In Year 3, Lisa Andrews calls me a lesbian. We are down the bottom of the playground, a group of girls gathered by an alcove in the hedge. We have been playing ‘Witches Boarding School’ and I am excelling at my role as the evil headmistress.

Content warning: This piece describes intimate partner violence. Let me tell you when I realised you were hurting me. It was in our old house, the one filled with the type of furniture four nineteen-year-old students can afford. I sat on the two-seater lounge with my friend Iris across from me on the recliner. “How …

Well as per usual, the Mardi Gras put us through a range of fuckery this year. Firstly, the ANZ advertisement and the cringeworthy as hell hashtag “lovespeech”. Puke. So, the ANZ ad saw a range of young LGBTQIA+ people naming the slurs that have been used against them. Ending with some rubbish about how words …

Monday night – hardly prime real estate for a date, but it was December, and so the days were bleeding into each other, weeknights taking on that languorous pace usually reserved for weekends. We sipped our beers, ran through the standard topics. I didn’t particularly like the way he put his hand on my thigh …

Sex toys can be useful not just in facilitating pleasure but also in the journey to overcoming body dysphoria. In the same year I got my period for the first time, I got my first vibrator. I was 12. Unlike many people I know, I didn’t feel shame or embarrassment over my period. I was …

It is late November 1943, and a man in his late 30s walks down the dingy streets of Montmartre, Paris. He smokes the last precious breath of a cigarette whilst a truck carrying German troops rushes past him, splashing water onto his pants leg. This man has recently left prison with a large manuscript for …

My home village is situated at the base of a small mountain. From there, you could hike a path all the way to its peak and, weather permitting, see miles of Welsh countryside. But most of the time it was foggy or raining. In the village itself, there was very little to do. There was …

After patiently listening to me whinge, my friend proposed a radical solution: use Dungeons & Dragons character building to ask for the sex I wanted.

Sometimes I feel like an intruder in queer spaces. OCD paints you as the liar, but only to yourself.

I moved to Sydney when I was 18 after growing up in Canberra. I didn’t know exactly what Sydney and Oxford Street had to offer but I knew that it was somewhere I wanted to be. My late teens and early twenties were a blur of late nights, early mornings and dancing with my best …

Unfortunately, there are few intersectional disability narratives in the mainstream, and likely even fewer that feature disabled actors.

I’ve always loved to read. So after making the long laboured over decision to medically transition, I began to seek out the stories of other people like me, those assigned female at birth who had decided to live in a more masculine form. I was hungry to know if they initially felt ambivalence like I …

Support inclusive media. Support Archer Magazine. We missed out on arts funding for this six-month period, and we need financial help to keep going.  Archer Magazine is a print and digital publication curating lesser-heard voices on topics around sex, gender and identity. Since launching back in 2013, we’ve printed 13 magazines, published more than 500 artists, and won …

When Hannah Gatsby asked ‘Where do the quiet gays go?’,  I thought, ‘Finally, someone else feels my pain!’ I had never felt more heard. Between being bisexual, being more disabled by my environment than by the disabilities themselves, and in my existence as a person of colour, my queerness has never been seen as fluorescently bright, …

While I’ve outgrown the items in the musty dress-up box, I never outgrew my desire to dress up. My collection no longer comprises ’70s velour nor does it have that insipid mothball stench I remember from my childhood.

This article contains spoilers for The L Word: Generation Q. It is recommended that you watch before reading. Okay, I have so much to say about the reboot. But, to be honest, I had to look up what everyone’s names were for this review. I was just so bored. Here goes: That. Opening. Scene. I don’t …

  I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. —Adrienne Rich, from the second of Twenty-One Love Poems   Of all my loves, my love for women is my most complicated. You could describe this love using phrases from psychiatry text books—hypervigilance; belief that …

This is the fourth part of “It’s All About Aly”, a series about friendship between a trans man and a cis man living together in New York City. Read parts one, two and three. This article contains graphic sexual content and discussion of body dysphoria. Please use reader discretion.   Two weeks later, Aly, Emily and I …

I am a graduate teacher just about to enter the workforce. I have my values and pedagogy set, I want to prioritise a creative English classroom with a focus on student agency and encouraging a safe environment. Many experienced teachers may groan at how idealistic I sound, but I feel as though it’s good to …

Welcome to Archer Magazine: the FIRST NATIONS issue.

Midsumma Festival is Australia’s premier queer arts and cultural festival, bringing together a diverse mix of LGBTQIA+ artists, performers, communities and audiences from 19 Jan to 9 Feb 2020. Midsumma Festival is a proud supporter of Archer Magazine.  FAMILI is a collaborative electronic music project highlighting contemporary artists from Pasifika and First Nation communities.  Arising from …

When Uncle Jack Charles appeared on a 2015 ­episode of Q&A, he took the opportunity to point out to Australian viewers the ways in which the country is uniquely and peculiarly racist towards its First Nations peoples. It’s something he has experienced and seen, a lot, firsthand. His words resonated strongly. The beloved actor, trailblazer, Indigenous-theatre pioneer, …