It’s a good photo, though. It just unnerves me to remind myself that it’s me in there and that’s what I used to be like.

But I know someone else looking at it wouldn’t see all that the same way.

I’m almost certain I submitted that photo to be considered for the reboot of Heartbreak High (2022). This semester, some of my classmates were saying that the show doesn’t represent Australian experiences truthfully. To me, it does, and I think they’re just way more sensitive to media they see themselves represented in.

More critical of it. And I’m not exempt from that.

This guy Christoph Ribbat wrote about separate ideas of ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ photography. The ‘straight’ photos are ‘technically perfect, non-manipulated, honest, simple’. But a lot of the notable names in that practice seem like dickheads. In their terms, the originals of Tahayori’s photos in Archive of Longing were more ‘straight’, and him altering them was making them ‘queer’.

Neither approach is more realistic, in my opinion. I’d say they’re their own versions of the truth, their own perspectives. Reality filtered through an artist and represented differently.

I remember feeling fucked during the taking of that last photo. Not that you taking photos of me made me feel fucked, that’s just what was going on in that moment. You couldn’t help that you captured that, like I was explaining earlier. Yeah, I wasn’t doing great, but as far as that photo’s concerned, I was.

You can take a picture of anything and represent it as straight. Not straight like ‘straight’ photography, but as in heterosexual. There’s this Melbourne-based couple called The Huxleys who make queer art, especially photos. You should look them up, they’re cool. But in a lot of other outlets’ photos of them—if they’re getting interviewed or whatever—you can’t be certain which way they swing. Similar to that, I was astounded to learn that James Corden is straight. That’s on me, though. That was my perspective.

Whenever you’d take photos of me and get me to flick through them and choose which I liked, I’d pick the ones I thought I looked best in. Except, if there weren’t that many of those passable ones, does that mean the pictures I didn’t like were a better representation of me? Even if I wasn’t keen on how I was being represented, were they the ‘better’ ones?

I don’t know.

In her writings about motherhood, Julia Kristeva presumed to know how mother–son relationships work when there’s a gay man involved. She’s addressed by Michael du Plessis, who highlights her saying ‘male homosexuality [is] a double confinement: that of the mother in the gay man, and of the gay man in his mother’s image’ to iterate how generalised and unfair that is.

Still, I think that argument of Kristeva’s is sort of why I didn’t like getting my photo taken. I remember getting so restless with you instructing me how to position myself, and even if it was awkward as, to hold still. You were making me appear how you wanted me to, and when you took the picture, I was literally in your image.

I don’t want to word it harsh but that’s the only way I can. I’m just trying to put it all out there.

In taking photos of me, I’m assuming there was the goal to have me represented in a way that was in line with your style. Of course, that style wasn’t always going to be exactly the same as mine.

When I first saw Archive of Longing, I thought that all those cracks that Tahayori made in the photos had to do with him not liking them and wanting to smash them apart into shards. He might’ve done that to a couple of them, but surely not the whole series. I’d get pissy with you whenever you’d tell me you were planning another photoshoot, I remember. And we have talked it out, but I am sorry.

Anyway, that ‘confinement’ thing is such shit. It’s a framing of a concept that Kristeva doesn’t fully understand. You are my mum and you raised me, so of course we share traits. And that has made us clash, but to me it just proves how alike we are.