Masculinity is an important and controversial topic in gay discourse, and Invisible Boys should be celebrated as an excellent document of the phenomenon as lived in regional Australia. Yet I lamented the absence of an effeminate gay character in Sheppard’s macho universe. A character for whom painted nails might not have just been “a punk thing.

There is no such thing as a Queer cop, it is a contradiction in terms. Some officers may happen to be homos, bisexual and so on, but this is not saying much. Nobody is born a cop; they are acculturated and at some point, they choose it, and in choosing it, they sever any claim to Queerness and community.

Characterising videos of trans people telling the story of their transness and the gender-affirming care they received as indoctrination and coercion is a lethal claim. The goal of this tactic is to limit information transfer and knowledge-sharing on gender-affirming care, as well as to suffocate the stories of trans joy that follow.

It seems lesbian identity has become something of a cause célèbre for the global right, providing pseudo-progressive cover to anti-trans hate. Lesbians, the logic runs, are women who are exclusively sexually attracted to other women, and therefore uniquely clear-sighted about what the most important and defining part of any woman is: the pussy.

The dichotomy of good verses bad trans woman functions similarly to the dichotomy between the deserving and the undeserving poor. A good trans woman is a trans woman who has (or desires) a full medical transition, does her best to pass as cis, and is ultimately comfortable with being relegated to a limited, conceded form of womanhood.

If the ‘popular image of homosexuality in the late 20th century’ was that of monied, white men, then each of these examples represent contemporary gay identities haunted by this recent history. Considered together, they offer a hauntology of cis gay subjectivity—an identity forming around a process of failed mourning that unhelpfully sublimates the possibility of queer futurities.

The restricted access to gender-affirming care is a discrimination issue, and it’s a human rights issue. It’s causing unnecessary suffering and death in a group already subject to intense discrimination and marginalisation, in a country that could and should afford to stop it. We’re not alone—together with our supporters, there’s a lot we could achieve. Our lives are valuable, and we are worthy of care. It’s time to get gender-affirming surgery covered by Medicare.  

Transitioning was, for me, a way of making my body mine. It let me decide what this body was and what it meant. This is what five years of testosterone actually does to a girl. From the words of Abigail Thorn, trans YouTuber and playwright: ‘the cause is my will.’

Early internet culture, its openness and penchant for performativity—found on the French Minitel, Tumblr, and even the Buffy chatroom—is innately queer. It is important for us to call on this past, to understand its performative nature, and to reckon with its unrealised potential.

It is abhorrent and morally indefensible for any government to suggest transphobia is an acceptable practice if you’re rich enough to subject your kids to an educational environment that actively incites prejudice against trans and non-binary people.

Zreika's self-imposed invisibility gives us a better sense of the meaning of her choice to sit out the Pride round: not homophobia, as some have assumed, but instead a reluctance to engage in what would constitute an act of protest within the Muslim community. She is well within her rights to make that choice.

Men who have sex with men are largely banned from donating blood in Australia and the United States. The ban on gay blood donations is a hangover from nearly half a century ago, when much less was known about HIV & AIDS. Individual donors should be assessed based on their individual risk—not their gender or sexuality.

Currently the Religious Freedoms Bill sits in inquiry, with plans to have it passed ahead of the upcoming Federal Election. No doubt it will be prominent on the agenda for the Liberal Party, a political football of sorts to whip their base. Such an attack on our community demands a suitable counter-response, and what better response than having our single biggest cultural organisation out in full force?

Across history, there has been a long record of the state shifting issues of sexual health into the carceral sphere for the purpose of building the idea of the nuclear family, and encouraging support of the national project. Nowhere has that become more pointed than in the police response to the Australian covid-19 lockdowns, and the kind of strategies taken to prevent movement and intimacy.

For Peter and perhaps other queers coming of age before the AIDS crisis, coming out was a process of enculturation into a specific community. Rather than simply something you said, it meant learning to be gay in a specific place and time, and importantly, learning how to do that from other people who had learned it before you.

Some may ask: does it matter if Pride is still radical? To this I would say: why would we ever want to be accepted by the same system which once criminalised our very existence? By accepting our place in civil society as the end-goal of queer activism, we not only legitimise the very state that once demonised us, but also forfeit all solidarity towards those who still suffer at its hands.