Jay

Hi, my name is Jay Monk. My pronouns are they/them. I've been in the arts which is a long, long time now; I've been doing classical ballet since I was four.

I didn't get into music theatre until halfway through high school. I was still doing ballet at high school. And then in grade 10, I did my first ever musical, which was Sweet Charity. I played New York Man 2. I still remember my first ever line, which was, “I'm a taxpayer!” That was my whole line for the show, and you know I ate that shit up.

After I graduated high school, ballet wasn't really like the direction that I wanted to go, but I still wanted to do arts. And so I started looking more into acting and then into musical theatre and stuff like that, because that still had like obviously a very strong dance element, which is kind of like my home.

I went to Brent Street for music theatre many, many years ago. And then very recently I went to the Queensland Con. I did my Bachelor's of Music Theatre there. And now we're living that starving artist life, just trying to get a gig as an actor out in the real world. Which is not the easiest thing in the world, but hey, that's what we all literally signed up for.

I only came out as non-binary fairly recently, about five years ago, it was mid-COVID, and that's because we were in lockdown. I'd just broken my leg, so I couldn't go for my hot girl walks or anything. I was just stuck inside with nothing to do except think and introspect, which I can't recommend to a lot of people.

But through that and in that time, I started becoming more aware in online spaces and interacting with more people who had come out as non-binary, because it was still a fairly new thing even five years ago. I didn't really know a lot of people who were genderqueer. I knew people who were trans, but I was like, that's not me. I don't feel hugely right in this body, but I don't want the alternative, which is very hard to wrap your head around. And then a few people online were like, yeah, this non-binary thing. So I spent weeks going down a rabbit hole, unable to walk, just in bed, going down all these queer Reddits and Tumblr posts. Can't recommend that.

And I was like, yeah, this actually sounds fairly accurate. And it's been an interesting journey since then. I think I'm pretty aware that I am a very masculine human and I don't do a lot to change or to hide that. But I don't think that being, you know, non-binary, like I'm not agender, I am just neither. I don't want to reject those parts that are masculine or feminine and I'm not like out to completely change myself. So that is very hard to grapple and it does make, I guess, interacting in queer spaces in person sometimes a little tricky, because I can, like for all wants and purposes, I present as a white man, which is fine.

But it's been,It's been a journey to be able to come to terms with that and how I want to present and how I want to interact with my queer community and my other non-binary friends and find out what gender is like, I guess, to me.