I felt unbridled joy at the thought of it being reduced to smouldering ashes, along with all the heteropatriarchal constraints it had come to represent.

In a hilarious skit about the exclusion of women from barbershops, comedian Geraldine Hickey mocks the idea that women are so threatening to these spaces that they need to be barred from them. Arguing against the notion that barbers should charge women more for haircuts, Hickey quips, “it’s not like you’ve got to cut around …

Asian Ambition is a movement and platform designed to highlight Asian artists, embrace Asian sub-cultures in all their complexities, and negate the stereotypes propagated by the media of Asian people being timid, stoic and academically excellent. I’d followed the Asian Ambition account for a few months and their previous photoshoots always left me feeling grateful …

The first time I experienced street harassment, I was wearing my school uniform. I was 14 and walking to my mum’s office after school when a man wolf-whistled at me. At the time, I didn’t have the words to describe what had happened. All I knew was that a strange man had found it appropriate …

Pseudonyms have been used and some details have been changed to protect the privacy of the research participant.   Najah’s path to self-acceptance was a long and winding road but led to a peaceful place. When she accepted she was exclusively attracted to other women in her late teens, Najah felt she could no longer …

Meryl McMaster is a Canadian artist and a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U). Through her distinct approach to photographic portraiture and self-portraiture, she explores questions of identity in relation to land, lineage, history and culture. Her work has been ­included in exhibitions throughout Canada and internationally, including the National …

As the coronavirus erupts, people are panicking. Me, I’ve worked for seven years with the threat and awareness of illness and violence. My body has always been on the frontline with my work; viruses and infections are a risk with every client. Vigilantly checking he doesn’t finger me with the same hand he just used …

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.