When I was living in Kerang I knew I was gay. You know it explicitly when you start to feel physical attraction towards the same sex, but I think even prior to that there was maybe some sense too, that I couldn’t articulate. I was thinking about the notion of shame attached to sexuality and where it comes from. I remember I was watching My Beautiful Laundrette. I picked that up at the video store a number of times and read the cover.
DR: When was this?
This was in the eighties, and it had not long been out. There was nothing about it that said it was queer really. Maybe I just took it home in the end because I thought the men on the cover were both attractive. I was watching it in the lounge-room by myself because my family were out, and of course it’s entirely apparent when you are watching it that they are gay and there’s a couple of sexual interactions. I remember I was watching it when my family came home and I quickly stopped it. I was thinking about that recently in terms of shame. It’s a really interesting thing because sometimes we fall into saying, I’ve always felt shame about it, but if I’m honest, everything I saw and experienced watching that film was a complete affirmation of who I was. It affirmed everything in a way that nothing else ever had. It recognised me, and was a complete affirmation. Then my family walked in, and I felt shame about it. So, my shame wasn't attached to my sense of my own sexuality at all – it was about other people's perception. That's an interesting thing to realise because often we conflate both those things. There’s a sense that I’ve always felt shame about being gay, but if I’m honest, I don’t think I ever have. But I've had plenty of other people pile that on, in terms of how they reacted, or how I’ve been treated in various circumstances. I remember that my favourite part in that film is when they’re doing some painting and the main character comes up to talk to the character played by Daniel Day Lewis, who’s there with his ‘thug’ mates and Daniel Day Lewis goes to whisper something in the main character’s ear and licks the side of his neck – in front of these people, but they don’t really see what’s going on. It was such a powerful moment for me as a kid. And there was something so interesting about it because it wasn’t a kiss, it wasn't sex, but it was full of all those things in a way. It was such an odd way to express attraction, or love, or care. That sense of affirmation stayed with me my whole life, like, Oh god, at last – something outside of me that is a reflection of what has always been in me. It’s really powerful that kind of stuff.
DR: Another thing I’m interested in is the idea of language and how that shifts and effects who we are.
TJ: I think it would be great if we didn't have to use pronouns. But it goes back to this unremarkable thing – something has to be seen, affirmed, supported, validated before it can be absorbed back into the social fabric. Language is important for creating that awareness and visibility. The language has already changed in the past ten years, in terms of the acronym increasing and all the pronoun stuff and gendered identities.. One of the things I always say at work is that we’re still using ‘male, female and gender diverse’ in our writing. Why not write ‘gender diverse, female, male’? This simple repositioning can help to change people’s thinking about who or what the dominant thing is. It’s a very simple thing, but people just don’t think to do it. Gender diverse, at the moment, really means any kind of gender identity outside of the traditional male/female binary. But my thinking is that ultimately gender diverse should be the overarching frame, of which male and female are component parts. All gendered identities can fit under ‘gender diversity’ as an umbrella term. That way we’re not privileging any gendered identity – all are part of a bigger world of behavioural possibility that’s in all of us. You occasionally see that they’ve started to put female first, but to me that’s not far enough because that's still only addressing female and male, and everything else gets left at the end. I would go a bit further than that.
In my poetry, I’ve written primarily in first person, and I don't think I was ever really conscious of why I did that until recently. You can get a lot of criticism for doing that in the literary community, particularly when you write poetry, because it’s sometimes considered an indulgence – that your writing is just entirely confessional, that potentially there’s no craft employed. These arguments operate on the basis of a proposition that is fundamentally flawed – that as a writer you can be apart from yourself. Even if you write in second or third person, you are the person writing, you are the filter through which real or imagined experiences come into character or story – you cannot be apart from yourself in the way that I think is sometimes suggested. Now, this is not the only reason I write in first person, but it occurred to me, with the shift in thinking about pronoun usage, that I may have unconsciously done this to avoid gendering myself. And this is not to say that I haven’t used gendered pronouns in my creative work, it is reflective of the world in which I live, but I’m interested to see how this shifts as the world shifts. I have even used the notion of being a man in a couple of poems, and all the pejorative connotations and the straitjacketing that comes with that. But the pronouns I would use for me, generally, are ‘they’ and ‘them’ and there's a part of me that thinks about writing using those pronouns. But at the same time it just feels like a bit of a gimmick at the moment – it's not a dictate of the poem itself – which is where all the drivers should come from.
In the end, as much as I'd like people to use my pronouns, I'm not particularly bothered if they don't, and I think that’s fundamentally because I know who I am. I know who I am in terms of not wanting to be gendered or not being a gender, so I'm fairly secure about that. I'm more concerned about those casual comments like, did you have a man look? Because to me that is tapping into a particular gender stereotype that potentially has more impact on reducing the sense of another person, than just saying he/she. That’s how it is for me personally – I know it's different for other people.
DR: Can you think of other uses of language in an everyday context that have impacted you?
TJ: I remember in one workplace, I was the only male for a period, and when they were interviewing for new people, a couple of the staff said, we’ve gotta get a guy in for Terry. I think all the people I’ve worked with are generally really onto all this stuff, but it's that thing of falling into a default position about something. If they were to stop for a moment, and think about what has just been said, they'd realise that's not representative of who I am at all. I've never asked for that, it's not consistent with the way I encounter people. I think they would recognise that they know that and it's just a moment of sort of blurting it out automatically. We all do it in our own ways with different things – its just catching ourself. Those things bother me more than anything else because what they say to me is, you haven't seen who I am, and there's plenty in front of you to show that that's not the way I see the world.
DR: When you introduce yourself to someone do you say your pronouns?
TJ: At work I do a lot. I just think, more than anything else, it’s about putting the language out there so that more and more people see it. My work colleagues use my pronouns and I have to say the first time it happened it was a kind of thrill.
DR: When did you make the decision to use ‘they’ and’ them’?
TJ: A few years ago now. We had a young queer group who were starting to use the range of pronouns as that language was coming into vogue. So I knew a bit about it and started to think about it in relation to myself. We started putting it on our signatures and this was well before the organisation made a commitment to that. So probably it was then.
DR: So how would you like people to see you?
TJ: I just don't want to be seen as a gender, ultimately. More to the point I don't want to feel that I've not been seen, and in those moments that's what it feels like – you've seen or applied some other sense to me that isn't true or actually isn't what I've put forward to you.
DR: If you were to introduce yourself, how would you describe yourself?
TJ: I probably would say my pronouns if it was in front of an LGBTQIA+ audience, because I think it's appreciated in that space. Do I feel I have to do that every single time? No, I don't. I might do it in other contexts, simply because I want it to be in a room where people aren’t really conscious of it. For me, using it is always a little bit of activism rather than an absolute necessity. Personally, I'm okay with my sense of being agender. Do you know the queer American performer/singer Taylor Mac?
DR: I don’t
He did a big 24-hour concert of American music here – he’s a pretty amazing, out there performer. I saw him on an interview on Colbert once, and his pronoun is ‘Judy’. To me that kind of cuts through to what the need to talk about pronouns is about – it’s about choice. I choose to be seen this way, or to be addressed that way, and it could be he, she, they, them – or it could be Judy. You can determine that for yourself. That sense of self determination is the important thing and you can wrap whatever kind of language you want around it, rather than using something that's prescribed.
DR: So if you were to use words to describe yourself, say, if I had the camera now – how would you introduce yourself to people watching?
TJ: You know, I would probably say I'm a poet. I know that can seem reductive to some people as well because there are very specific connotations of what that can mean. It can be quite wanky to some people. But at the same time, poetry, and what poetry does for me, is just a really good fit in terms of … wrestling with the world, in a way, through writing. There's something expansive about it, and for me, there's something of the other about it as well. I guess I have this sense of being an outsider on a few different levels. I don't mean that in a self-aggrandising way, elevating that experience above other possibilities in life. But it is just my experience and I value what’s come from that. Even though I'm not technically an orphan, I identify very strongly with the notion of orphanhood. My father was still alive, although I didn’t live with him as a child. My mother is still alive, although I didn’t know her until I was twelve, and really had no relationship with her. I grew up with my brother for a bit in the home, but then we went our separate ways as well. So I’ve always felt very separate from family. Being in an orphanage, literally, and then – as a gay person – having a sense of being outside a norm, of being in the world in a way that’s different from other people. As much as it might have had drawbacks, it has all these advantages as well. Being a poet is still an outsider thing, because there’s not much of a call for it, you can’t make money from it etc. Historically, poets traditionally had no money, often they would have a benefactor to support them in some way. They were kind of outside the rest of society, in terms of the way they had to live and survive. I guess there’s a sense of tragic romance about them as well, in the same way that there can be about the notion of orphanhood. So, all those things for better or worse are threaded together for me. Yeah, I would say I’m a poet.
TJ: I think it's coming up to 12 years in September. I moved here September 2010, from Melbourne. I grew up in an orphanage in Ballarat from about three ’til 10. Then I was placed in what they were calling family group homes at the time – in the early ’80s. They’d put five kids in a normal house with a couple looking after you. I was there for about three to four years and then went to live with my grandmother in Kerang in northern Victoria, which was a big change. Completely different landscape, much more isolated, a smaller population. I was in Kerang for my teenage years from about 13 till I finished high school and then I was in Melbourne for about 20 years or so. When I was about 20 I went to America and studied acting for a couple years in New York.
DR: Did you enjoy that?
TJ: Yeah, I loved it. I first went there for a couple of months to check it out and locate a school I might go to. When I moved there, I’d just turned 21. I’d never been on a plane before.
DR: So brave.
TJ: It was terrifying but it was something I always wanted to do, and it was the best experience. I was just so incredibly shy. And growing up in institutions you’re not properly socialised either, so it takes a long time for you to work out how to navigate even just everyday relationships and stuff like that. It's interesting that dichotomy of being so shy and terrified, but at the same time feeling an absolute compulsion towards something that just pushes through that on some level. It doesn't mean all that fear and anxiety disappears by any means. It’s still very present every step of the way, but the other thing just pulls you through, it seems.
DR: Did you pursue the acting afterwards?
TJ: I loved it – I loved the craft of it, and often found rehearsing more interesting than the actual performance because that’s when you discover the most. But I got back here and it's a little harder here. It's harder to get good agents, whereas over there, you've got trade papers so you can just access information about auditions and show up, by and large. It's not the same here, you have to have an agent. I got an agent but not a very good one.
The other thing for me was I kind of resented the lack of control you had over anything as an actor. You’re often auditioning for things that aren’t really stretching you in any way, or utilising most of what you know, and you're always at the mercy of everyone else. I’ve always been writing on some level and I just thought, maybe I'll concentrate on the writing because I have more control over that. So that's what I pursued. It's interesting because all the acting stuff informs what I write and how I write, in terms of the questions I might ask, or the subtextual elements of what I'm writing.
DR: In what way?
TJ: Its funny because I don't know that I've ever properly been able to articulate what it is exactly. I think there's a highly intentional aspect in all my poetry – as in thinking about what I'm saying, who I might be talking to, and what I might want from them – which kind of directs the course of what I’ve written. In acting, that intentional stuff underlies the dialogue you get to speak, so it's the thing that drives the dialogue – these are the words with which I'm going to say this thing. You can do that in poetry as well, it's just that you might have to make it a bit more explicit in some way. Because if it's completely buried in some kind of subtext, it might not be evident in the poem at all – so it’s a bit of a balancing act. As much as I write poetry for the page, I'm also thinking about it from a performance point of view. I don't mean a really explicit kind of theatricality, but just – again – knowing what you're saying, why you're saying it, who you’re saying it to, what you want. That kind of driving the course of things.
I do both writing and performing, but I really like the reading experience because it's different from the writing experience, and I do get to employ some of the other skills that I've gotten from studying acting. I get to employ them in a more explicit way, but not high theatricality by any means. Often poetry readings are small and intimate, so that kind of over-the-top or amplified presentation isn't always appropriate. For me it's more that I like talking, I like to feel like I'm having a conversation with the people I’m in front of – I often look at them as well. I don't pretend there’s some kind of fourth wall between us. It’s a kind of intimate exchange, that is more than just a recitation of something.
DR: How old were you when you moved to Castlemaine? And what's it been like living here?
TJ: I was about 40. It's been good. It’s funny because at the moment I really like being here, but at the same time, I could go. Maybe I'm just at an age where I feel I need to stimulate or re-stimulate or reinvigorate my life in some way and moving can do that in a big way. But in terms of living here I’ve really enjoyed it. It's an interesting mix in the town, so you feel that you have engagement with people that are like-minded, and with art stuff as well. But at the same time you're in a town where there are people with differing views and positions on things. That can be a frustration sometimes, but I actually think it's good to be reminded of that fact, because it exists wherever you go. We can minimise our engagement with particular views or behaviours, and we can lessen its impact on us, but I don’t think we can escape it completely. So like anything in life I think you just have to negotiate the best way to be in it.
DR: What about in relation to the LGBTQIA+ community? What's that like, living here?
TJ: There’s certainly a number of queer people in town, but I have to say, until I did ISH [Queer Ideas, Activism & Arts Day Castlemaine], I didn't really have any significant engagement, other than basic social interaction with people that were gay. One of the reasons I did ISH, to be entirely honest, was because I thought maybe I’d find a boyfriend.
DR: Oh really. That’s a lot of work to …
TJ: It didn’t work, I made new friends – new queer friends which was important too. But one of the reasons for doing it was that I was just like, how do I meet anyone here? There's no queer social space, so it will be through friends of friends of friends kinda thing – but that wasn’t happening that frequently. It wasn’t until ISH that I got to see how much bigger the queer community was here. There are a lot of pockets – like The Alluvians that have been here historically and congregate every so often – but I wasn't really part of that either. It would be remiss of me to suggest that that is only a circumstantial problem, it’s possibly also my own shyness and self-consciousness. But then there's another part of me that has actively tried to cultivate that kind of engagement as well. It’s very similar to that thing of being terrified of the acting stuff but feeling absolutely compelled at the same time.
DR: Do you identify with a particular part of that community?
TJ: No probably not. I don’t know whether I really believe in community at all. I think people can come together and energy can kind of accrete around a social issue or whatever, but I think a lot of people think of their community as a static thing – a thing that doesn’t shift and change. But these things do shift and change over time.
So what community am I part of? I don’t know – possibly many, in a way, and none in some respects as well. I'm not very good at being beholden to a group. I just feel like it somehow … I don't know whether diminishes me is the right phrase. I just feel at some point I need to go away from the group and do my own thing. If you belong to a group or a community and stay there, it can mean a sublimation of yourself to the overriding needs of the group. Maybe I just don’t feel comfortable with belonging.
A friend of mine told me a couple years back that they’d put me in their will. I don't care about money but I said to her, what is really meaningful for me about it is that it makes me feel like I belong to someone. It’s hard to say that without crying. But that's not belonging to a group, that's belonging to an individual, so I guess that's the distinction. It’s funny because this person is not gay, or lesbian, bi or trans, but I wouldn't necessarily identify her as heterosexual or heteronormative. This is why I use the word queer a lot, because it's less about sexuality and more about a particular way of being, doing, or seeing the world that's not heteronormative in essence. So I don't know whether I contextualise my sense of belonging to her as belonging to an idea of queer community, or just belonging in a friendship sense.
DR: What do you think of the term LGBTQIA+ community? And do you feel a part of that community?
TJ: I was very much part of that during the marriage equality stuff here with the local council. I drove a bit of that myself, and got some other people activated along the way. I was really engaged in that space. The marriage equality stuff is a case in point. I couldn't care less about marriage, and I couldn't care less about the equality campaign. I just thought they were trying to control the narrative too much, and not really addressing the homophobia or queerphobia that was being thrown at people at that time. That needed to happen, so I was involved and engaged but I wasn't part of the dominant movement in that space, which was primarily about marriage. I actually resented that framing of our rights, because it’s fairly limited being subsumed into a hetero-norm. No one should have to be in a certain type of relationship to have their rights. So, I just thought it was a bit reductive. I was very engaged at that time because fundamentally it is about equal rights. I think people really didn't clue into the limitations that framing it in terms of marriage put on it – in terms of a broader perception of what we were really fighting for.
There was a councillor here that was very supportive, and before we finally got the flag up on one of the flagpoles here in the main street for IDAHOBIT [International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia] one year, and just prior to the event, he stopped me on the street and we were chatting – and he said, you know I just want it to be unremarkable, for it to not be a thing to raise the flag or for you to get married. I think it's interesting the language that’s used to support us sometimes, you know – I just wanted it to be nothing. Ultimately that’s the goal, but you can’t get to unremarkable without doing this middle bit – which is seeing us, supporting us and affirming us.
I’ve thought about that often, and if people say that to me, particularly if they’re heterosexual, I say, well you know the way to make it unremarkable is to affirm us, validate us, support us every second of every day, in the same way you have been validated. That is why you are unremarkable in this space, and that's how we will get to be unremarkable as well. That's the thing that they miss, they think that we just have this moment where we fight for something and then it's all over. The work that actually needs to be done is on that everyday social level, so that every space I go into is a space that I feel seen and affirmed in as a queer person, in the same way that heterosexuals walk into that type of space all the time.
DR: So, what would that look like, or what doesn't it look like?
TJ: Well, it doesn’t look like marriage. Or not marriage alone. It looks like what the world looks like for heterosexual people, I think. They're not confronted every day with the same challenges to who they are. Marriage Equality has also been a failure in understanding that being equal doesn't mean that we have to be the same. We always talk of sameness when it comes to equality, about it being the unifying thing – shared experiences and all that kind of stuff. But you have got to flip it on its head and say that difference is the thing, difference is the commonality we have. That’s a better starting point for ensuring that people's difference is acknowledged, and that people are still treated equally. I think the way we look at it is sometimes completely wrong, because we shouldn't have to be the same. I actually think difference is the one thing we have in common – everyone is different to everyone else in their own ways.
DR: Going back to how you feel when you walk into a space and you’re not affirmed or seen, can you talk about how that manifests in people's behaviour?
TJ: You often hear that casual kind of homophobia when things are said when there's absolutely no consciousness about you being in the room.
As I get older, I don't know that I feel more safe or secure in the world being queer. I feel very unsafe. Maybe because of all the stuff that's swirling around, like the stuff that's happening in America that’s starting to encroach on the progression of queer rights. Even here, just having political leaders that think it's okay to espouse their religious underpinnings as though that's relevant to their roles. I think it’s really quite alarming. The religious discrimination bill is at the point here where discrimination could be legislated against us. It's just a bogus kind of bill that shouldn't occur at all – religious groups are not fundamentally persecuted against here. There might be one or two religious faiths that are targeted, but it's certainly not the faiths that are pushing for this discriminatory bill. It's just a kind of bullshit argument. To go through all that shit with the plebiscite and then have the government give a concession to the people who lost is just bizarre. And all the trans discrimination crap that's going around now, and the policing of young people's bodies, all of that is a bit frightening.
I think in a way it can be healthy to shut off from it as it can make you feel quite unsafe in the world. I think it’s that sense of being othered or being an outsider on some level. For me I think that it’s probably also tinged with having grown up in an orphanage where you are literally outside of society.
That’s not to say that I feel unsafe here necessarily, but I just feel that the world is still pretty hostile when it comes down to it. When you're in relationships you’re buffered a bit more from that. You can retreat into your relationship and you have support there. It gives you a sense of safety. So maybe it's just, as a single person in the world, I feel a bit vulnerable to the vagaries of all those phobias.
DR: Have you experienced that hostility here at all?
TJ: I have experienced it when trying to garner support for the council to raise the flag.
Just some pushback from people. Nothing overly overt, just trotting out homophobic tropes and things like that. There were a couple of letters in the paper around that time that were very ill-informed which I responded to in the opinion section in the local paper.
It was basically around the marriage vote and all that kind of crap. So I wrote responses to different people which was really fun. I did it with humour because otherwise it just becomes a drag having to be super serious all the time. I was putting factual information in there but trying to undermine or show the stupidity of people’s positions with humour. It's interesting, what happens a lot of the time in those opinions things is that it ends up being a huge back-and-forth because other people responded in the paper as well. I responded because I just thought, okay, what if a young person reads this or somebody that's vulnerable, and they don't see anyone countering it? I don't do it because I want to have an argument or a debate about it, because the position is totally wrong – it's not a debate. So I don't continue the conversation, it's just one letter and that’s it. I'm not on Facebook but there was a fair bit of stuff playing out there, during the plebiscite and council fight – some people sent me screen captures of it. But I just deleted it because to me it’s just noise – it’s not worth engaging with.
DR: What did you do to drive the activism around the raising of the rainbow flag in Castlemaine?
TJ: When we were about to do ISH, which was in the week of IDAHOBIT, I approached the council about it and I actually got an email back saying that it had been approved. But when I checked back in, it hadn't been approved. So I went in to talk to them and basically had a conversation that went nowhere. I said, well next year I’ll be coming back again to ask you. And I did that again and they said no again. I’d sent the request in an email because they are obligated to respond that way. But it was a basic no, the justification being that we don’t generally put up other flags – blah, blah, blah. So then I started writing to councillors and the Mayor, just trying to encourage them to support the LGBTQIA+ community. Saying that raising the flag was the thing that we would really like to see, because those symbols are really important and have a significant impact.
I ended up having a meeting with the mayor where it became very clear that it wasn't something they were going to do. So I started to go forensically through the council’s website and there was only one thing on there that mentioned LGBTQIA+ and it was a flyer for an event that somebody else had organised. There was actually nothing in their official documents that mentioned that cohort. What I tried to highlight in my response letter was that, when you talk about community in your plans and policies, you are talking about this group too, even though they're not explicitly there. They didn't seem to understand that there were LGBTQIA+ members in their community, and they may not identify themselves as such when needing something from the council – whether it's a flag being raised, or a road being fixed, it's still potentially an LGBTQIA+ person asking for it. I think the best thing to do when approaching councils is to look at what they've got written up about their obligations to community, and then articulate how you, as a cohort, or an individual community member, would be covered by the obligations they’ve outlined that they have to deliver on. So I just tried doing that. Look, it's really exhausting as well.
DR: It must have been so much work.
TJ: It was quite a bit of work, and I was really sick of doing it by the end, but at the same time I have to admit I really love the forensic nature of it – making a considered argument to advocate for things.
DR: What gave you the energy to do it?
TJ: I was really angry that nobody actually stood up to challenge the notion of a plebiscite in any serious way. Like, why isn’t everybody angry about this? You can get into this space when you're passionate about an issue where you have an expectation that everybody else should be up in arms about it as well. It’s not a very realistic expectation because that is hardly ever the case, so I’ve tried to adjust my thinking about that. I'm over here focusing on this issue and putting my energy into it, but somebody might be over there focusing on another issue that's really important but that maybe I don't give as much of my energy to. So there’s a kind of understanding that people are investing their energy in the things they can, and all those things are good, as long as someone is doing something in all those spaces. That’s better than just getting angry because nobody is speaking up.
DR: What happened in the end – did they put the flag up?
TJ: Eventually we got the flag up in 2018, but they developed a flag policy during that time. It's a stalling process where they develop a policy that says if you want to put a flag up you have to apply to council – you have to do it within a certain amount of time, it has to fulfil certain criteria, it has to be specific measurements … There’s all these protocols around flags, particularly on council flagpoles. I’ve seen this happen a couple of times where there was no flag policy until someone asked for the rainbow flag to be put up. I think the flag raising now might be embedded in the council’s annual calendar so people don’t have to request it anymore, which is good.
It’s funny that it never seems to happen easily. There's this idea of risk in anything that's LGBTQIA+. I don't think it's justified, by any means. I often think organisations create more of a problem for themselves if they don't clearly say, we're for equality and we think this is a good thing. When you let a vocal minority have space, you ultimately amplify their voices by not saying unequivocally that you, as an organisation, are for equality. Rather than saying, this is no problem for us, it's consistent with our desire for people to be treated equally and supported. It’s a very simple thing, but people are just terrified to say this unequivocally in certain contexts, particularly organisational contexts.
I found it exhausting by the end, emotionally and mentally. What the people at the other side of the table sometimes don't understand is that when you go into those meetings, those spaces, what you’re experiencing every time are the effects of culturally ingrained homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. You’re a queer person in that space. I don’t want to suggest that I’m overly sensitive, or that other queer people in the room were, but that’s what we were faced with, and the people on the other side of the table have no consciousness of the intolerance, the discrimination and the culturally ingrained queerphobia that’s in the room. Because they’re not subject to it.
DR: So what was the behaviour of the councillors like towards you?
I think there was one councillor that was particularly supportive – even though I think he was maybe a little bit ignorant as to the complexity of how we were being impacted by the whole thing. I do think he was genuinely supportive, and the rest I thought were just going through the motions of appearing to be supportive. To me the most telling thing was that they suggested we could set up a roundtable which was not something that anybody had asked for. We just asked for the flag to be raised. I felt this was their way out of doing the thing we actually requested, but we engaged with it because you've got to in a way, and we had a couple of meetings, for the roundtable, where we were talking about terms of reference and that kind of stuff.
At that first meeting we talked a bit about the council staff having put up rainbow flags in the window to show their support. I said that I was very aware that they had queer staff, and they must be suffering in this context as well, and I hoped council was doing something to support them. They said, yes, yes, yes that’s happening. And then the very next day the staff were all directed to take down those rainbow flags from the windows.
It just exposed how much of a performance that meeting was, it wasn't genuine. I think, the roundtable was created to placate and create a sense that everything was okay. So I decided I wasn’t going to be a part of it because I didn't think they were serious about using it to achieve anything – often roundtables are places where things go to die. Just a lot of talk and no action. In the terms of reference there wasn’t any commitment to actioning anything. That may be different now. At one point at that first meeting someone in the group said to the councillors and CEO, why are you doing the round table? And they couldn’t answer, they hadn’t even thought up a bullshit answer to present to us. That was really telling.
My feeling about it is, we spent a lot of time talking with them, they haven’t really moved much and they haven’t done much – so let’s just take that as a given and direct our energies somewhere else, somewhere more productive. And then if they eventually come on board – fine. That’s the other thing I learned from that experience – that sometimes it’s important to have that really full-on public moment that disrupts, creates awareness and catalyses action for a lot of people. You keep at it in those moments, because with disruption there’s an opportunity to move things along, but I think when you see that things have stopped moving significantly, you have to acknowledge that part of moving anything is … time. You can have the big moment, but the impact and the effect of that might not be apparent until a couple of years later, in terms of changes in behaviour or understanding. Personally, I didn’t want to stick around for those two years – banging my head against that wall. There’s a kind of organic absorption that occurs over time and that’s been reflected in LGBTQIA+ awareness-raising by others who stayed on the round table and the number of queer events that have popped up since then.
DR: So something positive has come out of it.
TJ: Yeah, Sherene Clow is quite involved in the roundtable and community and she’s great and Martyn Shaddick at Community House too. The other thing I realised is it goes back to that notion of community as well, and the idea that sometimes communities are a monolith. I was very conscious that even though we were all driving toward the same thing, we were all driving in different ways. Sometimes what can happen, and what did happen in that space, is that people start to direct some animus at each other for not pursuing it in the same way, rather than just accepting that they might be better investing their activism energies elsewhere. You have to accept within the space where people are fighting for the same thing, that doing it in different ways is not a problem. I think having a range of people around the table pushing a range of buttons is actually a really good thing, and it’s good not to see that as a potential threat or an imposition on somebody else’s preferred way of moving something along. They all actually work together, but sometimes that sense of things is lost in the moment.
DR: It does seem to be happening more and more – the trans conversation you were talking about earlier comes to mind.
TJ: The trans stuff at the moment is horrible. But in terms of discrimination, it's just a continuation of what's always been there. It comes fundamentally from religion and faith, which is to my mind where most queerphobia comes from. I’ve got a great dictionary called the Dictionary of Homophobia that’s an A to Z of homophobia, and it shows clearly that in a lot of places where homophobia, biphobia or transphobia exist in the world, it's a result of two things that follow each other – colonisation and the bringing of, more often than not, Western Christian faith into a particular location. Often into places where there has previously been a tacit acceptance of homosexuality within the community, or the notion of a third sex, or trans.
What often happens, when the establishment lose one argument against the push for rights, is they recalibrate and rebrand and focus their attention on it in another way – and in this instance it’s trans people. Toilets have historically been a site for civil rights battles. The suggestion that trans people are a threat in these spaces is bullshit. Statistically, there is a lot of data that shows that trans people are more likely to experience harm in these spaces than anyone else – because of ongoing transphobia.
There’s just so much more to know – all of this has been a high learning curve for me, because I really had to educate myself about lots of things that I wasn't fully aware of. I started reading a lot.
DR: What were you reading?
TJ: Things like the Dictionary of Homophobia and a lot of books from queer activists in the past. I obviously read a bit of queer literature. I also listen to queer speakers and activists, particularly ones that step outside of narratives that are fundamentally heteronormative, and really don’t want to address us – really just don’t want us to exist. How do we argue for ourselves in that space, when all that language is about not addressing us – not treating us as valid or equal? The perfect example is biblical arguments. Some people argue that the Bible says this, and then others say, yeah, but it says you shouldn't eat shellfish either, or whatever. And I’m like, why are you even having the argument? It doesn't matter what the Bible says, it's got nothing to do with anything. That may be relevant for a person of faith because that's what they've chosen to believe, but it has no bearing on anything else. So to use it to counter what's being argued by the person of faith validates the Bible as an authoritative text. People fall into that space really easily and we just end up stuck there. We're not really stepping outside of seriously problematic framing of our lives and unashamedly asserting our right to exist in the world, to be treated fairly.
DR: Can you talk about the flag and Pride and the idea of community?
TJ: It’s hard because there is a dichotomy. I understand the flag as being a really important visible symbol – it makes me feel immediately comfortable if I see it in a business or shop window. I know I can walk in there and I’m not going to encounter any whatever, but I do think it’s become a kind of Disneyfied, family-friendly presentation of who we are – and kind of sexless as well.
We never talk about the fact that we actually have sex or the sexuality component of being queer, because that's the thing that really bothers people and that's the thing they can't get over. I don’t think hetero people really have a hard time with the idea that we love people of the same sex. And if they do, it’s because they’re seeing love between us as sex. The flag has become, as a result of equality and Pride campaigns, aimed at ‘changing hearts and minds’, a kind of sexless, family friendly representation of us – safe and non-threatening to hetero people. We are not just one thing, and there’s a whole lot of value and learning that can be got from the fact that we’ve lived in different ways and we behave in different ways. I don't think that should just be thrown out the window in this march towards marriage or any other hetero ideal.
The other thing is, the colours of the flag traditionally don't represent lesbian, trans etc. Historically, they are things like sensuality, sexuality … I can’t remember them all off the top of my head. But because people want to see themselves represented, you've now got the addition of trans colours and colours of different cultural groups. That’s really good, but at the same time it misses the fact that historically the colours do not represent a particular group but express a range of possibilities for a whole bunch of people. It’s happened really quickly, this addition of colours to the rainbow flag, and I just wonder if there is a failure to understand the history of the flag. To me that reflects – like the marriage stuff – a failure to understand what we're giving up of our own history and experience in order to just run like mad towards this hetero ideal of relationship.
DR: There’s the ‘love is love’ mantra as well …
TJ: Yeah, don’t you find when you say that, it’s almost meaningless? It really says nothing.
DR: Yeah, and even with ‘Pride’ – you have to remind yourself what ‘pride’ actually is.
TJ: That’s the thing, its benign, which to some extent renders us benign. And I think that's been the goal – to knock the perceived ‘difficult’ edges off of us. And given this, what do phrases like ‘love is love’ mean when you’re not seeing us in all our complexity? And not to reduce it all to sex, but I don’t think love is the issue for people who don’t like us, I think sex is. Certainly, that’s the impression you get from them.
DR: That’s such a good point.
TJ: But you're not going to trot that out at your family-friendly thing. ‘Sex is only sex’ is true, of course, but you just don’t hear it.
Reading lots of stuff about activism has really shown me that we do have a significant history, not only of activism but courage and resourcefulness. Some people either don’t know about it or want to run away from it very quickly to be in that safe space – which is ultimately a compromised space as it's currently presented I think.
DR: Can you talk a bit about gender?
TJ: I think about gender a lot. I don’t want to be gendered. I don't want any of it, and this is something I’ve only really been able to articulate in a very clear way in the last five or six years with shifts in language – new awareness of pronouns, that kind of stuff. Since I was a kid, I’ve always felt particularly strongly that the notion of being male, or being a man, is like a straitjacket. I've always had an aversion to that. I even remember little things as a kid. We used to go to my grandfather’s for holidays, and whenever we met people, particularly men, we had to shake their hand, which I really hated doing. It was always so aggressive – If I didn't squeeze hard enough, they’d squeeze mine harder. I’ve never really worn a watch, because I remembered my father gave me a watch when I was younger, and I didn't like it because it was so big and chunky. And without sort of being able to articulate it, I think that gendered sense of an object didn’t sit well with me.
So, I just feel like if I had to use a term at all, what I would use is agender. To say, I don't identify as male doesn't mean I identify as female – I wouldn’t ascribe maleness or femaleness to any of my behaviour, because my feeling is that if it's in me – and yes, I’m biologically male – then it’s human behaviour as opposed to gendered behaviour. So the logic that you’re behaviour is male or female doesn’t work for me. There are often these kind of stereotypes – like men are withdrawn or unemotional or not able to express their emotions. I can think of a number of women who are exactly like that, so who does that behaviour belong to, which gender? I think behaviour is just human behaviour, and we’ve ascribed a sense of maleness or femaleness to it. I think that’s a kind of a straitjacket for everyone. I just don't want to be straitjacketed.
I remember at work I was searching for something and couldn’t find it. My boss found it and said, oh, you were having a man look. This is the casual kind of gendered stuff you get all the time. And I was like, no, I just couldn’t find the thing. And then there would be times when she couldn’t find something. I’d jokingly say to her, I love it when you gender me, which she knows I don’t. So people become conscious of when they are doing that, even just casually. I think when you gender somebody else pejoratively with a stereotype, in that same moment you gender yourself in a way that's constraining too, because in a binary context you are saying, I am not this set of behaviours, I am the other set of behaviours. Which in traditional terms means male or female, and the associated behaviours we’ve applied to these categories. I really don’t think people realise that they have also narrowed the parameters for their own expression in moments like this.
People would probably say I'm cis-gendered, in terms of presentation, because I present as male. But you have to acknowledge also, then, that we’ve gendered these pants as male. I wouldn’t say these shoes are male or female necessarily. Once you let go of that, what are my clothes saying about me? Ultimately nothing really, they’re just clothes. I really try not to gender other people as well, by applying some reductive gender stereotype to them. I don't necessarily want to encounter people as men or women, male or female because I think that's not a good way to start with people. I totally accept that some people want to be gendered and have specific gender identities, and I'm very happy to honour that as well, but I'm not into it myself.
DR: Is there a point where you crystallised these ideas?
TJ: Probably in the last five or six years more pointedly. There was a period when I was operating within the binary, and aligning myself more with a sense of femaleness, because I felt there was probably more room for expression in there than there was in ‘man’ for me. But now I think both those things are straitjackets. I was at a training session once with Safe Schools and I actually asked them, do you think we will ever get rid of gender? And they said no. It’s so ingrained.
It's interesting because gender is not innate. You’re not born gendered. I mean you’re born male and female, intersex, yes – in terms of biology – but everything else is something we pile on. To me it has an interesting correlation with another constraint that I also believe is not innate – religion. You're not born religious. You are indoctrinated into a faith, often from birth, so you come to think that tenets, propositions, dictates of faith areinnate. But they’re things that are taught. I think what this moment is showing us very clearly is that they can be unlearned as well, and that’s really frightening to lots of people.
I also think marriage equality was an opportunity for hetero people to really stop and think about what kind of relationships they want to have and see as valid, beyond marriage. But that didn’t occur. We just went, Yep, we will take what you have thanks, and that’s enough for us. With the gender stuff it's the same moment again, in a way – people who operate in that traditional binary can actually stop and think, What does it mean for me to say I’m a man or a woman, in gendered terms, and does that fit me properly? All those associations or connotations of behaviour – are they good for me? Are they truly representative of me? I understand why people don’t do it because it can be very frightening, but when you have an experiential sense of being different in the world, that consciousness is already in you. You know there are other possibilities so maybe it's not as difficult to be open to those possibilities, or broach them. I think about it in terms of being gay as well.
When I was living in Kerang I knew I was gay. You know it explicitly when you start to feel physical attraction towards the same sex, but I think even prior to that there was maybe some sense too, that I couldn’t articulate. I was thinking about the notion of shame attached to sexuality and where it comes from. I remember I was watching My Beautiful Laundrette. I picked that up at the video store a number of times and read the cover.
DR: When was this?
This was in the eighties, and it had not long been out. There was nothing about it that said it was queer really. Maybe I just took it home in the end because I thought the men on the cover were both attractive. I was watching it in the lounge-room by myself because my family were out, and of course it’s entirely apparent when you are watching it that they are gay and there’s a couple of sexual interactions. I remember I was watching it when my family came home and I quickly stopped it. I was thinking about that recently in terms of shame. It’s a really interesting thing because sometimes we fall into saying, I’ve always felt shame about it, but if I’m honest, everything I saw and experienced watching that film was a complete affirmation of who I was. It affirmed everything in a way that nothing else ever had. It recognised me, and was a complete affirmation. Then my family walked in, and I felt shame about it. So, my shame wasn't attached to my sense of my own sexuality at all – it was about other people's perception. That's an interesting thing to realise because often we conflate both those things. There’s a sense that I’ve always felt shame about being gay, but if I’m honest, I don’t think I ever have. But I've had plenty of other people pile that on, in terms of how they reacted, or how I’ve been treated in various circumstances. I remember that my favourite part in that film is when they’re doing some painting and the main character comes up to talk to the character played by Daniel Day Lewis, who’s there with his ‘thug’ mates and Daniel Day Lewis goes to whisper something in the main character’s ear and licks the side of his neck – in front of these people, but they don’t really see what’s going on. It was such a powerful moment for me as a kid. And there was something so interesting about it because it wasn’t a kiss, it wasn't sex, but it was full of all those things in a way. It was such an odd way to express attraction, or love, or care. That sense of affirmation stayed with me my whole life, like, Oh god, at last – something outside of me that is a reflection of what has always been in me. It’s really powerful that kind of stuff.
DR: Another thing I’m interested in is the idea of language and how that shifts and effects who we are.
TJ: I think it would be great if we didn't have to use pronouns. But it goes back to this unremarkable thing – something has to be seen, affirmed, supported, validated before it can be absorbed back into the social fabric. Language is important for creating that awareness and visibility. The language has already changed in the past ten years, in terms of the acronym increasing and all the pronoun stuff and gendered identities.. One of the things I always say at work is that we’re still using ‘male, female and gender diverse’ in our writing. Why not write ‘gender diverse, female, male’? This simple repositioning can help to change people’s thinking about who or what the dominant thing is. It’s a very simple thing, but people just don’t think to do it. Gender diverse, at the moment, really means any kind of gender identity outside of the traditional male/female binary. But my thinking is that ultimately gender diverse should be the overarching frame, of which male and female are component parts. All gendered identities can fit under ‘gender diversity’ as an umbrella term. That way we’re not privileging any gendered identity – all are part of a bigger world of behavioural possibility that’s in all of us. You occasionally see that they’ve started to put female first, but to me that’s not far enough because that's still only addressing female and male, and everything else gets left at the end. I would go a bit further than that.
In my poetry, I’ve written primarily in first person, and I don't think I was ever really conscious of why I did that until recently. You can get a lot of criticism for doing that in the literary community, particularly when you write poetry, because it’s sometimes considered an indulgence – that your writing is just entirely confessional, that potentially there’s no craft employed. These arguments operate on the basis of a proposition that is fundamentally flawed – that as a writer you can be apart from yourself. Even if you write in second or third person, you are the person writing, you are the filter through which real or imagined experiences come into character or story – you cannot be apart from yourself in the way that I think is sometimes suggested. Now, this is not the only reason I write in first person, but it occurred to me, with the shift in thinking about pronoun usage, that I may have unconsciously done this to avoid gendering myself. And this is not to say that I haven’t used gendered pronouns in my creative work, it is reflective of the world in which I live, but I’m interested to see how this shifts as the world shifts. I have even used the notion of being a man in a couple of poems, and all the pejorative connotations and the straitjacketing that comes with that. But the pronouns I would use for me, generally, are ‘they’ and ‘them’ and there's a part of me that thinks about writing using those pronouns. But at the same time it just feels like a bit of a gimmick at the moment – it's not a dictate of the poem itself – which is where all the drivers should come from.
In the end, as much as I'd like people to use my pronouns, I'm not particularly bothered if they don't, and I think that’s fundamentally because I know who I am. I know who I am in terms of not wanting to be gendered or not being a gender, so I'm fairly secure about that. I'm more concerned about those casual comments like, did you have a man look? Because to me that is tapping into a particular gender stereotype that potentially has more impact on reducing the sense of another person, than just saying he/she. That’s how it is for me personally – I know it's different for other people.
DR: Can you think of other uses of language in an everyday context that have impacted you?
TJ: I remember in one workplace, I was the only male for a period, and when they were interviewing for new people, a couple of the staff said, we’ve gotta get a guy in for Terry. I think all the people I’ve worked with are generally really onto all this stuff, but it's that thing of falling into a default position about something. If they were to stop for a moment, and think about what has just been said, they'd realise that's not representative of who I am at all. I've never asked for that, it's not consistent with the way I encounter people. I think they would recognise that they know that and it's just a moment of sort of blurting it out automatically. We all do it in our own ways with different things – its just catching ourself. Those things bother me more than anything else because what they say to me is, you haven't seen who I am, and there's plenty in front of you to show that that's not the way I see the world.
DR: When you introduce yourself to someone do you say your pronouns?
TJ: At work I do a lot. I just think, more than anything else, it’s about putting the language out there so that more and more people see it. My work colleagues use my pronouns and I have to say the first time it happened it was a kind of thrill.
DR: When did you make the decision to use ‘they’ and’ them’?
TJ: A few years ago now. We had a young queer group who were starting to use the range of pronouns as that language was coming into vogue. So I knew a bit about it and started to think about it in relation to myself. We started putting it on our signatures and this was well before the organisation made a commitment to that. So probably it was then.
DR: So how would you like people to see you?
TJ: I just don't want to be seen as a gender, ultimately. More to the point I don't want to feel that I've not been seen, and in those moments that's what it feels like – you've seen or applied some other sense to me that isn't true or actually isn't what I've put forward to you.
DR: If you were to introduce yourself, how would you describe yourself?
TJ: I probably would say my pronouns if it was in front of an LGBTQIA+ audience, because I think it's appreciated in that space. Do I feel I have to do that every single time? No, I don't. I might do it in other contexts, simply because I want it to be in a room where people aren’t really conscious of it. For me, using it is always a little bit of activism rather than an absolute necessity. Personally, I'm okay with my sense of being agender. Do you know the queer American performer/singer Taylor Mac?
DR: I don’t
He did a big 24-hour concert of American music here – he’s a pretty amazing, out there performer. I saw him on an interview on Colbert once, and his pronoun is ‘Judy’. To me that kind of cuts through to what the need to talk about pronouns is about – it’s about choice. I choose to be seen this way, or to be addressed that way, and it could be he, she, they, them – or it could be Judy. You can determine that for yourself. That sense of self determination is the important thing and you can wrap whatever kind of language you want around it, rather than using something that's prescribed.
DR: So if you were to use words to describe yourself, say, if I had the camera now – how would you introduce yourself to people watching?
TJ: You know, I would probably say I'm a poet. I know that can seem reductive to some people as well because there are very specific connotations of what that can mean. It can be quite wanky to some people. But at the same time, poetry, and what poetry does for me, is just a really good fit in terms of … wrestling with the world, in a way, through writing. There's something expansive about it, and for me, there's something of the other about it as well. I guess I have this sense of being an outsider on a few different levels. I don't mean that in a self-aggrandising way, elevating that experience above other possibilities in life. But it is just my experience and I value what’s come from that. Even though I'm not technically an orphan, I identify very strongly with the notion of orphanhood. My father was still alive, although I didn’t live with him as a child. My mother is still alive, although I didn’t know her until I was twelve, and really had no relationship with her. I grew up with my brother for a bit in the home, but then we went our separate ways as well. So I’ve always felt very separate from family. Being in an orphanage, literally, and then – as a gay person – having a sense of being outside a norm, of being in the world in a way that’s different from other people. As much as it might have had drawbacks, it has all these advantages as well. Being a poet is still an outsider thing, because there’s not much of a call for it, you can’t make money from it etc. Historically, poets traditionally had no money, often they would have a benefactor to support them in some way. They were kind of outside the rest of society, in terms of the way they had to live and survive. I guess there’s a sense of tragic romance about them as well, in the same way that there can be about the notion of orphanhood. So, all those things for better or worse are threaded together for me. Yeah, I would say I’m a poet.