Xena and Solitude

I grew up in rural Australia. I think my home town qualifies as a city now, which doesn't count for much; the quantifying measurement is a population of twenty thousand people. But the past is a different place, and I can't go back there.

There were less people when I lived there, and as is common in any rural community, there were of what I see now were cults. Unlike The Family, this didn't extend to child trafficking. But we were pretty immune to one of my brother's mates seeing his father chase his mother with a machete. There might have been more murder if gun control hadn't been federally mandated. I only just realised a few years ago that one of the pastor's sons told me he was being sexually abused by his twin brother. There's more to that story, but let's leave that for another day.

It's already a pretty heavy start to a blog, but I'm hoping to explain a little bit why the crime genre speaks so loudly to me.

Being rural we didn't have the best access to VHF and UHF channels. Aunty (ABC aka the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the government owned national broadcaster) was about as much as we got, and they bought a lot of content from the BBC. We were lucky enough to have not one but two televisions; a 20 inch one in the living room, and a 12 inch one in the back room with an Atari console plugged into it. I have no idea where it came from or who bought it, but most of the kids in my school didn't even have televisions, so in the day of SNES and PlayStation, we were privileged to have an Atari. Most people had radios, because of the constant threat of bushfires and flooding.

But we had an extended antenna, and if the weather was bright and clear, I could pick up other stations if I got up on the roof and shifted it a little. This is probably my first attempt at hacking; I have done much more complicated stuff since. And back then I was always on rooftops because no one else was up there. So it wasn't particularly suspicious if I was on the roof with a book.

Xena was syndicated in Australia on one of the main broadcasters, I misremember which. And there was a regional broadcaster that would air it sometimes, usually weeks if not months after the cities had shown it. That didn't matter to me.

As soon as I saw that leather tunic and the delicate fretwork of that breastplate, I was hooked. I managed to get some VHS tapes by trading mice I had caught in the chicken yard to someone who had snakes. I was vegetarian at the time since my parents had killed my favourite rooster, and I had to cook for myself but I wasn't allowed to use the stove or the oven or touch anything that wasn't pretty much peanut butter. Also I threw up a lot but if I told anyone I just got prayed for and when I did see a doctor they told me not to have children if I wanted to be able to stay out of a wheelchair. Anyway, since my brother and I were left alone a lot when we weren't at church, I managed to record a few episodes - the ones where Xena bodyswaps with Callisto.

Xena wasn't exactly my gay awakening. When I was about five, I told my mother that I was going to marry my best friend Jody (a girl Jody) and we were going to live on a farm with horses.

This was not met with the enthusiasm with which I had expected.

I never did marry Jody, and I think that's why we moved out of the city. That, or my mother had already run through all the churches and had personality clashes with all the major pastors. Either way, Jody, I hope you're happily living on a farm with horses and if men make you happy I hope you got a good one.

Jody wasn't my gay awakening either. I remember being younger than that and being mad about all the expectation there were for women and being mad at the doctor for getting it wrong and that I should have been a boy.

I'm not really a boy. But I was never really a girl either.

I think what I'm trying to say, through a trauma dump, is that a) I am very gay for women and b) super gay for women and c) Xena inherently did something to me by showing loving relationships between women in a landscape entirely void of them.

I used to get dropped off an undeveloped block of land someone my parents knew owned, and I used to run through the forest with a red Irish setter doing a Xena yell with several sticks (some for the dog, but some to fight trees with). I wanted to be her, or I wanted to be like her.

But instead I sit at a computer all day, and I remotely access systems and try to make the world a slightly better place. So instead I am more like Gabrielle, because I lived to tell the story.

These stories.