I remember the day I found the porn magazine in the park. I was around seven years old and I sat high up in a tree, a warm feeling growing at the bottom of my belly as I flicked through the pictures of naked women. I wondered why there were naked women in a magazine …

Being queer defines me about as much as my enthusiasm for burritos, passion for gardening and disdain for spiders do. Much like how a vegetarian doesn’t think about not eating meat until an alpha carnivore interrogates them at a barbecue, I hadn’t thought a great deal about my sexuality until I became a comedian. Performing …

Transgender stories may be complex to tell, but they are crucial in filling the space around ‘male’ and ‘female’. Here’s a concept that needs a word. I am walking my dog on the beach. It’s cold and windy. Winter is here and the beach is sparsely populated, the way Melbourne beaches are during winter. A …

To say that BDSM endangers women is unreasonable to begin with, but ignoring that abuse happens elsewhere is wilfully ignorant.

To be an influential teacher, one must be relaxed and not guarded; one mustn’t wear their teacher costume like armour, leaving space for hypocrisy or dispassion to seep in between the performance of teaching and the character of the person. Knowing stuff about the teaching subject helps too. I’ve taught English as a Second Language …

It appears the only way society has allowed femme rage is when it is displayed by white, conventionally attractive women, and portrayed through the aestheticised lens of film.

Maintaining an active sex life in a long-term relationship is not always an easy task; as time goes by, finding a spare moment to get hot and steamy with your partner (or partners) becomes increasingly difficult, especially when full time work, exercise, household chores and social commitments are entered into the mix. My girlfriend and …

A guy I went to school with recently said to me, “You know who has the most accurate gaydar? A 15-year-old straight boy at an Australian high school.” It’s a pretty dark joke. Back in the 1990s, I was in the year above this same guy at school. Every time he got up on stage …

In an age of sexual liberation, a variety of guiding voices on issues of sexuality resonate throughout the internet. Bloggers pave the way for conversation about the fluidity of sexuality, the no-nos of slut shaming and how to be sexually active in a heteronormative, patriarchal society. Mainstream media overlooks the world of bloggers, yet they …

When the 25th Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) wrapped up last month it was a momentous occasion for one of the world’s longest-serving and largest celebrations of LGBTIQ voices on the big screen. Reaching the quarter century mark is impressive enough for a community-driven event that receives no major funding from either State or Federal …

AT ARCHER, one of our biggest aims in life is to be inclusive. We pride ourselves on the diversity of our readership. When advertisers and funding bodies ask us: “Who reads Archer?” We respond with: “Everyone!” and this makes us happy and proud, while leaving the funding people thoroughly confused. Because advertisers and funding bodies are the second-most important group in …

On Friday 7 November last year after a long legal battle, three Malaysian trans women secured a historic victory as a Federal Appeals court ruled that a state Islamic law criminalising trans-women is unconstitutional. Malaysia has a two-track legal system with separate Islamic laws on civil matters only decided by the conservative religious ministry which …

Our little person is co-parented. Four adults in two separate (but now kind of inter-dependent) relationships are actively involved to varying degrees at varying times in providing an abundance of love and care. We get to take turns on nappy duty, sleep deprivation, and having baby-free adult time. The next layer out involves a whole …

The words ‘good girl’ shoot through me like ice water, I feel cold, my muscles start to contract inward, and my face contorts into an angry snarl. My hands try to form into fists but I grab his ankles instead, something solid I can hold onto, something to stop me from pulverizing my lover with …

Fleur Kilpatrick talks to people in parks, in mountains, in bedrooms – and out the back of museums – and records them speaking about gender, sex and beauty. Archer will be sharing some of her interviews online. Fleur: Describe where we are. Her: We’re in your bedroom, on your bed in your apartment. The curtains are closed. …

Most of you are probably familiar with coming out stories, the emotional rollercoaster of publicly admitting, “I’m different.” This is a different kind of coming out story. This is a story about shifting sexual identity and about telling my queer community, “I’m different.” When I finally admitted to myself that I am attracted to women …

Imagine the sense of relief it might have brought, that attraction between two people of the same sex at your age was normal, and not something that needed to be suppressed.

There are many books we queers hold sacred. For many of us they are mementos of our troubled and tormented adolescence. These might include Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948) or James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). While these books reflected my own angst-ridden, introspective teen years, they only seemed to offer antiquated portraits of homosexuality, as their …

With its freewheeling, colourful weirdness, bouts of horror, psychodrama and surrealism, and frank rejection of the assumed strictures of children’s television, Adventure Time is consistently and unconditionally one of the best shows around.

Kids’ shows have often been accused of promoting an ‘agenda’, from the Teletubbies to Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie.

Sport: it’s Australian, mate…although in some cases if you are a trans or gender diverse Australian, you may not be given a ‘fair go’. It is therefore a great step forward to see the release of Transgender People and Sport: Complying with the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights …

Fleur Kilpatrick talks to people in parks, in mountains, in bedrooms – and out the back of museums – and records them speaking about gender, sex and beauty. Over the next few weeks, Archer will be sharing her interviews online. *Warning: this article contains explicit language. Fleur: Describe where we are. Him: We are in a park. …