SEEING QUEERLY
PHOTO SARA DAVIDMANN
When I was a girl my dad and brothers would, on occasion, say homophobic things about other people. It was completely normalised, a joke. Aside from this, I can remember only two times when Mum said anything about being gay, observations that were separated by years. Once, she pointed at an actor on TV and said authoritatively: “He is a homosexual.” In the second instance she told me: “Lesbians do it with their fingers.” These words of wisdom were uttered in a vacuum of queer representation in the public sphere and I was socialised in an almost complete queer cultural desert. I say almost because by the time I hit puberty I had developed a deep curiosity about homosexuality that I satisfied by finding, reading and watching forbidden things in secret.