Transgender children have been the focus of considerable media attention in Australia over the past two years. Two examples this year are episodes of Australian Story and 60 Minutes, where viewers shared in the journeys of Georgie, Emma and Izzie, three transgender teenagers. The episodes highlight how the media can either contribute to or inhibit the …
It was 2011 and I was in the Hunter Valley. I’d just had a very expensive indulgent meal and was ungrateful, scribbling furiously in my journal about how my family didn’t understand me. This is pretty standard fare for a seventeen year-old nearing the end of their high school life and dating a girl living …
From the pathologising times of trailblazing European psychotherapists of the 1930s, through to the more personal accounts of modern transition in the writing of Transgender people like Jenny Boylan and Janet Mock, or the more academic work of sociologist and Trans man Jamison Green, the Trans narrative has been significantly refined, reinterpreted and refocused. At …
When I was your age…” was how my Zimbabwean mother would often begin her lecture-sermons. “If God were to see you now,” she would say, in her rich and powerful African accent, and I’d know I was in for a long one. For many children growing up in the western world, the delivery of life lessons with a …
The fourth annual Queer Screen Film Fest is around the corner, kicking off in Sydney on 20 September. In addition to 12 films at Event Cinemas George Street, the festival includes a free screening of Inside Out (one of our favourites) in Sydney Park (18 Sep), and screenings in Canberra and the Blue Mountains in October. To get the low-down …
Flicking through the pages of a magazine like Archer, it’s surprising to think that there was a time when sex was taboo. Sex has since come to make up a large portion of our identity. Sex was once purely seen as something you did – an act, but now, sex has become who we are. …
I came out at a young age and found myself in a relationship straight away. I was thrown into the heart of the white gay scene without ever wanting to be there. Back then I didn’t see what I see now. I went through the phases of being fetishised, tokenized, played with and put down. …
The Beauty Myth is a non-fiction book by Naomi Wolf, and a foundational feminist text that continues to ring true today, 26 years after it was published. I first came to the book when I was a baby feminist at 19 years old. In my teenage years, I felt worthless because I wasn’t thin. My curly hair was …
JD Samson is best known as a member of electroclash band Le Tigre and the art/performance collective MEN. She helped form the Dykes Can Dance troupe, and contributed to Broadly documentary The Last Lesbian Bars. Lottie Turner interviewed JD Samson for issue #6 of Archer Magazine, which you can buy here for the modest price …
I was 35 when I met my wife. Madelina was dazzling and charming and utterly refreshing, not to mention 11 years my junior – a cute and sexy pastime, I imagined. Except that when I met her, I had a girlfriend. Ruth and I had been together only two months or so. She initially asked …
