Home Page - Save Our Kids - AT TINA’S

Somewhere new: their latest find is Tina’s at the top of William street, a gay bar recently incarnated on the site of the Laramie restaurant. Tina’s came as a surprise. It was a clean, almost well lighted place. Tina, a drag queen who worked for three years as a barmaid in the Taproom of the Rex was intent on keeping it that way. She seemed a bit concerned that the kids would lower the tone of the place.

Late at night the bar had a chummy ambience with the clientele, many in their middle years, gathered around the piano for a singalong. The kids were out the back, on the dance-floor and huddled around the jukebox, playing agin and again the same records they’d played at Castello’s and the Crest.

“Everyone comes to Tina’s now,” said Bianca, 15, hitching at the stocking under his Fiorucci jeans. Bianca was new to the Cross and not yet jaded. But he did have a problem: “I want to crack it in the Cross, pay protection but I’m too scared.”

Some weeks before, he was arrested while soliciting, charged with offensive behavior and fined $200. “If I can’t pay up, I’ll go to jail.” So he was on the dole, receiving $87 a fortnight after convincing the authorities that he was 20 years old and said his fine would have to paid out of the dole money.

Bianca ran away from home when he was 11, after being expelled from school. About a year ago, he decided he was “transsexual”. At that time, Bianca was a pretty 14 year-old boy who looked older, and worked as a prostitute in a Melbourne massage parlour. Since then, he said, “I’ve lived as a woman. I went with a guy for nine weeks. He didn’t know. I paid a lot of money to learn how to do trick sex (so sexual partners will be convinced they are with a woman, not a man).

“I used to put on a voice like a girl, but it hurts my throat too much. I’m going to have my vocal chords done. I’ve heard about it from other queens. I take hormones – I’m waiting til my breasts get bigger do stripping.”

“I shave my whole body every morning, my arms, my legs, my feet, my chest. I shave my face three times a day. The rest of the day I come to the Rex, I go to the Crest, I clean up my flat. I keep myself busy, do me hair, do me make-up, wipe it off again.”

Bianca claimed to have worked exceptionally long hours at the massage parlor in order to save money for a sex change operation. He left Melbourne some months back, told his parents he had a two-year modeling contract in Israel (“it was the furthest place I could think of “) and came to the Cross.

Released from Long Bay on a Wednesday morning, John was in the Taproom of the Rex Hotel that night, swaggering from one clutch of young acquaintances to another, with messages from inside and tales of his own daring. He had been in prison for a month, after failing to pay fines on a possession charge. On his release, he was handed back the $40 odd he had when he went in, and immediately spent $35 of it for a tattoo on his upper arm which said with scrolls, hearts and flowers; “Joylene Rose of my Heart.”

Joylene, a wan, nervy blonde of 17, had the name of a former boyfriends’ gang tattooed over her breasts, and the name of another ex on her arm. She had scrubbed so hard at the marking on her arm that several layers of skin, but not the tattoo, had come off.

Joylene and John planned go to Melbourne the next day. She said “I reckon we’ll stay together for a long time otherwise he wouldn’t have got my name tattooed eh, for $35.” We’ll be together forever,” says John.

As it turned out they didn’t not go to Melbourne together the next day, nor the one after, and I did not see them together again.

Like most of her companions, Joylene kept talking about getting out of the Cross: ”But I’ve got nowhere else to go.” She’d been there, on and off, since she was 14. At that age Joylene fell pregnant and left school to have the child. Sometimes she stayed at her parent’s house, on the western fringe of Sydney, and worked at conventional jobs.  But she said that her parents did not really want her around. There ware 15 children in Joylene’s family; three died in infancy and one died in a childhood accident. Her father, a tradesman, was no longer working she said. He’d been partly paralysed in an accident.