It is late November 1943, and a man in his late 30s walks down the dingy streets of Montmartre, Paris. He smokes the last precious breath of a cigarette whilst a truck carrying German troops rushes past him, splashing water onto his pants leg. This man has recently left prison with a large manuscript for …

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 …

Sometimes I feel like an intruder in queer spaces. OCD paints you as the liar, but only to yourself.

I moved to Sydney when I was 18 after growing up in Canberra. I didn’t know exactly what Sydney and Oxford Street had to offer but I knew that it was somewhere I wanted to be. My late teens and early twenties were a blur of late nights, early mornings and dancing with my best …

Unfortunately, there are few intersectional disability narratives in the mainstream, and likely even fewer that feature disabled actors.

I want to create more public queer spaces like this. Less like a nightclub, more like a lounge room. A meal to share, along with a plate of conversation.

  I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. —Adrienne Rich, from the second of Twenty-One Love Poems   Of all my loves, my love for women is my most complicated. You could describe this love using phrases from psychiatry text books—hypervigilance; belief that …

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, …

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 …

“Oh, that’s hot. Can you kiss for me?” These words, in different orders and intonations, have been said to me more times than I can count. I’m fifteen, flirting properly with a girl for the first time at a friend’s house. She whispers in my ear, and it is something cute and innocent. I’m experiencing …

Content warning: This article discusses homophobia and transphobia   At my first job, when I was a high school student, my boss was openly homophobic. Once, he told me that being gay was disgusting and wrong, at a time when I was a teenager, closeted, and already convinced I was inherently wrong in some way. Now …

I wanted him to have a safe space to discuss sex before he got into it. I wanted him to have somewhere to go to talk about the weirdness of sex and how it all works and how awkward those first moments can be.

I felt the need to shield my screen the other day. It was my lunch break at work and I was reading an article about the world of lesbian dating on my work computer. I had the screen minimised and my cursor hovering over the tiny x in the right hand corner. If I was reading …

Bisexual Visibility Day is a day of celebration that really turns into a month of celebration when all is said and done. After kicking off in the USA in 1999, September 23rd marks the annual celebration of bisexuality, an event that now reaches across the globe. But September 23rd isn’t all about bisexual people donning their …

Sophie King explores living with OCD and the intrusive sexual thoughts that accompany it.

“Did you know that Madison is a… bisexual?” my aunt harps during the heart of Australia’s ill-famed plebiscite debate in 2017, locking eyes with my mother as she mouths the word. The transgression, rather. Bi-sex-ual (|bʌɪˈsɛkʃʊəl|): something that is neither here nor there, a kind of “duplicity” that Iranian-American filmmaker Desiree Akhavan knows well. “You’re …

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 …

Every time that someone thinks that my romantic partner is my friend, I can’t help but wonder whether this has to do with queer femme erasure.

Growing up in Australia in a time when fad diets and homophobia were all the rage, for me, the 90’s and early 00’s meant crash diets and sneaking off to Sydney to make out with girls on the weekend. I hid my sexuality and forced myself to have relationships with men to appease society, I …

The most wonderful time of the year in Melbourne is upon us: International Comedy Festival time. Each year my dad and I watch the televised MICF events – usually the Gala performance and opening night. Comedy is one of the things that Dad and I bond over the most, sharing a similar sense of humour …

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 …

Content warning: this article discusses drug use.  It’s widely acknowledged that drug-use in LGBTIQ+ communities is high. It also happens that many of the drugs we take are recreational, and illegal. This doesn’t seem to be deterring queer communities, who consume ecstasy alone at a rate almost 6 times that of the general population. What …