To celebrate my resignation from my first full-time job after college, I booked a flight from the Philippines to Singapore for a break. I brought one bag with me for a month-long stay. When I landed I realised how reckless my decision was. I had no idea what I was going to do there. I …
I’m walking down King Street in inner-suburban Sydney with my headphones in, engaged in that detestable digital-age behaviour: scrolling through social media while walking. I come across a video posted by Juno Mac, a UK-based colleague and comrade in sex-work activism. I’ve been watching her posts closely this week because she’s where I’d like to …
Names. Labels. Decisions… We, as human beings, do love to put neat little labels on nearly anything. We have a deep-seated need to create well-balanced order out of the endless amounts of chaos that this universe tends to fling our way. Your name is there, sometimes even before you’re born, just waiting to slap a …
It’s been ten years since I finished school. A decade since I definitively declared “School’s out for summer, school’s out forever”. Between that day, the beginning of the rest of my life, and now, I came out. Returning to my Catholic high school in Sydney’s inner west to see what had changed, I expected better …
Welcome to Archer Magazine #12: the PLAY issue. Featuring work by author activist Nevo Zisin, transgender athlete Hannah Mouncey, feminist essayist Elizabeth Flux and indigenous editor Bridget Caldwell, the PLAY issue tackles topics including sex toys, swinging, Mormonism, lingerie, sex work, Aboriginal queer motherhood and being LGBTIQA+ in sport and the world of gaming. PRE-ORDER ISSUE …
The first time I got my period, my mum cried. I had woken up to find a red stain on my cotton briefs when I went to the bathroom, quickly hauled my PJ pants back up and dashed to the front door where Mum was just about to leave for work. ‘Mum, it came, I …
I was recently caught in the revolving door of the closet. During small talk with an acquaintance, I’d mentioned my girlfriend. After a meandering chat about household chores, she dropped the word ‘friend’ into the conversation, the cogs turned, and I realised we were on different wavelengths about what my girlfriend was to me. As …
HIV for me has always felt simultaneously impossible and inevitable. Impossible, because like so many of us who are young and privileged with good health, we feel invincible. Although we know something could happen, we doubt that it will happen. This is where impossibility sat, in the arrogance of youth and the privilege of good …
“Are you choking me?” my partner asked me, pausing in the middle of sex. His expression was somewhere between shock and confusion. Caught off guard while on top of him, I found both my hands wrapped, perhaps a little bit tightly, on his neck, so I quickly released them. He laughed and, in my embarrassment, …
Content warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault, suicide, and therapy Although there have been shifts and tides since the onset of the #Metoo movement, it remains deeply pertinent and personal to so many of us, triggering memories of our own sexual traumas, causing us to speak to the interiority of our experiences …
