Crossing the bridge: Growing up LGBTQIA+ on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with Clare Smylie
Photos by Gabby Griggs; words by Natasha Gillezeau
Clare Smylie, 22, was born in Adelaide. She moved to Mosman, on Sydney’s Lower North Shore, when she was 5. Growing up, her friends were scattered around Mosman, Cremorne, Neutral Bay, Cromer and Dee Why.
Clare realised she was gay in about year 6, but only this past year has she really felt comfortable saying out loud the words: “I am a lesbian”.
She doesn’t think it would have been a big issue if she’d come out earlier from the perspective of the friends and family she grew up with. When she was going through highschool at SCECGS Redlands, where she graduated in 2015, there were many out, queer students – although admittedly, most were guys.
However for Clare coming to terms with her sexuality has been a long, highly interior process. This is partly because she thought her life would be easier if she was ‘straight’. It’s also because growing up she had no idea what to actually do about being gay. She knew what straight people were about. But lesbians? Not so much.
Here Clare shares her story in the second installment of a One Eighty Avalon series called “Crossing the bridge: Growing up LGBTQIA+ on Sydney’s Northern Beaches”.
I ask Clare how and when she realised she was attracted to women.
“When I was little, kind of in primary school, I realised when people were talking about crushes, I just didn’t really understand it. So when I talked to Mum about it, she said, ‘you know, some people just don’t have crushes. They aren’t attracted to anyone’. And then when I got into year 6, I was like, ‘oh, the people that I feel attracted to like that… aren’t men’,” she says.
In year 7, Clare had a semi-breakdown in front of her friend Mia, who is still one of her good friends today.
“I was like, ‘I’m gay, and I don’t want to be gay, and blergh’ sort of thing. When I was 12, it was really isolating, because you see all these movies and everything, and everyone is 16, 17 [when they realise], where I was this awkward 12-year-old who had high social anxiety, but was also weirdly comfortable with being gay, but hated it at the same time. Because I didn’t know what to do then. It was like, so what now?”
So what do I do now? is a phrase Clare repeats many times when recalling her main feelings towards her sexuality during school.
Realising she was gay was one thing. Translating that into IRL action was another.
“It wasn’t as though I felt that people didn’t like gay people. It was more, ‘I don’t know what to do’”
“It’s represented in the really boring, banal, mundane sh*t like when everyone is sitting in class going ‘oh my god we get it, you had a fight with your boyfriend’. But I’d be sitting there like… do gay people have fights? Do they go on first dates? What do gay people do? But if someone had been like, ‘yeah, the only thing that’s different is that it’s the same sex’, I’d have been like, ‘oh, okay, sweet’.”
Clare did come across some resources aimed at gay women in early highschool. But they were all pretty sh*t.
She remembers a sealed section of Dolly Doctor in Dolly magazine, which for decades was pretty much the sole repository of information about puberty, sex and dating for teens.
In general, Dolly Doctor was a pretty legit source. But what Clare read next I can really only describe as some of the most bizarre lesbian ‘advice’ of all time.
“One of the questions was like, ‘how could you tell if you were possibly into women?’ I was reading it, and it said, ‘you’re interested in certain parts of being a woman, you’re hyper-focussed towards female issues, periods’, and I was like… ‘I’m interested to the point that now all of a sudden I’m bleeding?’ But it went on, ‘lesbians are really interested in female issues, like when their boobs come in’, and I was like ‘ahhhh? I don’t know if that is me?’” she says.
This was all fake news, but at the time it left Clare even more confused than before.
She also read Kaz Cooke’s guide to sex and puberty for tweens Girls Stuff, which her Mum liked because it delved candidly into issues like masturbation.
“But then the stuff she had about lesbians was just so weird,” she says.
“I found the book the other day – and I could see that I’d marked like page 59 – and it was like ‘how do lesbians have sex?’ And then, the only thing it said was ‘lesbians usually have extreme sex’. And I’m just thinking of me, being like, 13, going, ‘extreme? What makes it extreme?” she says.
“So it’s this whole idea of the people who were writing stuff for you to read had no idea what was going on”
At 15, Clare started a long distance relationships with Peter (name changed), who lived in Adelaide. They dated for over five years. Clare really cared about him, but also saw the relationship as her “ticket out” of having to deal with her sexuality. Then again, because Clare didn’t have any other relationships to benchmark her feelings against at the time, she also entertained the idea for a while that she was bisexual.
“It was just this idea of, I get along with him really well, we’re really good friends, I can put up with having to kiss him. I didn’t realise that people actually liked kissing until I was like 19, 20,” she laughs.
So what changed? How did that relationship go from being her “ticket out” to something she couldn’t continue?
“I slowly started realising through talking to people, and so many breakdowns, that this is just stupid, this isn’t a way to live. Like what the heck am I doing? What am I putting this other person through? We had both worked out about two years ago that we were just mates. Like, I never introduced him as my boyfriend. It made me really uncomfortable. And you get like, really depressed about it. I was super anxious,” she says.
She also hated talking about sex with her friends.
“I’ve had the same tight group of friends since like year 7, the girls at school. And I’m really close with them. So, we’d talk about our sex lives – and I just hated it. I would sweat. I would be like ‘lol’. I just didn’t ever talk about it at all despite the fact that I come from a really sex positive group. Like there are no boundaries. They totally would have understood if I’d brought up this topic, but it was just this humiliation thing,” she says.
Clare says at least when she was a student, Redlands was trying to create an environment of not just tolerance towards LGBTQIA+ students, but active acceptance. In year 9, if students would use phrases like ‘oh that’s so gay’ or homophobic slurs, certain teachers would actively stop that language and explain its broader impacts.
Her school environment wasn’t perfect, and the lack of LGBTQIA+ resources and sex ed certainly didn’t help. But Clare feels that her path towards coming to terms with her sexuality has been more of a private, internal journey rather than tied to what was happening in her outside world.
I ask Clare how she feels like her journey with her sexuality and mental health have been connected.
“I definitely think they’re interrelated. I have a bipolar diagnosis, so I do have a lack of control over a lot of my moods. But they have definitely coincided, particularly the depressive episodes, when I was with a male and realising you know ‘what am I doing?’
Everyone looks so happy in their relationships and I just feel really weird. I’d become so depressed, like crazily depressed,” she says.
“I just really didn’t want to be gay. You’re taught, and it’s true, that your life is easier if you’re straight. And so, you know, it just makes you feel really sh*t. Even if you grow up in a really accepting family, which my family is, like when I came out, everyone was excited and happy that I felt comfortable to tell people. I think just for me, I was like, f*ck, I just don’t want to be gay, I just don’t want to be.”
“But it hasn’t honestly been until like I’ve been out to all my close people that I was like ‘wow, I feel really normal’. Like, I feel normal for the first time”
With her ex, Clare would constantly assess how the relationship looked from the outside. Since dating women, she finds it far easier to relax and just be, and feels “50 thousand times more confident in my sexuality than I ever did as a ‘straight’ person”.
Finding queer spaces has also been a good thing for Clare, from exploring online with Tumblr to attending social events put on by Sydney University’s queer collective SHADES.
Even though overall Clare feels better and stronger in herself these days, certain interactions do leave her feeling frustrated.
One type are demonstrations of over-the-top, performative support for the fact that she is gay.
“This is what I’ve found on the North Shore – it’s this ‘I can’t say anything wrong. I have to show that I’m being really supportive of gay people. Because if I don’t say it, they’re not going to know. They’re not going to know if I’m not like, ‘I love gay people’. People will be like ‘my hairdresser’s son is gay, and I love him... I’ve never met him, but I love him!’ There’s this whole ‘sh*t, sh*t, sh*t, if I don’t say the right thing, I’m going to look homophobic’,” she says.
Granted, these kinds of responses represent a fairly seismic shift in social attitudes from where things used to be. But instead of feeling supported, it can make her feel alienated. Clare says that support is about creating safe spaces, not listing every gay person you know, and that the well-intentioned “anxious straights” of Sydney’s northern suburbs can afford to tone it down a notch.
“I can list like 20 gay people who are absolute dickheads. Being gay doesn’t make you a nice person – it makes you atttracted to the same sex,” she says.
“For example, if a customer is like ‘oh what are you doing this afternoon?’ and I’ll be like ‘I’m going to go see my girlfriend later’ and they’re like ‘oh my god that’s sooooo nice, that’s soooo exciting’, and it’s like okay, I get it. It’s a nice thing. But it’s really bizarre. It’s not like white guilt, but straight guilt. It’s like ‘I voted Yes in the same sex marriage plebiscite! Don’t worry about me! Because I voted yes!’. And it’s like yes… you and the vast majority of people in this giant electorate voted ‘yes’,” she laughs.
So, what has someone said to Clare that she actually did appreciate?
“The nicest thing that someone has said, I was there with their family, and they said, ‘you know, if you ever feel uncomfortable with the people who are around, just let me know and we can move on, we can go somewhere else’. It’s just about creating that safe space. Not being like, ‘Every single person here would lick your feet because you are gay! We love gay people!’,” she laughs.
I ask Clare what is one thing that she would want to tell her younger self.
“I would say, just wait for what’s ahead because you’ll find yourself surrounded by love and acceptance, being a lesbian is f*cking liberating, and I love you”
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.