Warning: Discusses abuse of minors, trauma, family violence and mental health crisis. Reader discretion advised.
By Paul Brzeski
Continued on from Part 2: Run, Survive, Repeat
So we packed things up and decided to go back to Australia. But rather than return to Perth, where we’d lived for the past four years, we decided to head to Sydney. I don’t understand why or how we decided that made sense – to separate ourselves from my father and sister but it was we did. My mum had relatives and friends in Sydney and it felt like a chance at a fresh start. I had a really good time living with these other people, I was still living in my head and pretending to be straight but at least I was interacting with others, going outside in the daylight – normal human things.
We’d gotten back to the final few months of the school year so I enrolled in the local public high school – an experience I’ll never forget. Busby Senior High School was a melting pot of ethnicities and personalities. I made some friends and then got hunted by one of them during recess because I didn’t reciprocate her feelings. For a few days I got chased by girls trying to stab me with sharpened sticks – apparently I’d led her on? I just wanted a friend.
Our strange brief life in Sydney came to a close when my sister flew over for Christmas. She guilt tripped my mum and me into coming back and so we returned, somehow to our original suburb of Ballajura. My parents were able to maintain a farce of a relationship for a while but just after I turned fifteen my mum left.
I saw her every odd weekend for lunch, as she had been in my childhood she gave me gifts because she didn’t know how to show motherly affection. Maybe she saw too much of my dad on my face or just didn’t care for children, that’s fine but it still sucks to be unwanted.
Before dating apps like Grindr, the web had dating sites that were popular with gay men. Gaydar.net was a big one but for adults. Mercifully there was an Australian site called Mogenic that allowed gay people from the age of 13-25 to chat. Obviously it was PG because of the underage audience, but it allowed people of the same age and interest to find one another and meet safely.
I met my first boyfriend ever on Mogenic, Giro (not his name), it was a nice first run at dating someone. We were both fifteen but went to different schools. They were close enough we could meet after school and go to the gym together. Giro was sweet but after a month I realised he wasn’t for me so I broke up with him and broke his heart. Twenty years later I only feel worse about how I treated nice guys like him. I did it because I didn’t know any better but that’s no excuse.
As the year 2003 came to a close, I’d left a string of broken hearts around town and my own was not in much better a state. I was traumatised from living with my dad, after his attempts to bond and discipline me just didn’t connect the way he’d hoped.
Lonely and looking to connect with someone who could ease me mind, I was wanting someone with a bit more knowledge of computers like me, I found that in Asterion (not his real name) on Mogenic. I was fifteen and he was twenty two, he was seven years older than me and had just sold his company in Singapore. Those extra years he had on me were enough to have made it in the dot come boom.
Dating Asterion was truly like being a teenage girl in a vampire novel. He would take me away in his car in the middle of the night, to watch sci-fi and comedy shows together, drink wine and talk about life. I didn’t want the dream to end so I offered myself to my vampire master with abandon. Due to my upbringing, I didn’t value myself so I didn’t realise what I was doing at the time. This was the experience I felt was craving and felt like I was missing out on with guys my own age.
When I turned sixteen, my dad decided to leave for his home country of Poland and so my sister and I had to move in with our mother. She didn’t have enough bedrooms for all of us so she slept on mattress on the living room floor, which made me feel really guilty. She had gotten away from all of us trying to start over only to be stuck with us yet again, I didn’t see her as a mother any more just a human being who needed help.
Asterion cheated on me with people from his past, he made excuses for his behaviour but it really became hard to ignore when I got crabs from him. He also recorded me in the nude for his own gratification, while I was 16 and shaving my pubes because he gave me crabs by cheating on me. At the time I thought I was just using him, and I carried a lot of guilt about that as an adult, but looking back I think he was very much in the driver’s seat and it was me who was being used.
My relationship with Asterion had it’s ups and downs, we broke up and made up a few times. From my point of view it was soon after I missed the perks of being in his home and even the company of his brothers, mother and her dogs. I remember at one point I was so comfortable coming and going from that house that I was bringing my own friends over to watch TV and borrow Asterion’s clothes. This was a sharp difference from how I felt at my mothers home.
I spent a lot of 2004 dating a bunch of older guys hoping to pick one to move in with while in my final year of high school. A chef I dated for a few months over the summer taught me how to cook and take care of a home. Sadly he wasn’t too good with me, I had to jump out of his moving car after I broke up with him…
With the summer of 2004 coming to a close, I realised the only way to get my mum her bedroom back was to live with Asterion. We got back together and discussed moving in together. I didn’t want to live in his mothers house because I wanted to also have my own space, although in hindsight it was probably a safer option for me than what we did instead.
It was 2005, I was 17 and had my own apartment in the inner city. I was living the Queer As Folk Justin fantasy. The real estate agent wouldn’t let me be on the lease due to my age. As Asterion made me pay a share of the rent I worked at a ice cream shop in the city and was sometimes so tired I would skip school just to stay home and recharge. I didn’t think much of the disconnect between my home life and that of my peers at school until the parents stuff came up. I.e. Permission slip for going to camp.
Eventually I had to disclose my situation to my teachers and somehow… That was that. No one offered my younger self counselling, to the teenage boy who had previously been homeless and was now living with an older grown man who was also his boyfriend. I know I was the age of consent, but I was still a minor and I really think my teachers let me down on this one. I appreciate maybe they wanted to provide sensitivity and respect to my situation, maybe didn’t know what to do because I was gay, but yeah just no support just seems insane to me as a grown man now.
One thing that hit me hard was realising my classmates knew about my home life. A girl from my drama class gave me a ride home, and said she knew I was living with my boyfriend in the city… That a lot of people knew I had gone through something and were there for me if I wanted to talk. That gesture completely went over my head at the time, but now I recognise that as one of the few moments of true kindness, visibility and recognition I’d ever experienced at that age. Something that I wouldn’t feel much again for years.
As our apartment was in the inner city, it was easy for Asterion to go out and get drunk with his friends. I was still underage so I stayed home on my computer. He would come home drunk, sometimes confessing he’d made out with other people. I asked him if he didn’t care about monogamy, why we couldn’t just have a open relationship. He told me he didn’t want to share me with anyone else.
Realising that he was just using me as a teenage sex toy, I broke up with him for good and moved in with my best friend. It was a tough move, I relied on another friend who had a car to help me get all my stuff across town but I finally made it. I had so little money I ended up eating all my savings over the summer, but I made it.
By 2006, I was 18, had started my first full time job out of high school in data entry and life was looking up. I’m now more than twice that age and still cannot believe all I put myself through, much of it probably unnecessarily. The abnormal family upbringing I had made me feel like I was alone in the world and couldn’t ask for help, when in fact so many people are out there who want to talk, to help and to be there for others.
If you are in a crisis, don’t hesitate to reach out to people whom you have known for a long time and trust. It doesn’t matter if you are hiding a secret, people who know you and care about you will already feel there is something to help you with and want to help.
For so many years I felt so alone and isolated, because I allowed the projections of others to define my own self image. As I have reflected in my late thirties, I’ve come to realise how damaging that was to me and to my success in life. It’s so important to love yourself, to love your choices and own up to your mistakes. Don’t shy aware from uncomfortable truths, because they are defining who you are every day and the harder you try to bury it the harder it will explode at the worst time.
I hope that this story of my coming out gives you some idea of the struggle gay men continue to live with today. Pride isn’t just a parade and a rainbow flag, it represents our shared struggle and trauma and pain, it’s about having integrity and a purpose, a core belief structure to love oneself and our community. That’s what I believe.