Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said ‘a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step’. In keeping with this month’s home edition, OUTinPerth spoke to a few LGBT people around Perth who have taken the step and now call Australia home.
Autumn last year, Suzanne Carruthers embarked on a journey from Edinburgh, Scotland for the warmer climates of Perth. Suzanne or Sooz, as she goes by, was travelling with a purpose though.
Permanent resident Michelle Harrison had met Sooz online some two years ago but it wasn’t till they began chatting about the Twilight films in early 2010 that a greater interest blossomed. In August, the pair started playing around with the idea of a move and two months later, Sooz was on the plane. ‘We talked about it and bam! It was done, it was very quick,’ says Sooz.
The 25 year-old feels good about the move now but at the time had been ‘very scared’. ‘The plane ride here was horrible… I left on the 24th [October] and arrived by the 26th,’ she said. Besides the obvious contrast in weather, the Scot found a number of things quite different to her home country: ‘The people; the places; the fact that you take so long to from one place to the other since our towns are quite close.’ Eight months on and the couple who are clearly in love couldn’t be happier, and are looking forward to a future together.
Sooz has been working regionally recently to try and gain an extra year in Australia. Visa 417 or 462, better known as Australia’s Working Holiday visa grants a person a full-year of work in Australia with the option of a second year if you’ve worked three months regionally. For the moment Sooz’s future hangs in the balance of the Immigration Department.
‘I don’t know if I’m going to get another year, hopefully; I’ve done my farm work so it should be ok.’
Michelle was confident that her partner would be able to stay in the country. Federal law reforms harmonised the pathway to citizenship for same-sex couples in 2008 although Michelle has her doubts. Michelle said: ‘The stress is the immigration because we know once she gets that second-year visa, that’s it, its heads down bum up doing everything we possibly need to do for the immigration process’.
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‘I feel like an Australian of Turkish heritage,’ says Haidyn Zafar. His memory of Turkey is vague anyway, the 31 year-old moved to Australia when he was just two. His father migrated to Perth initially in 1979 to work in the mines with no English. Haidyn, the youngest of six children, followed his family and joined his father in 1981.
‘They [his parents] love Australia but they still hold onto some things that make them feel Turkish as a comfort thing,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any day-to-day feelings of connectedness with Turkey, however play me some Turkish music and I go into a different world’.
While he had known he was gay from a young age, familial and cultural pressures pushed him away from his natural inclinations. In his twenties, Haidyn became ‘morbidly depressed’ at his situation: ‘I couldn’t live a lie anymore… I was really at my lowest point and I thought I could never come out to my family; they’re from a Turkish background, they’re Muslim’. In 2004, he moved to Melbourne to come out.
It would take him about two years to adjust to being out in Melbourne but once he did, he reached the point where he knew he had to tell his family. One by one, he came out to his siblings over the phone much to their shock. On a visit to Perth in 2005, he told his mother who had ‘a big, emotional breakdown’. Haidyn’s mother struggled with the news but after two years and much support from his siblings, ‘she came around’.
In Turkey, homosexuality has been legal since 1958 however Haidyn believes cultural taboos and stigmas still exist. ‘You can go to Istanbul and go to a gay bar and you’ll meet transsexuals and drag queens and everything is all there however outside of those city limits, it’s back to traditional Turkish culture.’ At the moment, Haidyn is in the process of relinquishing his Turkish citizenship. Returning to Turkey is out of the question; he says he could face time in prison for not completing compulsory national service.
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‘No fat, no fem, no Asians’ is a regular phrase Gavin Tsai reads while perusing profiles for online social media like Manhunt, Gaydar or Grindr. His qualm with this mindset is not so much that it’s offensive but that many guys who write it probably have never been with an Asian gay guy. Taiwanese-born, Gavin says living in Perth can be like living in a ‘minority within a minority’.
The 34 year-old has lived in Perth for the past 12 years, leaving Taipei as the gay and lesbian movement was well underway. Gavin came out at 17 just as the scene was evolving in Taiwan; his family lived just 10 metres away from Funky, one of the first gay venues in the city. He loves Perth and backs it up by stating that he would have moved to the east coast by now if he didn’t.
Yet he believes there is a mood in Perth that does not bode well for gay men of Asian descent. ‘In Perth, the gay and lesbian community, more specifically in the gay community, there is a lot of prejudice towards people of colour… more specifically, if I’m daring enough, gay Asians,’ says Gavin.
He is not talking about general discrimination per se; it’s more about ‘mate selection’. ‘We don’t really have a presence of a gay Asian community’ he said. Gavin suggests there are a great number of gay men from the region in Perth although the population is largely transient due to the international student population and opportunities on the eastern seaboard.
Gavin himself was drawn to Australia for its focus on the individual. He said ‘from a very young age, I had very valued individuality which is what Australia’s society highly valued’. Sexuality and his heritage played little influence in the scheme of things for Gavin: ‘To me, it does not really matter, I see myself as an individual just like I see everybody else’.
Benn Dorrington
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