Masterchef Australia contestant Conor Curran has responded to the #burntheblazer protest.
Earlier this week James Robinson, a visual artist and graduate of elite private school St Kevin’s College in Toorak, took to social media to share his latest work — a protest against the “hyper-masculine” culture at St Kevin’s.
Robinson, who graduated from the all-boys secondary college in 2013, broke into the school grounds and set his old blazer alight on the school’s oval, to highlight the misogyny and homophobia at the private boys’ school.
The protest was sparked by the arrest of AFL player and former student Jordan De Goey. De Goey was stood down indefinitely by Collingwood last week after he was charged with forcibly touching a 35-year-old woman and assaulting a 37-year-old man at a rooftop bar in New York.
Robinson wrote that upon hearing the news of De Goey’s arrest, something within him “snapped.” The photographer, who works between New York and Los Angeles, says that De Goey’s arrest was “unsurprising”, and symptomatic of the sexist, homophobic, and racist culture that St. Kevin’s breeds.
“St Kevin’s is a bubble where privileged young men can rehearse oppression without consequence, before graduating with flying colours into public. A place where “locker room talk” exists openly in hallways and classrooms,” Robinson wrote. “I saw a system designed to let young boys think they can do anything … and get away with it.”
Robinson went on to detail allegations of revenge porn, bullying, violence, and bribery that ran rampant at the school.
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Conor Curran, who appeared on season 13 of Masterchef Australia, took to Instagram to respond to Robinson’s artwork, detailing his own experience with homophobia at a Melbourne private school.
“The story that James spoke of resounded so deeply to me. I also went to a private school in Melbourne, granted it was co-ed, but my experience is one that like so many other queer humans had was traumatic,” Curran wrote.
“I was bullied heavily daily. I was called ‘faggot’ more than I was called Conor. To be clear a lot of straight males got away with this. Not one suspension, barely any discipline.”
Curran went on to detail that he was met with a lack of support during his time at the school. “The fact that I was openly verbally harassed daily to the point of deep depression and being suicidal is not a new tale, it’s eerily the norm for a lot of queer people from my generation.”
He continues, “We stay so silent in the years that pass and for what? For nothing to change? I’ve gone and made something out of my life despite what I went through and I am incredibly proud of myself for that, but I don’t have to worry for myself now. I’m good, I went and peaked in life.”
Curran went on to question what action schools are taking to ensure that queer children are protected. “Is anything changing, is the curriculum keeping up with the world and are teachers protecting queer youth,” he asked. “I don’t need another student to burden the trauma I still carry today. Enough is enough.”
Elsewhere in the post, Curran wrote that his school reached out to him whilst participating on MasterChef to ask if he was interested in becoming one of their alumni.
“I found it so confronting and tone deaf but also it felt like a slap in the face,” he wrote. “Now that I had reached a level of known or accomplished something incredible like I did on MasterChef they now were happy to parade me around as a success story.”
“I succeeded not in spite, but despite of what I went through. I’m not singling out my school, this is to every single school,” he continued.
Read the post in full below.
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