There is a question I hear again and again in the lead up to Pride every year, one which drives at the rotten core of contemporary ‘gay politics’ in this country. I have heard some variant of it in bars and living rooms alike, at parties and in the street, and always in an exasperated tone. The question is this: why are the cops at Pride?

By continuing to allow the police to march as a float, the Mardi Gras board continues to stand by their record of racial violence. In allowing the police to march, Mardi Gras tells every Aboriginal family who’s had someone they love killed by a cop or died in their custody that it’s the police who they prefer to celebrate. Mardi Gras tells me, a gay Aboriginal man, that the parade isn’t for me.

the expectation from fans that Eric not only forgive Adam but start a relationship with him – which has been getting so much traction on Twitter since this season's trailer was released – is troubling and raises broader questions about how we exhort (and, sometimes, bully) racial, sexual and gender minorities to embrace their abusers.

After the successful election of Charlie Murphy to the Mardi Gras Board in 2019 and the passing of multiple motions against corporate sponsorship of the parade, the success of Pride in Protest shows the very real demand for bringing Mardi Gras back to its protest roots and being a force in broader Australian political discourse.

By taking a stand against the homophobic policies and human rights violations of Scott Morrison, the Liberal Party, the police and corporations, we can give the LGBTQIA+ community a political voice.

Pindi remembers running from the cops with Roberta at her side. It was Darlinghurst in the late 1970s, when being a sex worker was a crime, and transgender sex workers in particular were targeted by police. Scared of being arrested, Pindi stuck out her leg, apologised, and sent her friend flailing to the ground. Through the tumble of her own limbs, Roberta may have seen Pindi dart around a corner and disappear.

My parents named their only child after one of Shakespeare’s most famous cross-dressers. One might have imagined, therefore, that they’d have been less taken aback to learn of my gradual slide into ambiguous Kinsey Scale territory. As it was, they were deeply surprised. Most people are.

Bert and Ernie occupy such a mighty place in the popular imagination that it’s hard for us to remember that they began as a reference to something else. But in the Jim Henson universe, sly, humourous, or worthy commentaries on public figures and social issues were always part of the process. The recent public debate about them seems to have handily sidestepped the fact that the characters are, among other things, an obvious allusion to The Odd Couple, originally a 1965 Broadway play by the late Neil Simon.

Why has it never been brought to my attention, throughout my primary, secondary and tertiary education, that Australia has a vast queer history? Only independent research has led me to discover the extent of Australia’s homosexual colonial past. The teachers and lecturers of Australian history, whom I have been a student of, have never touched upon the country’s queer histories.

It is supposed to be a good time to be single and trans. We’re hot property, after all – the flavour of the month. We’re on magazine covers and winning civic and cultural awards. We’re mostly allowed to use the bathroom in public, and you can even marry us in any number of uncomplicated ways.

Under the authoritative and seemingly benign objectivity of ‘demographics’, the survey results are selectively interpreted to demonstrate that one of these groups is more traditionalist, more conservative, more intolerant – in other words, less assimilable to dominant ‘Aussie values’. However, because ‘they’ are homophobic, ‘we’ are not being racist in making these claims.

When you’re doing your Sunday morning shop, she’s in the apartment just overhead, being passed around by a group of gay men in various states of undress. She’s in every rainbow neighbourhood of every big city, everywhere. She’ll make your sex better and your fun wilder; make you want to fuck for days and days. And maybe, if you need it, she’ll make your shame go away. The people Tina touches are like no ‘junkie’ I’ve ever seen or met.

In Nanette, a brilliant meta-comic retrospective meets arts-as-activism performance, Gadsby revisits punchlines she’s been delivering onstage for years, as a gut-punch farewell. I remember these jokes from shows past: her slow, deliberate phrasing deployed to get our biggest laughs. But this time, she makes her audience pause to consider these stories. Are they jokes? Are they funny? Aren’t they horrific?

On 2 May, PR consultant Ben Grubb, along with a few celebrity signatories such as Troye Sivan and Missy Higgins, launched a public petition to get an ‘LGBTI focused anti-bullying program’ nationally funded by Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government. It was billed as ‘Safe Schools 2.0 – without the ideology’ and was from the outset a spectacular misfire that didn’t stir a single hair on a bigot’s head while managing to wound the very people it aimed to defend. The backlash was so swift that the organiser retracted it the very next day, issuing an apology.