Aurelia St Clair On The Power Of Reclaiming Your Queer Youth
From your first friend to your first crush, remembering your firsts can bring a wave of fond memories and pleasant nostalgia. But for queer people, looking back on your adolescence can be difficult — especially if you’ve spent a lot of time repressing it. That’s the beauty of the show My First Time featuring Aurelia St Clair.
My First Time is the brand new video series by We Are Pride which features a bunch of talented queer people across the country, including Kween Kong, Wesley Enoch AM, and Katherine Wolfgramme. The series is made for queer people to share their “firsts” and explore how transformative those experiences can be.
I wish I had a series like this growing up. I spent so much time hiding so many parts of myself that looking back now feels like I’m trying to drag things out of the closet, so to speak. Recalling my first queer kiss or the first time I felt queer attraction is tinged with euphoria, but also despair because of how I had to bottle those feelings up just to get through life. But now, My First Time is allowing queer people, irrespective of age, to look back at their lives and find beauty in those once-forbidden moments.
Junkee caught up with comedian and writer Aurelia St Clair to talk about what it was like to go back into their queer past and how we can better address the “boys club” that is Australian comedy.
Ky Stewart, Junkee: Why is a series like My First Time important, especially for a lot of queer people?
Aurelia St Clair: I think My First Time is going to be really good for young people who maybe don’t have access to seeing themselves represented. I remember being on YouTube a lot when I was younger. When I was in my teens, I was mainly there to watch Lady Gaga music videos but I also would just [watch] anything that I was curious about. I think the cool thing about the We Are Pride channel is that there are so many different videos that they’re posting from queer movies to now, the My First Time series, which I hope will reach a really different and diverse crowd just due to not being behind a paywall or signing up for like a streaming service.
Watching Lady Gaga music videos is so real. I watched the ‘Marry the Night’ music video constantly and it is just the gayest thing I could do when I was younger. Basically, a lot of us queer people have to teach ourselves how to grow up and we do learn a lot from the internet, especially YouTube, but how did you navigate your own queerness and identity beyond music videos?
I was really into Tumblr and Twitter [now X] back in the day and a lot of my exploration into queer spaces started online. That’s something I think that this series covers like ‘Where did you find your community?’ and ‘Where did you start meeting people?’ But for me, reading people’s Tumblr posts and queer couples on Tumblr and Twitter was definitely my first step because I didn’t grow up with any queer representation in my life. My mum [was also] really strict and really religious. If she’d had any hint of [what was] being consumed by me, she would have blocked it immediately. Being on my phone or just sneaking time away when I was walking home to read posts was really important for me.
I think that’s something that bonded a lot of us together. Tumblr definitely was a little hub of queer people just trying to figure out what was going on. When I was watching a few of the episodes of My First Time, the series navigated a lot of questions that might seem really simple but for us queer people, they’re hard to answer and it’s a big deal. Why do you think that is?
That’s a good question. When I was sitting there being interviewed I didn’t know what the questions would be so I didn’t have time to go back and think ‘That was my first experience or my first friend or my first kiss’, and just sitting in that moment trying to come up with it was quite hard because I feel like when some of my first times were happening, I wasn’t ready to acknowledge them.
If I go way back, I had my first kiss with a girl when I was still in primary school but we were just practising you know? So I don’t think of that as my first because we were just being silly and I didn’t think of it as being gay. But now I’m like, ‘Oh, I was so looking forward to practising kissing’. That definitely meant something that wasn’t just funny or what it seemed like at the time, so I feel because a lot of fellow queers didn’t have the chance to come out and freely express those experiences as they were happening, it’s harder to recollect.
Well, for queer people, a lot of our childhood and youth was really spent figuring out who we were or hiding it or having to justify it or ignore it. Watching this series, I think that was coming through rather authentically but it’s really sweet to be able to go back and reclaim that, in a way. Was that something that you felt afterwards? That you were able to reclaim that history, even though it’s your own story?
Yeah, I did feel that a lot actually after the day wrapped. I’ve never thought about a lot of these things since they happened. I definitely hadn’t spoken to any one about them because even with your partners or your friends you discuss your past and your first experiences but often you don’t really dive in deep … but just being able to speak about it freely and knowing that it might go to someone who needs to hear it or who would appreciate it was just a really profound and deep feeling.
I think something that resonated with me was the chosen family aspect, which is obviously a big part of queer people’s lives. Where did you find your chosen family?
I would say I’m constantly expanding my chosen family. I think that’s the great thing about having a chosen family is it’s always growing. Living in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, there’s definitely a big pool of people to choose from. I lived in a share house with lots of other queers and it was just really fun. Living with people who had some life experiences and even though I was dating girls and they were dating boys, there would still be a revolving door of characters in our lives that became family. That was really important for my coming out — being able to live with people who are like me because I didn’t have that growing up.
How do you think we can queer up spaces and venues in Australia, especially the comedy scene?
With pride month coming to a close I think all queer comedians and drag acts will find themselves so booked and busy, myself included, for the last six weeks. It was show after show and everything just lined up. Then entering the rest of the year it’s like nothing. There’s kind of only two months a year when we really find ourselves even stretched thin because I’m feeling a bit stressed at the moment. But there’s ten other months where we’re still queer, and we’re still looking for work, and we’re still wanting to make people laugh and perform. It would be really nice if people remember that they can book queer talent all year round and we’re not your token.
I think the other thing is, it’s a systemic issue as well, because at comedy rooms across the country a lot of the bookers and people running the show are still cis white men. It’s a bit of a boys club in the comedy scene where people get booked again and again and you’ll see the lineups look really similar and it’s because of their mates. I mean, if I had a room I’d love to book my mates but I’d want to switch it up every now and then so it’s not just six men on the lineup every week. It kind of goes into having bookers who are queer so they can recommend people that may be on their radar and not on everyone else’s or even bringing in someone as a sort of consultant if you like … and helps you pick other acts. Before I started doing comedy and more diverse rooms and seeking out drag shows, I didn’t know acts that weren’t on TV. It was only when I immersed myself in those spaces that I saw those acts so it’s just a matter of doing the work and I think that’s a field that not only comedy but the overall performing arts scene, writing scene, and music scene could do better.
Ky is a proud Kamilaroi and Dharug person and writer at Junkee. Follow them on Instagram or on X.
Image: Supplied / Junkee