Stories about: religion
Serena Williams’ Vanity Fair shoot uncovers much to be said about the politicisation of the black woman’s body, writes Hina Ahmed. It goes without saying that Serena Williams is certainly a force to be reckoned with. As a woman, and more specifically as a black woman, Serena has earned many accolades, with over twenty-three …
Angela Serrano speaks to Candy Bowers about her latest production, One The Bear.
Late last year, I attended a forum on queerness and faith. The event was supposed to be multi-faith, but five Christian chaplains came and no other faith groups were represented at all. Even when I talk about Buddhism, which is my own faith, Christianity is always the elephant in the room. As much as we …
The whiteness of ‘coming out’: culture and identity in the disclosure narrative
It’s been eight years since I first kissed a boy, and two since gender loosened its grip on me, yet I never came out to my father. I’ve made my peace with never coming out to him, or the rest of my extended family, for that matter. For someone straddling two cultures, this is a …
Exactly one week after the Pulse nightclub shooting, my cousin Tariq and I drive into downtown Orlando for a drink. I’ve just flown into Florida for a writing workshop, and my Dad reached out to his old friend Tariq to show me around in the meantime. In Afghan culture, we refer to people like Tariq …
Learning to be selfish: The quest for a fulfilling sex life as a 43 year old Uruguayan woman
Right around the time when I discovered masturbation, me, my sister, and my cousin found a VHS copy of Caligula. This was the late 80s, so, porn was really hard to come by, especially if you were a girl. To be honest, I don’t remember much about Caligula. My ex was a big fan, but …
Like queerness, astrology has always been written into and out of history, depending on who’s documenting it. Both have been denied existence, succumb to institutional fear and persecution, and have had glorious times of celebration and reverence. The juxtaposition of living in queer bodies under the heteropatriarchy is that we are continually forced to locate …
I had my first depressive episode when I was 17. Every day, I would walk through a busy intersection frequented by cars, buses and beast-like trucks on my way to school. For three months, I could not shake the thought of walking right in front of them. As a queer person of colour, disentangling the …
Archer Asks: Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra, performance artists and community organisers
Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra are two irreplaceable icons of Sydney’s queer scene. They collaborate on projects such as Ex-Nilalang, a genderfluid folklore-inspired video series, and Club Ate, a QTPOC performance arts club space. Sharing a Filipinx-Australian identity, they are performing new work at Asia-Pacific Triennial Performing Arts (Asia TOPA 2017) in Melbourne. Angela Serrano talks …
“Will I ever not be Haram?”: Masculinity, queerness and visibility in Palestinian culture
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, …
This is an excerpt from A Life of Unlearning by Anthony Venn-Brown, out now. It was a tragic way to end a successful and rewarding career. At the age of 40, my entire world was caving in. I’d lived most of my life with only one ambition – to preach God’s word – and worked …
“When I was your age…” was how my Zimbabwean mother would often begin her lecture-sermons. “If God were to see you now,” she would say, in her rich and powerful African accent, and I’d know I was in for a long one. For many children growing up in the western world, the delivery of life lessons with a …
I came out at a young age and found myself in a relationship straight away. I was thrown into the heart of the white gay scene without ever wanting to be there. Back then I didn’t see what I see now. I went through the phases of being fetishised, tokenized, played with and put down. …
Piper and Alex are fucking onscreen again. I’m lost in thought, wondering how many People of Colour the writers of the show had to ignore to focalise the love of two white women. My Father and I are in the living room of our family home in Virginia. I half-heartedly watch Orange is the New …
“MUM, WHAT ARE BUTT-PLUGS FOR?” my 12-year-old son asks at the dinner table. I yelp at the question before admitting I’m curious myself. “Some of those things are huge,” says my 20-year-old stepdaughter, helping herself to another serving of Caesar salad and recounting her recent excursion to a sex-toy shop, to “satisfy her curiosity”. Later, as I clear …
Last week I flew back to Sydney to celebrate Pesach (Passover) with my family. If you think seeing your parents once a year is a lot, try an Orthodox family and at least six major Jewish festivals a year. The seder, which recalls the exodus from Egypt, is a night of experiential storytelling. As someone …
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 …
The expansion of gender identities is not just because of the internet: A brief look at the role colonialism has on gender
“The gender renaissance is upon us!” These might be your thoughts if you’ve ventured out into select parts of the internet lately, or if you have a keen interest in the fashion world. There’s been extensive media coverage of public figures like Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, Nina Poon, Miley Cyrus and Carmen Carerra, and …
The Big Bang Theory tells us that after the start of the universe, there was an amorphous cloud of atoms and particles. The catalyst for the coalescing of the gases and dust were very small differences in that early cosmic soup. If it wasn’t for these differences and mutations, the universe would never have formed. I …
“BEING GAY IS complicated. Being Arab and gay is even worse.” Australian web series I Luv U But follows the lives of an Arab-Australian couple who go to extremes to hide their sexuality from their parents. Oscillating between hilarious and poignant scenes, the show explores the complex situations faced by Sam and Mouna, who are …
NEW LEGISLATION WAS recently passed by the legislature in the US state of Arizona that would allow businesses, under the pretence of religious beliefs, to refuse service to gays and lesbians. The bill, which was eventually vetoed by the Governor, would have created segregation within the state. We could have easily seen “NO GAYS ALLOWED” signs …