Like most people, I’ve had some awful haircuts. Even now, just thinking back on some of them makes me feel such intense embarrassment that I physically spasm with shame. There were my monk-like shaves in primary school (not too bad, really), followed by my bowl-shaped undercut phase (getting worse), to the ill-advised Disney prince look: a combed, down-the-middle bum-part that dominated my high school years.

I might’ve been Chinese, but all I really wanted were the same haircuts that the cool white boys had. It’s only later that you look back and realise you can’t just transplant good haircuts between races and expect it to work. Think of those Caucasian women who get their hair tightly braided and beaded by Ghanaian hairdressers on holiday and you’ll get my point. On me, these white boy haircuts were less “Disney Prince”, and more “Merry Little Hermaphrodite from Feudal China”. I never really got the cred I assumed a cool haircut would afford me.

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I didn’t have the life story where I would settle down and have children in my 20s. So if you’re not doing that—which is one way a lot of women went—you’ve got to be on some other journey. So I was on this journey of taking the opportunities as they came.

In your 20s, you just have boundless energy. I never watched television in my 20s, I never went out to restaurants for dinner. I was on the move the whole time. I was singing in bands, I was tap-dancing, I was doing self-defence, I was organising rallies. I was taking everything in. I’d go dancing a couple of nights a week and work through the day when I finished studying. Continue reading →

Dear Straight Men of the World,

We’re not so different, you and I. Even though I’m a card-carrying homosexual, I’m also fond of wearing flannel, drinking scotch and eating everything in sight. Like you, I thoroughly enjoy undergraduate jokes about poos, farts and foreskins, and I’ll always adore you for teaching me delightfully instructive phrases like, “Two in the pink, one in the stink,” and the simple-yet-effective, “Bash the gash.” In fact, one of my fondest memories is you at the sushi train, drunkenly teaching me how to finger-bang girls. (On a side note, I’ve shown my lesbian friends your technique. They say you’re doing it wrong.) Continue reading →

Sing to me, suburbia of my childhood! Sing to me of Lorraine at Copperart and Yvonne at Chandlers! Sing to me of Barry at security and Garry at parking. Sing to me of pregnant-looking men eating chips bathed in gravy, and of actually-pregnant mothers checking dockets (to be safe) and shop-a-dockets (for two magical nights in Mooloolaba). Sing to me of Merril Bainbridge cassingles and of PAs that play Tina Arena’s Sorrento Moon on repeat. Sing to me of Muffin Break and Mathers, of Lowes and Bi-Lo. Sing to me, oh acne-ravaged Asian teenager working at Big W named Benjamin Law, even though you’re going through puberty and really shouldn’t sing at all. Sing it sweet, and sing it loud!

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In the 1960s, I was studying medicine at Sydney University. The idea of making people healthy and happy always appealed to me, but I wasn’t all that keen on university. I was very shy. The other issue was I was gay. At that time, it was something no one spoke about, and police were busy arresting gay people by the hundreds. I remember one man—a radio announcer—being taken to jail, because he’d been seen kissing another man in a car. It was headline news, and there was much clicking of tongues and horror. It was absurd and repressive.

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Several months ago, my youngest sister threw a party. Back then, I didn’t know her friends too well, but it wasn’t long before my boyfriend and I got caught up in a conversation that was friendly and foul-mouthed in equal measure: our favourite kind of chat. We all started talking about our lives—their undergraduate studies; our daytime jobs—until I must have said something that made them look at us with suspicion.

“Wait a minute,” they said. “Exactly how old are you guys?” Slowly, we told them our ages—I’m turning 28 this year—which prompted something odd to happen. Everyone began to shriek. And by “shriek”, I mean that what came out of their mouths was truly awful: scandalised, wraith-like howls that you’d only make in the presence of Death. For the first time ever, we were the oldest people in the room. I’d hit my late 20s and was already a goddamned hag.

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