Being bisexual, just like being a blakfulla, became a solid constant of my identity. Unshakable and unquestionable by those outside of myself.

Even today, decades after September 11 kicked off the profiling of Middle Easterners in the Western world, I question if I have the ‘unsafe’ kind of brown skin.

The way the Batik is tied onto each individual is rooted in tradition, like what you may see in the villages of Malaysia.

My black hair is proof. It’s an emblem in the same way that I have a shaved undercut on the sides of my head to signal and show my queerness.

I follow a very systematic process for creating my work. The story of Camo all begins with the fabric.

SJ Norman is a writer, artist, and curator who works across performance, installation, text, sculpture, video, and sound. He has won numerous art awards, including a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship, and was the inaugural winner of the KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award.  SJ spoke to Yves Rees about his debut book, …

For a long time, I wondered if it was possible for me to reconcile the Korean part of myself with the Australian bisexual part.

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His second book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, was longlisted for Canada …

I am 28 years old and still can’t say my name properly.  This is not from a lack of effort, but due to a deeply ingrained self-consciousness. Theoretically, my name should be easy to say. Two syllables, reasonably phonetic – but every time I say it, it comes out a little different. Image by: Jon Tyson …

The name is Wakim. That’s Wak-eem, not Whack-em. My childhood was filled with tabouli and hummus, and punishment was a smack with the wooden spoon. I’m Lebanese, and my features show it. The thick, curly hair on my head is what most people first notice about me. This hair was a catalyst for breakdowns in …

Taz Clay, a 22-year-old Kalkadoon and Bwgcolman brotherboy, has made waves by using his lived experience of homelessness and queerness to advocate for better living conditions of those navigating LGBT+ healthcare, out-of-home care and alcohol and other drugs support over the last five years. An unrelenting activist for sistergirl and brotherboy suicide prevention and child …

“No, no, no!” I was playing Chopin’s Etude Opus 25 No. 1 on my teacher’s grand piano, an expansive black instrument that filled the entire room. It twanged discordantly as my fingers fumbled, and I flinched at each reprimand. “Let’s just move on to the Bach and see if that’s any better.” For nearly twenty …

Stone Motherless Cold is a combination of blak excellence and club kid aesthetics, here to celebrate and highlight WOC and blak queerness.

A small plaque outside the IGA includes a photo of a couple with an inscription, which reads: “The only known image of ‘Denmark’ Aboriginals 1898.

From Archer Magazine #13, the FIRST NATIONS issue, SJ Norman chats about their artistic practices and work as a Blak and trans artist.

Blends of blues and greens shimmered back up at me from the palm of my hand. Lightly brushing sand off little pearlescent jewels, I looked into what was very recently a home for a little saltwater friend, but was now lying in the company of many other colours and shapes. Every trip to the beach …

I began to think about how my experiences have been shaped by the spatial absence of queer Aboriginal peoples in regional Aboriginal communities.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Midsumma Festival is Australia’s premier queer arts and cultural festival, bringing together a diverse mix of LGBTQIA+ artists, performers, communities and audiences from 19 Jan to 9 Feb 2020. Midsumma Festival is a proud supporter of Archer Magazine.  FAMILI is a collaborative electronic music project highlighting contemporary artists from Pasifika and First Nation communities.  Arising from …

When Uncle Jack Charles appeared on a 2015 ­episode of Q&A, he took the opportunity to point out to Australian viewers the ways in which the country is uniquely and peculiarly racist towards its First Nations peoples. It’s something he has experienced and seen, a lot, firsthand. His words resonated strongly. The beloved actor, trailblazer, Indigenous-theatre pioneer, …