Unzipped Disclosure

Nights in Naarm can end in borrowed bedrooms, those sheets rumpled, a stranger’s cologne immixing with my perfume. When the clothes fall away, it is not my quivery mouth but the quiet ripples of my body that speak first. 

There is hair, always: a dark curl pinned to my cheek, the soft trail across a lover’s stomach, the way his tuft rubs raw against my soft jawline. Stretch marks from my past etch into my thighs like pale constellations, faint red spots on my chest that flush brighter when touched. Thin, pale chasms trace the story of surgeries past—the ones I chose, the ones I endured. Some run along my hips, some fade beneath my breasts, some are almost invisible in the half-light. 

Lovers’ hands graze them without knowing their histories, mistaking them for accidents, for nothing. But I feel the way fingers pause, even briefly, when skin tells a story the mouth has not.

(He/Him) was not aware of that secret history. To him I was enveloped in western shadows, a woman sweet to touch for a night, cold to love. His rage was a typhoon—I only told him after devouring each other’s bodies that I was not the person I was born as. He was confused—betrayed. I assured him it doesn’t work like that anymore, he’s not allowed to feel that way. He unzipped the tent and stormed out into the low cumulus clouds. Traceless. Unfortunately another horrible experience with a cis white male. 

This world, cold and white, discards us like that. Ethnic and queer folk like us are invisibilized, but ready for consumption. Our pain is exoticized, our scars treated like illness, our bodies whispered about but never dignified. And when the weight of loneliness presses, they blame us for being unseen, as if their blindness were our fault. 

I sometimes think of Xiaotangshan, Beijing—in my early years, the city was a blur of smog and horns, yet somehow the hiding felt different there. I learned to smoke at six, knew I was different long before I had words: my Ultra-Queer Blackness marked me as foreign even in my birth-city, exogenous before I could name the ache. I still hid, but I also named myself in the small mirror of my bedroom, carving a self behind the mask that would later become my shield. 

By my early teens I’d ostracised myself online, not feeling I belonged in Beijing because of my sexuality and identity. I picked up hobby-smithing, making snelvish jewellery and armour, and wrote smut poetry under the pseudonym Ellie—neither took off, which I attribute to my lack of privilege.

At cosplay conventions I finally donned the pieces I’d forged. Compliments confluenced into a chorus, that validation I’d longed for. One of those compliments slid into a bathroom stall, into hurried touches and muffled laughter against cold tiles. He was a cis white man, an Australian. For weeks afterwards we corresponded across oceans, the distance wrapped in promise. Then he receded back into his world. That hookup stayed with me not for its extraordinariness, but for how it underlined the thinness of the line between being wanted and disposability. 

I remember my first proper date in Naarm, nerves coiled wiry beneath my skin. I hid the truth of me, sliding through dinner and small talk like an improv scene no one else had the script for. It became a pattern—men stacked like nights in borrowed bedrooms, none knowing my full story. 

Each time the same choreography: his hands fumbling at zippers, my body tensing a second too long, heart racing in case he felt something out of place, paused, asked. They never did. They moved on, hungry, careless, convinced by the facade I’d carried from Xiaotangshan and polished here. I lay there half-elsewhere, waiting for the question that never came. I almost told one guy on the 19 tram—but swallowed the words, convinced silence was its own performance, a fiction that lived only for the span of a night. 

My non-white, trans truth is not a debt to be collected at the threshold of intimacy. What I was, what I am, what I have become; these are not disclosures but evolutions, constellations only I can chart. 

If a man takes my body in his hands and finds warmth, desire, and the trembling of life itself, what more could he claim to require? The rest is mine. To demand otherwise is not love but conquest. To keep my silence is not deceit, but the same survival I learned in Beijing, made art here in Naarm—and in that art, there is no shame, only the certainty of my own becoming.