It’s one o’clock. There’s a pile of work in front of me that only seems to be getting bigger. My Spotify playlist has just come to an end. I feel a tingle down there. I could do with a break. I deserve a break. I disconnect my phone from the Bluetooth speaker and head into …

Content warning: This piece contains discussion of intimate partner violence. There’s a myth of queer solidarity – an idea that here, in this community that values alliance and acceptance above everything, people have got your back. But a few years ago, when I found myself on the receiving end of violence, I realised that the …

Ronnie Scott and I sit in our respective homes, connected over Skype. He’s clean-shaven, his hair thrown back. Outside it’s overcast with a faint bloom of sunlight and the suggestion of rain later. When our video stream loads, he launches into a thought about the impacts of the pandemic. “It just hits you, how the …

Content warning: This story contains details of sexual assault. As a young teenager, I knew my queerness. It was as real to me as the floor beneath my feet, and the freckles spotted across my face. I knew who I was despite my homophobic school, despite very few people around me detecting anything about my …

February, 2019 The Rural Fire Service pager beeped soon after my partner Jen and I returned to the farm – after the long drive from Sydney with the truck loaded with my late mother’s books, rugs and writings, after we’d pulled a cow who’d got stuck in the mud of the bottom dam. We were …

Dramageddon is a genre-bending choose-your-own-adventure podcast set in the year 2050. Created by Jean Tong (playwright) and Lou Wall (comedian), each episode pits two queer women or non-binary guests against the climate apocalypse. We were lucky enough to chat with Jean and Lou. Tell us about yourselves and Dramageddon – how did it come about? Jean is a writer, …

I don’t, however, want your integrity or your seed. I simply want to harness your orgasm in order to heal myself.

Franz Kafka’s seminal literary work, The Metamorphosis, has crept into my world at three crucial points. It’s tangled with my psyche and influenced the course of my life as an observer, a performer and a writer. I was a naïve and impressionable thirteen-year-old student at an all-boys high school on Sydney’s Northern Beaches when first …

I had my first crush on a woman when I was 20 years old. That was the first time I knew I was bisexual+. It took me several more years to act on that knowledge. I was waiting for some concrete proof, not so much for my own benefit but to show others I wasn’t …

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 …