Crossing the bridge: Growing up LGBTQIA+ on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with Chris Hayward
Content warning: this blog addresses sexual assault. If this topic distresses or triggers you in any way please support yourself by calling Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyondblue on 1300 224 636.
Photos by Gabby Griggs; words by Natasha Gillezeau
Chris Hayward, 24, grew up in Cromer. He has three older brothers who he describes as your typical Northern Beaches boys.
From years 7 to 10, Chris went to Mater Maria, a Catholic independent school in Warriewood, before doing the HSC at Freshwater Senior campus. Throughout high school, Chris felt an intense pressure to fit into that more prototypical, straight, masculine, surfer culture, for example, by getting with girls.
Even when Chris finished high school, his denial about his sexuality had become so heavily internalised that during a post-HSC Europe gap year, in a continent where he knew no one, he found himself swiping for girls on Tinder because he was in such immense denial. In his words:
“it was so instilled to me, implicitly – it wasn’t explicitly – but it was this idea that ‘you can’t be gay, being gay is bad.”
Chris came out as gay at 20. It was a milestone series of moments. As soon as he came out, he was shocked at the amount of love and support from family, friends and people on social media. However, a lot of the connection he had hoped to find with others after coming out has arisen paradoxically not so much from his experiences with the queer community, but with people he has met through yoga, meditation and making music. He credits these last three things, alongside traditional therapy, as playing a big role in his growth and healing. About six months ago, Chris came off antidepressants after being heavily medicated for ten years.
Here, Chris shares his story in the first instalment of a One Eighty series called “Crossing the bridge: Growing up LGBTQIA+ on Sydney’s Northern Beaches”.
I ask Chris what his early understandings of what it meant to be gay were growing up.
“Nothing,” he says emphatically. “Literally had no idea of it. All I knew was that it was different, and bad, and wrong.”
Had he heard the word ‘gay’?
“Nup. Probably the first time I heard the word I was in year 7, so 13 years old, and people told me that there were rumours that I was gay, because I hung out with girls and liked to cook instead of surfing and you know, dating girls,” he says.
“And then I just went into complete denial. And that word – ‘gay’ – it became such a shudder thing for me. It was like ‘oh, no I can’t be gay’.”
As a kid Chris felt this general sense of “difference, or separation” from his family and community. These feelings were exacerbated by how people would respond to things he would do.
For example, one time in primary school Chris raided his Mum’s make-up to put on foundation. Admittedly, it was a smudgy job, he says. But he didn’t want to look “pasty” (every Northern Beaches kid’s nightmare) for school camp.
“But like, bless, I just wanted to be tanned for camp, and then someone in my family in front of a group of people was like ‘oh, are you wearing make-up?’ They weren’t doing it in a bad way, it was just that feeling of being publicly shamed, different, because boys aren’t supposed to wear makeup. And then, I started to doubt myself,” he says.
“I associated self expression with rejection and shame, which is so dangerous for a 10-year-old. This is where I started telling myself ‘it’s not okay to be who you are’.”
“I am not sure if they knew then that I was gay, but I guess the whole Northern Beaches culture makes it seem like there are no gay people. It’s just bizarre.”
In the absence of any outside guidance, petrified to reach out to his family from fear of judgment, Chris did what every 13-year-old does who has questions the world around them won’t answer.
He turned to the Internet.
He can’t remember exactly what he Googled, but it was something along the lines of “gay people Sydney”. He found an app called Grindr, lied about his age, and made an account. He doesn’t think that he even put a picture up. Chris had never met an openly gay person before, and he had questions.
He matched with a 26-year-old man, saying “I’m only thirteen, I just want to talk to someone” who told him sure, they could talk. The man lived in Collaroy, and offered to come and pick Chris up late on a weeknight when his family had gone to sleep.
“I don’t know what I was thinking, getting in there. I guess I was just so desperate to have … like I’d never met a gay person before, which was so bizarre. It was such a foreign thing,” he says.
“He drove like 20 metres down the street, and like pulled into this little side street. And I should have picked up straight away. And then he wasn’t quite like aggressive and forceful. It was more like, manipulative and grooming.”
Chris went on to share with me how the man molested him in his car.
“So I think that this is where the guilt came from. Because my body was still stimulated, you know? And so just from that moment, up until that point there was just this confusion ... and that feeling of separation and feeling different, but the strongest feeling was utter self loathing. And from that moment, which was pretty defining, for the next ten years, it was like ‘okay, I am wrong’. And then I just blamed myself so much.”
Chris was already navigating the impacts of both the overt and covert shaming coming from growing up in a place where a culture of silence around what it meant to be gay had led to the (completely untrue) story to fester that there must then be something wrong with being gay.
So when those pre-existing feelings were met with the shame and confusion he felt after being sexually assaulted – common feelings for anyone who experiences any form of sexual violence that can often be made worse by victim-blaming and a lack of community support and aftercare – he went into overwhelm.
“I just spiralled into absolute self hate and active depression. Mum took me to a psychiatrist who put me on medication. And the medication got stronger, and stronger, and stronger, the trauma got more and more buried. And I became more numb and numb and numb, at seventeen I was on the maximum legal dose of 2 different antidepressants for an adult, because nothing was working,” he says.
“When I finally started exploring, before I came out, discreetly, with guys, I experienced this neediness, and desperation, it was like the trauma created this massive extreme on the other side. On the one hand, it was like, I can’t believe that anybody would ever be interested in me, which is something I still struggle to accept, and then yeah, when they would show interest, I would just get so attached,” he says.
Chris says that romantically or sexually connecting to others also brought up immense fear of abandonment, which at times made him act “out of character”.
He didn’t tell anyone about being assaulted for ten years. Then one day, when in rehab at a private hospital in Curl Curl, he had a flashback. He told another in-patient, and suddenly, other things in his life began to make sense.
I ask Chris about high school. He remembers Mater Maria as being very socially segregated between girls and boys. He recalls people gossiping about and bullying an openly gay teen who was thought of as “weird”. Watching this play out fuelled his own denial because he thought, well, I don’t want to be bullied like that.
People weren’t malicious, he doesn’t think. But they were quick to comment on anything that fell outside of a preconceived norm.
When I ask Chris how he feels about this, he says in a lot of ways, he feels a sense of compassion. He thinks that a lot of ignorance about LGBTQIA+ people and issues on the Northern Beaches stems from the fact that over generations, this is what has been instilled in people and taught to them. But things can change, and there are already signs of change, as shown by Chris’ family and friends who have actively grown their awareness and understanding since he came out.
So what does he find healing? What brings him joy?
“The most powerful thing for me has been people who embrace my creativity, extra-ness, and sensitivity. And realising that I shouldn’t have to settle for less, and overcompensate, and justify who I am to tick a box and be worthy”
“I’m done trying to be someone I’m not out of fear there isn’t anyone that would love me exactly the way I am. Something I’m still struggling to accept.”
When Chris came out at 20, he spent a solid year working hard by day at a cafe-cocktail bar in Manly and partying harder at night, partially in an effort to try and meet other people who were also gay.
“I feel like a lot of people, they go to these clubs to find people and it’s not where you’re going to find genuine connection, I don’t think. Getting f*cked up in a club? I mean, we all do it, it’s fun. But I basically saw that as the ‘solution’ – to be accepted by the gay community,” he says.
“I found much more sense of belonging in a room of people that I do my yoga practice with, or the sound stuff. And I won’t say ‘wasted’ ... but I just feel like I wasted all this time going out to these clubs, so desperate to be accepted by the gay community. And that’s the problem, as a society, we’re separating ‘these people’ into a different social demographic, when individuality should bring people together not set them apart. It’s how we learn about each other and grow as a society on the whole.
“It’s great to have gay friends and find comfort in people who are in a similar situation to you. But my strongest connections are people I connect with through yoga, spirituality and my music.”
In the same way that Chris has qualms about how whether you are straight or gay can then determine what society says about how you should act and who you should hang out with, he has also thought about the impacts of labels in relation to mental illness.
On the one hand, Chris says that a diagnosis of depression, OCD or anxiety can be extremely empowering and help a person feel seen and get help. He gets it, he says, because he’s been there.
“It’s finding that balance, because on the one hand, labels are so helpful and validating to be like ‘f*ck, there are other people struggling’. But I think that people who are suffering from mental health issues can be quite fragile and cling on to that, and I don’t think it’s the solution… it’s a fine line,” he says.
“I think people aren’t always ready to get to the core of it. They receive a diagnosis, and find comfort in that, understandably. And everyone is on their own journey. For some people it takes a lifetime, some people get over their stuff really briefly. I never thought I’d be over it – I thought maybe I’d been on medication for the rest of my life.”
The nature of mental illness and what helps people and what doesn’t is highly complex, sensitive and nuanced territory. I ask Chris if there was a particular moment that prompted his personal reflections about what he sees as the potential downsides of becoming too attached to a mental illness ‘label’.
“The turning point was during one of my last hospital admissions. Every day we did the check-in, and we’d say ‘I am’, and ‘I have’. And that’s such a powerful thing to say. ‘I have’, ‘I am’. There is a risk of becoming attached to your illness by constantly affirming its power over you,” he says, recalling a group therapy session at the hospital in Curl Curl.
“Their reason behind that is that ‘this is your space to own it’. You can say what you want – like I started to say ‘I’m here for treatment of’… it was something I decided, as I wanted to strip away from the power it had on me, and something I found more appropriate.”
“But I was just kind of listening to this other guy and how he identified with this illness. And thinking, ‘wow’ when he said ‘that’s why I’m emotionally manipulative’. It was almost like hearing myself and how I used my illnesses to justify my actions for a while, and it just clicked. Just because a doctor diagnoses you with this disorder, this disease, there is a danger of it becoming an excuse, as it feels like it rules you. It allows you to not be accountable for your actions, I guess. Which is a hard pill to swallow, because if someone had said that to me when I was in my active addiction and trauma – I would have been like ‘f*ck off, this is me’. You know?”
“That label sort of allows us to connect. It’s like people who dabble in drugs and stuff, like cool, try it, whatever, cool. But keep doing it ... and clinging on to it ... that’s when it gets unhealthy. It’s the same story for clinging on to those labels and not moving forward in your recovery. Like yep, I was diagnosed with this. I suffered from this. I sought treatment for this. But it’s not who I am. I am stronger than this.”
I ask Chris how he feels like his journey with his sexuality has related to his mental health journey. He replies that the two have been heavily intertwined.
“Directly proportional I would say,” he says. “The pain and self-hate was directly proportional to not being able to express myself, and feel normal, and be embraced.”
So what would he say to someone who feels like they’re struggling right now?
“I see you and I hear you, with or without your mental illness. With or without your sexual preferences. With or without your trauma. There is help and there is hope, even when you don’t believe it.”
“You are supported, loved, and worthy of a happy life, every f*cking one of us on this planet. Every single person”
Any information on this blog is not a substitute for professional advice. It is written from personal experience and research only. If you are in crisis, go to your nearest emergency room, call lifeline on 13 11 14 or dial 000.