For the next seven days I’m guest hosting the @WeMelbourne Twitter profile curated by Sarah Stokely (@stokely). This week also marks the one-year anniversary of the first guest, so I’m feeling the pressure to live up to its full potential. I’m looking forward to showing my appreciation for Melbourne life as I live it.
Rather than clog up your timelines with tweets introducing myself, here are five quick facts about me. I’m borrowing these questions from The Guardian Australia’s weekly profiles of the guest hosts of my other favourite guest account, @IndigenousX, curated by Luke Pearson. This week’s guest is Summer May Finlay so please, hop on over and follow @IndigenousX quick smart.
Where are you from?
I was born at Emily Jessie Mac and grew up in Box Hill. I moved out of home when I was 18 — gay kid, Catholic single mum, you know how the story goes. I lived in the ‘South side’ gay enclave for eight years and the cafe lifestyle just felt soo cosmopolitan, but the drunks on the street every night, not so much. In 2008 I moved to Footscray and I’ve never looked back. Yes, there’s visible drug trade but the users are just another group weaving through the crowds and trying to get by.
On a longer timescale, Dad’s family came to Australia from the Netherlands after some years in Indonesia post-WWII. Mum’s family are Irish Catholic Australians going way back, but I was brought up thinking they were Danish — the nationality or family background of my grandfather’s adoptive father, who may or may not have also been his biological father. Complicated.
What do you do?
I’m a writer by disposition. I work in public and community health, planning ad campaigns and writing funding submissions. I also do community consultation and write policy and strategy documents.
I’ve worked on health issues like HIV, viral hepatitis, and cancer screening, and social issues like racism, social exclusion and stigma. I have worked with communities including gay men, people living with HIV and hep B/C, people who inject drugs, international students, refugees and asylum seekers.
I’m always pushing for projects that work with, rather than against the grain of the community in our priority groups — piggy-backing on the ways in which people swap stories and advice about health and social problems as a way of building community and a shared culture.
What do you plan to talk about on @WeMelbourne this week?
I’m hoping to be led by the @WeMelbourne community on what you’d like to hear about. But I’d love to talk about how the HIV epidemic has changed, how it does nobody any good to cling to old ideas about safe sex, and why it doesn’t help when opinion writers and politicians react with outrage to the idea of prevention strategies beyond condom use.
Why don’t we use condoms for oral sex? What are the alternatives to condoms? Are young gay men ‘reckless’ and older gay men ‘complacent’? Go on, ask me about it.
What issue in your community life do you think is most pressing?
I’m waiting for an Australian leader to stand up and say, 12,000 boat arrivals is nothing — so relax everybody, we got this.
I’ve done a lot of focus groups in my time and I know their limitations. People are not good at accounting for their feelings. The second you ask someone to explain why they feel X about Y, they start thinking too much and coming up with reasons that sound plausible. And what’s plausible is judged in terms of the social environment, so if it’s about politics, they’ll regurgitate what they heard from the public debate. ‘Queue jumpers!’ ‘Illegals!’
If you don’t know this, then focus group findings amplify talkback radio amplifies newspaper coverage amplifies electoral strategy amplifies focus group findings.
I’m willing to bet no political party has ever gone to a focus group in Western Sydney and said ‘would you feel better about boat arrivals if we spent enough on humanitarian settlement in your area so that refugees get a good start on life in Australia?’
People in Western Sydney know that social services are starving for funding; they know that inadequate support leads to school dropouts and crime; they’ve a hidden potential for generosity that any genuine leader would have the moral imagination to call on.
Who are your role models and why?
It will astonish her to read this, but I see my Mum as a powerful social activist. In my teens she edited the newsletter of Women and the Australian Church Victoria and railed against the he/him wording of the new liturgy in our Catholic parish, St Dominic’s, where, despite her activism, they still got her to do the readings every Easter and Christmas.
It takes a particular strength of personality to stand up to 2,000 years of misogynist dogma in your own community, and to speak out against it you have to first crash through all those inner walls of doubt and shame and politeness and self-restraint.
So you build up a head of rage and momentum and when you crash through it can look to the outside world like you’ve exploded out of nowhere… and that can make you look crazy and easy to dismiss.
In my adult life I’m still learning how to slow down and engage more gently and strategically. It’s tough going but I’m grateful for my role models on Twitter and in my community of practice, people who I trust and admire to give me guidance on keeping that trajectory controlled.
What are your hopes for the future?
I’m hoping to write up some of the lessons we’ve learned in the Australian response to the HIV epidemic and export them to the world.