Me Mum’s A Queer by Catherine Johns
1994
I can’t find a blurb online.
Taken from ‘So Gay: a List of Australian Children’s and Young Adult Contemporary Realist Novels with LGBQ Characters 1985 – 2015 (plus three remixes)’ by Jenny Pausacker
*Spoiler Warning*
Catherine Johns says in her acknowledgements, “This book began when I asked a twelve-year old friend if she had told her friends at school that her mother was a lesbian. She gave me one of those long-suffering looks and replied, “You’ve gotta be joking!” Johns’s response is a novel of ideas that looks at the position of lesbians in society from a variety of angles. Sixteen year old Manny (short for Germaine) decides to acknowledge publicly that her mother is lesbian, because “I didn’t like to have secrets from me friends, ‘cause then it wasn’t an honest friendship. I went through this long period of time when I hated me mum being different, and a queer and that, but I’d grown up a lot since then.” (p 2) As she tells her friends, one by one, each of them comes up with a different objection, which Manny then counters: she also deals with homophobic abuse at school and her grandparents’ regrets. In the process, she loses a few friends but her closest friends understand and one of them comes out as bisexual. Johns’ characters are fairly undifferentiated and improbably articulate but these are occupational hazards for a novel of ideas. More importantly, in 122 pages Manny never gives an account of her initial homophobia or her reasons for believing that she herself is heterosexual.
“I’m not lesbian, Gran.” “Do you know?”
“Yeah, I reckon. I reckon Mum just didn’t really know.” (p 118)
As a result, Manny comes across as someone who is winning debates with her friends and family, rather than engaging with their resistance or objections, and Johns’ exploration of ideas stops short at the point where she would have to question what she and Manny ‘really know’, which is summed up in the admiring comment from Manny’s mother: “There is no normal to you Germaine, you name what is really there.” (p 52)
