Drive safe love take your time xxx
I see the text from Mum just as I’m finishing the last brush of brow mascara to the hair on my upper lip.
I shoot back a reply saying I’m leaving in five, thumbs sticky with beige foundation.
I still have to pull my binder on, make a cuppa, feed the cat. I finish filling my eyebrows, and wriggle my way into my chest binder, adjusting to the familiar feeling of compression, like those clamps I watched my dad use in my boyhood when he worked with wood.
Despite being assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, I am a male and female presenting person; two rivers that run into the same ocean: gender-fluid.
I have (with assistance) facial hair, body hair, a flat chest, and perpetually shorn head. My gender doesn’t always align with the typical expectations of masculine or feminine gender expression. Both femininity and masculinity are performative to me. All the world’s a stage.
Jes Layton (aged 25) with family; taken at Colac 2020. Source: Supplied
I punch the address for my family home into Google Maps, a two and a half hours from Melbourne. I turn the phone, snapping a picture of myself, making sure I’m facing the sunlight, and that the upper lip hair features prominently on my smiling face. I send the picture to both my Dad and then Mum.
It feels like a kindness, a reminder or maybe even a warning, to let them know where I’m at gender-wise, that my queerness will follow me home. I’m a far cry from their country daughter that moved to the city five years ago.
To say I’ve struggled with my identity growing up would be an understatement, but I became public, and became visible very early in my life. My queerness was often in the local newspaper. It followed me at school, my visibility as a queer person in a rural area was not under my own power. I was always that one.
I escaped my country hometown of Colac at the earliest opportunity, moving 200 kilometres to attend a Melbourne university on scholarship. Travel was life: a 45-minute school bus trip into town. The weekly trek between my divorced parents' houses, my father’s in Yeodene, my mother’s first in Birregurra, then Colac. I moved across southwestern Victoria like a hermit crab, fitting into new houses long enough to discover the best climbing trees and see how long I could stretch the three-minute shower rule on a new tank.
Jes Layton (aged three) with mother; at Apex Preschool Centre, 1999. Source: Supplied
I keep catching my own eye in the rear-view mirror and smile at what I see there. The irony of being gawked at from a young age is that you never feel truly seen. Now I am older, I demand to be visible.
The ‘queer/gay’ things I craved as a child were in the city. People weren’t queer down here, and if they were, they were so privately, acceptably. Nothing to buck the binary or take up space. I was told regularly that I had to leave the country, my home, to be myself.
When I was 13, a boy came up to me on swimming sports day and asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I remember my body going cold. I felt exposed, as though someone had stripped me. I stammered "girl", before escaping into the girls' change room. I already knew I didn’t feel conventionally female, and deep down feared I might be a trans boy and was scared. As a kid with internet access I knew the stats on transgender suicide.
Jes Layton (aged 6) with mother; and sibling, 2001. Source: Supplied
I didn’t see any trans people around me. At the same time, trans boy didn’t feel like a true fit for me. Not wrong so much, just, slightly left of centre. I liked my body, and felt it fit me, most of the time. But not all the time. After coming out as a lesbian at 12, I resisted makeup and brushing my hair for years. It wasn’t that I had anything against taking care of myself or beauty products in general, just that I was told lesbianism existed in opposition to femininity, and I was already being stared at enough. By friends, peers, teachers, strangers. I didn’t want to draw more attention.
Every return home as myself feels like taking back space. There’s a pleasure in this transgression, of looking the way I do. Nine-inch rainbow platforms, a buzzed, vibrant hairstyle to match. A confusing mix of drag king and queen in the daylight.
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I enter a servo and catch some glances. I smile at a little kid who stares at me when I walk in. He grabs the woman beside him and points at me. She looks up; takes in my face, my body, my attire, and frowns.
In Colac, two tween girls stare at my face then whisper. They think I can’t hear them, but I can. On my way in I get stares – a few of them accompanied by smiles. People are confused at best, judgmental and hostile at worst.
Being a visibly queer person in Australia means running through an excruciating mental gauntlet.
We sit in a space between unacceptable and ‘mainstream’ where complete strangers judge us to be different or weird or interesting and feel entitled to look and pass comments on what they see, or think they see. But I hope for all the judgmental people, there’s someone who looks at me and sees, maybe for the first time, queerness off the screen, in their hometown, in their Woolies.
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"We’re getting a Seven Eleven," my sister Ann tells me. "I’m going to absolutely drown in Krispy Kreme."
I think to myself that I am maybe a bit like a Seven Eleven Krispy Kreme. Something so quintessentially Melbourne. Down here. Feels weird. Feels like progress.
"They won’t be a treat anymore," I say. "You’ll end up getting sick of ‘em."
Ann rolls her eyes. "You gone and seen Mum yet?"
"Nah. Just grabbing some flowers," I said. "What kind of son would I be if I didn’t bring my mum flowers?"
The word ‘son’ pricks in the air for a moment. There’s a slight stuttering behind my sister's eyes, a brief second reboot. This is still new for them, my family, even after years. Down here, I am their only example outside the binary. I know they’re trying.
Being a visibly queer person in Australia means running through an excruciating mental gauntlet
Ann might not even be aware of how she pauses. After a little buffering, we’re back and she’s telling me she is coming over to Mum’s for dinner and then we’re walking over to a self-serve so I can buy a bouquet.
I chuck Mum a text: five minutes oxo.
I walk up to Mum’s house, knock on the door and know that I stand as proof for a younger me that you do not have to leave the country to be a queer person, you bring your queerness with you in all that you do.
When Mum opens the door she’s smiling. "You’re so tall!" she laughs as she hugs me. "I missed you!"
"It’s the shoes," I murmur folding into her. I turn my painted face into her soft neck. "Me too."
Jes Layton (He/She) is a writer, artist and professional geek whose work has been published by Black Inc, Junkee, Kill Your Darlings, Archer and Voiceworks among others. Find more of his work and projects on Instagram
This article is an edited extract of an entry chosen from the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition.
