The anniversary of the 2017 postal survey returning a ‘Yes’ result commemorates a complicated legacy. Many in our community will celebrate this day as a great moment in the history of gay rights, while for many others it is overshadowed by the bitter experience of those difficult months. Contrary to much of the commentary during …
What does it mean to come out as asexual? What does it mean to identify as something that is essentially an absence? This is what I am thinking about, seven years into a happy straight-passing relationship with a cis-het man. It would be easy to continue in this relationship without coming out: just go on, …
How do you make a picture of something you can’t see? I’ve been commissioned to create an artwork about hidden queer histories, using the collections of local archives. At the State Library of Victoria, the search term transgender brings up zero results in the multimedia, images and scripts collections. The article and book results are …
I was born in 1991, the year that Nicholas Toonen, a gay activist from Tasmania, sent a communication to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. He argued that criminalising sex between men in private was a violation of his right to privacy. In that year, homosexual sex was still a criminal activity in Tasmania. Under …
Tumblr, the microblogging social platform, has long functioned as a space where young people tend to feel comfortable enough sharing intimate personal details about themselves, particularly in comparison with other social media networks. For me, it was the first place I truly felt like I could express my queerness. I had a typical high school …
As a non-binary person, I am constantly seeking films, television shows, music and online spaces where gender diversity is the norm, not the exception. They are still far too rare, and much needed in our current context. Misconceptions about transgender and gender diverse people continue to abound. In the United States, President Trump’s administration is considering defining …
Have you ever been part of a conversation where people talk about their sexual escapades with a brazen confidence? Ever tried to slink away from such a conversation because you don’t have anything to add, or are embarrassed to say what you feel? That’s me in the corner, losing my confidence trying to keep up …
It took me 25 years to come out the first time. I didn’t consciously know I was queer for a long time, so it didn’t really feel like I was ‘holding it in’ until I finally came out and thought, “wow, where’s that weird sense of indefinable tension that I’ve been carrying around for literally …
Sometimes, queerness is associated with sexual freedom and experimentation, often in the form of promiscuity. This assumption is used in very different ways: on the one hand, it’s an idea perpetuated by those who fear queerness as a threat to the ‘natural order’, chaotic and radical, lacking structure. But on the other hand, this sexual …
Content warning: this article discusses suicide. In 1926, a headline in the New York Times newspaper boldly asserted that: “Only man is gay in bleak Greenland.” Fast forward nine decades later and this article remains a common Google result for anyone who is curious to learn what — if any — gay scene exists in …
