Benjamin Law ➝ 2010 ➝ March

Qweekend,
20-21 March 2010

Posted by benjamin
Saturday, March 20th 2010

Body Double

Originally published in Qweekend (20-21 Mar 2010)

In the second term of Year 11 English, Callie MacNaughton and her classmates were given the outline for an assignment: they would each have to give an oral presentation and it could be on any topic they chose, as long as they argued a point and it was something they believed in.

Speech day arrived and students launched into passionate, earnest manifestos on ‘why all cigarettes should be banned’ and ‘why people shouldn’t drink and drive’. Callie nervously waited her turn. She’d chosen a sensitive, potentially contentious, subject: why gay, lesbian and transgender people deserved equal rights.

Out of the Closet

Edited version originally published in frankie #34 (Mar/Apr 2010)

Faux pas run in my family. Between us, my family members have made chatty references to leukemia with friends, not knowing that our friend’s sibling had died of leukemia. We’ve bemoaned our pale, wintery “corpse-like complexions”, before remembering we were at a funeral. We’ve impersonated the effects of stroke, to people whose friends just had a stroke. Between us, we have a special knack for saying and doing all sorts of wrong, hideous shit, at the exact moment when people need it the least. I suppose you’d call it a skill.