Marrying a Younger Man, What It Does For This Man
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| Steve with His Fiance |
We’ve been together for eight years. I’m a writer, he’s a musician. I’m Scottish Chinese, he’s Malaysian Chinese. We have a lot in common, things that make relationships like ours work long-term: compatible personalities, similar senses of humor, bedroom chemistry. These things transcend our differences. But my gay history is hindering me.
I don’t feel safe holding hands with him in public. When he’s with strangers I’ll maintain a respectable distance unless he calls me over. I’m coy about our public displays of affection. It’s a reflex I find hard to shift.
I came out in Queensland in 1986 when being gay was a crime. That meant whenever I plucked up the courage to go to The Terminus, an underground gay bar in Fortitude Valley, I went knowing that if I hooked up with anyone, I’d be breaking the law and could be arrested for it.
There was an election that year delivering a seventh consecutive term for Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party government. There were union crackdowns, police corruption, and police raids on abortion clinics. The government had tried to extinguish land rights too and even wanted to withhold HIV treatment from First Nations people. Gay bashings went unchecked. Just standing outside a bar could get you beaten up. Even today I feel nervous around straight men, especially in groups.
As my family’s only son, I felt a responsibility to be straight. Besides me, there was only one male cousin to carry on the family name. But the pressure was unspoken. Recently I read my father’s journal. In it he describes his early difficulties finding a girlfriend before he met my mother. That’s why I think he never asked me about my love life.
When I decided I should broach the subject, I informed my mother first. She told me not to tell Dad because she didn’t think he could handle it. She was trying to protect me and maybe him. Dad had often expressed distaste for ‘poofters’. I’d used all the energy I had just come out to her, so I left it at that. Dad died without knowing my authentic self.
If homosexuality or same-sex marriage had been legal back then, I wonder if I would have had the guts to step around my mum and go directly to my dad.
During the Joh days, there were ways to avoid being rounded up. I learned to act lost if I was confronted by a cop. “Oh really, officer? What’s a gay bar?” I learned to keep my head down while entering or leaving to avoid being recognized by passers-by.
It has taken me until now to feel that same-sex marriage is not just a political statement but a life stage I am entitled to.
My weekends were a clandestine thing. I couldn’t talk about them at work, even though I had a job in advertising with people who broke all kinds of laws, mostly drug laws. But to my straight co-workers, gay sex was the punchline of an insult. If I wrote a headline that was too soft, they’d say “don’t pounce around” – ‘pounce’ being an overly effeminate homosexual. If I upset someone, they’d say “suck my dick”. I wanted to say, “I’d be honored” but I was too afraid.
My gay history haunts me even today. Private, consensual sex between men was only legalized in Queensland in 1991, the year Madonna’s ‘Justify My Love’ was number one, which feels like only yesterday. I’m still amazed that I won’t be thrown in jail for being gay and am fearful my liberty might still be taken away. I catastrophized the 2017 Marriage Equality Plebiscite and the follow-up Religious Freedoms Bill.
My gay anxiety came out of remission and I found myself being aggressive and on the defensive. I shouted at a close straight friend who joked that he envied me because I didn’t have a wife and could have casual sex anytime. I said, “Don’t compare your shitty sex life to my inequality,” which was out of character for me.
It has taken me until now to feel that same-sex marriage is not just a political statement but a life stage I am entitled to. I sat at home during the announcement of the vote result and watched it with my partner on TV. When we won, he acted happy and satisfied, but my mind went straight to my fears of a backlash.
I had a meeting in Toowoomba that day. On the drive there from Brisbane, I listened to talkback radio. I suppose I was waiting for a weather report, an advance warning of a coming storm. I had planned not to mention the plebiscite at the meeting, in case there was any cynicism, but when I arrived, one of my employees handed me a little bouquet of balloons. She gave me a hug and said, “Congratulations!”
Meanwhile, my fiancé was just a kid in 1991 when homosexuality was legalized in Queensland. The moral high ground was already being won by the time he was 18 and heading out to gay bars. They were no longer underground, they were mainstream, riding high on a wave of gay chic. Will & Grace and Queer as Folk were on free-to-air television. Elton was out, Ellen was out, and George Michael was out.
Brisbane’s biggest party night was a pop-up LGBTIQ+ club called Fluffy which happened on a Sunday. There was a VIP entry out the front and people lined up there to be seen. I suppose that’s why my fiancé is more at ease than me. He’s spent more time on the right side of history.
I have lived through the decline of a taboo. Mum and Dad experienced this. They were married back when interracial relationships were controversial. My mother’s father objected to their union so they had to elope. They had an age difference too, like the one between my fiancé and me. My fiancé has so much about him that nurtures and sustains me. But it’s his youthful levity that I’m most in love with.
He doesn’t act defensively. He doesn’t feel the need to be an activist or political. He doesn’t look back in anger. If he can teach me how to live in the present the way he does, with optimism, that will be an incredible gift.
I don’t want to hold back from him or to feel that my marriage is still up for debate. I want to feel secure in my existence. I want to forget what I used to know about being gay. And I want tomorrow’s generation of same-sex couples to be unmarked by gay history. Their beautiful marriages are untouched by a reflex of shame and fear.
This article has been published in partnership with Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement.
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