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Colour Story - Caspar McLeod

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Caspar McLeod is exhausted. He’s in an unfamiliar area. He hears Arabic for the first time. His sinuses are clogged when he tries to breathe. The air is dusty, but his surroundings are still non-rural. He’s in a city, with the sun at the break of the skyline. But as though the place was a sandy desert, he’s in a Metropolitan city with many skyscrapers at his sight. Caspar, 9, has just arrived in his new home, Dubai.

Dubai is the city where Caspar spent most of his life, from 2010 to 2018. During his childhood, his family constantly moved, and he’s lived in five different countries: Australia (Melbourne); Hong Kong; Kuala Lumpur, Thailand and then Dubai. But Dubai was the time where Caspar matured and found out a lot more about the world, people. And himself.

Living in Dubai made Caspar used to multiculturalism, being surrounded by students from more than 90 different nationalities in his school. He made friends with people from all sorts of backgrounds. This also diversified his palate when going to friends’ houses. Which helped increase his low spice tolerance.

“One of my really good friends is from India,” he told me.

“Whenever I went to his house, there would be a big Indian lunch, food constantly comes from through the door, and it was very, very spicy," he said. "I do not deal well with spices, but I used to be a lot worse.”

When Caspar reached high school, bigger matters unfolded. He noticed that he wasn’t the same as other guys at his school. He started to find guys attractive. He was confused and asked himself “am I gay?” But he knew that he also liked girls. It was in 2013 that he came into terms of his bisexuality.

It was a lonely time for him, as it is for many young same-sex attracted and gender diverse individuals. Except the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was not as open or accepting as places like Australia.

“I still wasn’t out, proud and loud about it, because it’s illegal in the UAE to express your sexuality if you’re not straight,” he said.

“I heard a story about one of my friends,” he said. “I think he was gay, but he wasn’t out.”

“Somebody made a rumour about him being gay and it got so serious that he had to go to the police and explain to them that it was a joke because he would’ve been deported if he was homosexual,” he said.

Though Caspar wasn’t ‘out’, he experienced teasing and the standard high school rumours. It first bothered him. But over the years he was able to discover an underground LGBTQI+ support group at his school.

They banded together to form a WhatsApp group where they talked about everything gay and not.

“We would provide a shoulder for those who don’t have one to cry on, regarding anything, but sexuality more often than not,” he said.

After graduating from high school, a few months later Caspar moved back to Melbourne. He is now an out and proud bisexual. He has a passion for journalism. He told me he wanted to become a journalist to tell the stories of different people to the rest of the world.