A RECENT DEVELOPMENT.

Due to my history of sexual abuse, I am extremely reluctant and reticent to trust male health professionals. Of late, however, I have had to have Rapid Antigen Tests before receiving my infusions as a patient at the Day Infusion Centre. There is a small group of nurses who do them and I have had dealings with three male nurses (well, there’s a fourth, but I’ll talk about that later), one of whom was Asian and he had earrings in both his ears, the second had a seemingly higher pitched voice than a typical male and the third has a small ponytail and an earring in his right ear.

I remember George Michael in his videoclip for Father Figure had two earrings in his left ear and one in his right and my mother said, “So, he could be either/or, he’s not sure?” When I was younger, the conventional wisdom was that if a man had an earring in his right ear he was gay. If he had it in his left ear, he was not.

When I was 18, a man who my parents thought was gay, propositioned me. Well, he told me that he’d been “attacked” in his own home and I saw a TV show a few weeks earlier where a man played by Australian Actor, Peter Phelps, was raped by an old school friend on his buck’s night, and I related it to this guy. He (the guy, not Peter Phelps) rang my house at 1am and asked me if I wanted to sneak out. I was young and I didn’t understand, and my father told me what he wanted to do. I was scared and I felt sick.

I am not a homophobe, in fact, when I was little, a couple of gay men lived next door to my grandparents and the older member of the couple was kinder to my grandmother than my grandfather was! And the father of the younger man gave me a Matchbox car.

Of late, I have found that while my sexual attraction is to women, I can relate to gender diverse males rather than cisgender males. I’m not interested in football and neither are they. And they are not interested in me sexually either.

The fourth male nurse I had dealings with, I thought was a bit aloof, but in my latest dealing, he was surprised that I remembered him after a couple of years and he told me that his kids are friendly with two autistic kids and that they are quite clever people. He and I have really connected over that, and after I was able to do something the other day, he told me I was a scholar and gentleman. I felt honored.

It is surprising what some positive experiences can do.