I have a complicated relationship with gender. Every since I was a child, I was drawn towards opportunities to wear masculine clothes and excuses to draw on facial hair. I remember fighting with mum so as to not wear dresses or skirts. I remember being glad of roles like secretary and juggler in the primary [...]

Growing up my parents did not push my sisters and I towards gendered play in particular, we had a range of play things from dress-ups to toy trucks. We did, however, have an impressive Barbie collection, the envy of the neighbourhood. This was partly due to an aunt with no daughters sending Barbie dolls or [...]

We’re supposed to be getting married in July 2020. My suit is hanging in the spare room closet next to her dress. Our shoes are nestled, unworn, in their respective boxes. On our dresser sits a row of shiny jewellery boxes holding rings, cufflinks, earrings, necklaces – all waiting for that special day. My suit [...]

I migrated to Australia in 1985 at the age of 10 (well 10.5). The world to which I arrived was vastly different from the one I left behind, Communist Poland. Barbie and her world of accessories was one very distinct cultural difference I never knew existed. I must have been at someone’s house when I [...]

I look at the feather fan, and I’m immediately taken back to 1999, and the first Feast Festival I ever attended. I was in my first year of my PhD, my supervisor was a queer academic, and invited me and couple of other postgrads to come along. My supervisor was also taking part in the [...]

I see this image and I think immediately of Vivienne Westwood’s cowboys t-shirt which was created in 1975 and sold at ‘Sex’, a shop on Kings Road, Chelsea that Westwood ran with her then-lover Malcom McLaren. The interior featured graffiti from Valerie Solanas’ radical feminist 1968 SCUM Manifesto on walls that were covered in rubber [...]

A cat in crimson plays C on a … piccolo. Why not a clarinet? A crimson cat plays C on a clarinet. That’s a better alliteration, but maybe all those C-words were getting a bit risqué.  Someone stammered, tried not to think ‘cunt’, and stuck a piccolo in the pussy’s lips. A Freudian slip. A [...]

Queer artists who tackle Australiana (and, indeed, Kiwiana) themes will find themselves portraying a Holden or two eventually. In 1976 a young gay art student called Brad Levido exhibited a drawing called ‘Holden by the Esplanade’ at his class’s graduation exhibition, held at the Newcastle Art Gallery in New South Wales. It shows an early [...]

I was drawn to consider this piece as something that was and can be queer, and is now normal and expected. It is telling that this burnt and decrepit wine glass is one of the more recent additions to the collection. I can’t help but think about the recent (and ongoing) California wildfires that are [...]

At about the same time every Sunday morning, somewhere between 9.30 and 11.30 am she would take out the stud box and examine the contents. Taking them out one at a time she would lie them side by side on the dressing table. The first is written in pencil on lined paper. It says in [...]