The process of self-discovery, of ‘finding yourself’, is the kind of yawn-inducing phrasing one often finds slapped on an Instagram ad for budget airlines. Yet for queer folk, for those who are not always set up for life in a way that most are, the notion of finding oneself takes on a much more significant – and confusing – role in our lives. The settings in which queer people are raised broadly follow heteronormative standards, with the boy-meets-girl expectation of high school romances and the calculated dream of a three-bed bungalow in the outer suburbs. These standards are not enforced, but they are omnipresent. From the first days of breathing and eating, most of us grow up in a world of mummies and daddies – with little variation of that family dynamic. How would anyone be able to know any better in that scenario? In the rather literal way in which children view the world, the unsure explorations of preadolescence become clouded under a policy of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. For the boys who maybe want to kiss the boy they like in their class, or want to know if they, too, have hair on their body in the same places they are noticing dark curls grow between their own legs, how can any of that be discovered in a world where boys are supposed to like girls? Needless to say, all of this creates a tremendous amount of internal upset and uncertainty for many queer folk in their early stages of personhood. Not only are they usually fighting with the tempests of puberty at this age, but also starting to recognise their own sexual desires and motivations. What shapes this understanding of self is a recognition of community. The queer kids that can only recognise at first that they are somehow ‘different’, later realise there are others like them, that they aren’t doomed to remain the only one who feels like this. This is what makes queer representation so important: it helps the outsiders know that there any many others like them. That they are not only a part of something bigger than themselves, but something that benefits from their unique inclusion. The LGBTQ+ community is not homogenous, for all the homosexuality contained therein, and there is fantastic scope and range for its members to express their own queerness. This is what has guided the curated works on display in I Me My: a desire to understand queer identity, both personally and within a broader context. The intensely personal ways in which individual queerness is explored in this exhibition depicts highly specific settings, reflective of the artists’ own upbringing, as well as much larger and unknown settings. What begins in the home – the first stages of queer identity formation, those anguished feelings and desires that can’t be explained but won’t go away – expands ever outward into a world that may not always be accepting of who you are and what it is you need to share with that world. This – at times challenged – relationship between the security of the home space and the uneasy hugeness of what stands beyond that space is keenly felt within the intimate, carefully balanced display of images in this exhibition. Depictions of figures within familiar, safe domestic settings who appear to be locked into themselves are contrasted with self-portraits that are held open to uninterrupted expanses of sky and shifting air. Spaces which are supposedly nourishing and restorative are not always best-suited to containing those personalities which, instead, thrive in the rough vitality of an uncertain arena. Such is the experience of discovering and developing one’s own queer identity. There is no precise method to any of it, and the process is rarely achieved independently. Much of who you are, as someone ‘different’, stems from the observation of others who came before and stand beside you. The role of queer expression – and its immense importance – is to speak out and move freely, so that it may show others how life can be achieved beyond the restricting boundaries of shame and fear that come when deviating from the standards of boy-meets-girl. That the boy who dreams of holding the hand of the other boy with whom he walks to school each morning can, free of judgement, do just so as his heart pleases. *** Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier is a freelance writer and classical music critic based in Melbourne.