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.

Holding the Man counteracted this culture by offering an intimate and unashamed portrait of same-sex love and the pains wrought by the epidemic, demonstrating the ability of love to transcend and persist beyond death.

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. …

The importance of queer content in children’s television is to create awareness of diversity, and to teach kids that to be different isn’t to be abnormal.

I’m being destructive, and I know it.” This statement comes from community consultation I did recently with HIV-positive gay men on how they feel they’re being affected by using crystal meth, otherwise known as ice, or tina in the queer community. If you have picked up a newspaper recently, you’d have heard of the crystal …

Frustrated by Australia’s stance on marriage equality and inspired by John and Yoko’s ‘Bed-In’ protest, I decided to have a marriage equality Bed-In. I called it ‘In bed with the Unwed – Bed-In’, or simply ‘The In Bed Project’. In the context of the bed, I photograph those who support marriage equality, including singles, couples and families. The …

Perhaps you’ve noticed a few products around the internet that claim to unleash ‘the future of wanking’. I’ve seen blowjob machines; Fleshlights; Occulus Rift-driven virtual reality experiences; creepily realistic sex dolls; and equally creepy tissue-paper bearing images of women’s faces. To really understand the future of wanking, we should probably first examine its past. Wanking has been …

Feminist pornography attempts to combat the depictions of gratuitous scenes of violence, aggression and dominance in mainstream pornography, by focusing on sex-positivity.

You’re in a nightclub, late at night. A dark, loud nightclub. Not so dark, though, that you can’t spot the very handsome man dancing across the floor. You make eye contact. Once, twice, a little bit longer each time. Soon you’re dancing together. Things heat up. You’re having a really, really good time, but you …

From pornography to incest, from prison rape to anonymous sex, the stories collected in Christos Tsiolkas’s new collection Merciless Gods are characteristically unflinching. Drawn from throughout his career, they explore and engage with transgressive aspects of human desire, and with sexual encounters which are categorised as taboo or rarely acknowledged. The presence of sex is …

As my girlfriend sat down on my lap and we lost ourselves in the moment for art, I embraced the ‘personal is political’ mantra and pashed with all my activist passion, to dispel the myth that people with disabilities don’t have sexual desire: I had it.

When it comes to inequity, especially in the LGBTI community, there is still a lot that needs to be said. Too many unjust ‘—isms’ and ‘—phobias’ hold sway over our society, and it is right to get angry because of that: to break it down, to pick these bits of bigotry apart so they hold …