Stories about: HIV/AIDS
For this month’s Queer Fashion Files, we’re featuring The Huxleys and their art exhibition, ‘Bloodlines’.
In response to harmful representation, the New Queer Cinema Movement arose; giving a voice to queer identities in a politicised, gritty way.
Film and theatre still have a long way to go to pull back the curtain on HIV and AIDS, even today.
As 2022 comes to a close, we can’t help but get reflective and sentimental – cue the smiling single tear emoji – about all the wonderful articles we’ve edited this year.
In 2020, an estimated 34,000 people died due to HIV in Indonesia. I can’t comprehend that level of loss, grief and death.
Content Warning: Incarceration ALGA has a range of content relating to struggles for prison reform and prison abolition. This edition of Out Of The Archives will uncover some of this history. In the last instalment of Out of the Archives, we brought you the story of Sandra Willson, a lesbian subjected to wrongful imprisonment …
For this next instalment of Out of the Archives we introduce you to Brian McGahen (1952-1990). He leaves behind a complicated life which begs the question, how do we write queer legacies? Out of the archives is a series from Jess Ison looking at queer her-/their-/his-tory in Australia in collaboration with Nick Henderson from the Australian Lesbian and …
I contracted HIV from the partner I shared a terrace with in Sydney almost twenty years ago. I realised the virus had entered my blood while I lay in his arms watching ads on the television for the upcoming Sydney 2000 Olympics. My partner cradled me while I complained of fevers and chills. That night …
I’m walking down King Street in inner-suburban Sydney with my headphones in, engaged in that detestable digital-age behaviour: scrolling through social media while walking. I come across a video posted by Juno Mac, a UK-based colleague and comrade in sex-work activism. I’ve been watching her posts closely this week because she’s where I’d like to …
HIV for me has always felt simultaneously impossible and inevitable. Impossible, because like so many of us who are young and privileged with good health, we feel invincible. Although we know something could happen, we doubt that it will happen. This is where impossibility sat, in the arrogance of youth and the privilege of good …
This series by 20-year-old HIV-positive American photographer Sam Stoich confronts a subject that has long been misunderstood, and remains burdened with stigma even today. Q&A with Jess Desaulniers-Lea Shot in the Dark has a sense of continuum; is this series ongoing? If so, how has it evolved so far and in what direction do you see it …
Now in his 50s, Peter Waples-Crowe is a powerhouse community figure in the Aboriginal LGBT community, managing a career in public health alongside a significant body of visual art that reflects his unique intersections. After catching up over cigarettes outside the State Library of Victoria, and reflecting on the sombre irony of smoking tobacco products …
For 35 years, gay men have been told one thing: wear a condom. In my work as a journalist and broadcaster, I have specialised in covering gay men’s sexual health issues, and have always encouraged listeners to be responsible for their own health and wellbeing. Now, new forms of protection that do not involve latex …
Nic Holas is a writer, activist and the co-founder of The Institute of Many (TIM), an advocacy platform and grassroots movement for People Living with HIV. TIM has the largest membership of any HIV organization in Australia. We chatted with Nic to talk about U=U, TIM’s latest campaign aiming to highlight the message that an …
Having been brought up on a steady diet of the gay and lesbian section of Blockbuster Newtown, I can say that my movie taste is pretty low grade. In light of this, I can be forgiven for loving the new film Riot, which was released in time for this year’s Mardi Gras and dramatizes the …
He’s been paddling in the pool for 20 minutes, locking eyes with every member of the water polo team. I’m reclining by the edge of the water with my shirt unbuttoned. When he gets out to sit on the grass, I get up slowly and walk towards the showers. A few minutes later, he follows me …
I keep interrupting him to ask if the condom is still on. He pauses for a second. “Yeah dude, I’ll let you know if it comes off.” We started speaking on Grindr two hours ago and now I’m in his apartment in Carlton North, long hairy legs sprawled open around his neck. Something about the …
To a group of people I’ve never met, Although we don’t know each other, sometimes I feel closer to you than I do my own family. When I’m walking hand-in-hand with a boy down the warmly-lit streets of the city, and I pause to lean in for a kiss. When I’m watching a popular, mainstream …
But I want it! I want it! I want it! He chanted like a prayer, even though his fear of the pain was enormous… The head of Fred’s cock pushed carefully into the sphincter. Slowly, lovingly, tenderly. And still Horst just couldn’t endure it. A wave of feelings swept through his body: fear, shame,anger… Since he couldn’t get a grip …
Whenever we think of AIDS, we are immediately drawn back to the 80s when its emergence was at the forefront of Australian media. To say that it was a difficult period would be a major understatement – people were getting the virus left and right, casual sex received a bad reputation and our government hoped …
I passed by a familiar face at the top of the stairs. He smiled knowingly at me. I remembered him from a one-time fuck some months ago – a face that had popped up on apps a few times, but had never materialised in the flesh again, until now. We spoke openly, the silence …
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.
