Seventeen weeks after they moved to the city, Sofia stole her boyfriend’s mouth. She’d been toying with the idea, on and off, for months. She knew it was the lazy way out. She didn’t want things to just be handed to her – she wanted to work, to grow. She had been to the Volkshochschule and sat on a hard chair for three hours waiting to be given a number to be given a lesson.

I thought that returning home to Australia would be simpler. I knew how high my home country has been building its walls, but it couldn’t apply to me or my newly approved wife. Australia’s conservative LGBT politics felt like something that would lap at our feet, easily ignored. Somehow I managed to be aware of it all and still believe, serenely, obliviously, marked in all the privilege I’ve been steeped in so far, that for us it would be easy. But I was wrong.