Archer Magazine #12 - the PLAY issue (Jun 2019)

a magazine about sex, gender and identity

THE PLAY ISSUE

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ANDROGYNY AND NON-BINARY LINGERIE, KINK AND SEX TOYS SWINGERS PARTIES TRANS INCLUSION IN SPORT LGBTQIA+ GAMING FAITH AND SEXUALITY QUEER PARENTING

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UNCLE JACK CHARLES

ON STORIES, SELF AND COUNTRY

Trust your instincts: you deserve respect.

Sometimes, someone we love behaves in a way that isn’t okay.

If something doesn’t feel right, step up and step in.

www.withrespect.org.au

ISSUE TWELVE CONTENTS Editor’s note

05

ADOLFO ARANJUEZ

Q&A with Uncle Jack Charles

10

ELIZABETH FLUX

Aboriginal queer motherhood 14

BRIDGET CALDWELL

Threads of Self

20

MERYL MCMASTER

Faith and sexuality

34

JESSICA KNIGHT

Sex toys and body dysphoria

40

NEVO ZISIN

Swingers 44 SAMSON AND GODIVA

Lingerie and kink

50

ALYSSA KITT HANLEY

Drag After Hours

58

SHELLEY HORAN

Greek androgyny

72

DMETRI KAKMI

Trans inclusion in sport

78

HANNAH MOUNCEY

LGBTQIA+ gaming 82 The Batik Series

86

ALAYNA COLE DANIEL ADAMS

Non-binary and presentation 100 ELIZABETH WILLIAM STREET

Sex work and labour 104 IRMA VEP Nightlife as community 108 KELLY LOVEMONSTER VISUAL CONTRIBUTIONS:

ATONG ATEM, STU BROWN, KITTY CHRYSTAL, JOEL DEVEREUX, DIRT EROTIC, KYLE GOON, JAMES HENRY, ETIENNE REYNAUD, CYNTHIA SOBRATY,

TAKEOVER TOKYO, JUN TANLAYCO, ALAN WEEDON, STEPHANIE ROSE WOOD

FOUNDER + PUBLISHER Amy Middleton EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Adolfo Aranjuez DESIGN + IMAGE EDITOR Alexis Desaulniers-Lea LAYOUT DESIGNER Christopher Boševski SUB-EDITOR Greta Parry IMAGE ASSISTANT Hailey Moroney ONLINE EDITOR Lucy Watson DEPUTY ONLINE EDITOR Roz Bellamy ONLINE EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Dani Leever WEBSITE DEVELOPER Mark Egan BOOKKEEPER Anh Nguyen

COVER IMAGE: Pancetta Love (photo: Shelley Horan) ISBN: 978-0-6485583-0-9 ISSN: 2204-7352 Visit us online: www.archermagazine.com.au For advertising and other enquiries, email info@archermagazine.com.au

HUGE THANKS TO Kat Muscat, Chloe Brien, Broede Carmody, Eloi Aranjuez, Elysse and Anton, Cathy Tran, David Heslin, Elizabeth Flux, Kent Burgess, Sara De La Cruz, The Butterfly Club, Halide Supply, Bill Condie, Sam Cooney, Cash Savage, Nigel Quirk.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Printed in Australia by Printgraphics Pty Ltd.

© 2019. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission from the publisher. Views expressed in Archer Magazine are those of the respective contributors and not necessarily shared by Archer Magazine.

EDITOR’S NOTE PHOTO: ALAN WEEDON

AT THE DANCE STUDIO (which is where you’ll find me lurking sexily during my hours off from editing and writing), whenever someone whips out a smartphone and presses ‘record’, everyone starts moving differently.

It’s an inevitable phenomenon: the knowledge of being not just watched but memorialised for posterity, the pressure of getting the choreography absolutely right, the desire to look better than the person dancing next to you. Something changes in that moment; something comes alive.

It’s much the same with the manner in which we present ourselves to the world. Sexuality, gender, courtesy, politics, professionalism – all of these are facets of who we are, but we inevitably enact or efface them depending on who we’re with, where we are, why we’re there, what we’re trying to achieve. Our pasts also walk the path with us, but we can have them burden us, like baggage, or uplift us into stronger, more sagely individuals.

The past few months have been especially significant for me, Archer aside. A 6000-word essay I’ve written on the mutability of gender and sexuality (which is where their power ultimately lies) was not just published in Meanjin – one of Australia’s most prestigious literary journals – but brandished on its cover. This piece, a blend of memoir and high theory (because nerd), uses as its focal point the notion of queer/ing: not just a noun and adjective, queer is also a verb, inviting us to constantly subvert, interrogate and play with the seemingly unmoving boxes we’re thrust into by wider society.

Which brings us to PLAY. As I’d conceived of it, it’s a direct response to last issue’s theme. Whereas GAZE homed in on the various ways our identities and outward guises are co-opted, complicated, corralled by how ­others, including politicians and powerbrokers, see us, this issue takes that gaze and goes all out with it.

PLAY is about seizing what’s inside and bringing it out.

It’s queer full throttle, challenging norm and convention, and razing the current structure to raise up a new one. It’s pushing buttons: do it right to get that tingly treasure, do it wrong and find yourself confronting the big, bad boss.

It’s irrationality and irreverence. It’s dressing up or dancing naked while the churchgoers watch, aghast.

It’s knowing what they expect of us and expanding it, expressing its opposite. So we take a shot, we hit the

stage, we change things up or seek cheap thrills – because it’s all a game, really, if we want it to be.

This issue of Archer is replete with com­pelling stories and image essays on an array of topics and experiences.

We begin with pieces on the hyper-­intimate and the personal, tackling the robust impacts of family and heritage (Uncle Jack Charles Q&A, p10; Aboriginal queer motherhood, p14; Threads of Self, p20) as well as religion and repression (faith and sexuality, p34) on our sense of self.

We then delve into exciting opportunities for exploring sexuality and identity (sex toys and body dysphoria, p40; swingers, p44; lingerie and kink, p50; Drag After Hours, p58), along with societal interventions and barriers to these (Greek androgyny, p72; trans inclusion in sport, p78; LGBTQIA+ gaming, p82; The Batik Series, p86). Finally, we discuss how we can reclaim those limita­tions to rise up and win our way (non-binary and presentation, p100; sex work and labour, p104; nightlife as ­community, p108).

On a less playful note, this issue will also be my last as editor-in-chief. While I’m immensely proud of the stories I’ve been able to help bring into the world, it sadly just isn’t sustainable for me to edit this magazine on a volunteer basis while editing another publication, Metro, full-time (not to mention write and dance and … live).

A labour of love is just that: labour. So, despite the magnitude of my affection for our communities and this mag, and despite how much we romanticise the idea of ‘doing what you love’, love on its own is a finite fuel when expen­ded on large investments of time and energy – not just for Archer, but for all worthy passion projects of its ilk.

But it’s been a wild, rewarding ride helming Archer these past three issues. And I still wholeheartedly bel­ ieve in the magazine’s mission.

Storytelling of the sort you’ll find in these pages is nothing short of powerful: empathy is often more transformative than rational argument. I don’t doubt for a second that Archer will keep championing those in our communities (and beyond) who benefit most from a platform for ­winning over minds and hearts.

Adolfo Aranjuez Editor-in-chief (one last time)

Join us in celebrating 200 issues of Metro!

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Q&A WITH

UNCLE JACK CHARLES WORDS ELIZABETH FLUX PHOTOS JAMES HENRY

Q&A WITH UNCLE JACK CHARLES

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, activist and Aboriginal elder is a skilled and compelling storyteller – most recently of his own life. In 2008, the candid, unflinching documentary Bastardy was released, detailing Charles’s many ­impressive accomplishments; his glittering, at the time stop-start acting career; his struggles with i­ dentity; and his history of drug addiction and ­repeated incarceration.

Since getting himself off heroin and then off methadone, he has gone on to perform his one-man show, Jack Charles v The Crown, all over the world.

In 2016, he was named Victorian Senior Australian of the Year. Later this year, he will be releasing a book, Jack Charles: A Born-again Blakfella.

A member of the Stolen Generations, Charles was taken from his mother at the age of four months, raised at Box Hill Boys’ Home and told that he was an orphan. Fed a foundation of lies from the very beginning, he has spent a lifetime piecing together his own truth.

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You’ve told your story in a lot of different ways – there was the documentary, then the play, and now there’s a book. Do you feel like they’re telling the same story at ­different points or is each a conti­ nuation? How do they fit together?

Lots of things happened after ­Bastardy – it was the catalyst for so many things in my life. It gave an instant rise to my profile, of course; nobody had ever pulled their pants down and showed the world their black moom like I had. You know how difficult it was for me struggling under the odds – under homelessness and heavy “Br’er Rabbit”, we liked to say. ‘Drug habit’.

When Bastardy opened up, going down and talking to the public allowed me to believe that I could be a spokesperson for the good, for those who are struggling in our prison settings and our detention centres – but also the homeless and those addicted people in our communities and in our towns. ­Bastardy gave me the legs to be taken seriously in my community and in the state of Victoria – Melbourne in particular.

It led me onto many roads of discovery … Melburnians had largely known me as a serial pest nuisance, a troubled actor down on hard times. People love to hear and bear witness to the story of a person who has been reformed, self-­rehabilitated – but more rehabilitated in the likeness of an Aboriginal elder statesman.

You were part of the Stolen Generations, and now you’re an elder in your community. How has your attitude changed across that time, and how have you fit in with the community? I remember reading

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that you often felt like an outsider – do you still feel like that now?

I’m still a fringe-dweller. I still feel it. I’ll always be a fringe-dweller, you know?

Why do you think that is?

Because I’m the wrong person to be delivering the message – because I have a criminal record.

That doesn’t sit well with local government personnel.

I [also] wasn’t really welcomed in Collingwood/Fitzroy [when I was younger]. The story of why I wasn’t welcomed in Aboriginal Melbourne was that, after Uncle Doug Nicholls died, a certain person came from Leeton, New South Wales – the son of a certain person that my mum was charged with killing in the blackfella camp in the ’50s … I felt there was a bit of a ‘payback law’ being delivered to me.

So it wasn’t anything to do with you – it was something outside of your control?

Yes. I was supposed to pay for the sins of my mother – but there’s more to that. I got to hear more [later].

Was there a single event that in­­ spired you to go on this journey?

No, because I was really pissed off over the denials … from the Aboriginal Welfare Board, and from the Department for Child Protection, who flatly denied any knowledge that I had family, that I had relations, that [said] I was a lone orphan. For me, it was a criminal act.

As you get more information, how has this impacted you personally?

I really felt incensed. Angry. And really pissed off. So it was always at the back of my mind: Is there no fairness? Why aren’t we allowed to bond? That’s why it still is hard for me to bond with my nephews and nieces …

The same time Bastardy came out, I became a [person of] public interest – bloody Royal Commission

[into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse], boys from jail asking me to give them my phone number so the class-action lawyers could contact me so I could give evidence, give credence, validate the stories of what went on at Box Hill Boys’ Home. And, in the delivery, I had to tell them what had happened to me, because my bed was the first, sometimes, that the officer would come to of an evening.

The upshot was I was given $100,000 for that. And I shared it with many people along this street here [in Collingwood] and down the flats, and I gave a lot to my nephew and my niece.

While you were at Box Hill Boys’ Home, you once had a visit from an aunt and uncle – but then you didn’t see them again until many years later.

And they denied ever coming and taking me out on that picnic that day. I couldn’t understand why.

I can understand why Jesus saw Judas as such a traitor, because here I am, JC, and my Judas Iscariot (in a sense) was my auntie and uncle who denied me completely.

This was a shock. I was trying to connect – was it because I was wearing, you know, lush yellow velvet flares? A big, beautiful afro? And that T-shirt that showed my beautiful, sparsely hairy chest?

Sounds very fashionable.

Wasn’t it? Though, speaking [with] ‘the voice’, everybody knew that I was gay – that I was a ‘poof’ and all that kind of stuff. Even walking into prison those first times, everybody knew. Not that I … ‘you never get your meat where you live’ is an old saying, so I wouldn’t allow anybody to jump into my pants.

I was always protected by bigger gangsters who were ex–Box Hill Boys’ Home, ex–Bayswater Boys’ Home. I was given a measure of protection, only because of my smallness, my friendship and my

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Q&A WITH UNCLE JACK CHARLES

accessibility in talking to all, even the gangsters and that.

How long did it take you to go back and search for your roots?

It took a lot because addictions and jail time took me well away

Through Jimmy Berg’s Koorie Heritage Trust and Link-Up, I’ve been given the full facts – and that’s why I’m full of it now. I’m it. I know who I am …

I wasn’t happy to be known as a mere Koorie. Now, I can faithfully

“ I was really pissed off over the denials … from the Aboriginal Welfare Board, and from the Department for Child Protection, who flatly denied any knowledge that I had family … For me, it was a criminal act” say I am Wiradjuri because I found my father two years ago; he comes from Leeton. I’m Wiradjuri on my father’s side, Bunurong on my mum’s side, which takes in the Arts Centre [in Melbourne], and down to Wilsons Prom, through Toorak and Brighton and all that. How ironic, says me with a laugh and a giggle.

This year, there is a new part to the story: your book.

Yes, Jack Charles: A Born-again Blackfella. And the reason I’ve called it that is because I’ve realised I’m as passionate as a born-again Christian. A little bit obsessive, perhaps – like a born-again Christian about my newfound heritage, the totality of it.

My Aboriginality. The full extent of my identity.

I’m more powerful, more black, more brilliant, more complete, more Aboriginal – because I know who the fuck I am now.

from it. Your main priority is to feed your addiction, so it was a big distraction – wasted nights, wasted days. Still, it gave me a lot of strength … I always knew that I would really discover the full extent of my history. And the only way to do that was [to] follow through and be stabilised in my life.

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Elizabeth Flux is an award-winning freelance writer and editor. She was a judge for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and is a past editor of Voiceworks. Her fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and publications, and her nonfic­ tion has been widely published and includes essays on cinema, pop culture, feminism and identity as well as interviews and feature articles.

MOTHERING

QUE WORDS

BRIDGET CALDWELL

BLACK AND

ERLY PHOTOS

ATONG ATEM

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Raising a black child as a queer parent is its own act of political resistance.

I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN I wanted to be a mum. The only other parts of myself that I’d ever been so sure about were that I was black and queer.

I became a mother in January 2016 to a healthy, gorgeous daughter. My Napanangka Nangari, a skin name given to her by two of her aunties. Becoming a mother has been nothing like I had imagined yet everything I could ever dream of. My daughter has soft, brown, unruly curls, long wispy eyelashes and bone-thin ankles. Everything about her is black and beautiful.

But becoming a mum means you have to deal with a type of ‘maternal ­profiling’. It feels as though accepting this role makes every other part of your identity secondary. No-one talks to you about you anymore, so you question whether or not who you are beyond mother is relevant anymore.

In my case, I felt like I had to redefine what it meant to be me. Was I just a mum now? Or was this simply another layer to my identity? More than that, how does this added layer interact with the other elements of my identity?

I wasn’t simply a parent – I was a black parent, and a queer parent.

It all starts with the title you’re given for your new job: mother. Alongside father, this is a binary term, with a distinct set of roles and responsibilities that society has demarcated along gender lines. But life and parenting are not binary experiences.

So what happens when you unlink those terms from gender?

My partner is queer and non-binary; they are also not the biological parent of my child. But, at three, my daughter has made the decision to call them “Daddy J”.

Since she has called me “Mum” since

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birth, we now have to deal with this painful invalidation of our queer relationship as we accept these binary terms for our parenting roles.

At the same time, however, our decision to use these labels means that we can, in fact, interrogate the mother/father dichotomy and redefine what it means to be the parent of a child, just as we have redefined what it means to be a family. We are breaking down Eurocentric v­ alues and norms imposed on us since colonisation.

MONOMATERNALISM – a term coined by Shelley M Park – refers to families that have only one mother.

Park’s research focuses on queer par­ enting, specifically within queer (lesbian, adoptive, polyamorous) families that break down the barriers of the nuclear family.

The assumption that a child can have only one ‘real’ mother is truly white to its core. As so many of us blackfellas do, I grew up with many mothers: my aunties, my older sister, my older cousins.

The kinship structure of the Aboriginal family is far more comfortable with resisting monomaternalism and the heteronormative nature of the Western nuclear family. My family consists of many kids – my nieces, nephews, younger cou­sins – all of whom share my household as if it were their own.

When speaking about having another baby with my current partner recently, I had a friend tell me that she “would never want to have two baby-daddies”.

My mum has five kids to three different men; we’re all brothers and sisters, and until this comment, I had never really thought much about it.

ABORIGINAL QUEER MOTHERHOOD

This non-Aboriginal conception of family – which, frankly, I find boring – resides at the intersection of patriarchy (with its insistence that women bear responsibility for biological and social reproduction), heteronormativity (which asserts that one woman and one man are required in order to raise children successfully), capitalism (in its conception of children as ‘private property’) and Eurocentrism (in its erasure of polymaternalism in other cultures and historical periods).

We can trace this back to the larger ideological disparity between white and black notions of family. If we look at the most prominent case in Australian history, the Stolen Generations, we see

examples ranging from oppressive state control to well-meaning (but misguided) individuals who legitimately thought they were ‘helping’ Aboriginal children.

The queer family simply resists this idea of ‘normal’. To be a queer parent is to challenge the white societal norms that have been colonially imposed – and, now, are profoundly entrenched – in us.

But this is not a new concept for those of us who are both queer and black.

By decolonising the gender stereotypes associated with notions like mother, father and family, we can introduce a broader range of relational options. We can begin reinventing the wheel through the way we talk about ourselves. We can decolonise the language we use entirely,

whether through using existing terms differently or terms that are completely unrelated to the parenting experience.

It’s mostly white people who say “it takes a village” to raise a child; we blackfellas never needed to label this approach to child rearing, or make it a crunchy parenting term. We have always had many people around, as my own upbringing demonstrated. There is a far greater sense of community and security within black spaces – and this is especially true for black families, whether they be blood-related or not.

YOU INHABIT TWO WORLDS when raising kids – and, so often, they can get tangled.

I can, and should be, soft and nurturing, but at the same time, I have to be tough enough to foster my babies’ independence and strength. How much do I tell them about this shitty world before they have had an opportunity to experience it on their own terms? What if I don’t tell them enough – is that doing more harm than good?

Being the mother of a black child means I have to worry about things that white parents don’t. I have had to deal with comments like, “She has beautiful light brown skin,” and, “What is she mixed with?” How am I supposed to prepare her for this world full of people who will continue to fetishise and feel entitled to comment on her appearance like this?

I am reminded of the comments made to me when I was growing up –“You’re too pretty to be Aboriginal,” “You must only be half,” and so on – and I recall how much these affected my self-esteem and the contruction of my identity during those crucial years.

As a parent, your most important job is to nurture your children in a way that allows them to thrive and become truly themselves. I can only give them so much of myself before they make up their own minds.

That, to me, has been the single most challenging part of this whole experience.

On one hand, I want to be loving and carefree, but on the other hand, I need to raise my kids with a heavy hand in

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order to keep them safe. In the context of raising black kids, this means safeguarding them from racism, discrimination and the ways in which living in a country rooted in white supremacy hurts us.

In a time when black kids’ lives are valued less than a bicycle – when, in certain states, a black child can, to this day, be adopted to a white family without parental consent, and black people continue to be left behind or forgotten altogether – my life as a black mother is, quite simply, terrifying. It means that I have far more to lose at a far greater rate than most other parents.

Most white parents I know don’t have to worry about these things. Their kids are, and will continue to be, safe.

Being a black mother means I always have this pressing need to protect my kids against not only the physical and emotional damage the world may throw at them, but also the psychological damage of having them internalise feelings of guilt about being themselves in all of their black beauty.

MY DAUGHTER AND I recently read a book called I Am Me, which my daughter has now turned into her own made-up song. She sings, “I love my eyes, I love my nose, I love the way my curly hair grows.” Through this somewhat small act of self-appreciation, she is already challenging the world by pro­ mising that she will love herself.

This makes me think back to my own childhood, reflecting on the ways that my parents were forced to keep me safe.

I can remember a time – I was in Grade 4 or 5 – when I was pulled out of class to attend an event for NAIDOC Week, which commemorates the history and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I remember feeling shame about missing class for these events; I felt singled out.

I went home and cried about it to my mother, but the reassurance she gave me that this ‘Othering’ in fact made me special and ‘different’ in the best of ways shaped those situations for me. It was moments such as this that allowed me to find the pride that I now have in being a black woman.

The way I parent has been inherited from the way I was parented as a child.

Much like how my mother, aunties, sister and nanna raised me, I am finding ways to reassure my daughter that she comes from a long lineage of matriarchal strength.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I parent. At the time of writing, I have just experienced a miscarriage, and the heavy weight of responsibility feels more crushing than ever. There is a sense that I have failed to bring another black baby into the world.

But, more than that, I’ve been thinking about how my next baby will have

her that clothing isn’t related to gender in any way.

When we read books that use binary pronouns, she also often asks how we know these people are male or female.

We tell her they are “simply people” instead.

Over dinner one night, my daughter called my partner “he”. After gently correcting her by explaining that we only use that pronoun when referring to someone male, she responded, “Oh okay, yes, because J is just a person.”

These small comments prove that we can help our kids understand, even at a young age, that we are all fluid, on

“Being a mother in a capitalist society rooted in white supremacy, misogyny and homophobic attitudes definitely means I am required to make some highly political decisions every day” one black parent and one white parent.

My children will have noticeably different skin tones, but they will be no more or less black than each other. They will have their own identities. How much of that can I control? Would I really want to?

PARENTING QUEERLY is a deliberate choice to raise children as free as possible from the limitations that labels, stereotypes and gendered norms place on marginalised people. This is not just about me being a mother who identifies as queer; this is about freeing children from the burdens of a world they had no part in creating.

In the process, I am working to eradicate the thinking that tries to target, isolate and oppress the least influential among us – even if just through little acts of domestic resistance. Our home lives, after all, are microcosms for society.

In my queer household, I create possibilities for challenging entrenched gender and relationship dynamics. My daughter asks a lot of questions about clothing, for example – “Mummy, are you wearing a dress today?” “Will Daddy J wear a dress today?” – and we remind

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gender terms, in some way. At the very least, I am showing her that she is free to express her identity in whatever way she wishes.

I am also fostering this environment of acceptance so that one day we won’t be considered a ‘queer black family’, but just a family. I am re-­creating the ‘normal’ that I had when I was growing up, before I was exposed to more ‘­traditional’ societal values and norms.

At heart, parenting queerly is about passionately and unrelentingly introducing children to queer ways of life, to the beauty and fun of gender exploration, and to the diverse possibilities of romantic and sexual partnership.

PARENTING ISN’T EASY. Parent­ ing a black child isn’t easy. Parenting with the added bonus of queerness is not always easy, either. There are lots of difficult conversations and lots of questions, some of which I may not be able to answer.

Being a mother in a capitalist society rooted in white supremacy, misogyny and homophobic attitudes definitely means I am required to make some highly political decisions every day.

It means that I have to always be on my guard and armed with a response.

I must actively place queerness in my child’s path because racism, hetero­ normativity and the notion of binary gender structure so many aspects of children’s lives – their toys, their books, their peers.

These parenting choices are not only political acts; they are means for survival. Giving birth to black babies is, in itself, an act of resistance, proof that

we are still here. Through my approach to parenting, I have to set an example for ways that adults who care for children can effect social change.

My queerness, my blackness and my relationships are all things that have defined me and will help shape my kids.

As a queer person, I will continue to be shamed and stigmatised for refusing to adhere to the sexual and familial norms of straight culture. As a queer black woman, I have a responsibility to

19

­ ecolonise my parenting so that my kids d grow up to follow suit.

So if my kids end up being anything like their parents, then really we haven’t done such a bad job after all.

Bridget Caldwell is a Jingili ­Mudburra writer and editor based in Naarm/­ Birraranga. She works as a co-editor for literary journal The Lifted Brow and was most recently managing editor for Blak Brow.

THREADS

OF SELF

PHOTOS MERYL

MCMASTER

Q&A WITH JESS DESAULNIERS-LEA

Meryl McMaster is a Canadian artist and a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U).

Through her distinct approach to photographic portraiture and self-portraiture, she explores questions of identity in relation to land, lineage, history and culture.

Her work has been ­included in exhibitions throughout Canada and internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Ryerson Image Centre and Seoul’s Hangaram Design Museum. She is a reci­ pient of the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award, the Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists, the Canon Canada Prize, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship and the OCAD U Medal.

Her solo exhibition Confluence will be touring across Canada until 2020.

Your work is rooted in exploring heritage, history, lineage and your bi-cultural identity. What sparked your desire to explore these themes through self-portraiture?

I have dreamed about being an artist and wondered what I might say through my art since I was a young girl. I think that I still have those thoughts!

It wasn’t until the final year of my undergrad at OCAD U in Toronto when the reality of those questions was brought to the surface. I knew I wanted to make work that came from a deeply reflective and personal place in the hope that I may be able to connect with others.

At the time, I was considering the age-old question of figuring out the self. For me, those questions start from our lineage, history and culture, and then are built on further from our personal life experiences.

Understanding who I am began with exploring my complex cultu­ ral background. I am Plains Cree from Red Pheasant First Nation in Saskatchewan and a member of the Siksika First Nation in Alberta as well as English, Scottish and Dutch.

Using sculpture, performance and photography, I began to try to rev­ eal the layered and multifaceted nature of my identity.

My works are like a catalogue of my thoughts, feelings and experiences, almost like a ­journal. They

22

exist with the hope of showing the person looking at the images – regardless of their cultural background – the complexity of experience and something about the world and our history that they maybe didn’t know.

In your work, you’re primarily the sole photographer and subject. Could you tell us about this artistic choice?

When I have included myself as the subject of a work, it has been a deliberate decision, as the majority of my images have been inspired by my personal experiences and questions about who I am. I am also quite shy and introverted, so I never felt comfortable working with someone else when it came to my images!

Art is how I express myself, and being the subject of my work brings me closer to the ideas I’m bringing to the surface – in both positive and negative ways. Through the process, I’m confronted and challenged, leading to a better understanding of myself and others.

You often feature the colours red and blue as well as handmade costumes and natural found materials.

We’d love to know more about the significance of these.

The colour red represents a lot of different (continued on p.28…)

(…from p22) things to me. One of the most direct links is that it repre­ sents the heart or bloodline and connection to one’s family and one another. Red markings within the images become navigational tools or trail markers for me, both to the past and present.

I use blue to reference the sky as an unknown place as well as a world of boundless opportunity and possibilities without limits.

Each of my photographs begins long before the camera enters the scene. I am always on the lookout, collecting different objects and materials (manufactured or natural) that I can bring together to make one of my objects or sculptural garments. Sometimes I am inspired by a certain material that then becomes the outfit, and sometimes the outfit idea comes first and then I need to figure out what materials are best to use to realise my ­concept.

Everything – myself, the camera, the location and the crafted elements – then comes together to generate these quasi-fictional worlds, through which I hope to extend the boundaries of identity beyond what is known and understood. Each subject I embody shifts in response to the natural environment and the costumes I’m wearing, which is then activated through a series of staged performances for the camera that my photographs document.

In this way, my private performan­ ces respond to the elements, to memory and to emotion.

How do you draw on your connection to the land in your work?

Your images seem to form part of a pre-existing story that is continuing to unfold.

Ever since I was young, exploring and working in the outdoors

has been a great interest of mine.

I have been on several remote camping trips, some taking place over a period of many weeks in the wilderness, and I have worked as a tree planter and outdoor guide.

I think these experiences over the years have naturally become present in my images as they are an ­ongoing passion.

In my early work, I started out photographing in and around areas that I was familiar with, mostly near where I was living at the time. In many ways, I was trying to re-create moments or experien­ ces from my past.

More recently, I’ve selected sites across Canada that are of significance to my family and cultural histories. There are stories written within these sites that I’ve wanted to immerse myself within in order to better understand them – and, ultimately, to introduce my viewers to them. These sites have included areas of importance to my Plains Cree ancestors, such as gathering places and transportation networks in Saskatchewan.

I’ve also photographed in parts of Canada that are of significance to my European ancestors – areas in Ontario where family crossed into Canada from the United States, and in eastern Canada at sites that hold meaning as the earliest contact points between the lands of those who came before me.

What has the learning process been like in terms of connecting not only with your own ancestry, but also with those of other indi­ genous communities in Canada?

Even though I was born in Ontario, my family is actually from Saskatchewan, in the prairies of Central Canada. My father grew

28

up in the Cree community of Red Pheasant First Nation, which I was able to visit many times in my youth.

Connecting with both sides of my family’s history has been a lifelong project and will probably continue over the course of my lifetime.

My most recent body of work, As Immense as the Sky (2019), allowed me to travel back to Red Pheasant and form connections with mentors from the area.

It has been very difficult being separated from this important area for most of my life – it takes a great effort to learn the language and stories when living so far away. But it has felt empowering to feel an increasing sense of connection to this second home and to have the support of new friends and mentors from the area.

Colonisation still profoundly impacts all indigenous peoples in Canada. How has this complex and layered history informed the process of constructing your own sense of self?

At school, I learned the history of Canada, yet I was taught very little about the inception of this country from an indigenous perspective.

I was given no further knowledge beyond what was in our textbooks.

I was aware of the life experien­ ces of my relatives and learned about my ancestry through family, but the relative absence of formal education in this area and the greater emphasis on Euro-­ Canadian history at school had a lasting impact. I learned a bit about the intersection between my heritages, but usually in negative ways.

This experience made me view ‘my’ history largely from the colonial perspective. (continued on p.32…)

(…from p28) This said to me that this history was not to be ­questioned, talked about, or rem­ embered. This erasure, in part, shaped my understanding of my family history, instilling a problematic feeling of being born into two heritages and not fully understanding their relationship.

I’ve come to understand that the narratives we inherit influence our identities because they inform our relationship with the past. Knowing this, I feel empowered to re-examine the stories that Canada was built on and to use the resulting con­ templations as teaching tools for future generations.

What are you currently working on, and do you have any upcoming exhibitions that may be travelling to Australia?

I’ve just finished As Immense as the Sky, currently on view at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto until August. This project was over two years in the making, and involved the production of many new sculptural elements that were photographed at significant sites across the country. I’m very excited to finally see this work out in the public and to see the conversations that are struck as a result of it.

Some of my new works will be shown at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, alongside James Tylor, in July and August.

This exhibition will feature images from As Immense as the Sky along with some complementary works from previous series.

I look forward to continuing this type of work in future projects – further learning the stories of our past and present, and the important places where those stories took place.

Like Australia, Canada has a long history of cultural genocide, stolen generations and mistreatment of indigenous peoples – all of which have societal reverberations today. As a contemporary artist with indigenous heritage, do you feel hopeful for a future of ­reconciliation?

I do feel hopeful; however, the healing needs to continue and the reconciliation that needs to happen may not occur during my lifetime. The list of recommended paths towards reconciliation is lengthy, and each component is very ­complicated.

We are making progress, and I think that the arts can play a role in helping us to understand each other and in enabling conversations that continue to move us towards a better relationship. My images are more about personal reconciliation, but the dreamscapes that I produce hopefully give people an opportunity to enter into and grapple with the difficult history of our country in a way that is more accessible than what the news provides.

Often, we are told of the very practical problems that indigenous people face in Canada – various economic, legal, health and social problems. I hope to give people an opportunity to engage instead with the emotional and personal side of reconciliation by presenting these issues in new ways.

Jess Desaulniers-Lea is a portrait and documentary photographer, writer and image editor based in Toronto, Canada, who has photographed for VICE, Cirque Du Soleil, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Canada-based music publications for internationally touring singer-songwriters.

32

LOV

WORDS JESSICA KNIGHT PHOTOS STEPHANIE ROSE

WOOD

VE

ARCHER MAGAZINE

The sexual and romantic shame instilled by a dogmatic religious upbringing can take many years to overcome.

IN YEAR 8, I signed a contract stating I would never drink alcohol or have sex before marriage. If I did, I would owe Karla G one million dollars. Karla wrote it up at lunchtime.

I was so certain I could do it. What could possibly make me sway from my religious values?

But then Karla said, “What if you fall in love with someone who is not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? What then?” The other girls all waited expectantly for my answer.

I laughed. “That won’t happen.

I won’t let it.”

WHEN I WAS 12, I was given the pocket-size pamphlet that would guide me through the temptation quagmire that is adolescence. It was entitled For the Strength of Youth.

The path was clear, and the end goal, explicit: Stay pure in thought and deed.

Avoid drugs and alcohol and sexual exploration with partners or with yourself. Do not go on dates where you and your date are left alone; go on group dates. Your Heavenly Father is watching, so make the right choices.

I was sure that I was going to get married to a handsome young Church member and we were going to be happy and have a family. This pamphlet was going to help get me there.

The Church took up a lot of my time.

There was Sunday service that went for three hours. There were ‘young women’s

activities’ when you reached puberty.

There were youth dances. There was my patriarchal blessing that warned me that my doubts about the teachings of the Church would lead me to destruction.

There was a whole ecosystem created so that we could be in this world but not of this world.

Then I actually started going to the Church dances. They were held in Melbourne, a three-hour drive from my home on the dairy farm.

It was a long way to travel to find out I didn’t belong in more than one place.

At my small country school, I didn’t fit in, and in the Church community that peddled inclusivity and acceptance, I came away feeling disconnected and wrong. How was I going to find my husband if no boys liked or wanted me?

This sense of being unwanted was made even more obvious when my younger sister started coming to the dances. At her first one, she got asked to dance as soon as she walked in. At 17, I was still being asked if it was my first Church dance, as I looked 12.

My parents met at a ‘young single adults’ New Year’s Eve party, where my mother drank almost all of my father’s slurpee when he said she could have a sip. I was sure my meet-cute would be just as wholesome.

But it was non-existent, even if I did everything that was required. I attended the Church activities that I had to. I had read the Book of Mormon. I went to seminary – Bible study for Mormon teens

36

that took place before school. I stood up at youth conferences and declared my conviction that the Church’s teachings were true.

I felt alienated and out of sync. And I kept a tight lid on what was simmering below the surface of my good-Mormongirl exterior: the desire, both sexual and intellectual, for so much more.

HE KISSES ME WHILE DRUNK and I feel beautiful for the first time. I don’t know how I’ve gotten drunk from virgin cocktails.

He lifts me up so I’m sitting on the kitchen bench. It’s 2am and nobody is around. This is my first kiss. I’m in the second year of my psych degree.

When I first meet him, I’m in first year. He’s sitting on the couch with the other young adults I live with; they’re all drunk and jubilant. I’ve come ­downstairs to make toast for ­dinner. I am sober, as always, and have been studying. This is unusual for people who live at university accom­ modation, apparently.

Someone tells him I keep a journal.

He jumps up over the couch in an agile motion; I pretend not to notice as he swaggers over to the same side of the kitchen bench as me. “Can I read your journal?” he says, smiling, as I butter my toast.

I shake my head and blush. “Can I have a bite of your toast?” I shake my head again and laugh. He has the unearned confidence of a handsome

white boy and I know straightaway I’m going to get a stupid crush on him.

He takes the toast from my plate and bites into it. The bite is large. I can feel his teeth going deeper into something inside my chest. Oh, I think, there goes my heart.

He is right when he says one night that I want to fuck but I’m too shy. I am also scared of going to Hell and disappointing my Heavenly Father and my Earth parents as well.

Later, I move to a dingy apartment with three girlfriends and start experimenting with my burgeoning sexuality.

I remember the guilt the most. Agony would overwhelm me after having a random guy sleep over in my tiny single bed.

Even if nothing more than making out would occur, it would hit me that what I’d just done was sending me further and further into darkness.

I would hear my new housemates talking about me: “If she feels so bad about it, she shouldn’t do it.” I would curl up into a ball and feel wave after wave of shame wash over me.

TOAST-STEALING BOY becomes my friend. He’s fascinated by the nai­ vety born of my sheltered Mormon childhood. I trust Toast-Stealing Boy because he’s irreverent and has piercings – nothing like the boring Mormon boys who ignored me at Church dances. He’s someone I never thought would find a myopic girl with scoliosis interesting.

37

Toast-Stealing Boy plays a huge role in my learning curve. He gets me drunk for the first time. His penis is the first one I touch. He says he likes how innocent I am. He likes corrupting me. I crush on him hard and, because the Church never tells young women about consent or what constitutes a safe and healthy relationship, I let a lot of things slide.

But there are lots of tormented jour­ nal entries from this time. Why doesn’t he kiss me? Why aren’t we running away together? Am I that gross that I’m only good for dick-tugging and nothing else?

Why can’t I have a frank and open discussion with him about what it all means?

I’m not equipped with the vocabu­ lary. At Mormon classes and conferences,

there was a lot of talk about what not to do and what you should aim for instead: marriage, sealed for all time with your partner who was as sexually pure as you. You learned that masturbation and same-sex attraction were wrong.

One night, he tries to return the favour. Toast-Stealing Boy takes his hand and places it inside the front of my pyjama pants. I push it away in horror.

It’s one thing to give pleasure, but to receive it? To lose control in that way?

I can’t do it. I’m fine with drinking once the damage had been done, but sexual gratification on my terms is too far. Nice girls don’t want sexual gratification from anyone who isn’t their husband.

PATRIARCHAL CHRISTIAN mas­ culinity surrounded me as I grew up; I believed these men had the power to protect me from the evils of this world.

The many young men around me also seemed to have more power. One Sunday

38

after church, I was happily teasing a male friend about a girl he liked. As he grew enraged, he threw a videogame control­ ler at my face. In the car on the way home, I was told that I needed to learn when to stop talking.

At 20, a bishop ‘lovingly’ lectured me on the correct behaviour that would let me stay in step with what the Lord had planned for me. He became a figment on my shoulder and remained so long after I stopped going to church at all. Years later, this same man would be involved in a scandal that would destroy his family and see him step down from his position of power.

This bishop and other men from the Church had a huge impact on my relationships. I had so much internalised misogyny and homophobia that I still feel ashamed of to this day – far more so than my shame around being a Mormon apostate. It’s only when you’re no longer completely enshrouded in the cloud of brainwashing that you can smell it for what it is.

But maybe you never really get away.

Just recently, some young, clean-cut missionaries from Utah found me in my inner-city Melbourne sharehouse. One of my housemates, stoned, let them in, thinking it was funny. I wasn’t laughing while these 18-year-old boys chatted to me about my future.

“I used to love punk as well,” said one. “But I got rid of all my CDs before coming on my mission. It was a good decision and I feel much closer to my Heavenly Father now.” I bit my tongue and, after half an hour, I showed them out.

I MET A TALL, BEAUTIFUL Kiwi boy at a house party some years ago. He asked me if my old Nokia phone had the game Snake on it.

I took him home after spending the party in the living room with him, talking excitedly while the party raged out in the yard. He taught me about sex and

FAITH AND SEXUALITY

all its complexities and wonder. I learned about the power of communication and how much the Church and its teachings had led me astray.

The beautiful Kiwi boy loved me for two years and told me he wanted to marry me. It became the cause of many arguments. Once I finally got proof of my ‘normalcy’ – a male human w ­ anting

He shrugs. He says he always enjoyed reading them.

We end up in a deserted beer garden and, in all that time I spent with him, I never say what I really want to: Did you ever love me, just a little bit? Do you ever feel bad about having spiked my virgin cocktails that night in second-year uni?

I really did love and trust him. He took

“Having left the Church, I had to relearn, again and again, what love actually was and how to accept it and extend it” to love and marry me – I realised I didn’t want that. I felt stifled and the panic would set in and I couldn’t arti­ culate why.

Having left the Church, I had to relearn, again and again, what love actually was and how to accept it and extend it. I thought about how what I thought was love was actually not love at all but instead something dangerous and abusive.

I didn’t want to do what the Church drummed into me in my childhood.

I didn’t want to be owned. The Kiwi boy and I soon separated.

IT’S A SUNNY AFTERNOON and I’m walking up Smith Street with earbuds in, blasting emo music from the early 2000s. Someone is calling out my name but I know better than to slow my stride for random creeps.

The person doesn’t give up, runs up from behind and says hi. As I remove my earbuds, the recognition sets in. It’s been years since I went to his wedding in Europe. It’s Toast-Stealing Boy. We have lunch together and he takes a photo of me to prove to his wife that he actually did run into me. I tell him I’m a writer now. He is unsurprised. “You always were,” he says.

I snort in derision. “You only read my journals – against my will, I might add.

Those don’t count.”

advantage of that a little bit. But I can’t hate him – not now or ever. Too many fun memories involve him.

That night I dream of us sharing a joint as I explain intersectional feminism to him. When I wake, the desire is still there. A twinge of regret that I once pushed his hand away. I smile; having regrets means that I’ve lived.

IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT and my partner and I are on the couch sharing a bottle of wine, taking turns sipping from the bottle. This long day started with us fighting before I went to see my psychiatrist. When I returned home, we talked more and it turned into one of those truly beautiful moments that remind us why we’re still together after six years.

I’m trying to be a feminist now, living in sin with someone who didn’t go to church every Sunday but is kind and loving. The perfect Mormon life means being the perfect mother and the perfect wife and I’m so disinterested in it.

Sometimes, it still sets in suddenly and catches me off-guard: the feeling that I’m going about it all wrong and that I will pay in the end. The longstanding effects of religious indoctrination.

If living with someone you love and rejecting rules dictated by old men clai­ ming to be prophets are sending me to hell; if having had a few sexual partners, kissing girls and questioning my

39

sexuality throw me out of the Heavenly Father’s favour; if finding autonomy and liking it means that I’m really, truly damned to misery, then why – at this stage in my life – do I feel I’m exactly where I’m meant to be?

Once I accepted that there was more than one way to love than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ compulsory heteronormative monogamy, I felt a great weight lifted from my shoulders. My childhood doubting was a sign that my mind was intellectually curious and active.

This is the thorny path I have chosen for myself. I’m excited to discover where it leads me next.

As my partner and I talk and drink, the sky outside darkens and I get drunker.

He does not love the story of how I got drunk for the first time. It makes him incredibly uncomfortable to think of someone betraying me like that.

I blurt out what I can no longer keep inside: “It’s not that I want to get married.” I take a deep breath. “But, if you did want to get married, out of all the people in the world, would you want to marry me?” I slug from the bottle while I wait for his response.

“Of course,” he says, somewhat baffled. We decide to have a party at some point instead, perhaps at the ten-year mark “if we make it that long”.

The idea that I have power to decide for myself whether to marry or not is comforting. Hearts are such huge muscles that can contain multitudes.

He cuts up fancy cheese and hands it to me with cherry tomatoes. I have no idea when he did this, but I’m inebriated and starving so it’s like magic food plucked from the ether. He carries me to bed and the last thing I say is, “I love you but you’re not my everything-person.”

I close my eyes.

Jessica Knight is a writer and con­ flicted heathen based in Naarm (Melbourne).

TOYS ARE

US WORDS NEVO

ZISIN

IMAGES KITTY

CHRYSTAL

SEX TOYS AND BODY DYSPHORIA

Sex toys can be useful not just in facilitating pleasure but also in the journey to overcoming body dysphoria.

IN THE SAME YEAR I got my period for the first time, I got my first vibrator. I was 12.

Unlike many people I know, I didn’t feel shame or embarrassment over my period. I was part of a tight-knit group of girls who were all body-positive and encouraging of sexual exploration and changes in our bodies.

My closest friend (then and now) was particularly developed for her age and sauntered into sex-toy shops along Chapel Street in inner-city Melbourne with the kind of confidence that allowed her age to go unquestioned. She’d bought $20 vibrators for each of us as a celebration for getting our periods.

We even had little period parties and gave one another gifts. I got a metallic green vibrator, a pair of cute underwear from Kookai and a book of sudoku. I can safely say it was the vibrator that got the most use.

I distinctly remember the very first time I used it and mouthing “oh my god” as I experienced my first, but ­certainly not last, technologically induced orgasm.

I STARTED MASTURBATING when I was about three years old.

While most children went down kicking and screaming for kindergarten naptime, I was very excited about what awaited me because, for this toddler, naptime was fap-time. The teachers became uncomfortable and were unsure

41

of what to do with me while I had a very good time with the blanket.

I used to call masturbation doing “my work”. I did my work all over the house, in front of family members, and sometimes in private with a sign on my door indicating that I was “doing my work”.

Masturbation is an incredibly common behaviour displayed by children, but it tends to cause parents to panic, concerned that their child will grow into some kind of sexual deviant.

That is very often not the outcome, and definitely wasn’t the case for this ­non-­binary, transgender, polyamorous, slutty ­queer-to-be.

My mum was non-judgemental about it, but whenever I slept at my grandma’s house, she would tuck me in hospital-­ bed-style and place my hands above the doona. With a stern finger, she would tell me to “keep your hands there”.

As soon as she left, I would walk my hands down and under the sheets: my first true instances of rebellion (though, to this day, I still can’t stand sheets tucked in too tight).

Masturbation has always been a big part of my life – and so have sex toys.

When I started having sex, I was a teenage lesbian excited about all of the products that could enrich my sex life.

For straight couples, there is often this assumption that sex toys are unnecessary, or a man’s ego gets in the way of experimentation with dildos, vibrators

and strap-ons. I am grateful that I went through my adolescent sexual awakening as a lesbian.

But it took me and my partner at the time many months before we could work up the courage to finally enter a sex-toy shop together. We were worried not only about being underage in an explicitly over-age

­landscape, but also of the homophobia and confusion we expected to encounter.

We had travelled to the i­ ndustrial ­outer-south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne and found ourselves in a huge factory-style shop. The women were friendly and not at all what we had imagined. In response to our explicit requests for toys that didn’t look too realistic, they presented us with far too many animal-related toys. Not to yuck anybody’s yum, but I personally was not interested in a bunny anywhere near my junk.

We settled on a purple dildo with zero veins and as little resemblance to an ac­­ tual human body part as we could get.

IN SOME WAYS, THAT DILDO laid some of the foundational building blocks for my later realisation that I was trans.

I had this complicated relationship with sex toys in that they could make me feel more inside my body than ever before and simultaneously more dysphoric than I had ever been. I couldn’t help but feel this acute frustration at the fact that I was moving my body in all the right ways and making my partner feel good, and yet I myself could feel nothing.

Sure, at times there were some ‘phantom limb’ sensations, but they were never quite enough for me.

This frustration generated uncontrollable waves of dysphoria that would leave me with internal turmoil.

This new discomfort over sex was distressing.

On a long road trip to a festival, I eventually brought up these feelings with my partner. They were amazing and sugges­ ted sex toys we could buy, along with some sewing they could do to create harnesses that may fit right. They told me that we would figure out a way through this together, and that it was okay that I was feeling this way.

They then gently suggested that maybe I might be transgender.

I didn’t react well to this. I got ex­ tremely defensive, claiming that I was a “strong feminist woman. You don’t know me at all!” Turns out when you’ve been with someone for over two years, they probably do know you and maybe you should listen to them.

WHEN I WAS NEWLY OUT of the transgender closet, I started looking into prosthetic penises and other products that I thought might ease my dysphoria.

I wasn’t seeking these products just to make me feel less anxious, but also to make me feel euphoric in my body.

Gender euphoria can be as impactful and important to a trans person as addressing gender dysphoria. It was not just the absence of distress that I was looking for, but the presence of contentedness and joy.

42

Many transmasculine people don’t undergo bottom surgery. There are ­currently very few surgeons in Australia who perform genital reconstructive surgery on those assigned female at birth. For those travelling overseas, Dr Riki Lane at the Gender Clinic in Melbourne estimates that it can mean an investment of anything around the $50,000–$70,000 mark.

Once you take into account the huge unemployment rates among the trans community across the world, surgery seems incredibly unattainable.

Not every trans person will want to undergo any kind of surgery, but every trans person should have the option if they do want to. In place of this idealistic world where trans surgeries are covered by public-health schemes, there are sex toys.

Sadly, though, many sex-toy w ­ ebsites overtly cater for a ­cisgender heterosexual clientele,

with their sections divided into ‘for him’ and ‘for her’. It goes without saying that these categories make cissexist assumptions about the kind of ­anatomy ‘he’ and ‘she’ have. For a transgender person, these sites are isolating, dysphoria-inducing and cringe-worthy, especially if you are specifically seeking out sex toys in order to combat dysphoria.

SEX TOYS AND BODY DYSPHORIA

In my long search for toys that would help me during the early days of my transition, I happened upon websites specifically targeted at trans men and transmasculine people. I found packers that would create a natural-looking bulge in my pants, stand-to-pee devices and realistic dildos.

At 17, I couldn’t quite fathom the price tag of owning something from each of these categories. And then I found it: a three-in-one device. This packer could be placed in your underwear flaccid, had a funnel-like cupping on the back that could be used to pee in a urinal, and had an external erection rod so the dick could also be used for play. I was beside myself with joy.

I spent hours watching YouTube reviews in which people would unpack their cocks, flop them around and give ratings. I read as many Tumblr blog posts as I could and, after chatting off my girlfriend’s ear about it, finally took the plunge and bought my first prosthetic penis.

It was practically colour-matched to my skin and set me back around $250 – a lot for someone in Year 12, but nothing

positioning of my penis constantly. My dick and I went everywhere together; it was a match made in heaven. I had to find the right moments to whip it out and give it a wash in the sink (with a soap that now, whenever I smell it, reminds me of penis), but other than that, I really felt like this dick was my dick.

I even used it in play. And although I still couldn’t feel everything, I felt connected in a way I hadn’t ever felt before.

That dick was crucial in helping me through a time when I was deeply dysphoric and also passing as stealth (not out as transgender) in my workplaces.

I could walk into the toilets with colleagues and use the urinal if I felt particularly confident. It was an experience unlike anything else. I was always worried there would be leakages – and there often were. But a little bit of pee was a small price to pay for the ability to do something I never thought I’d be able to.

At the age of 18, and with a few months of testosterone under my belt, I started to feel more comfortable in my gender expression and body. The

“Sex toys are less of a ‘daily dysphoria reliever’ for me now, and more a fun extra thing to bring out on special occasions – a holiday dick, if you will” compared to the possible surgical costs.

I was stoked. I tracked my package every day, watching a dot inch across the screen, closer and closer to me.

EVENTUALLY, IT ARRIVED. I was ready to meet my dick.

I had many failed attempts at peeing while standing in the shower and practised holding my flow, releasing it slowly and cautiously so that I wouldn’t suffer any splashback. I practised masturbating as a cis man and enjoyed walking around with five-and-a-half inches of silicone tucked into my underwear.

I found myself acting like a pubescent teenage boy in that I had to readjust the

physical and physiological changes that began to take place as a result of the ho­rmones eased a lot of the discomfort I was feeling within myself. Additionally, surrounding myself with people who affirmed me meant I didn’t feel as much of a need to ‘prove’ myself.

Over time, my prosthetic penis also started becoming a burden. As I got more used to it, the feeling of its loss became so much greater every time I took it off. What was I left with? What was my anatomy, and what words could I use to describe it?

Even though this toy had been really helpful in distracting me from my dysphoria, it ended up playing into it

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even more. So I decided to take a break and instead consider my own genitals as my dick.

ALL OF THE SEX TOYS I have been able to experiment with, connect with and create myself (out of a water bottle, hot water and a condom – but that’s another story) have allowed me to come to terms with my junk in a way I never could have before. And for that, I am incredibly grateful.

I don’t pack anymore and I don’t ever stand to pee. I figure, with how often I’m always running around the place, I deserve to sit and relax where I can. I have an important and lifelong relationship with vibrators, and I exclusively buy from sex-toy shops and brands that acknowledge the existence of people like me.

Sex toys are less of a ‘daily dysphoria reliever’ for me now, and more a fun extra thing to bring out on special occasions – a holiday dick, if you will.

After just over a year on testosterone, I went to babysit two children I had looked after a couple of years prior.

Quite suddenly for them, I had facial hair, a lower voice and generally just looked quite different. Their mother told me they would inevitably have some questions for me.

Once alone, I prepared for the worst.

They both looked up at me with inquisitive little eyes: “So do you have boy bits or girl bits?”

I thought about it for a while, then responded, “I just have me bits.”

Nevo Zisin is a Jewish, queer, non-­ binary writer, activist and public speaker. Based in Naarm/Birraranga/­ Melbourne, they run workshops in schools and workplaces around trans issues. They are the author of the award-winning Finding Nevo, a memoir on gender transition, and a contributor to the anthology ­Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories.

in full WORDS SAMSON

AND GODIVA

PHOTOS KYLE

GOON

swing

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Swinging, much like kink and BDSM, is a practice that affirms and empowers natural human desires that aren’t always looked kindly upon by society.

WE CAME INTO SWINGING after many years immersed in kink culture.

Just as we became versed in the language and expectations of kink, we learned through experience how to express ourselves in the distinct culture and subcultures of the world of swinging.

The view commonly held in society is that swingers are just selfish heterosexual hedonists. However, over the years, we’ve grown to respect the authenticity and bravery of those in the scene, who are stubbornly declaring their right to pursue sexual fulfilment as part of a lifestyle that many regard as immoral.

Ultimately, swinger is as valid a sex­ ual identity as any other.

OUR FIRST SWINGING experience happened in a pansexual nightclub, La Maison, a venue catering for people across the sexual spectrum, but parti­ cularly focused on swingers. We went there for the kink and fell in love with the freedom.

On a Saturday night, the club would be full of swingers, queers, crossdressers and kinksters, dancing and flirting in a nightclub atmosphere. There was a strong culture of consent, which was very familiar to us from the wider kink scene.

For legal and business reasons, sex was only permitted in the members’ area of the club, and that gave us a sense of security and confidence. Nobody was pushy or intimidating. The attention was

gentle, flattering and enticing. Godiva is a total exhibitionist, and revelled in being able to dance in nothing but glitter and heels, writhing for an excited but respectful audience.

Back then, we were still timid – but we nonetheless experimented. We flirted on the dancefloor or at the bar. Godiva gave herself to a talented Dom to be tied up, Japanese-style. Samson close-danced with a stranger.

Gradually, we became comfortable with the feeling of intimate contact with someone else, and with seeing our partner enjoying someone else’s touch. The culture cultivated within the club helped us feel secure as we delved deeper.

But that culture also became a little frustrating. As a paid membership was beyond our financial reach at that stage, flirting could only go so far. Unless we were invited into the members’ area, we would never be able to cross that ­threshold.

After a couple of months of making eyes with beautiful people and dancing closely in nothing but shoes every weekend, we had grown more ready than we knew. That’s when Toby spotted us. He knew – and, with gentlemanly patience, he reeled us in.

He began with drinks and gentle conversation: light touching, flattering words to Godiva, compliments to Samson. The game as he seduced both of us was thrilling. Would we like to see the members’ area? Of course!

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Toby gave us a tour of the play area: three small rooms with low beds, a St Andrews cross, a black leather swing.

But there was no-one else in there. All this time we had been fantasising about these premises, and now the rooms seemed small and empty.

Nevertheless, the air was charged with excitement. Toby invited us to recline on a bed. More talking, more compliments, more gentle touching. The slow, methodical stripping away of what Godiva was wearing, along with our inhibitions.

Even then, Toby masterfully res­ trained his advances; playing on our obvious exhibitionism, he encouraged the two of us to begin making love to each other, with him as audience. Having sex in front of someone else for the first time was thrilling – so free and exciting.

Only when we were both carried away in the moment did he gently insert himself into the game.

Soon, we were having our first threesome, at a sex club, only dimly aware of the hushed, licentious crowd that had gathered around us in that room to watch.

THINGS TOOK OFF with Toby and his partner, Lisa. Before long, we had found ourselves in a full-blown poly­amorous foursome.

Toby and Lisa were swingers to the core, so they took us on an extended tour of their favourite venues. This led to our first swinger house party: Sensualitee,

SWINGERS

held in a house in a respectable suburban neighbourhood, and attended by about 50 suburbanite couples.

The culture here was quite different from anything we were used to. Suburban swinging is usually straight and vanilla. There is little male bisexuality, although female bisexuality is common, and the sex is sensual, even romantic, with none of the darkness of BDSM. Furthermore, consent was conveyed through a non-verbal code, a combi­ nation of gentle touching and eye contact on the part of the interested party to assess the receptivity of the other party. If a couple was keen on another couple, they would start with smoky looks and a gentle caress. If this was not rebuffed, they would move on to kissing and explicit touching until, at some point, someone would ask, ‘Should I get a ­condom?’

It was a shock at first. In the kink world, negotiation is ideally done in advance; activities, limits and triggers are all laid out before a scene begins.

But swinging takes place in a much more fluid environment, often between people who have just met. No means no, of course, but there’s a lot of potential for embarrassment. So the negotiation is subtler and coded, to preserve the dignity of everyone involved.

Once we learned this code, we began to really enjoy our swinging, and we re­alised that the world of swinging was as

diverse as the kink world. The parties had a broad mix of guests – various shapes and sizes, young parents, m ­ iddle-aged couples, newlyweds, retirees.

Everyone was in lingerie or their best Calvins, enjoying the freedom to be sen­ sual and sexual around other people.

Hardcore swingers were writhing in piles on the floor. Experienced couples were sharing salacious exchanges with couples they’d been chatting with earlier.

Many couples were simply making love to one another, thrilled to show off their sexual chemistry in front of the rest. Nervous but excited newbies were clutching each other around the peripheries of the dimly lit orgy room, kissing and fondling, intimidated and thrilled by the sight of people just like them in uninhibited ecstasy.

All these people, whether they were gangbanging, swapping, showing off or just watching, were everyday couples celebrating their sexuality with others in a way that is taboo in their daily lives.

ONCE THE RELATIONSHIP with Toby and Lisa ended, we took a long, hard look at our own relationship and asked ourselves if we wanted to conti­ nue in this lifestyle. The answer was a definite yes.

Swinging fulfilled a need for us. It didn’t satiate all of our sexual and emotional needs – we still needed kink, and we were still looking for someone to

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share our lives with – but the experience of having sex around and with others had become fundamental to our relationship. So we branched out on our own and went to some events we hadn’t visited with Toby and Lisa.

One such event was Waterworks, held at a gay sauna that threw its doors open to swingers once a month. It was a strange shindig, a mash-up of gay cruise culture and swinger party culture. And, again, it had its own conventions for consent – a bit more rough-and-tumble than those of the events we had been to previously.

The venue was a maze of dimly lit corridors, darkened orgy rooms and lockable booths. Unlike our earlier experiences, here, single men were admitted, and the play areas were always crowded with horny guys. The atmosphere was often claustrophobic with sexual tension.

To handle this challenging environment, we developed our ‘lemonade’ code, which hinged on two facts: the air in the play rooms could get oppressively humid and Godiva doesn’t drink lemonade.

If Godiva was surrounded by a large crowd of men and felt overwhelmed, Samson could ask if she was thirsty, or Godiva could say she needed a drink. If she asked for water, then she was having fun, albeit a little hot and thirsty. If she asked for lemonade, we could make a polite exit to ‘get refreshments’.

SWINGERS

The code gave us the confidence to be more adventurous, knowing that we could communicate discreetly and clearly with each other, even in a messy crowd.

And the crowd could indeed get messy, in the best way. This event was open to everyone – and we met so many sexy, inspiring people.

There was the retired lady, as soft

“ We showed off our passion for each other in front of hundreds of people. It felt transcendent to be able to publicly show that we are in love, we are sexy, and this is what we do together” and white as a dumpling, who was hair-­ trigger orgasmic. Any sensual stimulation set her off. Inviting Godiva to caress her with her long, silky hair, she quivered for 10 minutes as she was shaken by one orgasm after another. Later, we lay beside her on the orgy bed while she shuddered for an hour straight.

We also met our lover Kristy, a single mother from a country town who came to the city once a month to get her dose of sexual fulfilment. She was a hard player and demanded attention. Even on her back, surrounded by a dozen horny men, she owned her sexuality, directing them to pleasure her. Defying the trope of the passively promiscuous female swinger, Kristy was a top through and through.

AFTER OUR ADVENTURES at Waterworks, we felt confident enough to try the city’s biggest swinger event, The Swinging Ball.

It’s hard to comprehend this event unless you’ve been there. Around 700 people in various amounts of costume crammed into a sweaty nightclub, dancing, partying and having sex on every available surface. It’s an exhibitionist’s heaven.

An event of that size and i­ ntensity brought with it new challenges. The first time we went, Godiva wore nothing but shoes, glitter and stick-on diamantes. This is the kind of thing she would wear at La Maison without a hassle, and she would be politely

49

admired and flattered by the respectful, sophisticated crowd.

But The Swinging Ball is a huge event, and unavoidably gathers the good, the bad and the ugly. We quickly learned to fend off the gropers and the leerers. At an event that large, it was also easy to disappear into the crowd. So we indulged ourselves each year with elaborate and ridiculous costumes.

There, we had some delicious liaisons with beautiful people, and we danced and flirted with semi-naked strangers.

Most of all, we showed off our passion for each other in front of hundreds of people. It felt transcendent to be able to publicly show that we are in love, we are sexy, and this is what we do together.

Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about what we enjoy, how to handle ourselves, how to negotiate and the kinds of experiences we want more of. Now, we are lucky enough to have two longterm lovers, and we live in a house large enough to host our own parties.

We have embarked on a new a­ dventure: that of creating our own commu­nity. We live this lifestyle for many rea­sons – the thrill, the joy of expressing ourselves sexually with other people. But we also do it for the people we meet. These people are brave enough to challenge the expectations they grew up with, and build new sexual identities without judging themselves or others for their sexual behaviours.

This, to us, is the essence of s­ winging.

In our society, sex is for single young people; most heterosexual couples, parents and suburbanites feel expec­ted to keep their sexuality ‘in the bedroom’, out of sight. Swingers are everyday people who have the courage to declare: We have sex! We like sex! We are good at sex!

Samson and Godiva are bisexual, kinky, polyamorous swingers from Melbourne. They have been actively involved in the swinging and BDSM communities for over 10 years, performing fetish burlesque and perfor­ mance art, and creating sex- and kink-positive events. You can find their household @HouseofWoland on Twitter.

little girl

LINGERIE ALYSSA KITT HANLEY PHOTOS ETIENNE REYNAUD

WORDS

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Clothing is imbued with power, especially when it is donned – and disrobed – for specific sexual purposes.

AS A CHILD, I USED TO sneak into my mother’s room and try on her things; nothing gave me more of a thrill than rifling through her drawers. My most coveted items were tucked away – a ­veritable treasure trove of hidden silken garments: camisoles, teddies, bras that I would stuff with tissues.

I’d try them on and, dripping with a decadent feast of femininity, top off the look with her costume jewellery. I’d then roll around on her bed, pretending I was Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

I loved the way these delicate items – the ultimate embodiment of womanhood – felt when they rested softly against my skin. But because they were deemed to be of a sexual nature, they were restricted to the adult world: 18+, closed doors and, for the most part, unseen, with the exception of that ­special someone (or, awkwardly in this case, my dad).

So while children are encouraged to play dress-ups with clothes from their parents’ youth – back then, it was musty ’70s velour, taffeta bridesmaids’ dresses and shorter-than-short ’60s miniskirts – they aren’t generally encouraged to venture into lingerie drawers. My mum caught me perusing hers on so many occasions that she must have known she was raising a little deviant.

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At 13, while grocery shopping, I spotted a maroon G-string for $8.99 in the aisle next to the socks and feminine-­ hygiene products. The bad fluorescent lights did nothing to deter my desire.

I mustered up the courage to ask my mum to buy it for me. Asking turned to quivering-lipped begging and she relented on one condition: “You’re not to wear it out of the house. Imagine if you fell over wearing it at school!”

When I got home, I ripped off the tags and pulled the G-string over my thighs. Its thin straps hugged my hips and created a dramatic curvature accentuating my already-ample behind. At the time, I did swim-squad training eight times a week, so most mornings and afternoons my butt was already exposed. But this G-string was just that little bit more obscene: 10 centimetres of sin, cut to exaggerate the feminine ‘asset’.

I never wanted to wear full-bottom briefs again.

MY OBSESSION WITH LINGERIE amped up after I got my first job at 14. I’d spend all my hard-earned $9-per-hour pay at the town’s lingerie store.

I revelled in my secret delicates. I’d amassed a collection of matching sets: fuchsia lace, creamy white push-ups, mint-green polka-dot soft cups with

LINGERIE AND KINK

frills. Every set made me feel special – different from all the other girls, who, I knew from the school changing rooms, were wearing boring, flesh-coloured, sexless bras.

When I turned 15, I found a corset in a friend’s dress-up box; I knew it had to be mine. I asked her if I could have it – and I’ll never forget the look that she gave me along with the response, “Take it. What would I want that for? Only sluts wear things like that.” For the first time, I felt ashamed. How did this piece of clothing make someone slutty?

That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I stood in front of my mirror and laced myself into the corset. With the ribbons pulled tight, the slightly warped boning cinched my waist. I felt constricted but curvaceous; it took my breath away.

I did a little saunter around the room and let my hips naturally sway, like a beguiling womanly pendulum. I faced

‘18+’ barriers like this held me back from a long list of things that I wanted to do.

You know what they say about girls who wear black lingerie – well, black lingerie was my favourite.

MY COMING OF AGE unfolded in Brisbane. Turning 18 marked the realisation of a list of things that I’d been waiting to do, all of which would firmly put me in the realm of ‘bad girl’: get drunk, get a tattoo, get my nipples pierced, start working in a strip club. Needless to say, the day after my birthday, I was rather sore. Not only was I nursing a bad hangover, but my new ship tattoo was still healing, as were my nipple piercings.

It took me a few weeks to descend the stairs surrounded by black mirrors into Club Minx in Brisbane’s CBD. However, I thought someone who was size 14 couldn’t become a stripper, so I began working in reception instead, counting dollars and greeting clients.

“Doing a little public play unleashed the inner demon inside me. Lingerie was my gateway to this treasure trove of titillation” the mirror and said aloud, “You’re a slut.”

The words cut the air with a tinge of den­ igration. They were demeaning, but I loved how they made me feel: dirty.

Over the next few years, I continued to collect pieces and began to experiment with different lingerie textures and configurations. Each one unlocked a new feeling, a new part of my personality – new ‘intentions’ and desires, even though I didn’t have an audience for them.

On top of all this, I was curious about sex shops. Each week, I would make my parents drive past a particular street across town from our regional Queensland home in Rockhampton so I could sur­­ reptitiously check out the new outfit on display at the local sex store, Loveheart.

I longed to venture inside, imagining a paradise of frilly accoutrements.

But the ‘18+’ sign over the doors was a morality barrier that my timid, innocent self couldn’t even imagine crossing.

What if they questioned what kind of young lady would be in there? Indeed,

My uniform – a see-through mesh dress emblazoned with a red ‘X’ – didn’t compare to the stripper’s outfits, and it certainly didn’t satisfy my need to show off my lingerie collection. I knew what I had to do and convinced management to let me give dancing a go.

The promotion to stripper meant that I needed to choose a new name, so I chose ‘Lexie’. I also shaved off the right side of my hair, donned a little blonde mohawk, and wore Bond Girl–esque black evening gowns with crotch-high slits that flashed when I walked in my six-inch heels.

I’d given birth to a new character – a femme fatale. At Club Minx, I felt like I had permission to mould myself into whoever I wanted to be; it was the ultimate identity playground.

I KNEW ABOUT BURLESQUE through Dita Von Teese’s book Burlesque and the Art of the Teese, so when I saw a sign at Mad Dance House advertising

55

classes, I immediately signed up. Under the tutelage of veteran striptease artist Lena Marlene, I performed my first routine to Christina Aguilera’s ‘Nasty Naughty Boy’.

With newfound confidence, I started playing with a burlesque persona at the club as well, wearing vintage French knickers, pearls and beige silk stockings, and playing with puffy marabou boas.

I began attracting a different kind of clientele – ones who were intimidated by sexy Lexie but drawn to the softer demeanour of ‘Miss Alexia’.

On top of this, I channelled yet an­­ other hidden character – coquettish, flirtatious and flippant, representing the 1950s cheesecake style of ­burlesque – all by donning a new outfit and ­different-coloured lipstick. I created my first solo burlesque routine and performed under the name ‘Cutie Catarina’. While Lexie would stare men down with the gaze of a sharpshooter, Cutie’s gaze would dart about and tease in a different manner.

But burlesque isn’t just about the performers on stage. In an era when we hardly ever get to wear ballgowns or tuxedos out, the audience, too, are encouraged to play dress-ups.

In 2009, at a big annual event called The Burlesque Ball, I spotted Mistress Kalyss and her posse; these costume aficionados were the best-dressed people I’d ever laid eyes on. They were members of the kink scene, and the night culminated in a basement dungeon in an unassuming suburban Queenslander filled with toys that made my eyes widen with disbelief: That goes where and does what?

Soon, I became part of Mistress Kalyss’s posse and she invited me to my first kink event, Brisbane Hellfire. I had no idea what to wear to a kink party, so I pin-curled my hair and put on a puffy black tulle lolita skirt, a white corset and big, exaggerated doll eyes. I was joined by my friend Alan, who, zipped into a black latex catsuit, transformed into the statuesque rubber mega-femme ‘Lolita Latex’.

Arriving at the event, Lolita asked me to polish her suit – which turned into the

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first spanking I’d ever given. Here I was, feeling excited in a room full of people dressed as ponygirls with bits in their mouths, or monochrome jesters in black lingerie and black latex. These were the outfits of my dreams.

Doing a little public play unleashed the inner demon inside me. Lingerie was my gateway to this treasure trove of titillation.

IN THE GOLD PRIVATE ROOM at the club, I disclosed to one of my reg­ulars that I’d started going to kink clubs. This initiated an unparalleled string of gifts – knee-high Bettie Page boots, books on rope bondage, my first latex pencil skirt – to the envy of all the other dancers.

I felt like I’d gone from an ‘innocent’ country girl to a cosmopolitan kink connoisseur. The only place I’d been able to show off my outfits in Rockhampton was at the local shopping fair, but now I had a slew of spaces where I could parade my true, underlying colours.

None of these were quite public, but there were always eyes on me. Paid spaces teetered on the edge of semi-­private, but I felt more protected in them than in a private room with a man.

But while the public spectacle of my sexual self-expression was thriving, it didn’t sit well with my very vanilla boyfriend at the time. Burlesque was acceptable, and stripping was tolerated because it paid the rent, but going to kink clubs was somehow deemed a big no-no.

“What goes on behind closed bedroom doors is one thing” – he was alluding to the fact that he secretly loved a good spanking – “but whipping men dressed as women in public just isn’t right. At what point do you think all of this traipsing around like a hussy is going to affect your career as a journalist? What happens when your family finds out? When are you going

to stop playing dress-ups and grow the fuck up?”

“Never,” I responded then – and “never” is my response now.

I CHANGED MY NAME to Alyssa Kitt – ‘Alyssa’ being my real name, and ‘Kitt’, my childhood nickname. I decided to invite my parents to all my burlesque shows; I wasn’t going to hide. My mum and I began going lingerie shopping together, and she has even assumed her own burlesque persona: ‘Mama Kitt’.

It’s been 11 years since I first stepped onto the burlesque stage. I describe myself as a purveyor of the naked arts, and my exhibitionism has evolved to a grand scale – I’ve performed in Las Vegas at Miss Exotic World clad in costumes designed by some of the world’s top artists.

While I’ve outgrown the items in the musty dress-up box, I never outgrew my desire to dress up. My collection no longer comprises ’70s velour nor does it have that insipid mothball stench I remember from my childhood.

Whether at a kink club, at a burlesque show or even just putting on a ‘professional’ costume for an office job, everyone should have the freedom to play with their identities. I very much believe that there isn’t a single person on Earth who doesn’t want to don a new character and flaunt their inner deviant on occasion.

As I’ve always said, one can never be too old to play dress-ups.

Fierce. Formidable. The Feminist Fatale. Alyssa Kitt Hanley dances across the lines of a dual identity.

She is both an artistic and intellectual chameleon. A powerhouse of Australian burlesque, feminist, writer, journalist and purveyor of the naked arts, she writes regularly on the public presentation of the body, burlesque, BDSM, sexuality and identity politics.

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LINGERIE AND KINK

PHOTO: JOEL DEVEREUX

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MODELS PANCETTA LOVE, PARIS, VALERIE HEX

DRAG AFTER HOURS PHOTOS SHELLEY

HORAN

CREATIVE DIRECTION HAILEY MORONEY

IMAGE EDITING/ASSISTANCE ALEXIS DESAULNIERS-LEA PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANCE CHLOE WILSON LOCATION THE BUTTERFLY CLUB FILM LAB HALIDE SUPPLY

Welcome to our fashion-editorial rebellion: one without designer labels or advertisers, turning the spotlight instead on drag queens in head-to-toe self-styled looks that will make your jaw drop. This photographic essay juxtaposes contemporary drag and drag of eras past against the awe-inspiring backdrop of The Butterfly Club, which is celebrating its 20th year as a venue at the centre of Australia’s queer arts scene.

All shot on film, these photos invite you into the playful and tantalising world of drag queens riding the high of post-show applause over cocktails. Join our three powerhouses – Paris, a pillar of Australia’s drag community; Valerie Hex, founder of award-winning cabaret group Yummy; and Pancetta Love, a boundary-pushing performance artist – as the lounge becomes the stage and candid moments turn Vogue.

Writing and creative direction by Hailey Moroney / @haileyharpermoroney_

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confessions of a

GREEK ANDROGYNE DMETRI KAKMI IMAGES STU BROWN WORDS

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Ethnicity and sexuality intertwine in ways that indelibly shape the person we become – and the communities in which we find belonging.

“YOU’RE TOO ETHNIC for me.

Try him over there – he likes wog dick.”

These are the words I heard the first time I talked to a man in a gay venue.

Time: 1979. Place: Mandate nightclub, St Kilda.

I was 18 years old, shy and uncertain of myself. Mortified, I fled, vowing to never speak to a gay man again. Especially if he was blond and blue-eyed – features that contrasted sharply with my dark Mediterranean appearance.

Later, I realised the full import of the man’s parting shot: He likes wog dick.

The four words, shouted casually in my ear over the thumping disco music, were like daggers. In that meat rack of a place, they further reduced me to a body part. I stopped being a human being and became a penis.

The words turned me into a fetish, an object to satisfy someone’s lust for sex with ethnic men. Furthermore, the proclamation dripped with undisguised bigotry while affirming entrenched ideas about what it meant to be Greek and gay at the time.

TO BE GREEK AND GAY back then meant either of three things: you were closeted, you were bisexual, or you had no inhibitions and rutted like a goat behind your dad’s fish-andchip shop.

You were also a hot, hairy stud, straight from the field. A five o’clock shadow and sweaty armpits enhanced

your masculinity. Anglo-Saxon men either swooned or were repelled by your musk. Moreover, you were either hung like a horse and took it up the arse, or, conversely, you didn’t go in for backdoor shenanigans because you were too macho to be the ‘passive’ recipient.

Myths abounded, each one contradicting previous assertions, further distorting a blurred picture as reality retreated behind cliché and make-believe. The first casualty of this stereotyping was truth; the second, human feeling.

To ascend the stairs to Mandate was to enter yet another world of make-­believe.

Up there, in that tiny fire hazard of a room, reality retreated and fantasy took over. These were the days of the clone – handlebar moustaches, leather, torn denim, plaid shirts, aviator sunglasses and black polished boots.

Almost everyone on the smoky dance floor was a construction worker or leather honcho. If you wanted to fit in, you emulated the standard ward­ robe and performed the fetishistic hyper-­masculinity that held you in contempt in real life. If you didn’t, you got the cold shoulder.

My closest friend at the time was Sal, a handsome Italian with compelling eyes and brown hair that started to thin at a young age. He and I were inseparable, going out together and living in each other’s pockets. There might have been a physical resemblance because people often mistook us for siblings – or

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for each other, calling Sal by my name and me by his.

I could not see the similarity. With hindsight, I see that the mix-up hap­ pened because Sal and I hailed from Mediterranean cultures – and although I was Greek, and he Italian, to the average AngloSaxon we were an indistinguishable ethnic melange.

Much like how people of Asian descent are said to look alike today.

There, the si­milarity ended between Sal and me. He was outgoing and confident, a real seducer. Mandate was his natural playground.

I was the opposite. Awkward and ill-defined, I lacked the courage to talk to anyone, let alone pick up. Aside from the invigorating Hi-NRG music, Mandate was not my kind of place.

To help out, Sal used to approach men on my behalf. “My friend likes you,” he’d say, and come back to report the usually negative response.

After a while, I lost myself on the dance floor while Sal played around in dark corners.

Late one night, a huge drag queen with glitter in her beard and moustache towered over me with hands on hips.

“You know what your problem is?” she shouted. “You don’t belong here.”

GREEK ANDROGYNY

THIS MESSENGER FROM the gods confirmed a long-held suspicion.

I was neither a clone nor a studly Greek.

Tall and willowy, with melting eyes and melancholy features, I did not fulfil the role of a hirsute greengrocer who es­ caped his wife’s clutches for an hour to cop a quickie at a beat.

It did not help that I dressed in a manner that was in gross contravention of Mandate’s prevailing aesthetic. Garbed in loose-fitting unisex Issey Miyake and Katharine Hamnett outfits, and sporting cropped orange hair one week and purple the next, I must have been a sight in that environment. No wonder no-one came near me.

Meanwhile, Sal, dressed like a construction worker in yesterday’s jeans and plaid shirt, scored every time.

It was not until the early 1980s, when I discovered Inflation

IF GRACE JONES OR PRINCE dared appear like that in public, there was no reason why I couldn’t. And so I went out of my way to look freakish by the day’s standards, bristling with silver ear cuffs, fetishistic black leather gloves with zippers, baggy cargo pants from London, hats and wimples, long before hoodies were a fashion item.

One evening, I was driving to Sal’s 21st birthday party with a m ­ ustard-coloured silk wimple wrapped around my head, Cerrone’s ‘­Supernature’ pumping out of the cassette player. A car-load of youths pulled up beside me at the traffic lights.

“Hey, mate, you a woman or something?” one yelled.

That, for me, was the ultimate compliment. At that point, I was trying to look as alien as possible because I felt alien.

Alien as a Greek in Australia. Alien as a homosexual in a heterosexist society.

Given my contrariness, I should not have been surprised when my rebellion extended to “Anglo-Saxon middle-class gay men excluded men like middle-class gays. Suppo­ me in the same way that heterosexuals shunned them. sedly ‘out there’ gay If I wanted in, I had to play by their rules. I was not men were prepared to do that” great confor­ mists when in the heart of counterfeit Hellenic temple transplan­ they gathered in packs. Dissent was not Melbourne, that ted to the Southern Hemisphere. encouraged; they even looked and talked I found my tribe.

That is why Grace Jones, with her alike. Frustrated, I used to call them The new-wave goths, flat-top haircut and mannish Armani ‘The Stepford Boyz’. punks, fashionistas, suits, was an instant magnet for me. As Understandably, after being rejected witches, dominatrices were Annie Lennox, Boy George, Divine, by kith and kin, they sought solace in a and stylish drag Sylvester, and the sumptuous Leigh group of like-minded individuals. Who queens were my ­Bowery, with his astounding shape-­ could blame them? But membership kind of people. shifting, body-defying costumes. to a club comes at a price. Adherents And it was at To me, they were not man, not supress individuality and turn away Inflation, woman, nor were they fully human. from those that do not provide a pleaswith its These trail­blazers – fearless, defiant ing ­mirror image. faux Greand utterly true to themselves – chalThrough mannerism, dress codes and cian collenged preconceptions about the body, silent rebuke, Anglo-Saxon middle-class umns, that turning it into ambulatory art through gay men excluded men like me in the I discovered mask and costume as they searched for same way that heterosexuals shunned the community the elusive, ever-changing self. them. If I wanted in, I had to to which I belonged: I was in search of an identity, too, play by their rules. I was not androgynous individuals who confused a way to express outwardly how I felt prepared to do that. the eye and delighted the imagination. inside. Androgynous pop stars, at once Rather I realised that I did not see myself as beautiful and grotesque, provided a than camouflage a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’, but something in mirror. I saw myself in them, and them myself in a pastel between. I did not want to be a woman, in me. uniform and hold discreet but I also did not fancy being classified strictly as a man, either.

In keeping with my Greek heritage, I saw myself as the classic androgyne of mythology: beautiful Hermaphroditus, both man and woman. To look at him was to reassess what it means to be man or woman.

My obsession with this figure made me realise that I was playing with how I presented to the world and how I wan­ ted to be perceived. Feeling narrowly defined as a ‘wog’ and as a ‘poofter’, I wanted to be looked at, but according to my rules. Dressing in outlandish outfits, I ­disrupted notions of what a Greek man was and what he might look like, while giving form to my inner ‘strangeness’.

Nor did the greater irony escape me that I staged my performance every Wednesday night in a nightclub with fake Corinthian columns stuck to a Victorian facade – an ill-defined Greek inside a

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dinner parties, I chose truth in visibility. Rather than pretend to be pseudo-macho, like the clones at Mandate, I challenged the dichotomy between masculine and feminine by displaying myself in a way that was confronting, threatening, off-putting.

I took to heart Grace Jones’s highhanded pronouncement in a 1984 issue of Interview magazine: “The future is no sex … You can be a boy, a girl, whatever you want.”

I’VE ALWAYS HATED LABELS. Rather than define, they restrict. I did not see myself as ‘straight’ or ‘gay’, or even ‘bisexual’. The term ‘queer’, with its malleable borders, came closest to defining my stance. But even that let me down in the long run by becoming too dogmatic, splintered and politicised.

It came down to one thing: I did not relate to gay identity politics. To adopt an identity based on sexuality made no sense to me. It seemed naive, reductive, prescriptive. It cut out ambiguity, complexity and contradic­ tion – all things

I prized.

A knowledge of my background may explain my attitudes to sexuality.

I am Greek, born on a Turkish island in the north Aegean Sea. I came to Aus­ tralia with my family when I was 10 years old. And, even though I have lived here the greater part of my life, those formative times on our rugged little island left an indelible mark.

I grew up in a culture where it was normal to see overt public displays of affection between men. No-one blinked an eye when two guys kissed on the cheek, or held hands or walked

a­ rm-in-arm to the tavern. Furthermore, male and female homosexual conduct was prevalent because the dominant Muslim culture segregated the sexes until ­marriage.

I grew up believing homosexuality was normal. That is why, when I realised I was same-sex-attracted around 15 or 16, I suffered no guilt, no shame, no embarrassment. It was just how things were.

When I came out to my family two years later, I sailed on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Mum was dismayed, then came acceptance. My sister shrugged it off and the usual protective female bubble descended over the paterfamilias. Under no circumstances was he to know.

To this day, he does not acknowledge the truth about his son. For although displays of affection and sexual dalliances were common between men in Turkey, one did not make a lifelong practice out of them. You married a woman and buried whatever feelings you had towards your best friend. This is still largely the case in Turkey.

These mixed signals did not sit well with me. As far as I was concerned, my sexuality was a natural part of the unfolding human tapestry, not a shameful activity with its own exclusive and highly politicised label. Nor was I in­­ teres­ted in settling down and raising a ­family. Sex with another man was something I did for love or pleasure– but an occasional act­ ivity does not define your entire being.

This belief remained intact even when I encountered early gay activism in Australia. In this country, my way of thinking was known as the ‘European attitude to sex’: earthy, open and uncomplicated.

This gross generalisation contains an element of truth.

Sal and I drifted apart when I voiced these beliefs. He thought I was apolitical. In truth – as I came to understand over the years – I was a libertarian humanist, wanting to break down

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barriers, and eradicate polarities and ­divisions.

I AM NOW IN MY LATE 50s.

I have been in a relationship with the same man for 32 years. Although I am happy for gay friends that choose to marry, my partner and I will not do so under any circumstances. Or have ­children.

I am not involved in the gay world: no nightclubs, no pride marches, noth­ ing. I live happily in my own bubble with a bunch of gay, queer and polyamorous friends as well as pleasingly ­broad-minded heterosexuals.

Although I voted ‘yes’ for marriage equality, in my view the campaign was misguided. We ought to have fought for universal equality in the eyes of the law, not to join a retrograde institution. The fight should not have been left in the hands of middle-class Anglo-Saxon gays to begin with. In their quest for acceptance, they sold out queer Indigenous people, our transgender and intersex siblings, and homeless queer youth.

For what? For membership to a club that will only have them if they play by its rules. Marry, have kids, join the army, go to church. Much like the Mandate crowd, these gays reveal themselves to be conservatives disguised as progressives. And I want as little as possible to do with their world.

Fashion and clothing remain a big part of my life. These days, though, I use colour, fabric and texture to elaborate and recontextualise an ageing body, rather than to play with gender. Having been Hermaphroditus for a while, I am now Tiresias, the prophet who was briefly a woman and now resides comfortably in a male body.

Dmetri Kakmi is a writer and editor.

The fictionalised memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and is published in England and Turkey.

Haunting Matilda was shortlisted in the Aurealis Awards Best Fantasy Novella category in 2015.

His essays and short stories appear in anthologies.

FAIR GOA HANNAH MOUNCEY PHOTOS JUN TANLAYCO

WORDS

TRANS INCLUSION IN SPORT

Sport is both a microcosm shining a light on society and a vehicle for effecting large-scale change – especially for trans inclusion.

L

I’VE COME TO APPRECIATE that playing sport at the highest levels is when I feel most comfortable. The bigger the tournament and the bigger the crowd, the more pressure the game brings with it – and the more confident and relaxed I am.

I’m a trans athlete, better known for playing Australian Rules football, but I’m a handball player first and foremost.

I represented Australia as part of the men’s team from 2012 to 2015, including playing at the world championships in 2013, and was part of the country’s Olympic qualifying campaign in 2015.

I now play for the Australian women’s team, and was part of the team that recently qualified for the 2019 world championships.

As a footballer, I played firstly for Ainslie in the 2017 season in Canberra, before being asked by several Australian Football League (AFL) clubs to nominate for the AFL Women’s (AFLW) draft of that year.

I’ve played sport for as long as I can remember, starting with cricket and soccer when I was five. Growing up, I played all manner of things – from hockey, swimming and netball, to touch football and, of course, football and handball.

I think my comfort comes from the fact that, in those high-stress situations, I’m more than up to the challenge and just know what I’m doing. I also know that the crowd has come to watch us, as have the people who have tuned in to the

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match on TV. We’ve all come together for the love of the game.

SPORT HAS THE POWER to do many things. It can unite people, and make grown adults cry tears of joy or sadness over the result of a game.

It can also incite riots and cause pol­ itical change. Sport has the power to be inclusive and life-affirming – if it chooses to be.

The exclusion of South Africa from international sport for 30 years, which contributed to the eventual dismantling of the country’s apartheid policies, highlights the ways in which sport can be used as a tool for power. Today, sport is once again at a crossroads in terms of helping shape a better future for marginalised people – this time, for the trans and gender-diverse community.

About 12 hours before the 2018 draft, the AFL reversed its original decision around my eligibility for the women’s league. I was no longer allowed to play at the sport’s highest level, but could play state league football, which I then did for the Darebin Falcons of the Victorian Football League (VFL).

To explain why the logic behind such a decision is confusing at best is a topic for another day. Instead, I’m interested in discussing the differing approaches of my two sports to an issue that has really only been at the forefront of the general public’s minds in the last few years.

On the one hand, there is the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

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As handball is an Olympic sport, it is governed by the IOC’s eligibility rules, which state that a trans athlete’s testosterone level must remain below 10 nanomols per litre of blood for 12 months prior to competing, and remain there for the entirety of their career.

The rules – which are backed by the authority of medical and health professionals from institutions as wide-ranging as University College London, Spain’s University of Vigo, Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) – are clear.

You either meet the requirements or you don’t. This provides a safeguard not just for the sport but also for its athletes, who then immediately know whether they’ve met the requirements.

But the IOC operates out of Europe, where, by and large, people have tended to be accepted for who they are much more readily than in other parts of the world. Australia, in contrast, is quite a socially conservative country, despite what we may tell ourselves.

And it’s for this reason that the AFL turned my participation in the AFLW

I tend to agree with a theory put for­ ward by many others: that the AFL’s fear of what a trans player (especially one who looked like me) could do to the public image of the competition impacted its decision as much as anything else. If I looked more like how people expect women to look, perhaps I would have played. Perhaps parents wanting their girls to play football wouldn’t be ‘put off’ and there wouldn’t be any commercial ‘risks’ to the sport.

TRANS HEALTHCARE, medicine and the effects of hormone treatment – much like climate science – seem to be areas in which some people are happy to ignore experts because they simply don’t like what is being said. But it’s worth pointing out that rigorous, ongoing re­search on these topics is being done by world-renowned experts like UCLA professor of genetics Eric Vilain, who also acted as advisor on the IOC rules.

People like American medical physicist Joanna Harper are u ­ ndertaking work – which has received Vilain’s support – that

“Despite the difficulties I’ve faced, sport has been the most accepting and welcoming environment I’ve found as a trans person. The challenge now is getting that message out” c­ ompetition into a complicated, very public saga.

Essentially, throughout 2017, I had been approached by a number of ­Melbourne-based clubs interested in taking me in for that year’s AFLW draft. I now know that at least two of those club selections would have been a certainty. I then joined my manager and one of those clubs (who I won’t mention, to save dragging them into it) in approaching the AFL to determine whether I could play.

The answer was an unequivocal yes.

We were stoked. However, just before the draft, the AFL decided – based on no evidence or expert advice – that I was, in fact, ineligible to play in the AFLW competition.

focuses specifically on the relationship between gender transition and sporting performance. Overall, the findings suggest that, despite any previous exposure to testosterone, trans women undergoing hormone replacement therapy have no inherent biological ‘advantage’ over their cisgender counterparts.

Then there are people like Czech-­ American former tennis player Martina Navratilova. She has been incredibly outspoken against trans women in sport – in February this year alone, she described our participation as “cheating” and “not fair” – yet so many of her views are seemingly not based on any science. In fact, the only summation I can come to from reading them is that they’re en­tirely made up.

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In a similar vein, there’s ex-footballer Sam Newman, who continues to rant about trans women playing in Australian sport any chance he gets. Thankfully, particularly after the backlash to his March 2019 social media post mocking trans people, both fans and former colleagues (including on The Footy Show, which he co-hosted) are going to great lengths to very clearly distance themselves from him.

And, of course, there are local politicians such as Mark Latham, Pauline Hanson, Corey Bernardi and Eric Abetz, to name but a few, who have been at the vanguard of attacking anyone seen as ‘different’ from mainstream Australia for well over a decade now. Lyle Shelton especially has given this assault on trans people a huge boost through his affiliation with the Australian C ­ hristian Lobby.

Sadly, their numbers and supporters are somehow only growing. And this is why we don’t see more trans people playing sport – or publicly participating in our communities in general. For whatever reason, in Australia, the conservative voice is often the loudest.

BECAUSE OF THIS, we need the voices of those who do support trans people to be extra loud: we need to drown out the hurtful views that demonise us. In fact, when accounting for people actually participating in the two sports, my experiences have shown that the response to trans people being able to play has generally been overwhelmingly positive.

I have been warmly welcomed into every team I’ve been part of, and often received praise from opposition players and coaches after we’ve played them – just for being out there. I recently played handball for Australia at a tournament in Japan, and received nothing but en­couragement and goodwill from so many teams, including India, Iran, Japan and Singapore.

The response was the same when it came to my participation in AFLW and VFL Women’s. There have been countless players (of whatever gender) who have offered their support, and they come from all over the country, not just

TRANS INCLUSION IN SPORT

the Victorian clubs where I personally know a fair few of the players.

Around the time of writing, former Collingwood AFLW defender Meg Hutchins spoke out about transphobic bullying online. Western Bulldogs AFLW captain Katie Brennan likewise voiced her support on Instagram, while Carlton’s Darcy Vescio not only did the same but also wore a mouthguard featuring the trans colours during the last few rounds of the AFLW season as well as at the AFLW Grand Final.

Were there as many people speaking up for trans people as when a photo of cis-female AFLW player Tayla Harris became the subject of online abuse? Of course not, it wasn’t even close; defending trans people can still open someone up to a world of criticism. But we can be optimistic about the fact that people are starting to do it.

The more this type of public support happens, the more we will see others become comfortable doing the same.

My hope is that similar developments will soon begin happening behind the scenes as well.

DESPITE THE DIFFICULTIES I’ve faced, sport has been the most accepting and welcoming environment I’ve found as a trans person. The challenge now is getting that message out. With players such as Meg, Darcy and Katie leading the way, it can only be a sign of more positive things to come.

I won’t be playing football this year.

After qualifying for the handball world championships, and with the Tokyo Olympics coming up, I simply won’t have time to do both – and I remain a handball player first.

My relationship with sport overall has also changed. While people who play at the ‘base’ level do it for enjoyment, at the elite levels, it can get very business-like.

Often, your first emotion after winning an important game is not joy but rather relief. While I will, of course, keep play-

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ing, there’s a security in knowing that sport is not the be-all and end-all for me.

But I do take heart in the positive impact that my participation can – and hopefully will – have on trans kids out there. Hopefully it shows not just them but their parents as well that being trans isn’t necessarily going to limit your op­­ portunities, that you can do whatever you set your mind to, and that the world can be a much kinder place than they might initially think.

Hannah Mouncey is a current member of Australia’s women’s handball team and played with the Darebin Falcons in the 2019 VFLW season.

Prior to this, she spent four years with Australia’s men’s handball team, including at the 2013 world championships, and narrowly missed out on qualifying with the team for the 2016 Olympic Games. She writes for The Guardian, The Roar, News.com.au and PlayersVoice.

COOPERATIVE

GAMING WORDS

ALAYNA COLE

LGBTQIA+ GAMING

Videogames have ­immense potential to educate and empower, but the growing inclusiveness of the games industry and broader community has not been without hurdles.

Overleaf: IT WILL BE HARD

by Hien Pham and Amos Wolfe

MY FIRST ARTICLE about video­ games was published in 2013. I was a fresh-faced undergraduate with a pas­­sion for playing games and very little understanding of what it meant to work in the industry. I didn’t even know if that was something I wanted to do yet.

In fact, I was confused about a lot of things. I was still finding my footing as a queer person and, little did I know, the games industry globally was figuring out its queer identity at the same time.

By the time I’d established Queerly Represent Me – an organisation that, among other things, tracks the release of games featuring queer characters, narratives and other forms of diverse representation – in 2016, the industry had changed significantly from that first foray. Initially, I created Queerly Represent Me to help me find more examples to analyse for my own research. But it soon became a useful resource for researchers, developers and consumers internationally, and expanded into the not-for-profit organisation it is today.

Without the increasing accessibility of game-making tools and distribution platforms – and the resulting archiving and preservation of personal, queer games – the Queerly Represent Me database could not exist. These days, consumers don’t need to accidentally stumble across games that make queer exploration possible, like I did when I started experimenting with queerness in my adolescence through games like The Sims.

This type of access is important; I don’t think I would be the person I am today without The Sims. Although the games I played growing up were fun, entertaining and sometimes frivolous, they were so much more than that.

These games offered me my first oppor-

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tunity to place myself into the shoes of a same-sex-attracted person and see what that felt like. They gave me the opportunity to see who I could be, and who I wanted to be.

Games are powerful things. They can teach anything from fine motor skills and literacy to empathy and morality.

They can teach people to cooperate and collaborate, to makes choices and to interpret stimuli. They can be art. Or they can be about constructing a teetering mountain of half-naked men (I’m looking at you, Mount Your Friends).

The last half-decade has revealed that games have so much more potential than many of us ever realised.

THE YEAR 2013 was a pivotal one for queer folks interested in gaming, whether as game developers or game consumers. The previous year, Anna Anthropy published Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, an influential work that hinted at the wide-reaching possibilities for personal, autobiographical games. This was the beginning of a movement.

“What I want from videogames is for creation to be open to everyone, not just to publishers and programmers,” Anthropy says in her introduction. “I want games to be personal and meaningful, not just pulp for an established audience. I want game creation to be decentralised. I want open access to the creative act for everyone.”

Since the publication of her manifesto, “personal and meaningful” games – including Anthropy’s own Dys4ia, as well as Robert Yang’s Cobra Club, Nicky Case’s Coming Out Simulator, merritt k’s Lim, Mattie Brice’s Mainichi, and Hien Pham and Amos Wolfe’s It Will Be Hard – have revolutionised the independent game market. These have demonstrated

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how ‘risky’ themes relating to the self and sexuality can be explored using a grassroots approach.

Some of these games were also precursors to my own explorations of sexuality through developing videogames. In 2016, I released Snapshot, where the player interacts with my teenage bedroom to learn about my experience of figuring out my bisexuality. A year later, I developed Rainbow Cafe with my partner, Dakoda Barker, in which the player speaks to an array of queer folks whose dialogue is based on true stories shared with me on social media.

Rise of the V ­ ideogame Zinesters inspired just

a community-driven event ‘dedicated to exploring the intersection of LGBTQ issues and video games’, was held in October in Berkeley.

Game consumers, developers and academics suddenly all had spaces to speak and learn about the experiences of the queer community. Marginalised experiences had never been spotlighted in this way before.

Beyond conferences and events, 2013 saw an increase in coverage of queer game content, players and design in general. There was more inclusion of queer representation in mainstream games (the most well-known of which may be Canadian studio BioWare’s franchises like Dragon Age and Mass Effect), more communities for queer gamers

and distribution methods, there has also been an increase in risk. In 2013, companies were able to freely support diversity initiatives with minimal blowback. However, since the escalation of Gamergate in 2014, it has become divisive to support diversity.

If you’re unfamiliar with Gamergate and its fallout… honestly, you’re lucky.

Gamergate was a harassment c­ ampaign against women and marginalised groups that was so intense that I still feel un­­ comfortable typing the term. (If this wasn’t a print magazine, I probably would call it ‘G*merg*te’ or something similar, to limit the risk that my name would appear associated with it in Google searches.)

Zoë Quinn, a game developer most well known for Twine game Depression Quest, “As many of these grassroots games focus on tender faced months of harassnarratives rather than intricate or difficult gameplay, ment, receiving threats they are perfect entry points for people who do not of rape and death both online and at her home consider themselves game-literate” address. Attackers hacked her online accounts, sent that: a rise. From 2013 to become part of (including local nude photos of her to her colleagues and onwards – on top of community-run Gaymer organisations made abusive phone calls to her father. individual games – that popped up in most capital cities) Quinn was not the only victim of this events and conferences and more access to game-making tools kind of harassment; media critic Anita dedicated to the stories for individuals unfamiliar with programSarkeesian and game developer Brianna of queer folks and other ming or computer science (including Wu were also central targets. A ­ nybody marginalised people Twine and GameMaker). who spoke out about Gamergate, parbegan springing up.

More distribution options allowing ticularly if they were women, and regardThe Game Developers consumers to access independently less of whether they were industry folk Conference – the largest developed games likewise emerged.

– like actress Felicia Day – was met with games industry conferItch.io – a distribution platform first similar treatment. ence in the world – had released in March 2013 – now hosts The consequences of Gamergate have its first dedicated ‘hyper-­ nearly 100,000 games, many of which been significant: people have lost their inclusive #LostLevels were independently published. While jobs, their homes, their partners, or have unconference’ in March distribution giants like Steam require completely left the games industry in in San Francisco, the pridevelopers to pay a fee to have their its wake. I’m lucky that I just get death mary aim of which was content hosted, itch.io allows people threats via Twitter mentions and emails. to be “more inclusive and accessible” for to publish their work for free, instead None of them have shown up in my the people attending. The first Different taking a small cut from each sale. physical mailbox – yet.

Games conference then launched in Opportunities like these have led to Some people think that Gamergate April in New York, aiming to “amplify more and more games featuring queer is over, but the attitudes that have led to the creative and critical voices of marcontent being released every year. Figgroups of (primarily) men thinking that ginalised participants in games culture”. ures on Queerly Represent Me show that, it’s okay to harass, abuse and threaten August saw GaymerX, a San Francisco while 54 such games were released in women and other marginalised people in event “dedicated to celebrating and sup2013, 172 made it into the world in 2018. the games industry are still alive. I only porting LGBTQ+ people and culture need to look at my Twitter mentions to in the world of gaming”. The Queer­ ALONG WITH THE ONGOING see that. Most recently, I received a tweet ness and Games Conference (QGCon), rise of these game-making tools, events suggesting that I “hang [my]self” simply

This page and overleaf, bottom: RAINBOW CAFE

by Alayna Cole and Dakoda Barker

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LGBTQIA+ GAMING

because my games work intersects with social justice.

Similarly, when Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg used the n-word during a livestream in 2017, these same communities fought anybody who spoke out against his actions. Sean Vanaman, co-founder of independent game studio Campo Santo, was one of these vocal responders. Following his criticism of PewDiePie, Campo Santo’s Firewatch was ‘review-bombed’, with hundreds of people jumping onto the game’s Steam profile to leave negative ratings and nasty comments – potentially endangering the game’s commercial viability.

That same year, former GaymerX board member Matt Conn told me that he felt “there’s been a total shift in the climate of supporting diversity and inclusion-minded events, where it moved from being an obvious thing, to being seen as a ‘political’ thing”.

Undeniably, it’s this risk of negative publicity and harassment campaigns that is limiting the amount of financial support that inclusive projects can gain from major companies, who ultimately want to avoid being seen to be making ‘political’ statements.

GaymerX has been financially struggling for the past few years, relying on crowdfunding to fork the significant costs of hosting the event. Sadly, it had to cancel its 2019 convention due to a lack of financial support. And it’s just one organisation feeling the negative impacts of these types of concerted attacks.

IT’S HARD NOT TO BE pessimis­ tic when the industry you’re in demonstrates that it’s scared to lose its market share in the ‘abusive jerk’ demographic.

But, despite the abuse and the difficult consequences, plenty of individuals are continuing to loudly support marginalised people. There’s work to be done, so we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and carry on.

Some companies are stepping up, too. In 2017, game developer Blizzard launched what it calls a ‘global diversity and inclusion initiative’ to improve its employment rates of women and marginalised groups. To achieve this, it

aims to encourage their involvement in conferences and organisations focused on representation and upskilling.

Microsoft has been working on its Gaming for Everyone initiative, and is leading the way in inclusion and accessibility with its Xbox Adaptive Controller, launched last year.

Also announced in 2018 was the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Speaker Diversity Initiative, which funds marginalised speakers who are seeking travel opportunities to share their knowledge or learn from experts.

This fund helped people attend the IGDA LGBTQ+ roundtable I ran at the Game Developers Conference in March this year; many of them otherwise would not have been able to voice their opinions and concerns with me in person.

This type of support makes a significant difference to people and the opportunities they have access to. But, while companies can sponsor events, fund creators and boost marginalised voices with their influence and net­works, it’s not just them who can support queer game developers.

Individuals can donate to crowdfunding campaigns, Patreons and Ko-fi accounts, or pay for games developed by queer folks. As many of these grassroots games focus on tender narratives rather than intricate or difficult gameplay, they are perfect entry points for people who do not consider themselves game-literate.

It’s also important to remember that there are many non-financial ways to support queer and otherwise-­marginalised game creators. Queerly Represent Me, for instance, is built on the tenets of ­representation, education and elevation, and these can be incorporated into anyone’s activism.

Even if we don’t have money to spare, we can support one another by spreading word about these developers’ work and by using our own knowledge to educate others to ensure gaming spaces are in­­ clusive and accessible.

WHEN I’M LOUDLY and unapol­ ogetically myself on the internet, I get abused for it. Not just because I’m in the

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games industry – although that doesn’t help – but also because I am queer and a woman. However, I care less about the actively horrible and malicious people in my Twitter mentions than I do about the misinformed and the willing-to-learn.

This self-assuredness shows just how far I’ve come from my uncertain self in 2013. Back then, I was wrestling with being queer, unsure about what my career might look like and certainly wasn’t running my own company. Now, I’m proudly bisexual, a full-time associate producer at a wonderfully supportive indepen­ dent game studio and the managing director of a not-for-profit.

So much can change in such a short period of time, and I hope the same can be said about the games industry. Although the angry mobs are still angry, they are outnumbered by those who can be educated, with access to the right resources, consultancy and personal stories.

It’s up to us to make sure those resources and stories are funded and shared broadly, perhaps in the form of interactive games and the communities those games are able to foster. Together, we can make the games industry – and the wider community – a safer place for all of us.

Alayna Cole is the managing director of Queerly Represent Me, a not-for-profit championing queer representation in games. Alayna is also an associate producer at Defiant Development, co-chair of the IGDA LGBTQ+ special interest group, and an award-winning games journalist and developer.

Top two: COMING OUT SIMULATOR by Nicky Case Second from bottom: SNAPSHOT by Alayna Cole

THE BATIK SERIES

PHOTOS DANIEL

ADAMS

Q&A WITH ALEXIS DESAULNIERS-LEA

Daniel Adams is a conceptual portrait photographer who explores gender, identity and cultural norms.

In his work, he delves into the use of social and political ideologies, and through it, hopes to start discussion among his audience. Along with these subjects, Adams also looks for the unusual and the not-your-everyday, aiming to re-create the surreal images in his head.

Having moved back home to Malaysia after studying photography for three years in England, he’s learning a lot more about his own culture and its traditions – something he wants to investigate further through photography.

What inspired The Batik Series?

After finishing my studies at Falmouth University in England, I decided to move back home to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. I wanted to create a body of work that really embraced Malaysians.

I had found the Batik fabric at a corner shop, and it sparked a memory of when I was researching for one of my university projects – seeing this image of an African woman in her traditional fabric headwrap. I wanted to play on that aesthetic but add my own take and style to it with Batik fabrics, which are native to many South-East Asian countries and is especially a large part of Malaysian culture.

The way the Batik is tied onto each individual is rooted in tradition, like what you may see in the villages of Malaysia. I wanted to incorporate the traditional and the modern together: traditional clothes and patterns with the ­modern Malaysian.

What conversations, dynamics or memories informed the way you put this series together?

Creating The Batik Series was a special experience. I got to in­­ teract with and photograph over 200 individuals.

The series actually started in my condo’s car park, where I photographed women in Batik wraparounds. I shot my friends at first, but then I put out an ­Instagram story and received so many requests to shoot someone’s portrait. It then evolved into a test shoot with just men, and that was

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a completely different dynamic – the styling was different, the posing was different and the feel was different – but also extremely interesting to explore.

From there, it expanded into bringing the series to one of the biggest festivals in Malaysia, the Good Vibes Festival, where I pho­ tographed 130 people in Batik over a span of 12 hours. I shot local and international artists – like Petit ­Biscuit, alt-J and What So Not – backstage wearing Batik.

I also collaborated with a local organisation, True Complexion, to shoot differently abled and unique individuals in Batik. The fact that I was able to showcase diversity and representation through this project was so incredible; the number of Malaysians who reached out to me to be a part of this project – people from all walks of life, different backgrounds, body sizes, skin tones and sexualities – was the highlight.

What was it like studying in England as a photographer from Malaysia?

I’m half-British and half–­ChineseMalaysian, and I was born and raised in Malaysia, so coming to the UK was a sort of culture shock for me. I wasn’t able to relate to everything and had to adapt to a different way of living.

Being a Malaysian photographer allowed me to bring my culture into my work. I got to link my Malaysian side and my British side together, which created a rather interesting narrative. Not only that, I was also able to (continued on p98…)

(…from p88) ­educate people in the UK about what happens in Malaysia and my culture through my work.

Despite media culture seeing more and better depictions of people with diverse bodies, varying skin tones and physical disabilities, it’s clear that we still have a long way to go, particularly in fashion photography and beauty portraiture. Why is it important that we address this?

Worldwide, there is still a huge lack of representation; however, in my opinion, it is definitely getting better, slowly but surely. We’re seeing more people of colour on TV, on billboards, in music, and it makes me so happy.

If I were to speak about repre­ sentation in the Malaysian industry, I would probably say the same: there is definitely awareness of body positivity and a movement in the right direction. An example would include Nalisa Alia Amin opening for Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week in 2018 as one of its first ­plus-size models.

Despite this, there are still obvious problems in our representation.

Differently abled individuals are practically invisible, and darkskinned models are also rarely in the media, even though a large portion of the Malaysian population consists of darker-skinned Indians and Malays. Adverts and campaigns promoting our traditional costumes use Westernised and white indivi­ duals, but this really doesn’t make any sense to me, as these traditio­ nal costumes are aimed at locals and are part of our culture.

To me, it’s important to help create diversity and equal representation because it’s something that’s close to home. When I go into H&M or Zara and only see white models on the walls, that becomes the ideal of beauty that many individuals aspire to.

But there should be no beauty ‘standard’ that we need to live up to. Dark skin is beautiful, all body types are beautiful, all races are beautiful – and these ideas can be championed by having more representation in media.

The current political landscape in Malaysia is largely hostile towards LGBT individuals, and there are legal consequences for speaking out or being queer. Was this forefront of your mind when you were exploring gender and identity in your work?

I am fed up with this aspect of the Malaysian political landscape.

Day after day, I find myself reading about conversion therapy and how the LGBT community are riddled with disease and sickness.

To be told over and over and over again that you are wrong, that you don’t belong, that you’re sick and have a disease just because you like the same gender … The amount of mental and psychological stress and pressure that the LGBT community have to go through, time and time again, just isn’t humane.

Exploring gender and identity in my work has been freeing. There are so many beautiful and talented individuals who are a part of this community. I tell myself that if I don’t put effort into exploring these

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topics and lives, and providing a platform even if it’s a small one, who else is going to?

What are you working on at the moment?

I am working on several projects.

I am just about to finish a yearlong collaboration with an amazing make-up artist and friend, Mandy Leigh, on a project dedicated to my late mother, Grace Adams.

My mum passed away two years ago, and I decided to create a project about the emotions I felt when she passed. Not only did it allow me to express myself without having to speak about it, but it allowed me to compartmentalise my thoughts as well. I’ll be exhibiting these at a solo show mid-year, and auctioning them off to raise money for ­Cancer Research Malaysia.

Apart from this, I’m working with another talented photographer, Catherhea, on a project that showcases dark skin in Malaysia, as well as three other projects on the LGBT community – one about LGBT discrimination, one about the transgender community and another about the drag scene in Kuala Lumpur.

I want my work to make an impact, to help people see from a different perspective. I want my work to be able to show people that everyone is equal and everyone deserves equal rights. I want my work to start important discussions and to encourage people to speak about things that would otherwise be behind closed doors.

Alexis Desaulniers-Lea is Archer Magazine’s image editor.

WORDS ELIZABETH WILLIAM STREET IMAGES CYNTHIA SOBRATY

RAINBOW Picket FENCE There’s an inherent playfulness to queer identities, but some of us face pressures to present in specific ways in different contexts.

RIGHT NOW I’M WEARING a black leather jacket – with a subtle matte leopard print on the shawl collar, thanks for asking – and a cream silk shirt, plus big hair and blurry eyeliner and black jeans and vintage combat boots. It’s all a little bit Too Much for a local bar on a Monday, but it’s also pretty clear that I’m not entirely serious. I came here to have a good time.

I’ve struck up a conversation with the guys at the next table, which in hindsight may have been a mistake. It turns out that one of them is a big fan of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who’s built a lucrative media career out of a­ rguments like non-binary people don’t exist. I sort of want to tell this guy that I’m one of Them, because that’s a joke that works on multiple levels, and I like jokes.

The guy asks me if I’m a musician, and then if I’m ‘Middle Eastern’, although I’m neither. I am ambiguously brown and dressed like an off-brand Rolling Stone, though, so I suppose that’s what I look like to him.

I wonder what he thinks a non-binary person looks like. What I’m supposed to look like.

A LONG TIME AGO, before I knew it was even possible to live as someone who wasn’t a boy or a girl, everything I wore around my neighbourhood was always a bit Too Much. Sometimes it was silk blouses, pearls and back-seam stockings. Sometimes it was vests and

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“At first I didn’t know what a queer or non-binary person was. Then I didn’t think it was possible for me to be one, even though I felt like one, because I didn’t look like one” tailcoats and broad-brimmed men’s hats. I’d pop out to get groceries, and people would ask me if I was going to a costume party.

Back then, I liked to dress up as a fancy lady, or a fancy man, because I thought it was funny. It was mostly funny because I was obviously broke.

There was a clear disconnect between what I wore and who I was, and I enjoyed that as a sort of visual joke.

Looking back, these outfits weren’t just jokes about my lack of money. They were also jokes about my lack of binary gender identity. I’d dress up as a caricature of a fancy lady because I was neither fancy nor a lady. One of the things I like about jokes is that you can use them to say serious things in public without being challenged.

Gender is always performative. But because there’s no easy way to look like a person who isn’t a man or a woman, the easiest way to look like myself was to turn myself into a joke about gender.

That was an impulse I followed for some time without knowing why.

Even now that I know I’m non-binary, there’s no real way for me to express my­ self without being playful. That’s why most of what I wear is still a joke on some level, a bit Too Much. I came here to have a good time.

BEING MYSELF ALSO MEANS not always being playful. For example, there are four dull dresses in the corner of my closet that I don’t like at all, but that I can’t throw out in case somebody gets married or dies and I have to go back to the country where my dad was born.

This is also why my big hair is always long and black and tameable, and why I don’t have a side-shave haircut or visible

tattoos. It’s why there are no public photos of me online with my arm around a woman in a certain way. Because of what life is like where my family’s from, I can’t be too visibly queer. I always need to be ready to transform back into the girl I’m expected to be.

“It’s funny that you say non-binary people aren’t a real thing,” I say to the man at the other table, “because I’m one of those non-binary people, and I’m pretty real.”

“Oh,” he says, and frowns. “You don’t look like one.”

At first I think, that’s an odd thing to say – after all, I’m non-binary, and this is what I look like. On the other hand, I think I know what he means. He’s probably never (knowingly) seen a non-binary person in the media or online who looks like me. He’s expecting tattoos and a side-shave haircut, possibly a septum piercing, probably someone who is white and about 25.

So it’s true that there’s no actual way to look like a non-binary person, and it’s also true that I don’t look like one. How did this happen, I wonder.

BEING VISIBLY QUEER isn’t something everybody wants. Some of us choose not to be. Some of us are visible because we don’t have a choice.

And some of us make the choice, whe­ ther sometimes or always, to outwardly break norms around dress and presentation – despite the personal cost – in order to be seen by and encourage one another, and to force society to acknowledge that we exist.

This defiant visibility is an aspect of queer history and queer being-alivetoday that fills me with capital-P Pride whenever I reflect on it. It’s part of why I sometimes come out as one thing

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NON-BINARY AND PERFORMANCE

or another to random dudes in bars: I want them to know that people like me are real, and everywhere, and actually pretty fun to drink with. If they know and understand who I am, it’s often easier for them to accept me.

The tireless work of loving and angry queers has won (some of) us rights under the law and (some) spaces of our own.

That’s made queerness more visible, and being queer more socially acceptable, and that’s good.

An unfortunate side effect of all this is that the public conversation about what it is to be queer is being led by people who society considers more ‘acceptable’, as well as by people who are more willing or able to be visible. That necessarily leaves some people out.

As a result, not everybody who belongs in the queer community feels welcome there. And I guess, on some level, I’m used to that feeling. I was born in Melbourne, and I’ve lived here all my life, but I’m still regularly asked where I’m from. And after I answer, there’s usually the follow-up question (or the quizzical look) of okay, but where are you really from?

When I fly back to the country where my dad was born, I look like the people around me, and I know what to wear in order to blend in. But I’m not fluent in the local languages. Over there – and in the spaces over here that are less welcoming to queers – I can expose myself as an outsider just by opening my mouth.

Over here, in the places I live, it’s always where are you from, with the implied I’m not sure you belong here. In my city, and in my queer community, I don’t look like I belong. Only certain people get to define what belonging looks like, and it turns out I’m not one of them.

WITH INCREASED SOCIETAL acceptance has come the gentrification of visible queer identities. The residents of today’s queer communities agree that it’s more comfortable here now – that there are more amenities, and fewer streets you might not want to walk down

late at night – but they also seem to agree that some of the old vibrancy is missing.

Back when things were a lot worse for us, societal-acceptance-wise, to be queer was necessarily to break norms. There were signifiers, and coded forms of self-expression, and secretly true things dressed up as jokes. But it was acknowledged that anyone could potentially be one of us, hiding in plain sight.

Nowadays, the community is brightly lit and public-facing and connected on Instagram. But not everybody can afford the new cost of living – being ‘out’, being ‘fierce’, sharing details of private lives – because culture or family or other social forces preclude them from acting as community representatives. These people go largely unrepresented and thus unseen.

The other means of securing resid­ ency is, oddly, respectability. This visible cohort are ‘just like you’, where you is a nice middle-class family, only with asymmetrical haircuts. They take out bank loans and attract corporate sponsorship and public goodwill, and are thus given platforms. The people who literally can’t or simply don’t want to live this way also go largely unrepresented.

Nowadays, I hear people who can still afford to live in the neighbourhood wonder: Why don’t we have a greater diversity of voices in our community? Often, these are the same people who are visible, and acceptable, and define what belonging looks like. Often, these are the same people who look at me and say, but where are you really from?

IN THE END, MY BAR MATE and I have a pretty good chat, even after I (accurately) describe Jordan Peterson as an intellectually disingenuous grifter. We talk about music and he buys me my next pint. Maybe people like me are a bit more real to him now.

I didn’t always feel real, even to myself.

At first I didn’t know what a queer or non-binary person was. Then I didn’t think it was possible for me to be one, even though I felt like one, because I didn’t look like one. I decided that my

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real self must be made out of the four dull dresses in the corner of my closet, and everything else I was doing was probably just a joke.

Over time, I learned about people who were like me and not like me. That helped me figure out both what I was and that being that way was allowed, even for me. Getting to hear and read their stories made me feel reflected, and that reflection eventually helped me to recognise myself in the mirror.

These days, when I make outfit-based jokes, they’re about music and my own personality rather than the fact that I don’t know what I am and am afraid to ask. I’ve stopped feeling like I have to hide behind jokes and started being genuinely playful. Now, I understand that it’s the four dresses that are the costume, and that I’m the real person who puts them on.

But I want this same sense of understood­-ness for people who are both like me and not like me. I want to expand the currently narrow queer neighbourhood and the range of joys that it celebrates.

I want more people to tell their stories, to be acknowledged even if they can’t be visible, so that we have crowdsourced defences against you shouldn’t be here or you’re not real. I want the new queer neighbourhood to incorporate the spaces we’ve already carved out for ourselves, instead of offering limited tenancies in the structures that already exist.

I want a bigger playing field and I want new rules. And I want another drink, because I came here to have a good time.

And I want you – yeah, you – to have a good time here, too.

Elizabeth William Street is the obvious pseudonym of a queer, non-binary South Asian–Australian writer who was born in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and escaped to the inner north at a tender age. They are currently engaging in gig-­economy proofreading for money and the provision of unsolicited political opinions for free.

SEX WORK and Subversion IRMA VEP PHOTOS DIRT EROTIC WORDS

Despite the ‘victim’ narrative surrounding it, sex work can offer freedom from systemic disadvantage.

THROUGH A SERIES of unfortunate factors – including auto-immune disease and a government that does not believe in inability to work, only unwillingness – I ended up being employed in the sex industry. It was the only way I could work minimal (and flexible) hours and still afford to live independently.

In my mind, working in a brothel was more appealing than returning to the town I grew up in to be looked after by my mum. The work in and of itself doesn’t really cause me any trouble; it’s the bigotry in the broader community that keeps me in the closet.

For example, my housemate (who doesn’t know where I get my money from) once drunkenly declared: Hookers are just the ugly version of strippers. Guys go to strip clubs to get hard, then to brothels to fuck someone ugly for cheap. Those girls only work in the sex industry because they’re lazy, and whatever ‘empowerment’ narrative they spin about their lives is bullshit because everyone else is just laughing at them.

Apparently, he’s unfamiliar with the concept of barriers to more conventional

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employment. While that exchange has stuck in my mind, it reminds me that I can’t let my sense of self-worth be defined by other people.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER was a black man born in a French colony. If you read his autobiography, you’ll find that he doesn’t mention his wife or children, or anything pertaining to how his race affected his quality of life. It’s ef­ fectively an expanded CV outlining his work in construction and the accolades he received from his superiors.

A part-time labourer at 14 and a fore­ man by 38, he oversaw the construction of government bridges, buildings and barracks. In recognition of his work in the latter role, he was “honoured by King George V with the British Empire Medal”. Citing one of his work references, he then states that his “enthusiasm, loyalty and ability for work have always been of great assistance in carrying out new and maintenance works on timber and concrete bridges”.

In my humble opinion, I think quoting work references in your autobiography

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is a pretty weird thing to do. While employment is important, I doubt it would be the first thing that comes to mind when I veer towards the end of my life.

As we confront the reality of our mor­ tality, we reflect on what’s important to us. Personally, I would be inclined to look back on the experiences that shaped me as a person, which inevitably involves anecdotes about the people I love and care about. For my great-grandfather, his work may have indeed been what shaped him as a person, as it’s clear he held what his employers had to say about him in high esteem.

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN more anti-­ establishment than my predecessors.

When I was seven years old, lunchtime was changed at my primary school. I wasn’t happy about it, so I wrote a petition and asked all the students to sign it, then hand-delivered it to our principal. I didn’t understand why he laughed because I was dead serious.

While (at the time) I didn’t have such a sophisticated vocabulary, I knew he didn’t have an inherent right to control my movements just because he was the principal. The student body were equal stakeholders in the matter, which was why I collected signatures. Lunchtime was changed back to normal, and all was well.

That authority-questioning kid still exists inside me. During a 2016 confe­ rence, sex worker and activist Tilly Lawless elaborated on the systemic inequality experienced by sex workers and advocated for both our integrity and our humanity. Two years later, the executive director of the organisation that commissioned her appearance spoke at the book launch of an outspoken ­whorephobe.

The book advocates for the complete criminalisation of the sex industry – the opposite of what Lawless (and the World Health Organization) has stated is in the best interests of sex workers. As we have asserted time and again, working for a legitimate employer bound by occupational health and safety (OH&S) laws will always be safer than working for organised crime.

Under criminalisation, if I am assaul­ ted at work, going to the police could mean both the attacker and I would be charged, as I would be engaging in an illicit trade. The industry needs to be legal in order to access standard workers’ rights like sick leave, superannuation, challenging unfair dismissal and OH&S. I sent that executive director a list of quotes from Lawless’s speech and another showing quotes from her pending interviewee, revealing that the latter was incredibly whorephobic and had politics that were starkly at odds with what the organisation was ostensibly platforming. I’m paraphrasing, but she effectively replied, “Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll agree to disagree.”

You cannot agree to disagree on sex workers’ entitlement to live and work in safety – these are basic human rights.

You either believe in those rights or you don’t.

I can’t replicate his politics. Chronic illness has taught me that I can’t rely on work, or any sources external to myself, to determine my value as a human being.

Opinions like those of my housemate, or the shit-for-brains whorephobe, or my clients or managers in the sex industry cannot be on the spectrum of things I deem important.

While I cannot say with certainty that I would refuse a medal from the Commonwealth, I would certainly be ambivalent about the ‘honour’ that it bestows because I don’t recognise the Queen’s authority over my life. These institutions and individuals only have as much power as I let them have. My personal autonomy supersedes their sovereignty over me.

MY (PREDOMINANTLY MALE) customers normally walk in assuming that they are, and will continue to be,

“There’s vulnerability in nudity and I’ve learnt that men are rarely as badass as they think they are … their ego still hinges on me because they want me to validate whatever idea they have about themselves” What I learned from this experience was that ticking the intersectionality box is an occupational hazard. In 2019, promoting marginalised groups’ art and politics is trendy. People may platform us without actually caring about anything we have to say.

IN THE POLITICS of ‘infiltrate or destroy’, my great-grandfather wouldhave leaned towards infiltrate. He worked within the institutions of a colonial gov­ ernment for his own and his family’s betterment. Those work references were, to him, I assume, proof that he was a ‘good guy’.

Consciously or unconsciously, he likely saw them as proof that he was not – as the stereotype would suggest – a ‘lazy black man’. His gratification from the dominant culture was his exit from a marginalised position; it’s an expression of emancipation from oppression through work.

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in control. I’m fine with letting them think that because it makes them easier to manipulate. In my experience, the most effective way to challenge ­patriarchal power in a brothel is to do so subtly.

One time, I was with a guy who seemed fine when we were downstairs. But, as we were going upstairs, it became clear through small talk that he had just got­ ten out of jail. I asked about the crime and he said his wife was “crazy”, but he’s “not like that”.

Domestic violence is endemic in this country: as the Australian Institute of Criminology has found, at least one woman a week is murdered by a current or former partner. That figure is damning, and doesn’t even include those who are terrorised by their partners but don’t die.

If a man is convicted of a crime against his partner, the statistics suggest it most likely involved domestic violence. I have

SEX WORK AND LABOUR

no way of knowing if he was bullshitting or not, but I’m certain it was an intentional attempt to scare me. If he had told me this when we were downstairs, I would not have accepted the booking.

In instances like this, my safety is my first priority. If I terminated the booking after hearing this, it would have been obvious that it was because I was scared. I didn’t want this man to think I was intimidated, or ark up, so I pretended I didn’t understand what he had implied.

they don’t behave – and have made men cry in doing so.

Then I made him laugh, and suddenly he wanted to be my best friend. I could control him because I understood better than he did that, despite his misogyny, he still wanted my approval.

There’s vulnerability in nudity and I’ve learnt that men are rarely as badass as they think they are. As much as they may be indifferent to my general wellbeing, their ego still hinges on me because they want me to validate whatever idea they have about themselves.

This can mean pretending I believe that they’re tough, or a good person, or good at sex, or a victim. I establish control by suspending that fantasy if

the world doing business stuff. He’s the descendant of slaves, and investigating his family tree involved going through deeds of ownership, as slave registers are the only written records of his forebears. After a few drinks, he told me that his goal in life was to be free – except, working 80-hour weeks in the corporate sector, he feels trapped.

I suspect my great-grandfather was happy, but I doubt he was free.

While my entry into trading in sex as currency was prompted by chronic illness, I had considered it before I got sick due to what the French would call

MY CLIENTS DON’T KNOW one another, but I bring them into conversation with each other in my mind. One is Greek and always rattles on about Greek philosophy – “You can have autonomy or happiness, but not both. If you’re happy, you won’t be free. If you’re free, you won’t be happy.”

Another was born in the Caribbean, lives in Paris and gets flown around

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ennui. The literal translation is ‘­boredom’, but it suggests a more existential restless­ ness and dissatisfaction with the conventions of everyday life.

Office small talk infuriates me. I find middle-class life offensively boring. Tell me something vulgar. Do something transgressive.

My transgression was that I had the audacity to escape a situation where, systemically, I was expected to be poor and go home. To mourn the loss of my ability to work 40-hour weeks in an

environment bound by monotony and dishonesty due to office politics.

Instead of conforming to the institutions of a morally bankrupt government, I chose to go AWOL into a hooker utopia where I control my price and hours, and can be explicit in my disdain for certain clients. Sex work may not necessarily make me happy, but it does free me from the bullshit of the world.

Irma Vep is at the apex of an underground Apache gang, known as Les Vampires. On the prowl for blood, dicks and ya mum’s jewels, she can be found at a brothel near you.

WORDS

KELLY LOVEMONSTER

PHOTOS

TAKEOVER TOKYO

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It’s on the dancefloor that many of us find our first flushes of queer freedom.

I FELT MY HEART START to race as we passed the long queue of people standing outside. My cousin must have heard it because she grinned and reassured me she could get me in.

I was 16 years old and a combination of anxious and thrilled to go to Midtown Manhattan’s hottest music venue, Club Exit. “Just be cool,” she whispered, right before kissing the 6-foot-3 bouncer on the cheek.

“This kid with you?” the towering figure nodded in my direction.

“Yeah,” she said, then guided me right past him.

I could feel the bass quickly entering my chest as we walked down a dark corridor and into the main room. Over the loud electro-house beats of DJ Junior Vasquez, she shouted, “Don’t take any drugs!” Eyes wide, feeling like I had arrived at the pinnacle of cool, I ignored her and ventured off to explore this epic, multi-level rave.

Surveying my new atmosphere, I saw men gyrating their shirtless bodies on top of one another and plunging their tongues deep into each other’s mouths.

Drag queens cackled as they took shots at the bar. And club kids posed as a photographer’s flashing light captured every detail of their mesh tops, stacked shoes and wild make-up.

I WAS RAISED IN NEW JERSEY and, by this point in time, I was very much still in the closet. My aesthetic that night read ‘bridge and tunnel’,

which is slang for anyone who doesn’t live in Manhattan and travels in just to party.

Remember that episode of Sex and the City when Carrie Bradshaw rants that no woman really from Manhattan would be caught dead wearing a scrunchie? I was wearing a puka-shell necklace – and that choker most definitely exposed me as a budding homosexual from the Jersey Shore.

Feeling out of my element, I went in search of my cousin. I found her in the main room; there, she was dancing and living her best life to Vasquez’s set alongside her friend Damen.

“Hey, man, would you like something to chill you out?” he shouted into my ear. Not really knowing what to expect, I nodded my head. Damen parted my lips with his fingers and placed a press pill of ecstasy onto my tongue. Without hesitating, I had a sip of his beer and took my first communion.

“What did you just give him?” my cousin exclaimed with a look of simul­ taneous worry and excitement.

“He’ll be fine,” Damen assured us, before continuing to dance.

My night was a bit of a blur from there. Here were some things I could remember: ending up on stage shirtless, feeling like everyone loved me and that the sentiments were mutual. There was an extraordinary laser-light show just as beautiful as the aurora borealis, the best house music I’ve heard to this day, and a large explosion that resulted in dollar

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bills raining down from the ceiling and onto the crowd like confetti.

We started late on Saturday night and partied well into Sunday afternoon. I walked out of that club baptised a child of the night.

THAT EVENING AT CLUB EXIT, I felt liberated in my body and got a glimpse of the beautiful potential of life.

I experienced a world where men were free to love one another, black bodies twirled alongside drag queens, and those on the margins were revered.

I would describe this experience as my origin story. I spent a good portion of my life thereafter subconsciously chasing that feeling. I looked for it throughout college, while I worked at Starbucks and a vintage clothing shop, and even during my three-year stint as a booker for a BDSM porn company.

I often found that feeling of freedom after an evening on a dark and sweaty dancefloor. So I decided to make it my full-time career.

For the past seven years, I’ve been work­ing as a nightlife curator, co-­ running a small San Francisco production company called Swagger Like Us. Our events elevate queer and trans people of colour (QTPOC) artists, and we produce epic day parties and seve­ ral exciting late-night functions for the wider QTPOC community.

I didn’t set out to specifically hold space for the QTPOC community. My initial intention was quite innocent, and

NIGHTLIFE AS COMMUNITY

perhaps even naive: I wanted to create a party that my friends and I could turn up to and still make it to work on time the Monday morning after.

I produced my first event in July 2012.

It was a cute function attended by over 200 Bay Area queers day-drinking and dancing. It featured my dear friend and performance artist boychild, our resi­ dent DJs (my husband boy_friend and business partner davOmakesbeats) and me as the host.

Since then, Swagger Like Us has worked with several extraordinarily talented artists like Princess Nokia, Azealia Banks, Cakes Da Killa, TT the Artist, Dai Burger,

queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz.

In his book Cruising Utopia, he writes: “Utopia is not prescriptive; it renders

“In a city with a rapidly developing landscape and a decreasing black and queer population, having an event where the QTPOC community, especially black queer kids, could congregate and affirm that we’re still here felt revolutionary” Ah-Mer-Ah-Su, J­ unglepussy and Ts Madison. We even had the pleasure of featuring self-­proclaimed “da baddest bitch” Trina for our 2017 Queer Pride event in San Francisco.

We’ve gotten to travel and party with our extended QTPOC family in New York, Los Angeles, Fresno, Portland, Seattle, Sydney and Melbourne.

THE IMPORTANCE OF nightlife, especially to QTPOC communities, has been written about at length by

potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema.”

San Francisco has been home to black folk since the California gold rush. It was a destination city for free blacks coming from the South, and has had thriving black neighbourhoods like the Fillmore, once deemed the ‘Harlem of the West’ for its predominant black community and lively jazz scene.

But things have since changed.

According to the 2010 census, black

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Americans made up 6.1 per cent of San Francisco’s population; by 2015, the census reported that the black population had decreased to 5.3 per cent. The figures have only continued to decline since the 1970s.

The plight of black San Francisco can be owed to a number of economic and cultural factors. As Thomas Fuller’s New York Times article ‘The Loneliness of Being Black in San Francisco’ and Dan Kopf’s Forbes piece ‘The African-­American Exodus from San Francisco’ highlight, the decline of the black population can be explained by increases in the cost of living and the gentrification of predominantly black neighbourhoods. The synopsis of the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco even reads: “A young man searches for home in the changing city that seems to have left him behind.”

Similar difficulties are being faced by the queer community. According to the 2017 San Francisco Homeless Count &

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Survey, 30 per cent of the city’s 7500 homeless population were LGBTQ. Cost of living, gentrification and ­difficulties finding employment are also cited as reasons for the high percentage of LGBTQ homelessness. I’ve had countless QTPOC friends move out of San Francisco to surrounding cities like Oakland, where housing is relatively cheaper.

After my first few Swagger Like Us events, I noticed that queer black kids had begun coming up to me to say “thank you”. When I asked why they were so appreciative, several said I had created a safe space for them to ­congregate, dance and just be.

In a city with a rapidly developing landscape and a decreasing black and queer population, having an event where the QTPOC community, especially black queer kids, could congregate and affirm that we’re still here felt revolutionary.

This event that had modest beginnings now represented so much more.

GROWING UP, I RARELY SAW examples in art and entertainment of the type of person I wanted to be. And then came the character Lafayette Reynolds, played by the late Nelsan Ellis, from the 2008–2014 series True Blood.

A strong and fiercely queer black man who was also deeply connected to his femininity, Lafayette would sometimes wear a bit of make-up, his nails would be polished and he didn’t shy away from his sexuality. In an iconic scene, he proclaims to a white homophobic ­customer: Well, baby, it’s too late for that. Faggots been breeding your cows, raising your chickens, even brewing your beer long before I walked my sexy ass up in this motherfucker. Everything on your goddamn table got AIDS. Lafayette isn’t afraid to remind the predominantly white population of rural Bon Temps, Louisiana, that he exists. This character has since served as my personal archetype.

Lafayette taught me to take pride in my blackness and my queerness, and I channel his energy in my style, my confidence and, in some ways, my nightlife ­curation.

It’s important to see reflections of yourself; as black activist Marian Wright Edelman put it, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” I’m a part of a lineage of curators past and present who understand the importance of nightlife in provid­ing opportunities for QTPOC to be seen and celebrated.

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Alongside Swagger Like Us, in the recent past, there have been parties like Mustache Mondays in Los Angeles, Papi Juice in Brooklyn and Ships in the Night in Oakland. All have done a really wonderful job of creating beautiful events that centre the narratives and experiences of QTPOC artists and hold space for the QTPOC community.

I would argue that nightlife affords many of us on the margins one of our first experiences of the freedom I felt at Club Exit as a teen.

“Your job sounds like so much fun” is a comment I often get. But my job is so much more than that. It’s my way of creating a moment, a utopia – if only a fleeting one – for folks on the fringes of society to feel strong, safe and empowered. This is my hope and dream for the world beyond the dancefloor as well.

Nightlife producer and freelance curator Kelly Lovemonster co-runs Swagger Like Us, a queer art hub that features emerging QTPOC artists.

Kelly also writes about queer nightlife and performance. They have been a contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and co-edited 4U MAG, an online culture magazine.

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