A few months ago, I was given the opportunity to indulge in the delightful collision between popular culture and minority politics at the Melbourne International Film Festival screening of Little Girl Blue. As the title may suggest to loyal fans, Amy Berg’s 2015 biopic presents a sprawling map of Janis Joplin’s life, her incomparable talent, …

Francesca is counting the months until they can move to Hobart, or, preferably the Mainland. They paint me a picture of their regional hometown in northern Tasmania as a repressive place, full of churches, with a gossipy, small town mentality. From passing cars, people offer up profanity just for wearing purple Doc Martens or having …

Rebecca Shaw (aka Brocklesnitch) is a writer, co-host of Bring A Plate podcast and creator of the parody Twitter account @NoToFeminism. She tweets hilarious responses to the sexist arguments about gender equality, complete with shoddy spelling and grammar. She just recently turned her famous Twitter account into a book, No To Feminism. Dani Leever asked her a few …

Ejaculating milk from my nipples during orgasm was not something I can say I expected, while I was expecting. It was a rainy afternoon during my third trimester and, without even aiming, I shot my partner straight in the eye. Fortunately, unlike semen, breast milk doesn’t sting and there was no burning or redness. In …

This is an excerpt from Pink Ink: The Golden Era for Gay and Lesbian Magazines by Bill Calder, out now.   The late 20th century was a golden era for Australian gay magazines and newspapers: more than five million copies of publications were printed annually at its peak, with revenues approaching eight million dollars a year.  Yet there …

As a child, I remember thinking about getting married. In my mind, I always pictured a woman by my side. I was socially conditioned to think this way from an early age because I never felt like I had any role models outside of the traditional representation of what it meant to be a man …

I recall blowing out four candles on my birthday cake and wishing that I’d wake up the next day as a girl. I can remember making that same wish with five candles, with six, with 16 and even with 32. There’s a lot that held me back from transition earlier in life – shame, guilt, …

Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars and Theology Before Stonewall explores lesbian community spaces in America in the mid 20th Century.

It’s the end of a big year for the queer community, scattered with ups and downs, wins and setbacks, progress and what can at times feel like regression. During the end-of-year celebrations, remember to look out for each other, and seek out hugs and friends when they feel necessary. At Archer Magazine HQ, we’ve had a …

The clouds are grey and heavy, compressing the ground and my mood with their weight. I’m sitting by an electric heater, drinking pale ale, in Eleanor Dark’s studio at Varuna, in Katoomba, where she herself sat and wrote, trying to find uninterrupted time to write amongst the demands of work and home. I’ve put aside …

Growing up, I was called mukhanath, or hermaphrodite, not because my class mates were certain that I had both a penis and a vagina, but because I was colored outside of the masculinity circle. They chose to assign me both organs because I didn’t have a rough voice, I wasn’t loud or violent, I liked …

Member of poetry duo Darkmatter, Alok Vaid-Menon, chats to us about performance, faggotry and being freakishly queer. This is an excerpt from Archer Magazine #7, the THEY/THEIRS issue. Q: How has your trip to Australia been so far? Politically and racially, everyone has a different idea of what’s going on here. US frameworks around race, …

Alex Lahey is a singer-songwriter from Melbourne, Australia who is having a pretty fantastic year. From winning the $7,500 Josh Pyke Partnership and playing on the stages of Splendour in the Grass festival to the release of a seriously successful debut EP, Lahey is getting a lot of love from the music industry. I meet …

Content warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault. One of the biggest stories this time last year was the accusations of sexual violence committed by porn performer James Deen, made by no less than ten women, including his former partner and fellow performer Stoya, Charlie Sheen’s ex Bree Olson, Teen Mom Farrah Abraham and …

In English, words describing sex and the body hold the highest level of taboo, amongst the various profanities.

Remembrance day always elicits mixed reactions from me, mostly because I vividly remember having red poppies pinned to my shirt in primary school every 11th of November. I remember standing around a monument, while politicians placed wreathes on the steps, celebrating the same wars and soldiers that displaced my own people from Afghanistan. Veterans in …

It had taken my boss three weeks to comment on my new look. I was glad she liked my shoes, because although I’d only owned office-appropriate heels for a few weeks, I’d dreamed of wearing them for more than 20 years. This is me now. Rewind a couple of years, and this personal unveiling would have seemed like …

“I don’t mind confusion about my gender, but I do resent cisgender people who make that confusion my problem.” – Bani Amor “At this point, the precise title is less important to me than the fact that I don’t fit into the binary.” – Mariana Podesta-Diverio In this groundbreaking edition of Archer Magazine, we curate …

It’s the last days of summer, the night air still warm although the sun absented itself hours ago. I am very pleased with my outfit for the party. Orange flowers on a navy dress, nipped in at the waist and full at the hips. I am talking to a woman, edgy haircut, big eyes. Really, …

This is an extract of a longer article available at the Intersex Day Project. Twenty years ago, Morgan Holmes, Max Beck and friends demonstrated as “Hermaphrodites with Attitude” outside a conference in Boston, and I had no idea. It wasn’t the start of intersex activism, but it was the first public demonstration that intersex people …

Step behind the scenes on our fashion shoot for the transgender and non-binary issue of Archer Magazine, out December 2016.

A fun element of being both queer and a lover of cinema is that you are so desperate to see a likeness of yourself and your community that you will watch literally any movie that has any hint of LGBT representation. You may have found a wonderful little selection of films online that focus on …