[CW for homophobia & the dehumanised responses it produces in me]
When my mum told me the marriage equality postal surveys had arrived, I thought ‘Finally!’
Then when I opened the letter, pulled out the ballot, read it, stared at those two boxes, I felt sick.
I ticked ‘Yes’.
All those years of hearing the people around me talking about LGBT people with disgust, with confusion, with mockery, with condescension, with loathing, with every little ingredient of reducing us to something subhuman until I grew up despising myself, started running through my mind.
I carefully ran my pen over my tick mark five times, to make it bolder, deeper, like embedding it deeply on the page would somehow give it more emotional weight.
Homosexuality was legalised here in 1997. I’m not sure if I remember the ‘debate’ or if I just picked it all up in the subsequent years, as I frantically searched through everything I could, fiction, non-fiction, for traces of people like me. I didn’t come up with much, so I started to write it myself, to promise myself, you’re not as alone as this Tasmanian high school makes it seem.
In 1997, I was five. I knew I was queer.
I always knew, and so I grew up terrified.
I grew up doubting my own humanity so much, I have depersonalisation-derealisation disorder.
None of the little things people said hurt much individually, but it added up, bit by bit, until I felt anxious even breathing, forget about coming out. People are casually hostile without realising, often without meaning to be, but it’s there, it adds up, to a postal survey, a single page, a badly worded question, two tick boxes, and my deeply marked tick.
I don’t even want to get married. I just want to feel that casual hostility ease. It had started to ease in recent years, but it still weighs down, as I stare at that page.
Ultimately, this survey doesn’t mean anything. We all know it. It’s throwing millions of dollars at delaying the extension of human rights.
And I know that’s kind of Australia’s whole thing, but holding the results, holding that deeply rooted contempt for my community in the form of a single page, a single question, two check boxes…
They reduced something representative of the pain my community has been suffering for centuries to a badly worded Yes / No question, and it doesn’t even mean anything.
I don’t feel particularly like a human tonight.
Sues Cummings 