Magical creatures

Today I said goodbye to an amazing group of young people, each of whom managed to make a huge impact on me over the course of the past year. I've been doing this for ten years now. You'd think I'd be used to it, but each year, in the week before Christmas, I come home from what seems like the longest day of my life, feeling somehow both inspired and deflated.

Teaching Grade 6, each year, means always having to let go. In seven weeks, these students will divide themselves among six different high schools, and what they do from here on out is none of my concern. Ideally. In reality I will think of, and worry about, those 29 kids often over my summer break. I will anxiously await any significant news about them, which has worked its way along the grapevine, upon my arrival back at work at the end of January.

I work in a tough community, and this year has been tougher than most for each of them. Several tragedies, and other unexpected events, have shaken them and chipped away at any part of them which still believed the world was only made of good. I know I was lucky to be able to hold onto this ideal for much longer than they have been. They are growing up in a completely different world to the one I grew up in.

What has amazed me, and made my heart double in size repeatedly this year, has been their collective ability to stand back up, each time they have been knocked down, and refuse to let those experiences define them. The particular brand of resilience these kids have demonstrated is one I've rarely seen before and have all shown bravery, strength, and courage at every turn.

I had a brief opportunity to sit with them today and just talk. I thanked them for being the best parts of my day. I made sure they know they are each every bit the superheroes they sang about together in their graduation song at the end of today's ceremony. I made each of them promise to look after each other. I'm confident they will.

I don't think it occurs to kids how much they are able to teach us about ourselves and the world just by being around them everyday. I don't think they now they're made of magic. I'm going to miss this bunch like mad, and I may not be able to listen to this song again without a tear in my eye, but each of them became my superheroes this year.

"When you've been fighting for it all your life
You've been struggling to make things right
That’s how a superhero learns to fly
Every day, every hour
Turn the pain into power"

So many outings

Over the years I've come out through letters, in phone calls, and while chatting online. I came out to my mum in a moving car, and wished I’d planned the evening differently. I've come out to one adult at a time, and I've come out to a room of 30 children, twice. I came out to one friend at a bus stop in the rain, and another in the library during study break. I came out to two friends while we ate McDonald's at the food hall after school. I've come out so many times in the past 17 years that my racing heart, as I correct an assumption of heterosexuality or confirm a suspicion of the opposite, has become the soundtrack to every memory of those admissions.

I don’t remember when I first came out to myself.

I don’t even recall when I first allowed the word to enter my mind and let it attach itself to my understanding of who I am. For the longest time I came out to people without saying the word ‘gay’ at all.

In the summer after Year 10 finished, I was 15 and had been sitting in silence on the phone to the girl I was in love with my best friend for longer than was comfortable. She’d asked me why I had been so quiet while we were laying together in the park, hours earlier, and why I’d seemed so angry when we left. I didn't know how to answer that because I didn't have any of the words which would allow things to both make sense and still be okay. Strict upbringings and Catholic school environments can do a real number on you. 

“I don’t want to be what I seem to think I am.”

There it was. Without using any of the words I needed to include to have it all make sense, I’d revealed every one of my fears in a single sentence. Over the next year I tried not being who I seemed to think I was, at absolutely every opportunity, and then another girl came along, made me fall for her, and completely foiled my plans. This is where the letters, phone calls, and the car ride with Mum began. While each of these ‘outings’ was a different shade of heartbreaking, in among them is one that serves to remind me that amazing people are lurking everywhere and simple acts of kindness can change the world.

On weekends in college I worked serving food at a street market. There were many regular customers who came by, ordering the same thing week to week, and two of these customers were a young, gay couple in their 20s. The two women would often arrive at the stall holding hands or with their arms around each other and I looked forward to Saturdays just to be able to see people expressing the very affection my mother had warned me not to show in public with my girlfriend. On the weeks they didn't come by at all, I would leave the market feeling a little dejected as though we’d had a standing arrangement and they had let me down. On the weeks they did arrive, I found myself looking at them and in my mind I would be screaming I’M GAY TOO, hoping desperately that they would hear me.

School was horrible. My girlfriend and I were bullied relentlessly, locked in toilet blocks, pushed around, and became targets to throw unwanted food at, and the nuns and priests in charge didn't know what to do about US. When the consistent message from all sides was that WE were the problem, I decided to write a letter to the two customers at work. Even writing that now feels absurd, but I didn't feel as though I had a single other person I could turn to. I can’t remember all of my words, but I do remember describing the difficulties my girlfriend and I were experiencing, and then writing 'I just want to know if it gets better'. Part-way through my next shift I saw them approaching our stall and while I worked with three other people, I hurried with the customers I was serving in order to ensure that I would be the one to serve the women.

I began preparing their order before they spoke and I’m not even sure I heard them over the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. As they paid for their food I dipped one hand into the coin draw for their change and the other into my pocket to retrieve the letter.

“Can I just give you this too?” I'm sure if my voice was even audible, it would have wavered as I spoke to the taller of the two, and offered out my hand, the change sitting with the letter I had written.

The following Saturday, she came along by herself. She ordered the same food as always and, this time, when I handed her some change, she handed me a letter. I don’t know if the smile on my face was a big as the one in my heart, but I do know the remainder of my shift went by very slowly as I waited for a chance to read her response.

The only things I now recall about her letter were her writing that she felt I was brave, and providing me with her phone number. There was so much more in it, three pages of blue paper, but those two things are the two which stood out. She was praising me for saying the words everyone else frowned upon, and she was offering her support.

Over the following year, this woman and her girlfriend offered me, and my girlfriend, advice and support at every turn. They invited us into their home and allowed me to phone them when I needed someone to talk to. They put us in touch with other people and organisations which could offer support. They supported us when my girlfriend took too many pills, and they visited her in the hospital. They supported us the first time we broke up and the first time we got back together. Knowing we had the support of these two women was one of the only things that helped me through my final year of Catholic school. The following year they moved interstate and we kept in touch sporadically over the next few years.

My relationship with that particular girlfriend ended about three years later and, a couple of girlfriends and a lifetime of experiences after this, I found myself crossing paths with these women once again. My ‘new’ girlfriend and I had been together for about six years and she was pregnant with our first child when I heard that they were moving back home as they, too, were expecting a child. We arranged to meet up and, at 28, I felt almost as nervous as I had done after arranging to meet them for the first time 11 years prior. Our children were born three weeks apart, a girl for us and a boy for them, and we now consider them to be some of our closest friends.

What is perhaps most significant about having these amazing women in my life again, after all those years, is that they know, better than anyone else, how much my life has changed. It got better, just as they told me, scared at 17, it would. Of the hundreds of coming out stories I have accumulated, this one stands out as being the very first positive. I don’t remember when I first came out to myself, but I do remember the very first time I was told that it was okay to be who I am.

Scaffolding

In education, we use the term 'scaffolding' as a metaphor for providing students with temporary supports before they are able to work at something independently. It is a way of increasing their understanding gradually until they no longer need assistance in a particular area.

When I was 11 years old, our class went along to see a production of West Side Story, performed by 16 and 17 year old students from a private, all girls college. As it turned out, it was a different type of scaffolding - the wooden planks and metal posts kind - which had a pretty huge impact on my understandings about myself. The auditorium at this school was huge, and so was the stage, but to represent apartment blocks they had scaffolding on either side of the stage and some of the scenes were performed in these 'apartments'.

A very brief overview of the play is there are two rival gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. Tony is connected to the Jets and he falls for Maria whose brother is the leader of the Sharks. As you can imagine, much drama ensues. The thing I would like to emphasize the most here, though, is that the particular version of West Side Story I saw was all female. Girls played girls, girls played boys and, therefore, the characters of Tony and Maria were both played by girls.

I can only imagine my eyes were wide for the entire performance. When people ask when did you first realise you were gay? I inevitably start talking about this play. In a movie about my life, the scene in which 11 year old me is watching this play would include a high speed flashback of all the other big gay clues which culminated in me talking to myself for the duration of the play and wondering what exactly it all meant.

The highlight of the entire performance was when Tony took his beloved Maria up the [scaffolding] stairs to his apartment and laid her on his bed...where 'Tony' was a gorgeous girl with her dark hair slicked back. I can't even begin to explain the stomach flip and I still recall fighting to keep both the blush and the enormous grin from my face. I wanted to look around at the other kids seated beside me to see if they were seeing what I was seeing but even without knowing exactly what it meant, I knew not to talk about it. It was 1993 and for the longest time the mixed message I took from the production was if I wanted to feel that way again, I had to become someone's boyfriend.

Earlier this year, I took my 11 year old students to see a play at the local high school and some of the male roles were, again, played by females. These girls were playing gangsters and were dressed in suits and ties and were wearing fedoras and I found myself wondering if any of my students who were sitting there watching were having the very same conversation with themselves that I had at the same age.

It is interesting to consider some of the things that impact how we see ourselves and the ways in which our understandings about our world can change so dramatically in such a short space of time. All I can say is that the 1993 production of West Side Story made the best use of scaffolding ever and set the wheels, which were already in motion in my mind, to full speed.

Show me where I fit

The decriminalisation of homosexuality occurred in my home state in 1997. Four years prior to this I was 11 years old and lucky enough to have an incredibly open minded teacher who refused to allow questionable laws and a rigid Catholic school system to cast a shadow over our opportunities to learn about the real world. He read to us every single day and we churned through novels at a pace I've not been able to match in my own nine years of teaching students of the same age. He planned our entire year around an exploration of human diversity and each of the novels we read, allowed us to explore a different kind of experience through a very different type of character.

Sure, this is not revolutionary, but when you're exploring the idea of drug and alcohol abuse with 11/12 year olds in a Catholic school through a book like Came Back to Show You I Could Fly and discussing HIV/AIDS and homosexuality through a book like Two Weeks with the Queen, also in a Catholic school, in a state in which homosexuality is still a criminal offence, that's kind of a big deal.

While I still remember most of the books we read that year, it was Two Weeks with the Queen which had the greatest impact on me. While listening to that book being read, I finally had a word for a type of relationship which I hadn't seen in my own world before. The protagonist, Colin, was about my age and, through an odd set of circumstances, ended up befriending a gay man whose partner had AIDS and was dying. Seeing the world through Colin's eyes, trying to reconcile how his new friend, Ted, could be treated so harshly by some people when he was such a nice guy, was an eye opener for all of us.

If the book had included two lesbian characters rather than two gay men, I dare say most of my questions about myself would have virtually been answered. Having said that, going through the next 4 years, with the positive dialogue from that class in the back of my mind, gave me something to cling to. I didn't have all the answers, but I had the beginnings of the language I needed to be able to start unravelling a thousand different thoughts and experiences which hadn't seemed to add up.

I need to track down my Grade 6 teacher and thank him. Besides being the type of teacher I aspire to be, he is also the first adult I can recall who asked us what we thought, instead of telling us what we should think. Without adults who understand the importance of exposing young people to a range of characters, we risk having more young people who grow up without a language to understand themselves, their lives and their experiences. While Two Weeks with the Queen wasn't the exact reflection I needed, it was the closest I got to seeing any aspects of myself in any characters for many years.

My students live in a world which is entirely different to the one I was living in at 11. There are more characters on television, in movies, and in books now, who young LGBT people might be able to relate to, but it still takes the encouragement of the adults around them to maintain young peoples' access to these characters and to facilitate the conversations which are necessary to support their understandings of themselves and their questions about where they fit in the world.