My Life History in about 1500 Words

I was born in Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital on 11 October 1972.

My childhood was isolated. Living on the corner of two arterial roads prohibited me from wandering into other neighbourhood and hanging out with other kids, and I am an only child. This meant that I spent most of my time doing one-person activities, and my favourite activity was playing with Lego.

School was hell, especially high school. My isolation prevented me from learning much in the way of social skills, and the adolescents interact with each other in the cesspool of stereotypes that is high school isn't something that one can deduce from common sense. This was especially true for issues relating to sex, sexuality and relationships, topics that I seemed to have more of a serious interest in than even your average zitty 13-year-old male. My parents applied classic Dutch liberalism when dealing with that topic, but they were ridiculously overprotective in other ways, especially when it came to going out. The only way I could have a reasonable social life was to lie to them about where I was going. Sure enough, after I realised this at age 15, something of a social life budded for me, and not with the "wrong crowd", as my parents might have thought if they knew. In due course this made highschool less of a torment for me, but those were still by far the worst years of my life.

The other turning point was getting my first modem in the mid-1980s. Through BBSes, I was able to meet many more worthy people than my school had to offer, and after a couple of years, my online friends decided to do something completely radical: meet in real life! I'm still in touch with some of those friends today, both online and in real life, and particularly those who I got to know through a BBS called Arcadia.

Things changed completely when I started going to university. I didn't have to deal with those fuckwits from school anymore, and I excelled academically because I could study on my own terms. I gained access to the Internet in 1990, and met many more people through IRC, including Leese, my girlfriend of three years. Sexuality was dealt with much more maturely as well, of course, in fact, it's pretty in your face at every Australian university I've ever seen.

However, it wasn't the notice boards with graphic images of bum-fucking men that caused me to seek out the campus gay and lesbian organisations. It was the fact that I'd already occasionally had sex with other males, and enjoyed it enough to start seriously questioning my sexuality. To cut a long coming-out story short, I eventually found my way to the Sydney Bisexual Network, and in due course became one of the main organisers of the group. I also eventually went back to the university gay and lesbian groups, which quickly renamed themselves to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) groups. I went to a few national student Queer Collaborations conferences, and even filled the union-affiliated role of sexuality officer in 1994, which is kind of the same as a women's officer but for queer issues instead of women's issues.

I wasn't your standard student politican, though—for one thing, I was passing all of my subjects! At least, that was true once I switched from electrical engineering at UTS, the 30-storey poo-coloured building that they call a university, to computer science at the greener pastures of UWS. I failed some subjects in my original course of study and only just scaped past many others, but once I changed courses, I maintained a distinction average. Computer programming was natural to me, so it's no wonder that that's what I eventually made into my career.

In 1995, I took part in a university exchange student program with CSUS in Sacramento, USA. Since most of my family is in Europe and North America, I travelled a lot in my childhood, but this was the first time I'd actually lived in a foreign country. I found state university life in the U.S. to be more like high school in Australia, and the fact that Americans have to wait until they're 21 to legally drink seemed to make uni students think alcohol was the most wonderful drug in the world. It was pretty pathetic—people in their 20s were behaving the way my friends and I did as drunk 15- and 16-year-olds. Thankfully, I found a few non-dickheads, mostly in my usual haunts of the computer labs and the campus GLBT group.

Once again, the GLBT group at Sac State only put the "B" in its name after I came on the scene. I quickly filled one of the group's "officer" roles, and befriended two of the other officers, a lesbian couple who were happy to have me crash on their couch and escape my Revenge of the Nerds-style student accommodation. It's impossible to abbreviate what happened in the years that followed without leaving out many important details, but I'll abbreviate it anyhow...

One of the so-called lesbians was M, and she and I completely fell for each other. We kept in touch after I went back to Australia, and started the longest relationship I've had so far in my life. It also turned out to be what I suppose some would call the biggest "growth experience" imaginable. After living in a long-distance relationship for two and a half years, seeing each other only every nine to twelve months, I moved back to California to be with her. We even got married—we were that serious, and it sure made immigration a whole lot easier to deal with. But, to cut a very long, sad story short, it didn't work out.

It took me a few years to get over that. Leaving absolutely everything you know and love behind for a relationship that falls apart is disappointing to say the least, and it wasn't until about the turn of the century that I stopped feeling fucked up. The best step I took was moving to what I've always regarded as my American home, San Francisco. The vain hope of M and I patching things up delayed this step, but once I made the move, I didn't look back. Sacramento has its charms, but it's altogether way too small and unimportant a town for me to live in.

It took me a year or so to really feel settled in the Bay Area, as I moved from circle to circle and scene to scene. Most of those circles revolved around polyamoury, though. Poly was far from new to me—I realised some ten years before that monogamy just doesn't work for me—but most of the circles I'd spent my life in until then were simply poly-friendly, and not specifically poly-based. The only real exception was the poly social group that rose and quickly fell again while I lived in Sacramento, but the Bay Area has a bunch of stable poly scenes: poly Pagans, poly Goths, a fledgling poly bisexual group, and various little poly groups in the suburbs. I felt understood and respected in these groups, and I got invited to some of the most amazing parties I'd ever been to. I also felt understood and respected, and nurtured and loved and listened to, by Diospyros, who I had a short-lived but very significant relationship with. Eventually, of course, I found friends and lovers to gather with outside of any formal group, and these are my best friends today.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I met Hope and her husband, Sinboy. We kept meaning to get to know each other better, but it wasn't until the second half of 2001 that Hope and I really started talking, and Hope, Sinboy and I started hanging out by ourselves. By November of that year, Hope and I had fallen completely in love, and in the months that followed we met Rose and made strong connections with her as well. Eventually the idea of House Dreamland was born, and we decided to make it reality a year later, in the middle of 2003. A lot happened in the meantime, especially as far as travel goes.

For a start, I spent the second half of 2002 living in Amsterdam. I had purposefully made as few plans as possible because I wanted to throw myself in the deep end and see how I'd fare. It was tough to stay afloat because I never got to put my working visa to any use—the dot com crash had only just hit there. But I had enough savings, and then enough credit, to keep myself fed and sheltered, and I met a few generous people on LiveJournal who were willing to help me out with things like loaning cars, connecting me with people, and putting a roof over my head between sublets. The most helpful of all was oddiofile, but I'm also very grateful to halimede and science_vixen, who I'm happy to say I've forged long-term friendships with. But I didn't forge many other friendships. I never really found a crowd of "my people in Amsterdam"—the social groups set up for expats were populated mostly by pretentious wankers with fake personalities, and I've never been much of a clubber. There was on poly scene at all that I could find, not even online. I suppose I should've explored the bi scene some more, but my online time got rather monopolised by LiveJournal.

My travels didn't stop there. For the first few months of 2003 I was back in Australia. I lived with my parents until they drove me completely insane, at which time my old BBS friend, GRiPZ, had a room become available at his place. It was half a block away from EverythingLinux.com.au, a company that another BBS friend, SmilieZ, owned, and he managed to find enough to do to keep me employed for a while. And then an old programming contract that I had done ten years before popped back up, in Malaysia of all places, so I spent April in Kuching working on my own ten-year-old C code.

But by the end of May I was back in the U.S, living with Hope and Sinboy in their one-bedroom South Bay apartment. Rose spent many nights there as well, and things went the way you might imagine if you lived in a one-bedroom apartment with three other adults, only we didn't kill each other or even scream much. By June we found a place in the City suitable to be House Dreamland, which is where I live today. I've yet to find any real programming work back here in the U.S, but I continue to look, and make ends meet in the meantime by doing courier work.