Interview: Jamie Nonis on Overcoming Internalised Homophobia & Learning to Love Yourself
As RuPaul said, “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?
SPEQ:TRUM podcast Host Jamie Nonis and popular content creator Aarika Lee switch roles with Jamie in the hot seat this time, as she opens up about overcoming internalised homophobia on the long journey to finally loving herself. The pair happen to be close cousins who grew up together, and they share a sweet moment at the end.
Q: I’ve always wondered, if there were moments when we were growing up that you really felt that you were alone. Because I feel like we were together a lot, but we never talked about any of this. So how did you go through so much of life not talking to us about it, though you saw and lived with every day.
J: I’ve written about this, about having the guilt and the shame, and feeling like I had to hide myself. So when society and family tells you your being, your existence is wrong, from the age of a small child, and you get that kind of messages coming in from society and that seeps into your psyche, and you just feel like you’re wrong, you’re a wrongness, you are a mistake, – it makes opening up even harder. Because you’re already dealing on your own with that guilt and shame. So I guess I felt like I couldn’t open up, I couldn’t share because there was just too much guilt and too much self-blame as well, because I actually felt like there was something wrong with me. How come I’m this way? How come I’m born this way? And there’s nothing much I can do about it. So it’s that whole thing of labelling yourself as “wrong”. But that said, yes, I do feel like I need to take accountability, in the sense of it’s me choosing not to take that risk to open up and talk openly about these things because I had the thought that people won’t be able to understand. So that was the overarching thing and that I’ll be judged, obviously.
Q: So there was never any one point where you did try and then you were met with a response that made you feel that you couldn’t open up more?
J: That’s a good question. I don’t recall any incident where I tried to with the close family members or close friends. So it was really my own thinking, I guess, my own assumptions as well about life and the world.
Q: I know you were very tomboyish when we were growing up. Maybe I’m just blur but I’ve never heard anyone tell you that you shouldn’t be a tomboy. But that was at Nan’s house. When you were not there, did you encounter (any of that)? Did people tell you that you shouldn’t dress this way or shouldn’t act this way and things like that?
J: Okay, I’ll tell you the messages that I heard and that do still kind of haunt me till today. These are from some relatives and family, messages like, “You can be who you are but you don’t have to be an open book. You don’t have to be so obvious about it.” So the message that a child gets is, “The way I am is not okay. The way that I am is not accepted.” On one hand, I do appreciate the fact that I wasn’t outrightly rejected or kicked out of the house like some of the other LGBTQ+ people may have to face. So I do feel grateful for that, but at the same time, those messages have had very, very drastic effects on my sense of self, my sense of self-worth as well growing up and feeling like--
Q: It’s like you can be this person but don’t really be this person, don’t show.
J: Don’t flaunt it, basically. Why I feel so much about the trans community is because in the whole LGBTQ group and family, they’re the most marginalised. I think it’s safe to say they are because they are so visible. There’s a lot of awareness and education that needs to happen in this area. And I feel a lot of people don’t get it, and I’m so grateful that I get a lot of support and supportive messages now from people, from straight friends, from straight industry contacts, and it does mean something to me and it means a lot. But at the same time, sometimes their narrative is, “We accept you, what. You are loved, what. And you are great, you are awesome.” But what they don’t get is actually they don’t understand our lived experience. So why I’m more passionate about the trans community is because they’re more marginalised, in a sense, because they’re so visible. If I choose to dress like a boy, I can’t hide the fact that I’m probably gay, you know what I mean? And a trans woman can be even more obvious. So the discrimination they get is very, very overt and in your face. Whereas, say, compared to a lesbian with long hair, they can still sort of pass. So they don’t get the very obvious discrimination. Sure, they have their struggles as well, but it’s a different level.
Q: That’s interesting. I know it’s been a long journey for you, but when you lived away for a little while, did you feel it was more freeing?
J: You mean when I went to study in Australia?
SPEQ:TRUM podcast Host Jamie Nonis
Q: Yes, like just in a place that maybe is not as conservative as Singapore. Maybe I could be wrong, maybe they were also conservative there but did you feel…
J: Okay, this is interesting because I don’t know why, but the memory that is popping in my head right now about my time in Australia was whenever I went to the gay bars, I always got hit on by gay guys instead of girls. That’s just my memory from uni. So twisted also. But what’s interesting is that even though the environment may be different and the environment may be more open and accepting, I didn’t feel any less alone in a sense because it was my journey and it was about my relationship with myself. These are some of the things that I’m now realising that you can actually have really great support but it’s your relationship with yourself that matters the most, and if you don’t have a good solid, strong relationship with yourself, or if you have a lot of self-doubt, then it doesn’t matter. The support almost just doesn’t count.
“You can actually have really great support but it’s your relationship with yourself that matters the most. ”
Q: It’s still secondary.
J: Yes. That’s why I’m always championing working on ourselves and building that strong relationship with ourselves.
Q: What has really helped you to slowly even start to come to that sort of reconciliation with yourself?
J: I think it was probably a lifetime of a lot of shit and a lot of really, really negative experiences, toxic experiences, toxic relationships and all that, that eventually I had to hit rock bottom to realise that I have to do something drastic and something major. So the last two years, I’ve been doing a lot of self-work and what I want to share is identity work. I’ve been doing a lot of work in terms of my identity and how I see myself and deciding who I want to be as a person in this world, what I stand for, my values. I literally sat down and decided all this, and then interestingly the actions just naturally flow from there and they start to be aligned with what I decided how my life is going to be and what I’m going to stand for. So I would say the biggest change in the last one, two years has been the massive identity work that I’ve been doing in terms of trying to undo some of the very disempowering thoughts and beliefs that I had about myself, and seeing myself as having value and really having to train myself from scratch in these areas.
Q: Do you see any benefit or power in being actively part of the LGBTQ community in Singapore? Because I feel like your journey, whether you chose for it to be quite isolating or not, it has been. So do you think it would be in any way helpful to you to be more immersed or be more involved in the community?
J: This is something that I’ve also been thinking about over time, over the years – why have I not chosen to be so involved in the community? And a lot of it had to do with not accepting myself and choosing to stay away because it’s internalised homophobia. Some LGBTQ individuals have internalised homophobia until we come to a place where we deal with it and then we get over it and we overcome it. So for me, I’ve been grappling with it for a long time and I know that this can be quite surprising to some people. I get this feedback from people sometimes, and they’re surprised that I had these struggles because they feel I look like I’m so out and open and all that. And that’s exactly what I want to share is that things aren’t always what they seem, and that’s why we always have to look deeper and try to understand from a deeper level what people are really going through and not just make judgements--
Q: Assumptions.
J: Yes, based on what we see on the outside, on the surface. So I think I’ve had that internalised homophobia for a long time and I had to admit to myself that I actually don’t feel so comfortable being in large groups of the LGBTQ community. And I trace it back to the internalised homophobia. It’s very strange, it’s like not wanting to be associated with it although you know you clearly are, and you know you can’t deny that, and it’s so obvious for the whole world to see. But to answer your question, this year’s Pink Dot was really very interesting because something clicked for me where I realised that, yeah, actually I’ve been isolating myself, I have been making myself an island thinking that I have to struggle on my own when actually there’s so much support out there. But again, I also don’t want to be too hard on myself now because there’s no point that I beat up on myself now, when I’ve worked so hard to get out of that. So now, it’s just about recognising that, okay, I did that because I had the internalised homophobia and I couldn’t kind of deal with it, so I stayed away from the community because maybe I didn’t feel very comfortable and all that.
Q: I know this year’s Pink Dot, which we watched from home, did it surprise you to see --I know it’s just a digital participation, but at the end when they showed the island light-up, were you surprised or amazed that there were that many allies or that many LGBTQ people around you? It might not have been an active way of being there for the LGBTQ community, when you show up at the space it’s very different from just logging online, but I think people really tried to make an effort. How do you feel seeing something like that?
J: It definitely moved me. I felt very, very moved and I wouldn’t say surprised or amazed, but I did feel very moved to know that I’m really, really not alone and there are so many out there. It was a wonderful feeling, very, very wonderful feeling.
Q: If you could tell your younger self something that would really--only you would know when was a really tough time when you were journeying--if you could write yourself a letter or tell yourself something at that point in time, what would you tell yourself?
J: Now you’re going to make me cry. Damn it.
Q: Because I’m sure there are--whoever’s listening--there might be someone who also needs to hear it and for you to also feel that power that you’ve come out of that place. What would you tell yourself?
J: I think what I would have wanted to know and feel and hear was probably that --okay, so if I was telling it to my younger self: “You are loved, and you matter.”
Q: Just those two things? Because sometimes we forget that the simplest words are the most powerful.
J: So for everyone’s who’s listening, Aarika just made me cry.
Q: I made myself cry.
J: But that was really powerful. I think a lot of people actually have a lot of trauma and sometimes it can be small things, you know, it doesn’t have to be huge, huge things. And we all need healing. And I think people in this community especially, because we go through a lot, from discrimination to just family acceptance and all kind of stuff; to different degrees, some people are a little bit luckier than others, some people have it a bit rougher than others. But I think a lot of people in this community could benefit from a lot of healing as well. And healing is so important because until we are healed, we can’t have really good healthy relationships, and we can’t have--
Q: I mean, they do say you can’t love someone else if you can’t love yourself.
J: Exactly, that’s the RuPaul thing, right: How the hell you going to love someone if you can’t love yourself? And the important message also is to not blame yourself. And for me, I had a lot of self-blame for most of my life, but the important thing is to not blame yourself because I think there’s a tendency to self-blame because the narrative is, “Why do I have to be like this? And because I’m like this, all this shit experiences happen to me sometimes.” But it’s not to self-blame because it just is what it is, and it was what it was.
Q: Thanks for sharing that.
J: Thanks for asking me these questions. It’s very interesting because on some level, I felt and I knew even from a long time ago--and I’ve been wanting to do this podcast for a long time, and it’s taken me two years since I first seeded the idea and we even did the first few interviews--it’s taken me two years to finally get it out and it’s really reflective of my journey to my own self-acceptance at different levels of acceptance over the years. I kind of knew that this was going to be healing for me as well--even though my main objective is to help other people obviously and share stories--but I knew that on some level it’s going to be healing for me to work on this project as well.
Q: You’re on the way.
Transcribed by Natasha Pestana