Articles
Esther Godoy is the editor of a new zine, Butch is not a dirty word, which had its launch in Melbourne in March. Lottie Turner caught up with Esther to find out more about the project. A: Tell us about BINADW? EG: Butch is not a dirty word is a publication that celebrates butch identity and culture.Whilst we …
Trans visibility, Safe Schools and living vulnerable: fighting back against the demonising of Transgender people
Today is Transgender Day of Visibility. It is a day that celebrates or makes prominent something in the public mind. For a day.
Deciding which films to attend with the myriad on offer at this year’s Melbourne Queer Film Festival? Don’t stress – we’ve made this painstaking task easy.
Online dating and meeting people now, especially in the gay community, is a new realm.
Say your life turns out really lucky, and one of these days you find yourself standing at the corner of Christopher Street and 7th Avenue, New York City. You should feel like you’ve landed in one of the queerest places in the world. Take less than twenty steps in any direction and you can choose …
For my identity, I look for language, because language and understanding have always been my left and my right, and the only way I ever get anywhere. But there are also words I seek to escape, because there are many places that I do not fit. Categories of gender and place, and where we are …
The Archer Magazine team is a loved-up group of people who reckon the media – and the world – should be a lot more inclusive. We love our work. We believe that talking about real people’s sexuality and gender will change our society’s weird belief that sex looks a certain way, and that we all fit into a few …
‘Red’ and other safe-words allow people to revoke their consent absolutely and for whatever reason, even after sex has been thought out, planned, negotiated, and renegotiated.
When I was in my first year of University, a friend sent me a link to scientific paper about female mice that exhibited ‘male-like’ sexual behaviour. His comment was something along the lines of ‘well, now this explains you!” A few years later, the first genome-wide study of male sexual orientation came out. It fascinated …
Happy endings, massage and exploitation: Stuck between a towel and a hard place
Sometimes the smallest shifts are the hardest to make. So you make a drastic move and opt, instead, to change everything. Moving to Australia from Turkey was that change for me. I came to Melbourne to escape an abusive relationship, the cultural codes stuck to my body from birth, my job as an art director, the prestige of my education …
“When are you going to stop writing about [Insert issue]?” An author’s guide to writing about your own oppression, part two
Charles O’Grady shares his lessons on writing about your own oppression.
HIDDEN Photography Project: Bringing LGBTIQ domestic and family violence out of the closet
The HIDDEN Photography Project is a stirring conceptual photography project that aims to raise awareness of domestic and family violence within the LGBTIQ community.
“When are you going to stop writing about [insert issue]?” – an author’s guide to writing about your own oppression
Charles O’Grady shares his lessons on writing about your own oppression.
Two years ago, Sydney’s infamous lockout laws were introduced on Mardi Gras weekend. While the official Mardi Gras party lay outside the exclusion zone, the raft of parties on Oxford St and the CBD scrambled to remind revellers to be in by 1:30, create makeshift smoking areas, and decide what to do once last drinks …
Writer/Director Julie Kalceff has created a world where intense, emotional and intimate relationships between lesbians are explored without using sexuality in a dramatic way to drive the narrative.
I became truly fearless the day I returned to the old school, no frills, male-dominated boxing gym that I had attended for years as a female. My friend had outed me to a huge, burley macho guy. But I stood strong before him without showing any fear while awaiting his reaction, even though I was terrified …
Popular TV is now littered with lesbians: Orphan Black, The L Word, Sugar Rush, Lip Service, Lost Girl, Glee… need I go on? Cheesy or not, we’re out there in prime time. What draws me to these programs is their realism: lesbians exist in their everyday ordinariness (well, and with superpowers). I can’t say the …
Pinkwashing by corporate giants, responsible as they have historically been for the erasure of queer visibility, rubs salt into the wound. Lest we forget that none of these companies support the marginalised unless they come with a profit margin.
Last week the Victorian Equal Opportunity & Human Rights Commission launched Pride Not Prejudice, a short film marking fifteen years since sexual orientation and gender identity were included in Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Act. The launch night was pretty remarkable, as those in the video and on the panel afterwards reflected on what life was like …
For a long time, I thought self-acceptance of my own bisexuality was enough. No one asked me for a label and I experienced very little overt discrimination. I toyed with the idea of telling my folks early on, but an older lesbian friend of mine advised against it. She knew that coming out to family …
“There were no women at all in that film.” This is an initial observation from a member of ‘the Queer Agenda’ – a fictionalised gay lobby who presides over the film to be screened during opening night of the Mardi Gras Film Festival. The ‘lobby’ is the central focus of writer/director Craig Boreham’s 2016 MGFF …
My first time masturbating was more awkward than my first sexual experience with someone else. Possibly because I had no idea what I was doing, uncertain as to what my body actually enjoyed, and because I was a fumbling 24 year old, alone in a sharehouse bedroom, desperately hoping nobody would hear the quiet …