Welcome to Archer Magazine: the FRIENDSHIP issue. BUY ARCHER MAGAZINE #15 HERE! “Friendships are beautiful, complicated, sustaining, lifelong, fleeting. They can be sexual. They can be found in unlikely places, be forged with unlikely people, flourish in unlikely circumstances. They can be entirely predictable. They can be a replacement for a partner, or a family. …

Caroline Newcomb lived and worked with Anne Drysdale on the Bellarine Peninsula for thirteen years, until the latter’s death. In her diary, Caroline described “my dearest and much-beloved Anne” as “the desire of mine eyes”. Upon her own death twenty years later, Caroline was buried beside Anne’s remains in their former residence of Coriyule. Historian …

I’d suppressed it for so long, never coming to terms with what had occurred, never acknowledging it.

Nevo Zisin is a Jewish, Queer, non-binary activist, public speaker and writer. In this Archer Asks, they discuss their new book ‘The Pronoun Lowdown’.

I work as a social worker in a prison. It is a tough gig working in a system that is oppressive by design and marginalises the marginal. It’s even tougher as a non-binary trans person who is also an abolitionist, plugging away for a wage in a system that perpetuates ongoing violence against queer and …

Content warning: This article makes reference to conversion practices.   When I first came out over a decade ago, I became alienated from the Jewish community I grew up in. After coming out to a few close friends via text, my rabbi and rebbetzin called me to their office. They said that I’d have to …

Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault, institutionalisation and trauma.    I have found the experience of writing and performing my work about my trauma of rape and institutionalisation a healing process. Someone on Facebook, who had not spoken to me for about two years, messaged me out of the blue and said, “I’m trying …

When I wore pink for the first time since transitioning, nothing changed. Years of testosterone didn’t leach out of my bloodstream, like rivulets of sweat running in reverse. My chest stayed a glorious flat expanse, pectorals underscored by my top surgery scars as if in emphasis. The pink cotton shirt was soft, and I liked …

‘Love in the Time of Coronavirus’ has been a source of entertainment and commentary during the pandemic. Playing on the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, the hashtag has been attached to everything from questions about how to maintain healthy relationships during lockdown to stories about people ending up …

The first time I looked up my natal chart, I was in the computer lab at high school. It was around 2003, when whole class periods were still allocated for ‘computer studies’; we were let loose in a room of bubble-shaped, candy-coloured iMacs, and told to see what we could find. I found astro.com, though …

Content warning: This article discusses sexual violence and ways of healing.   Dear Queer Survivor, I am a queer woman working in research and community work with LGBTQA people who have experienced sexual violence. I wanted to write to you to share some hope and words of wisdom from a group of queer and trans survivors …

Most people don’t know exactly what their life will look like, or what they definitively want. We all have ideas about such things, but like burning incense, these ideas swirl and transform, twisting and augmenting over time. This can become more complicated amongst sexual minorities like myself. Sometimes other LGBT+ people find it problematic if …

I think about sex a lot. If you could take a microscope and peer inside my brain, you’d assume I was obsessed with sex and, in a way, I am. But it’s not the thought of actual sex that runs rings around in my head and tortures me in my sleep. It’s the fact that …

It looks reasonable in writing: the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards dictate that for a trans woman to have surgery, she needs two letters from two different mental health professionals. You might skim past that in text and not give it another thought. It might not sound like a big deal – …

Content warning: This article discusses rape, trauma, and ways of healing.   A year ago, I was raped by two men I went home with after a party at Sydney’s Vivid festival. Afterwards, I denied my trauma until I finally hit breaking point. Something within me felt wrong, and that feeling hasn’t changed even now. …

This year has been hectic, to say the least. To round out the year that we’d rather forget, we have put together a top 10 list of our editors’ picks for 2020. You will see some of the excellent pieces published this year, the most-read pieces and our older favourites. Our online editor Roz Bellamy’s …

I was standing on the balcony of Bondi Golf Club at a straight wedding, a glass of champagne in my hand. My girlfriend at the time was introducing me to a number of her friends who I hadn’t yet met throughout our year-long relationship. One friend, Anna, was telling us a story of a recent …

I am a male-presenting non-binary individual: I have stubble, body hair, a deep voice, a balding head. All of these align with society’s acceptable image of masculinity. However, I also wear makeup, which deviates from an acceptable form of masculinity. For me, wearing makeup in public gives me a lot of anxiety, though I’ve done …

Last Christmas Day driving from Melbourne to Adelaide, my partner and I stopped in my country hometown. It was empty, dusty, sunny – just as I remembered. As we drove past my old church, the full car park – an unwanted flashback of a thousand Sundays- made my stomach turn. Yet, a few hours later, …

I stopped seeing masturbation as something I needed to get over and done with. I stopped seeing it as something I needed to overcome.

I became single in the midst of a pandemic. Everything feels different, and not just because the process of uncoupling and change is unconventional in its slowness. I have felt a shift in the way I view all of my relationships, the ebbs and flows of connection and distance, valuing time I get with my …

I want to tell you something about being quiet. I want to tell you about the four weeks I spent at an artist residency in rural Finland. I want to tell you about the forest and the lakes and the summer evenings when the sky went a different shade of blue but never darkened. About …