I was on the train in Melbourne heading out last Saturday night. On my carriage was a group of teens, I’d say not much older than 16. Most of them appeared to be of South Sudanese descent and they walked to the end of the carriage where I was standing. They were doing what kids do: making a bit of noise but being generally harmless. I was busy listening to a podcast when they shouted out “Apex” loud and proud. I took off my earbuds. I looked at these boys and saw innocent, baby-faced young men. I laughed. Sure, you’re a “gang”, I said to myself.

Why? Because the “Apex gang” has become the go-to scapegoat to explain violence associated with Africans. In the aftermath of the Moomba festival riots, where the “Apex gang” really came into the public consciousness, a police source told the Age how Apex operates: “They have no clubhouses, no meeting places, no colours like we see with [outlaw motorcycle gangs].”

Then how do they function? How can you legitimately tell the difference between someone who’s a part of their gang or an individual working under their own volition? You can’t. But who needs to when there are saucy headlines like:

Sickening moment a man is stabbed ELEVEN times in unprovoked attack by African Apex gang members as he cowers against a wall on a Melbourne street.

Despite not knowing the identity of the men, the Daily Mail claimed they were a part of Apex. The only features linking the offenders to Apex is that they are African and the crime was in Dandenong.

The Apex gang has become the stuff of legend, a public bogeyman, used to blame violence and crime on terrorising gangs of young people of East African and Middle Eastern descent. The gang, apparently, is named after a street in the multicultural outer Melbourne suburb of Dandenong, where some of the “gang leaders” live.

But were these kids part of a violent gang terrorising innocent Melburnians? Probably not, but reality doesn’t matter. They were dark skinned black Sudanese boys in a train carriage full of white passengers. They were actors reading from their script. To their mind, these people either adored their performance or feared their existence.

How do I know? Because I am also guilty of wanting to play into a narrative that was more fantasy than reality. It’s hard to grow up around people who have a fixed idea of who you are based on the shade of your complexion.

Several key moments in my youth helped define how I saw myself. One incident I remember involved a teacher at my high school. I was at school, wearing sportswear – it was a sunny spring afternoon and I was readying myself for a game of soccer. I was looking for a teacher to collect some work before the school holidays and when I found him, before I could start talking about the work, he looked down and joked about the length of my navy blue shorts. He said, “You better be careful nothing slips out.” I knew what he was crudely alluding to.

I’m not going to lie: that was tough to hear. I didn’t know what to feel or say. Everything we’re taught in this macho culture tells me that’s a great compliment. But it didn’t feel like it. I felt awkward and weird. I was 16, speaking to a teacher I respected – he was one of my favourite teachers. So I did what I thought anyone would do. I chuckled, nodded and moved on. That was the way. I needed to learn to deal with it. I wish I could say that was the first time something like that happened. It wasn’t. I don’t expect it will be the last, either.

I, like the boys on the carriage shouting “Apex”, wanted to play along, become an active part of the show that was being written about me. If people were going to have an idea about me, well, I was going to make it a good one. So I embraced it. I became this hyper-masculine guy my teacher had assumed me to be.

But it never turns out quite like you plan. In class one day, I was bigging myself up and a much taller, more imposing classmate didn’t like my new persona. So he put my new-found “confidence” to the test. He suggested we “compare notes” inside the bathroom, saying he wanted to know if it was true what they say about black guys. I fell into my chair. I was terrified.

I had wanted to boast but not like this. This wasn’t what I signed up for. I didn’t want my manhood to define me, or for others to define me purely because of what they thought black people – and this instance, black men – were like. It was like those weird moments when my friends would tell me they knew young white women who only liked black guys. I didn’t understand it at the time but it felt off. We were the fantasies of others, whether it was out of conquest or disgust. We didn’t have a choice in how we were going to be perceived, it was already defined.

My train ride last Saturday night took me back to those uncomfortable moments and my own struggle to find a sense of myself – a self defined by me rather than prevailing stereotypes. I saw my confused 16-year-old self in those boys on the train; grappling with my identity and my masculinity, not knowing whether or not what I was doing would help me fit in, all the time telling myself that’s my worth: I am as simplistic as a trope, as basic as a racial fetish and as limited as a white fantasy. I didn’t know I deserved complexity, and I fear those boys don’t either.