Queerdom, an exhibition of photography and poetry, presents a history of queer and trans performance in Sydney that challenges recent narratives about queer life in Australia.
RuPaul’s Drag Race, now in its tenth season, is an extraordinary success. But the show valorises a specific form of masculinity and is still grappling with a rapidly changing discourse around gender.
The new Queer Eye has viewers hooked on its emotional ride through men’s lives, aiming to embrace diversity and counter toxic masculinity. Yet its focus on consumerism threatens its lofty ideals.
While lesbian women were technically banned from serving in the Australia Defence Force until 1992, many before then found that military life was a place to express their love and desire for the first time.
The dream of a “gay utopia” is a constant in gay and lesbian historical imaginings over the last 200 years. But the Greek attitude to same-sex attraction was not nearly as permissive as many have assumed.
From William Chidley to Germaine Greer Australia has spawned more than its fair share of radical thinkers about sex, and Australians have often embraced their ideas, despite persecution by officialdom.
Given that only 20 years ago Tasmania decriminalised male homosexuality, the same-sex marriage survey result represents an extraordinary change. But there is still work to be done.
The distinctive visual style of Robert Mapplethorpe’s beautiful, oversized images seems now more classical than shocking. But he can still reveal the subconscious of an era we think we have outgrown.
Queer life thrived in 1940s Sydney despite policing and prohibition, as a new production of the musical Only Heaven Knows demonstrates. But it was not to last.
Until 1992, being a gay or lesbian soldier was illegal in Australia. New research is unearthing the heartbreaking stories of people who devoted their lives to the military but were discharged when their sexuality was exposed.