Silenced by Section 28

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Hunter Poetry

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I knew I was different, long before I ever had the language for it
Without these words I couldn't progress my thoughts and come to a meaningful conclusion about who I was
Instead, I was confused, because not being able to articulate it didn't make my experience any less
My inner monologue told me that something was wrong, but I couldn't represent my reality
through speech
I was never taught
And even though I was academically advanced I was silenced by the missing discourse
I tried to force it, and handpicked my primary school crushes based on who I thought was popular
If the other girls fancied him
then I would pursue him too, convinced that I'd grow into it
Really, I just liked his haircut
And I could never tell my friends about it, but I had a crush on Jessica Rabbit
I thought they
would think I was sick, so I kept it to myself and internalised my self-doubt until I started to question everything
If girls didn't like girls, then maybe I just wasn't meant to be one
So I desperately wanted to be a boy so I could like the things they liked without having to hide
Instead, I immersed myself in the Sims and used cheat codes just so I could wear men's clothes and create a family in my own vision
It was my little secret
And although I'd seen gay men on TV, they were no more real to me than Jessica was
They were flamboyant fictional
characters and I was unsure if they really existed
Kind of like the tooth fairy or unicorns because my dad didn't act like Graham Norton
I discovered the word lesbian when I was 11 I was in year 7 and we'd found a Playboy magazine
It confirmed that I wasn't attracted to men but I didn't have my own breasts yet, so I certainly wasn't ready to think about sex
But it did give me the language that I'd been so desperate to taste
I learnt that gender and sexuality weren't mutually exclusive
And I'd eventually try some of the things I'd seen with my best friend Kim
Totally naive to the things we'd have to face
Like how often our rights would be debated on the world stage and how they'd only just revoked section 28
I was ashamed
Although holding hands felt natural with her, I'd never seen casual intimacy between two women before
She wasn't my first boyfriend, so I couldn't etch her initials onto the inside of my school planner or set a picture of us as my screensaver
Instead, her paragraphs were hidden in the depths of my Sony Walkman phone
I was in love for the first time
But I couldn't share the joy of this key moment with anyone, and I had to figure it out on my own
And this just shows that shielding children from the dialogue doesn't eliminate the experience
They can still feel something even if they can't speak on it
Our community aren't grooming them into coming out, we're giving them the language to find themselves
No amount of words will influence their preference, but arming them with the language gives their identity validity
Words are the clarity that conceptualise self-discovery and
Babies will always cry before they learn the word for hungry

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