Even in African countries with slightly more favourable LGBTQI+ legislation, queer people are still subject to prejudice and violence.

Very often, I find that as Black people, we are not allowed to outwardly express our anger and pain. It is an implosive reaction. We keep it to ourselves.

The “bury your gays” trope is a real one to combat, but They/Them doesn’t even fully engage with the potential horror of the setting.

If I had been forced to stay at my Christian school, I would have lived in secrecy, staying quiet during class discussions debating my life.

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

I draw parallels between being agnostic and agender: both are non-binary. I feel my agnosticism is my non-binary nature manifest spiritually.

This is what makes purity culture social media influencers so unique; their ideologies are bound in digital currencies – not physical ones.

Here’s a top 10 list of our editors’ picks for 2021, celebrating some of the incredible articles written by our contributors.

Content warning: This article discusses conversion practices.   What you can’t pray away   I   Sometimes I dream of someone coming up to me in the street; someone I vaguely recognise from the past. They point at me and say, “You.” In that weird way dreams have of collapsing whole timelines and unrelated ideas …

I imagine gender as an enormous structure. Human-made buildings of every kind of architecture, material, and colour imaginable – and unimaginable – sprawling across the landscape. I may be taking the concept of gender as a social construct a bit literally, but the metaphor helps me conceptualise it in all its forms: the binary and …

Content warning: This article makes reference to conversion practices.   When I first came out over a decade ago, I became alienated from the Jewish community I grew up in. After coming out to a few close friends via text, my rabbi and rebbetzin called me to their office. They said that I’d have to …

This year has been hectic, to say the least. To round out the year that we’d rather forget, we have put together a top 10 list of our editors’ picks for 2020. You will see some of the excellent pieces published this year, the most-read pieces and our older favourites. Our online editor Roz Bellamy’s …

Last Christmas Day driving from Melbourne to Adelaide, my partner and I stopped in my country hometown. It was empty, dusty, sunny – just as I remembered. As we drove past my old church, the full car park – an unwanted flashback of a thousand Sundays- made my stomach turn. Yet, a few hours later, …

Jehnny Beth, the charismatic lead singer and co-writer of UK band Savages, recently launched her first album as a solo artist: To Love is To Live. In addition to the album, Jehnny Beth will also be releasing Crimes Against Love Memories (C.A.L.M.), her first book, featuring a collection of erotic short stories along with photography …

Growing up in an Islamic household, I had no clue what sexuality entailed.  Love wasn’t really about love – it was about making your parents happy. My grandmother’s desire was for my mother to have an arranged marriage, and so my mother dutifully complied. All I knew about love was that it occurred within a …

I first saw The Miseducation of Cameron Post – a film about a same-sex-attracted (SSA) teenager sent to a Christian facility to ‘reorient’ her sexuality – in August 2018, though I didn’t think much of it at the time. It was technically part of a job, just necessary research so I could edit the reviews …

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 …

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 …

My home village is situated at the base of a small mountain. From there, you could hike a path all the way to its peak and, weather permitting, see miles of Welsh countryside. But most of the time it was foggy or raining. In the village itself, there was very little to do. There was …

I used to have a job teaching kids not to be themselves. I was a Catholic youth leader, running activities and leading prayer circles every Friday night, organising events and outings, and acting as an extremely unqualified counsellor for a collection of 13-18 year olds. I held a seat on my parish council, and I …

My identity is made up of different identifiers. I identify as being male, was perceived as effeminate when young, and grew up in public housing in western Sydney with my iTaukei (indigenous) Fijian father and Anglo Australian mother. I was brought up in a relatively conservative Christian family, and now I have much more progressive …

It’s been ten years since I finished school. A decade since I definitively declared “School’s out for summer, school’s out forever”. Between that day, the beginning of the rest of my life, and now, I came out. Returning to my Catholic high school in Sydney’s inner west to see what had changed, I expected better …