It's a bit of a running joke within my circle that my sexuality announces itself before I do. My friends often tease about how they can hear me coming before they see me. The jangle of keys on my carabiner is like a rumble of dyke thunder before lightning strikes. Pair this with my eyebrow piercing, button up, and mullet then you get the full picture. I don't need to vocalise the phrase “I’m gay” to let people know, my outward expression does it for me.
Don't get me wrong, there is something about this visible, masc power that I love. Queer people instantly know I'm one of them; I communicate silently with fellow sapphics, straight men know to not even bother. In fact, I often get the "bro, dude, my man" treatment by drunk men in town, which I'm sure sounds preferable to the torment my femme presenting peers endure in similar situations. If we’re ever out and I spot one of my girls getting hit on uncomfortably, I feel I owe it to this lesbian superpower to use it for good. Simply putting my arm over her shoulder makes the boys retreat.
However, it's not all roses. Whilst my presentation is a bold, flowing flag, it is also a target.
Over the summer, when the majority of students flock home to work at New World and be with their parents, I stayed in Ōtepoti for the first time. I wanted to see how different this city was with the student population gone. Sadly, it left a lot to be desired. This period of my life was marked by 3 instances of homophobia, which all occurred in relatively quick succession. Briefly, they were:
1) Getting a note written about me and a close friend (a femme sapphic) by a patron of the bar she worked at as we were hanging out, platonically, during her shift close. The phrase "I support all communities, I don't support them" was underlined.
2) My best friend (a visibly queer man, lavender marriage prospect, and somewhat of an icon on campus ifykyk) and I were walking down George St at night as we passed a group of men our age. They chose to greet us with "Sup faggots", thinking we were a couple. As they got closer to me they corrected their mistake, "Oh fuck, it's a lesbian". Both of us immediately shut up and bolted home, neither fancied a gay bashing.
3) I was questioned by the police in relation to a burglary in Ōtepoti as I matched the description of the suspect caught on CCTV. She was a fellow gender non-conforming woman (turn yourself in btw, come on now). I mostly joke about this one but being profiled because you belong to a very small, very visible pool in Ōtepoti does have a sting to it.
Unfortunately, I know that my masc presentation had something to do with all of these scenarios. Almost instantly, over the course of one summer, Dunedin felt decidedly less safe. It's often said that trust is something hard to build and easily broken, and for the first time in 6 years I started to doubt the city I had called home. I began to question my presentation too. After years of living as a confident, masc woman I asked myself if I wanted to continue being as visibly queer as I was. Was it time to rein it all in?
A lifetime of being an outlier will do this to you. I can't hang out with my femme friends without people thinking we're dating or hooking up, I can't hang out with other visibly queer people without risking harassment. Slipping beneath the veil of anonymity via conformity in Ōtepoti is not an option for me. I stick in people's minds, purely because of the novelty of being butch in this small city. I cannot un-announce my queerness, it is not a card that I can hold close to my chest and reveal on my terms. I do not have that comfort, I do not have that privilege.
Growing up in a small rural town, this feels especially true when I visit my parents. I avoid going into public for that very reason. I don't feel safe. The only way I could claw back that privilege would be to start dressing more femme, more conforming, more straight. But this too feels impossible: my masc identity is me. Retreating on that would be living a lie. So instead I live in an in-between space, walking a tightrope of risking my well-being versus being true to myself. Balancing authenticity with safety.
As I was struggling with this dilemma, whether to dial down my identity and trial run Ōtepoti as a less queer version of myself, the summer break came to a close. February rolled in and with it came an influx of new and familiar faces, the student body returning to campus for another year. Within a week I remembered why I love this city so much. The student population brings with it a wave of youthful optimism, where the prevailing attitude seems to be one of “do you, but don’t be a dick”, which stands in stark contrast to the more conservative parts of our population (I’m looking at you, Dunedin News). For all the shit Ōtepoti cops for being a university town, I can’t help but appreciate what that means for people like me. Nestled in between the drinking culture and general debauchery of the Otago experience there is a space for us outliers of society. Couple this with the fact that people who funnel through university education tend to lean left, and the whole equation creates a much friendlier atmosphere for us queers.
A few weeks ago, I attended the trans rights demonstration in protest of Winston Peter’s horrific member’s bill regarding the definition of gender. I felt indebted to attend not only for my trans siblings, whose lives are directly threatened by the legislature, but also out of a kernel of self-interest. As a woman that visibly steps outside the boundaries of what is expected of my gender every day, a bill that ensures entry to single-sex spaces is based on biology alone terrifies me. I inflate the feminine aspects of myself every time I go into a public bathroom as it is; an actual law has me worried about the possibility of having to “biologically” prove myself. I’d like to keep what resides in my boxers a secret, thanks. The protest itself numbered in the hundreds and those gathered were informed that this was the largest trans-rights protest Ōtepoti had ever seen. In a growing culture of conservatism, fascism, and transphobia, this felt massive. Most strikingly, however, was the complete absence of any counter-protestors, no one showing their face to harass us. The upper Octagon was TERF-free.
What I did see in the crowd was my community. Not just my friends but faces I’ve passed numerous times on campus and on the street. People who I’ve seen at the audience in drag shows, or sitting outside Woof! at night, people who I feel connected to without even having spoken. All of us coming out of the woodwork to show a united, solidified front. That's what I love about Ōtepoti. For a small city that dwells at the bottom of the South Island, surrounded by farmlands and true-blue country, we punch above our weight in terms of social progress.
Don’t get me wrong, it's certainly not perfect being queer here; my summer experience is proof of that. I’d be hesitant to even say it's great; our dating pool resembles a puddle, we have only a few cornerstones of queer culture, but we make it work regardless. The Ōtepoti queer family may be small, but it is mighty, and we make ourselves heard. As Nina pointed out in her editorial a few weeks back, Wellington (everyone's answer to “where is the gayest place in NZ”) has yet to produce a trans-rights protest of its own. Instead, the rallying cry came from way down South.
Today, I am proud to say that I am just as visibly queer as I was before the summer, and I feel safe enough walking down the street this year. Events like the trans-rights protest remind me of how closely-knit Ōtepoti’s community of gays and allies is. We have a singular gay bar, everyone seems to have 20 mutual followers on Instagram, and we show out when it matters. As the hub of New Zealand’s deep south, our city should have the rainbow chips stacked against it, yet we persist and try our best to thrive. There’s something endearing about that.
My relationship with this city is one of love and hate. It’s like a partner who’s flaws you’ve learnt to live with because you’re in it for the long haul. I’m aware that pockets of Dunedin are prejudiced, I’ve experienced it myself. I know that I’m surrounded by rural NZ and the attitude it tends to hold. And I know that when the students leave, you can feel it. But I also know that this city houses a community that has got your back and that it supports a growing queer culture. That's what I choose to celebrate.
Gays love a call to action, so I suppose I’ll end with this: support Ōtepoti’s queer scene, I beg you. Frequent Woof! on a night out, support the Ōtepoti Drag Directory, turn out for protests when they are organised. The queer community leaders of this city are some of the hardest working people I know and they need our backing. It is certainly a scary time to be queer, but we must band together and we must have hope. Queer people are so often urged to focus on our history and use that to shape how we navigate the present, but this leaves no room for looking towards the future. Queer solidarity is survival, queer community helps us live, and queer joy is liberation. And it makes this masc lesbian have a little more pep in her step strutting along George St.