The purpose of this grant was to grow my Substack newsletter with a specific project called The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project, which would provide original reporting on queer representation in media and culture. The idea stemmed from the usually terrible ways that straight-led media reported on LGBTQIA+ issues. At the time that this idea originated, I was seeing media flounder while trying to report on an increase in transphobia in Australia, culiminating in the Nazi-ridden tour of anti trans campaigner Kellie Jay Keen. Considering we’re still riding the shockwaves of that particular event in Australia, it shows just how unprepared Australian media was to cover this kind of organised far-right hate movement.

I was frustrated about the limitations in coverage from even progressive outlets, who failed to provide a broader context to the tour, used regressive terms, and even platformed transphobes to talk about it. The conservative outlets immediately jumped on board, eager for a culture war. But mostly I saw how trans people, and the broader queer community, were shut out from that reporting, and not only rarely given a chance to comment on the stories, almost never allowed to lead the reporting. The idea of the LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project would be to put queer people and their reporting first, and provide lived perspective and lived expertise to the reporting on queer issues. Considering there’s only a handful of trans journalists and writers in Australia anyway, one of the goals was to help grow trans and gender diverse writers’ portfolios, and provide experience and guidance if possible. This also broadened to how LGBTQIA+ issues were represented in broader culture, not just in the media.

My role was to act as a kind of editor in chief - decide on what stories to cover, commission articles from a stable of freelancers, regular contributors, and a couple of columnists, edit and write stories, and run our social media and marketing. Essentially my job was to run a mini publication. I was well aware of the limitations of this role - I’m a white cisgender man, who can’t and shouldn’t represent the entirety of the community - the best I can do is uplift other voices, which I hope I managed to do. I had a bunch of initiatives I put into place to try and combat this limitation - but it’s still just a bandaid, really.

Working on this project has been one of the greatest privileges and honours of my life, and I’m insanely proud of what we accomplished, and the many brilliant articles and videos and posts we published. It was also maybe the most stressful and unrelenting years of my entire life, for many reasons - the largest being that I also got a book deal in the same week (lol), and also that I was stupid and didn’t really pay myself enough so had to hustle several other jobs at the same time (more on that later).

I’ve had a few weeks of distance from the project now, and my overwhelming emotion about it has moved from burnout into excessive gratitude: I thank all the people who helped the project launch, I thank all the amazing writers who trusted me with their work, and most of all I thank all the subscribers and readers, who literally made this possible (genuinely I cannot stress how much the subscriber fees helped me survive).

What did we achieve?

 By March 2025, we published over 60 feature articles rather than the originally intended 40. This was a targeted increase as the hunger for features over news pieces was clear, so I changed tact halfway through. It was also clear that many other queer publications in Australia with more resources already admirably had the news story beat down, and I was better placed to respond with analysis, opinion, and reporting through feature pieces.

 We published 40 queer writers from Australia and overseas, with 12 of those authors writing multiple articles for us.

 We did three callouts for submissions, including one specifically for trans femme writers called “Dolls to the Front”, all of which resulted in hundreds of pitches and submissions. There are so many queer writers in the world - we only got to publish a drop in the bucket

 Instead of weekly news pieces, I put that budget into more feature articles, and also paid for a writer to do monthly social first “explainer” pieces, and for a video journalist to do two monthly Instagram videos. This resulted in 12 Instagram explainer posts and 16 video reels, each of which were some of our highest performing social posts

 Instead of 40 social posts for Instagram as planned, we exceeded 100, both with original content from the newsletter, and Instagram specific work

Some of our top performing articles:

2.

3.

4.

5.

A chorus of angels

Nonsense originated as a newsletter to house me and Bec Shaw’s very popular Bachelor recaps. After I rage-quit from my job as editor of Junkee, they weren’t keen to keep our award-worthy recap series, so we took it private to the badlands of Substack. However, The Bachelor swiftly went into its flop era, and the newsletter gradually morphed into a broader queer culture and comedy offering, with me (your hero, Patrick Lenton) acting as the editor, and Bec as a kind of beloved yet distant queen who occasionally graces us with her benevolence (articles that make me cry because they’re so consistently funny and brilliant).

For the LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project (wish I’d thought of a cooler and less long name - like ASSTOWN, or Big Barry’s Craw Shack), I only hired queer people for short and long term contracts. Behind the scenes, I’m very thankful to Alex Norman who did our branding and art work (still obsessed with our logo and these gorgeous colours), Srishti Chatterjee who worked on some launch strategy, and Samantha Wheeler who worked across the entire project on our paid advertising and analytics. Also a massive thanks to Patrick O’Duffy who was instrumental in helping me get the grant in the first place.

I’m also incredibly lucky to work with some absolute talents as our columnists and regular contributors. This included Julia Kanapathippillai who wrote regular social-first articles, who did our brilliant video series, who wrote our Queer&A posts, and who was our only monthly feature columnist.

It’s not a small thing to put in this kind of high quality work and dedication into an independent project like this - it’s something I really am thankful for. Utter brilliance from all of them.

Transparency!

It would be pretty funny to do a whole project about media transparency without being… transparent lol.

Payment:

Feature articles, videos and explainers: we begun our payment at $400 per 1000-1200 word article, with increases for fast turnaround or significant time spent researching. The most we paid for a single article was $800 for an investigation. This is more than most publications pay in Australia, but if I did it again, I would change from a flat rate to payment by the word (I’m just so bad at maths I couldn’t work out how to do that on the fly).

News pieces (400 words max): were $200

How did we use the grant:

Grant Funding Received $119,700.00

Project Salaries - 1x Part-time editor 12 months - Patrick Lenton $45,000.00

Columnist budget - $20,800.00

Contributor Budget - Multiple Freelance Contributors, 12 Months $34,331.90

Marketing - Facebook advertising for Instagram - $7,536.48

Marketing - Facebook advertising Marketing Consultant - $3,300.00

Project Admin Costs - $6,500.00

Graphic Design - $1,400.00

Acquittal Fee - $1,980.00

Total Expenditure $120,848.38

Let’s talk about the meta of it all

Meta is a piece of shit, and I’ve hated that godforsaken company for a long time. So why take money from them? God forbid a queer man has a hobby.

Because, frankly, it felt good to take their money and not only redistribute it into the queer community, but also report on how shit they are. If they had even a single ounce of editorial oversight over the project, I wouldn’t have accepted the money. But they didn’t! In fact, by the time I got this money, they’d completely stopped pretending to give a shit about ethical journalism, and scrapped the whole grant project. It’s also worth noting (to my handful of Bluesky critics) that **pretty much every Australian media company, including progressive ones, has received this grant before lol**. I’d ask the people who keep criticising this publication over the grant to specify what the issue is, when they have no impact on what our coverage is?

Meta is such a piece of shit that I discovered the promotion of the LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project on their platforms was suppressed, despite the fact I was using their own money to do it. What this essentially meant was that it was almost impossible to do things like used paid Meta advertising to promote any overtly LGBTQIA+ content because they cracked down on any “political” content, and queerness is inherently political to them. They lowkey suppressed LGBTQIA+ content on Instagram and Facebook in more insidious ways too, which made it very funny to FORCE them to boost it via money when we could get around it (there are ways). And then to top it off, they recently allowed hate speech about LGBTQIA+ people to flourish on their platforms with no consequence.

Thanks for the money, eat shit.

So what’s NEXT?

I’m taking a BREAK. So are my columnists, who worked non-stop!

And by a break, I mean I am desperately trying to write my second novel, because baby it is due and I am very late. I also need a job now (hello!). I also need to promote my book In Spite of You, which is coming out in August. But even with the break, I’m still publishing to Nonsense - just not as often as I did when I had the Media Watch project going, because I’m not being paid to do that anymore and I need money. Bear with me as we settle into a new schedule.

Nonsense will still be the home of new writing from me and Rebecca Shaw, and once the dust has settled a bit, I will work out a nice and regular schedule of stuff. This will include my columns, Stupid! and One Thing, as well as other stuff that I haven’t decided yet.

As for the Media Watch Project, I don’t plan on finding another grant - grants are so scary, and I can barely add basic numbers together - but I will try to continue it in some way. The more people who remain subscribers, the more likely it is I can pay other contributors for a it. I am definitely open to continuing this project in some way, but right now, I don’t know in what form, or how! Let me know if you have some ideas (I’m talking to you, wealthy gay benefactor).

Having this audience at Nonsense is honestly just so wonderful - there’s now over 4000 free subscribers, which is insanely cool. I love this newsletter, and it’s still one of my top priorities, don’t even worry. One of the interesting things we discovered during this process is that even with all the amazing writers we found around the world, articles from Bec, Natalie and I were by far the most popular, showing that subscribers, I think, are interested in investing in a couple of regular voices. So, that’s what we will do!

I’d also love to hear from you, our subscribers, about what you want in the future. Let me know any concerns, let me know if there are any ways I can make you happy, I’m a people pleaser. And thank you again for coming along for this weird ride, it’s been a blast.

One of the most awful parts of this story is that Rebecca wasn’t even entering the United States at the time. She was trying to leave when she was arrested and detained.

This raises the important question, if the advice of a white British cis woman with enough money to buy a plane ticket home is that America is far too dangerous to go visit, what is the advice for people who aren’t that privileged? How does that affect the already over-policed LGBTQIA+ community?

What does the Australian Government think?

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade runs a website called Smartraveller. This website covers everything, including what to remember before you start travelling internationally, what to do if some nasty shit goes down like an earthquake, or what can happen if you get arrested overseas like, for instance, by border police.

This information is extremely useful, and is great for easily understanding your rights in those situation. Laws and customs vary significantly around the world, and a result, there are situations when Australian tourists, known for being a bit culturally insensitive from time to time, may accidentally find themselves in trouble without realising it. The website, helpfully, details all the relevant laws and customs for each country to avoid this, and also includes four categories detailing the wider safety risks: “Excercise normal safety precautions” in green, “exercise a high degree of caution” in yellow, “Reconsider your need to travel” in orange”, to “Do not travel” in red.

Of course, these are generalised categories. Rwanda, for instance, is listed under Green as a whole but with the full-blown Red for the Rubavu district due to the current M23 campaign. Additionally, the website carries other great advice such as to take anti-malaria medication, avoid using plastic bags (which are banned in Rwanda) and avoid taking photographs of government buildings (which is illegal in Rwanda). It’s great to see a government website contain so much detailed information about what your rights are. I hope other government websites can follow suit honestly.

The United States page is not as thoroughly detailed, with the latest update, made on 4 April, stating:

“Entry requirements are strict. US authorities have broad powers to decide if you're eligible to enter and may determine that you are inadmissible for any reason under US law. Check US entry, transit and exit requirements. Whether you're travelling on a visa or under the Visa Waiver Program, ensure you understand all relevant terms and conditions before attempting to enter the United States.”

Right now, there is no information given on what to do if you are refused entry, or the consequences of what could happen if you are refused entry to the US, such as possible detaining or travel bans from the country.

Rebecca Burke’s experience was not an isolated case, with more examples flooding in since writing this article. Last month, German tattoo artist Jessica Brösche, who attempted to enter the United States from Mexico through the San Diego border, was trapped in immigration detention for over a month. She was eventually released after six weeks in detention, including eight days in solitary confinement, after invention from the German government. And while some of us like to think we have a special relationship with the United States, an Australian MMA coach named Renato Subotic was also placed in detention by US immigration officials for 24 hours due to a visa “mistake”.

Being detained without charge is a human rights violation and goes against international law. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which both Australia and the United States are signatories to, covers this in Article 9. Even so, the United States does it freely anyway and there’s very little that any other country has done to prevent them. It’s not like Australia has a leg to stand on when criticising this practice anyway. We started the trend of doing this to refugees.

Even so, you’d think that the government would at the very least warn travellers that there is a very real chance travelling to America would lead you to being locked up for potentially over a month without trial. Instead the only news we’ve heard from Foreign Minister Penny Wong on this matter is that Australia has joined the United States’ Global Entry program back in March. This means we join an elite club of 15 other countries, America’s other besties around the world such as the United Kingdom and South Korea, who enjoy faster immigration channels at major US airports. Senator Wong stated, “Expansion of the Global Entry Program is a testament to the closeness and friendship between our people”.

Advice for queer travellers: Don’t go to America!

And, I can’t stress this enough, these are cis white people. What about the rest of us? How at risk are we?

Equality Australia has issued a travel alert, warning that “Travel to the US now carries serious risk for LGBTIQ+ people”.

It goes over five pages and it’s worth a read, even if you don’t plan on visiting America. To summarise, Equality Australia recommends that transgender people, or people with a history of queer activism, should advice extreme caution when travelling into the United States, citing that border forces in America have a notorious reputation of violence towards marginalised people, and urged trans Australians to contact the US consulate or a migration lawyer before travelling.

This travel alert came alongside official advice from governments of several European countries aimed also at their queer citizens. Denmark and Germany warned non-binary citizens who have an X marker on their passports that they should contact the US embassy before travelling, while the UK actively warned “You may be liable to arrest or detention if you break the rules.”

Similar warnings are also coming from queer activists within America itself. Transgender activist and writer Erin Reed has been keeping a “National Risk Assessment Map” of the United States on her website, detailing each state’s safety level for trans people, from the “safest states with strong protections” all the way to “worst laws passed” and “do not travel”. As of March, Texas and Florida are both in the “do not travel” zone, while fifteen other states are “worst laws passed”.

As of the United States as a whole, Erin Reed grimly states that “I’ve designated the United States a “Do Not Travel” zone for non-essential travel for transgender people without a full understanding of the legal environment, due to the heightened risk of visa revocation, denial of entry, or detention”.

Equality Australia issuing their own travel alert in this way is extremely rare, and if anything, does more to showcase the Australian government’s deafening silence on this issue. Smartraveller does have specific advice for LGBTQIA+ travellers, although the advice is vague and can basically be summarised by “just look up the local laws”.

The United States travel advice for LGBTQIA+ people is even more vague, merely stating that “some states and localities have laws that may discriminate against or otherwise affect LGBTQIA+ travellers. Check relevant state and local laws”, and that “Although Australian passports comply with international standards for sex and gender, we can't guarantee that a passport showing 'X' in the sex field will be accepted for entry or transit by another country. Contact the nearest United States Embassy or Consulate before you travel for further information.”

Nonsense contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and ask if they were preparing any updated statement on travel to the United States, or anything specifically directed at LGBTQIA+ travellers similar to that of European governments. I received this:

“We recommend Australians travelling abroad to read Smartraveller and to contact the nearest embassy, high commission or consulate of your destination for further information.

Australians can also subscribe to our USA Travel Advice. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) keeps all travel advisories under close review to ensure that we provide accurate and up-to-date information.”

The sheer irony of this is that America is an enticing destination for queer tourists right now. Pride Month is just around the corner, despite what Google might say. WorldPride is scheduled to take place in Washington D.C. from 17 May to 8 June, but the organisers have also released an official warning for queer people seeking to travel to America for the global event too.

“Due to an executive order issued by the U.S. president on Jan. 20, all travelers must select either ‘male’ or ‘female’ when applying for entry or visas. The gender listed at birth will be considered valid. If your passport has ‘X’ as a gender marker or differs from your birth-assigned gender, we strongly recommend contacting the U.S. diplomatic mission before travelling to confirm entry requirements.”

So, to conclude, all the expert advice is that America is far too dangerous to travel to right now, but for whatever reason, the Australian government hasn’t translated this into an official government warning.

The impact of bad travel advice

The lack of an Australian government response doesn’t change the fact that the human impact is very real.

Statistics vary but the secretive and illegal nature of the indefinite detention system, but the abolitionist organisation Freedom for Immigrants says there are 350,000 people in indefinite detention each year across two hundred centres currently operational across the United States. In 2022, under the Biden administration, the Supreme Court ruled that immigrants detained in America are not entitled to a bond hearing and thus can be detained without trial indefinitely. Earlier this year, Trump pledged to expand Guantanamo Bay, known for its use of torture on its detainees, to house up to 30,000 migrants.

Australia’s use of indefinite detention against refugees was once considered one of our deepest scandals, facing international condemnation, but now it is the policy of both major parties and its normalisation has led to it being adopted across the world. As a result, we face a world in which its impossible to guarantee the safety of anyone travelling abroad, even to our closest allies, and it’s unclear whether our government will intervene to protect us.

On top of that, let’s pay some mind to the fact that American trans people are fleeing their home country in droves too, and there are even relocation guides available online. Trans people are far more accustomed than most to living in a hostile world, with many countries most people consider “friendly” being no-go zones for us, but even so, it’s a very hard pill to swallow to see the country of Elliot Page, Hunter Schafer and 100 gecs being added to the no-go list. So much for my Coachella plans.

Our trailblazing mistreatment of refugees is also well in the spotlight now that the world is grappling with the concept of queer refugees. This isn’t a new phenomenon – queer people have been fleeing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran for yonks – but it’s impossible to escape now that a flood of American trans people are desperately escaping their home country. Suppose a trans woman, wanting to escape America, flies to Australia and ends up overstaying her visa. Do we really feel comfortable sending her back into the hands of American border police? Is that really not our problem?

The Australian government doesn’t appear to have a clear response to these questions, but it doesn’t mean we can just pretend they don’t exist. There are American people living in Australia right now, terrified of how safe they may be if they ever want to move back, or if it’s better for them to just stay here. In the case of American trans women, never seeing their home country again may just be the best option.

I asked Morgan, a trans woman from New York State now living in Australia, about how she feels about her prospects travelling back to her home country. Her response was very clear:

“I'm terrified! I’m terrified that the US is paving the way for their hatred to become the norm worldwide. I’m terrified I'll have to move back, and not knowing what to do or how I'll continue to be able to live as myself in such a vitriolic fearmongering country.”

When I asked about her advice for people thinking of travelling to America, she added:

“The simple answer of course is to not go, to not risk anything. But I know that's unrealistic. So I'll just say, please do your research. What states are safe for queer people, which cities or counties are best and most welcoming. Make sure you have safe and loving connections wherever you're planning to go. And always always always, have some form of self defense on you.”

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Natalie Feliks is a writer and activist originally from Adelaide, now living in Melbourne. She's written for the likes of Junkee, Crikey, and Overland, and spends her time listening to pop music and eating chocolate.

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

Dear Queer & A: I'm a cis person who loves and wants to fight for the trans people in my life, but it feels like there's so many attacks I don't know where to direct my energy to do the most good. How do I be the best trans ally I can be for this moment?

Dear reader, I won't sugarcoat it, it's bad out there.

You may be experiencing this: I like many of us am waking up, rolling over and immediately doomscrolling to discover the fresh horrors: we're talking with friends and at some point the thousand-yard stares are unmasked, we're pausing before figuring out how honest to be when someone asks the increasingly loaded question "how are you?". We're talking a lot about the US, with its bans and restrictions on things like public spaces or travel, the systemic anti-DEI push, deportations and general stoking of fear, but we're also talking about on our own shores. While we're currently a country that is making strides for trans rights and freedoms, we're not past the point where something as simple as a Dutton win could have us experiencing similar attacks.

What I've also seen is trans and gender diverse people around the world standing up and fighting back in numbers and ways beyond any I've seen in my life before: digging our heels in and saying that it might be tough out there, but we're tougher. I've also seen our allies showing up like never before, in person and online, demanding an equal and just world for their loved ones.

While there is a lot happening, there's also so much more to be done, and what will be best for you to do is so dependent on your situations and circumstances. Do you have money or time to spare – or both? Do you have trans people close to you physically or emotionally, or are you wanting to fight for the trans people in your communities or workplaces?

Rather than telling you exactly what you should do (a rocky and generally unwanted territory for advice columnists unless the instruction is "dump him"), I want to give you a list of ways you can be an ally, and hopefully serve as a springboard for imagining how being the best trans ally right will look to you.

So here is a list of Things To Do:

Be an ally in public

This may feel obvious, or simple, but I can't stress this enough: I want to hear your support of trans lives loudly, boldly, and regularly.

This can look like: sharing media or posts from trans loved ones or trans folk you know, or being visible and verbal in your own words about your support; it might be showing up to the party, but it's definitely showing up to the protest; it can be trans flag stickers on your laptop or water bottle or car, or wearing clothing with slogans of support or art by trans artists; it can be adding pronouns and a message of support to your email signature, posting from your work social media in support of trans people, or raising money for a local trans group, org, or surgery fundraiser as part of a party, gathering, or work event.

It can also look like consuming and talking about media by trans people, however I want to be honest that allyship requires not just taking part in our cultural existence but advocating for our right to existence, freedom and joy. Reading the hot new trans novel is not an act of allyship, but writing to your local library or bookstore asking them to stock a wide range of books by trans authors, or donating money to a cultural org that helps support trans writers is.

Whatever allyship looks like for you, I want to see it. Be loud in your pride, and generous in your love so that the trans people in your world can see you, and the cis people around you can see what positive, beautiful allyship can look like.

Be an ally in private

You've gotten loud, now lets get to work. Visibility is so valuable, but much of the change we make as allies happens in these spaces: casual chats and meetings, pushing the envelope, and setting expectations and standards.

Have that difficult conversation with a family member and find out what's required to get them on board with trans rights. Follow trans activists and educators, and get involved when they make calls to action. Push back on transphobia in your workplace or school or community, not by calling someone out but with consistent and clear advocacy. Look to and be led by the evidence that trans people are safest, happiest and healthiest when we're not just able to be our affirmed selves but are loved and held by our communities. If you are in a position to help but aren't sure where to begin, talk to the trans people around you about what they need, or reach out to a local organisation or group to seek guidance and advice.

This is often the difficult allyship, the stuff that takes work and planning and strategy, so don't do it alone – find the allies around you and be a team: working together, celebrating your wins, and supporting one another when you face difficulties or setbacks.

Get trans literate

As we've seen a rise in trans media and public discourse it's exciting that trans issues and lives have become part of common knowledge and ally literacy, but too often I see people excited to support the trans community without doing the work of understanding or in some cases respecting us. Fighting fascism side by side is even more difficult when I feel like you don't take my experience seriously or aren't putting in the effort to get something as basic as my pronouns right!

As trans people are increasingly made a political and social wedge issue, lies about our lives and existence are directly harmful, but also a key part of the broader attack on education and evidence. We need our allies literate and excited to inform others, but also to push back against those lies and cut them off at the root, and it starts with the basics: there's no excuse to not use the language people desire and deserve, or to make assumptions about experiences, bodies, or lives.

If you haven't read through it before, check out TransHub's 101 section – I recommend going from there and reading through as much of the rest of the site as you can, and then onto a wide range of trans writers and advocates that resonate with you.

If in doubt, be honest and open: responding to someone's question with "you know I'm actually not sure, I'm going to ask one of my trans friends and get an expert opinion on that" is much better than guessing, and helps to center trans people as experts of our lives.

Make it a habit

As we see increasing moments of transphobia, I've seen lots of allies jump up in response to a moment or a tragedy, and then disappear for a while until the next big moment.

Don't get me wrong, I'm so glad to have you there, but what would it look like to shape your allyship into being a regular and recurring part of your life?

Remember that this moment is not about trans people

It can sure feel like this mask-off authoritarian moment is about trans people – and to be clear, the attacks we're facing are real and harmful – but we're seeing all of this specific bigotry because we're viewed as an easy target, not because we're the only one.

Allyship can't survive being single issue, and as you build your support and care of trans people, let it radiate outwards to other marginalised groups and people who are hurting right now, many of whom have experienced similar, targeted attacks since before trans people were known by that name.

To say this is not about trans people is not to say don't fight for us, but that to fight for trans people is to fight for immigrants and First Nations people and Palestinians, to fight for workers rights and reproductive healthcare and welfare systems, to fight against ableism and misogyny, and to push back the wave of fascism at every opportunity, not just when it affects our friends.

Do something practical

As we approach the third observance of my favourite annual holiday 'Mira Bellwether Buy a Trans Woman a Pizza Day', I want you to do something practical for the trans people in your lives.

Yes, buy a trans woman a pizza, but you could also just cook her dinner or drive her to an appointment. Help a trans guy move apartment, or a non-binary person wash their dishes if they're having a bad pain day, or a genderqueer person build their new Ikea furniture that says 1 person required for assembly but honestly really needs two (c'mon Ikea get it together).

On the practical front, too, money is really helpful. If you have the means, there are countless surgery fundraisers, mutual aid orgs, local groups, and trans-lead-advocacy bodies that can turn even small donations into direct support and action.

The mental toll of the world is rough at the moment, and the basics can get a lot tougher when faced with each new day, so reach out and ask what you can do literally this week, today, or right now that will make life just a bit easier.

Be a barrier from harm

Early on in my trans life, there was someone in my social circle who was just being a bully about it. She was subtle, hostile in a way that flew under a lot of our friends radars, but got under my newly feeling skin so quickly. I remember her, not because she weighs on me to this day, but because of how another friend responded. Reaching out privately, they said they'd seen what was happening, and asked to intervene. I was hesitant at first, saying it wasn't their fight, but their reply still sits with me: "It may be your fight but you don't have to be the one doing battle".

When you hear about struggles or difficulties the trans folk in your life are facing, ask about ways you can be a barrier for them. Show up to the appointment and correct any misuse of language, sit on hold to the bank that's fucking up their personal info, or be the one to make the time to call in a friend who's being shit about it. This fight for trans rights, justice, and existence is our fight, but I want to be arm in arm with you.

One specific and important way to help with this is to resist the urge to share the latest news about the horrors with the trans people in your life. Sharing stuff with other cis people and online is valuable, but the trans people in your life know what's going on and are likely managing their information intake carefully. If we want to talk about the horrors, we can bring them up, but until then assume I'm up to speed and reach out with love or support instead.

Get covid cautious again

As attacks on trans healthcare, science, and vaccines all intensify and blend into one another, it's a great time to be taking COVID-19 precautions seriously again.

There's a lot of big words out there about the intersecting venn circles of trans experience and health disparities, but the short of it is: COVID-19 is still present in our communities and public spaces, it's airborne, it causes long covid in at least 10% of infections, and the effects of long covid can be devastating for anyone, not least trans people already struggling to survive.

It's not very popular to talk about covid caution, but sometimes allyship requires us to push our comfort zone a little, or do some work we'd rather not, such as wearing a mask in crowded spaces, staying home or away from people if you're feeling sick, and doing COVID-19 testing if you've been at risk of exposure, even if you're feeling symptom free. We're fighting this fight because we want to live long, affirmed, healthy lives, and protecting each other from covid is a critical part of that.

Don't minimise this moment

I understand the impulse. When someone you love tells you that things are bad in ways that you haven't seen or can't imagine being real, there's a desire to say it's probably not that bad, or that it will all be okay. Babe, it's not good out there, and I need you to sit with me in that reality, and not minimise how it looks or how it feels. However,

Remember that we're going to win

The fact that it's bad right now doesn't mean it always will be, in fact, we are going to win this. Trans people have always existed, and we will always exist – no laws or bans or frameworks or bigotry can erase us, and that gives me so much hope, but also a sense of purpose and responsibility: we may be in a dark moment, but there is a future where trans people are being born into a world that will hold and hear and support and love them unconditionally, and we can start building that future today, together.

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Before we move into the doing phase of this work, I want to reflect on your question of doing "the most good", as this is something I have often sat with too. There is a strong impulse to try and game out the ideal version of our actions – a perfect input and output where the minimum labour produces the most profound positive effect on the world – and I get it, but you can't start there. To plan the perfect revolution is to be planning the revolution forever, while the actual revolution has happened, imperfect and inexact but still so much better than where we started.

Start somewhere, anywhere, and let yourself gravitate to the work that you feel good at, able to do, and that makes a difference you can see. Be steadfast, take risks, but also take breaks, and make sure the work is embedded in a foundation of knowing and loving the people you're fighting alongside. Then "the most good" will come.

I can't wait to see you: fighting loudly and proudly, hearing tell of the work you're putting in behind closed doors, receiving your hugs, feeling seen by your understanding of me and my siblings, sharing a pizza together, and wearing our masks while we dance away the night in a revelry of love and shared commitment to a better, more beautiful world. Now let's get to work.

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Thanks for reading! Queer&A will be on a hiatus for the foreseeable future, but we hope to bring more questions and advice to your inbox in the future.

QueerandA is an advice column written by Liz Duck-Chong (she/they), who you can find at @lizduckchong on Instagram and BlueSky. Liz is a proud board director of the Trans Justice Project, whose work you can learn more about and support directly.

Defined by Amnesty International as “formal therapeutic and informal practices which target LGBTQA+ people of faith with the false ideology that their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender and sexual expression can be changed or suppressed,” conversion therapy practices have faced serious scrutiny in recent years.

Medical organisations and LGBTQ advocates believe these practices are harmful to LGBTQ people and have no grounding in science, with organisations that oppose bans on conversion therapy practices saying such laws restrict pastors biblical prayers, parental rights and clinical conscience.

Organised by the International Foundation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice (IFTCC), a London-based organisation that says it is a “home for the once-gay”, the declaration contains ten points that signatories are asked to agree with.

Statements which lack scientific evidence, such as “conversion therapy bans are unsafe and infringe human rights”, are included alongside the attempt to reframe conversion therapy as "change-allowing therapies”.

Through our investigation, we've identified 49 Australians who have signed the International Declaration on Therapeutic and Pastoral Choice, including a medical doctor in Sydney, a New South Wales public school teacher, a South Australian Bar Association lawyer and even a suicide prevention advocate.

Back in August 2020, Queensland became the first Australian state to make so-called conversion therapy a criminal offence. Victoria passed a law banning conversion therapy in February 2021, followed soon after by the Australian Capital Territory in March 2021. South Australia banned conversion therapy in September 2024, with a New South Wales ban being effective from April 2025. Conversion therapy practices remain legal in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania.

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Wicked is political, obviously. And the world of Oz has deliberate parallels to our world (The Wizard is literally from it), and these parallels are lessons that can be applied in a whole manner of political and social contexts.

And that includes the election taking place on this random continent.

New video from Lilah RPG explores how the LGBTQIA+ community is being turned into a “really good enemy” this election.

It’s an honour I don’t take lightly, because whilst all stories deserve to be told, it doesn’t mean that all stories are going to be heard. Some stories might be lucky enough to be shared and peppered all over our social media feeds, but most aren’t. Many are just too sad, too confusing, or too unpalatable to be processed, but it doesn’t mean that those of us in the game of storytelling won’t try to tell them anyway.

One story I really struggle with telling is my own. I’d love to say it’s because a story of graduating private school, university, then slowly making it as a writer isn’t super interesting, but yeah that’s not it. I struggle with sharing my story because, for the longest time, I was ashamed of my background, I felt undeserving of my platform, and because I felt that detailing my experiences with homelessness and social housing could unfairly damage the reputation of the organisations that provide the social services that many trans people rely upon.

However, as time goes on, I’ve realised my story is far from unique, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that these organisations are hopelessly ill-equipped and unprepared to protect us from the wave of fascism about to hit us. This needs to change. Maybe if detailing my experiences is too harsh for these orgs to hear, then that’s all the more reason for me to use my platform to share it.

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Sometime during the middle of lockdown, this happened to me.

I was walking the abandoned peripheries of a now dead, quiet city. My Spotify algorithm decided, in all of the ebullient quirkiness , to direct my post-punk, gothic playlist into a new genre. The music it sent me felt like it was more than music—it was a vicious, emotive noise. It was the first form of music that I had listened to in over a year that seemed to have made any sense to me.

This artist was Uboa, a noise/metal artist that I had heard about only through ever-slight whispers and recommendations by other trans folk. I was transfixed. This strange, atonal, and evocative sound that she created in her LP The Origin of My Depression cut through me like flashes of lightning. It was harsh, even brutal. But in her music was a brutality that conjured such ananger, an entangled estrangement I felt about a world that seemed more and more hostile —both to my existence as a trans woman, and someone expected to navigate a world infused with the rampaging effects of an equally brutal and all encompassing pandemic. More than anything else, it seemed, this music was a comfort.

A Noise By Any other Name

Sometimes, a genre or a scene cannot be easily described until well after its heyday is over. Only in retrospect can you tell what a scene really meant to those who were a part of it, what it encompassed, and what it evoked. Sometimes a scene can be so specific, and so integral to the experiences of those that created it, that it can afford those risks for the sake of creating something completely unique, that calls forth specific experiences.

These experiences could be about a lot of things: alienation, sorrow, anger, self-determination, affirmation. All evoked by a sound united by harsh, clanging sensations, lingering soundscapes and brutal, metal and industrial sounds that constrict and liberate at the same time. A lot of artists, particularly in Naarm, use these sounds, these experiences, to evoke a very particular mood. By fracturing typical ideas of musicality, or by ignoring certain forms of musical ease like a recognisable beat or swooning instrumentals, they evoke something that reaches out to those listeners who are looking for something that is completely new.

What appealed to me, as a trans femme looking for music that evoked emotions that I would have thought impossible to suggest musically, was that many trans-femme performers were evoking those themes, creating a sound that encompasses so much of our experiences.

Naarm has produced a steady stream of artists that have used such elements to describe themes surrounding alienation, loss, and self-affirmation. There is what one might call a ‘scene’ but in reality they are just a loose collection of artists that work in similar mediums. I chatted to some, hoping to see if I could categorise the work, to make an argument for a unified idea of what transness, queerness, marginalisation brings as a potential soundscape. This sound might have a name, somewhere along the lines of noise, of ambient music, etc. The beauty of trying to quantify the vast reaches of music and sound is that there is always something that surprises you, that challenges your musical palette. Seeing trans performers embody these sounds is wonderful to behold, as they create music that dares to push those creative limits. But what is this scene? Why is it so important? Why am I writing an article about it? Well, first I have to figure out what this scene could even be called…

What appealed to me in this whole milieu of artists was the visibility of trans performers and other marginalised folk. Whatever you may call it, the scene as it has developed grew slowly from the industrial scene, slowly moving from house parties to the pubs of Fitzroy. Violet, who performs under the name ‘teeth dreams’ describes it as a scene that was built from a disparate group of performers who collectively have formulated themselves from the work of those who have been building their discographies since the early 2010’s:

“I think the "scene" (is "Naarmnoise" a decent name for it?) really came together around a gig a lot of us played back in 2022 . Xandra (UBOA ), November (Pathological Function ) and myself had been talking about wanting to gather a whole group of then-disparate artists we were friends with on one bill. We called it Noisevember, gathered eleven or twelve acts for the lineup…and packed a surprisingly large and diverse crowd of people into the front room of a sharehouse/diy venue down the road from where a lot of us were living at the time. I befriended a few of the punks who lived there and booked some more shows over the next six months, before their landlord got wind of what we were doing and shut down the operation. Rest in peace, Static 0pen - fuck landlords!”

Cool, great, we have a start. Naarmnoise works, that is a scene that we can name, right? Noise artists from Naarm. Done. Except, what kind of noise? Guitar pedals and screaming, right? Not quite. Many of the artists that could work under this moniker of Naarmnoise can fit various types of genres and musical styles:

“I think a lot of us are coming from different places along the industrial music spectrum but eventually converged on a few somewhat similar concepts,” says Violet.

“For instance, Blood of a Pomegranate is a neofolky martial industrial project, Caustic Grip makes Pretty Hate Machine-style EBM , Scumwitch/Romy Fox makes Posh Isolation-style modern death industrial. For my part, I make microtonal drone and musique concrete. You can see the lineage we're all part of, but are still fairly disparate in terms of the specific parts we're inspired by.”

For the unacquainted reader:

Neofolky martial industrial: A branch of industrial music that takes inspiration from political movements, with heavy reliance on ambience with dense orchestration.

EBM: Electronic Body Music, similar to Nine Inch Nails but with a more minimalistic dance atmosphere and structure.

Death industrial: experimental electronic music with an oppressive atmosphere and dark, undulating textures, a la Depeche Mode.

Microtonal Drone: A genre that experiments with tones and their structure.

Musique Concrete: Music that uses recordings of natural environments, everyday sounds, and voice.

Give me Your Worst Sounds

So here we are, with artists coming from various disciplines, musical influences, different sounds and instrumentation? Classification becomes a bit trickier now, but surely we can use a general ‘noise’ descriptor here?

Of course, asking these artists anything exact or definitive about what certain genres attract these performers risks oversimplifying the diversity of their sounds. As artists who exist outside of the mainstream, even placing one genre or sound to all of these artists risks reducing their abilities to ‘a trans sound’. By placing them all in one genre, it risks being reductive and transphobic. I used to think that there was something explicitly trans-feminine in this scene, a notion that performers such as Uboa know intimately:

“I’ve been asked this by interviewers, academics, radio hosts, etc. and I keep changing my responses because there isn’t a single answer. There’s the appeal of noise to trans people – its stimulating nature. Then there is historical connection of trans women to noise and electronic music, starting with Genesis P-Orridge and Wendy Carlos. Then you add the fact it can be quite cheap to make this style music on your laptop, and you can do it alone in your room (especially if the outside world is hostile). It’s also a transgressive genre, with modern noise and adjacent genres stemming from industrial music in the 70s and 80s, and trans people (especially women) obviously tend to be seen as inherently transgressive by society at large, so there is this element of embracing one’s outsider status (especially mixed with other minority intersections). Finally, a few trans people in the scene (mostly women and NB's, but more transmasculine people are getting into it which is wonderful to see) set a precedent for more trans people being in the scene – many noise shows here in Naarm are essentially trans-centred spaces. Ta-da! You have a bunch of autistic transsexuals in a room or discord server making the worst sounds imaginable.”

We are getting somewhere, but there is still not quite enough to describe Naarmnoise. Mara MacDonald (who definitely does not make the worst sounds imaginable), just released her album August and June referring to her own style as, contrastingly, a work of high lyricism and collaboration. She first started creating her work using coding, then slowly building toward a unique sound of her own:

“The way I started making music was with live-coding. I used a program called tidal-cycles, using a programming language called Haskell. It is marginal and a bit dorky. You would type say, bass drum x4 and in one loop it would play the bass drum four times, and then you could put a higher level order on that like every 2 fast four, so every second cycle it would speed up the whole cycle four times, and then you would layer logic like that until you can get very insane IDM sounding generative beats. That was where I started with music. It was a great place to start because people would freak the fuck out. I would project my laptop on a screen and people would be amazed because ‘the code controls the music’. It is the easiest shit in the world. It is just a really elaborate sampler. But it was great to start off with that because you could do it on your computer, and it made for a really interesting performance. I just used it on my university laptop and with no gear whatsoever.”

Although Mara’s methodology might have changed from her earlier coding days, her work still presents a sense of the distant in the familiar, through field recordings and gentle piano interludes. The development of her music, in the same way many of the artists in the scene have a similar journey, comes from those early years, when we are young and we find yourself searching through the internet to find that exact piece of music that ends up coursing through your veins and forms part of your musical DNA:

“For me and others in the scene that I think a lot of people share is just being very young, on the internet, and developing a voracious appetite for the most fucked up, weird music that you can find. When music is this infinite horizon that you can never see the end of, you find those artists that make you ask those questions: Why did they make this? How did they make this?”

Teeth Dreams makes her music with just as much focus on her ability to re-phrase the experiences of her life:

“Teeth Dreams…is basically my audio-collage dream journal. The lyrics and spoken word passages are usually lightly edited stream-of-consciousness scribblings written in hypnogogic snatches during interrupted nights of sleep. There aren't necessarily direct correlations between the imagery and events described in the music and things that have directly happened in my life, but there's undeniably a link. Conceptually, it's quite heavily indebted to David Wojnarowicz and his "tape journals", which largely consisted of him speaking into a dictaphone stream-of-consciousness style. As a chronic insomniac who has suffered from periods of quite severe derealisation, the haziness of applying a stream of consciousness approach to composition has always been fairly intuitive for me. Days have a tendency to drift together, events and faces blur and shift. It's an aesthetic I'm quite easily drawn into, so it seems fairly natural that it sits at the centre of this project.”

So, how does someone try to make that music into “naarmnoise”? Do these artists even use the same theorisation?

“The theoretical stuff often comes out intuitively. My first theoretical approach is actively prioritising affect, emotion. I don’t actively try to force philosophical concepts into my music as I think art is primarily an affective rather than conceptual discipline. Concepts are better left to theoretical texts, art’s function with concepts is rather 1) the creation of new concepts through aesthetic events - making works of art which retroactively inspire conceptual thinking and 2) to add affect to a concept to inspire praxis.”

Music of the Margins

So, Naarmnoise. Have we discovered something specific here? In all likelihood, probably not. But there is no doubt that this scene, genre, sound, is lead, primarily but certainly not exclusively, by trans-femme performers.

No doubt the perennial nature of the art has its appeal. Many people experience the difficulty of alienation and its effects. The need to develop an artform that expresses those sentiments is certainly something that ‘noise’ is very good at doing. It is ‘outsider music’ in the sense that one is often driven or pushed to create such a music on those margins of art, to express something in lieu of the accessibility of a space to create anything else. As a result, that existential state informs the music, and is integrally shaped by it. As Uboa says, this kind of music has its history, with its DNA embedded with a history of marginalisation that many trans people are very familiar with, as well as many others who have had their experiences ignored and whose voices have been silenced. This form of music is then enriched by the ingenuity of its creators and the dedication of its listeners. The performers I talked to all seemed to be aware of their placement as artists, and no doubt many are hyper-aware of how their outsider status influences the formation of their work.

Each of these artists have found their sound, played to audiences intrigued and enticed by this very specific daring of the self, in light of appeal to certain genres or expectations of musicianship. Many of these artists know themselves not just in how they differ from each other, but in how they create in dialogue with each other:

“There is a much wider world of music in both noise and ambience.” Says Mara. “I would consider them colleagues and peers in the same way that I would say the same thing with Uboa and Teeth Dreams. It is a totally vibrant thing across all of Naarm and not just localised to trans people…. To a certain extent we are all making internet music. Maybe all music is internet music. There are so many other things that are more localised than what we are doing.”

Maybe they are all just internet musicians, in just the same way people from all over the world will search for an Uboa, a Teeth Dreams, Blood of a Pomegranate, or a Mara Macdonald. There are far more artists out there that I will ever be able to interview or track because the amount of artists working adjacent to or alongside the work done by the above performers is so diverse, unique, and varied to cover in one article. For me, to see these artists perform, evoking their rage into walls of sound, distorting and reforming their sounds in evocative phrasing and discordant fracturing, is to see innovation done by artists that define themselves in dialogue with one another, developing unique musical approaches that establish a sound which will enliven and enrich Naarms musical environment for years to come. As a trans woman myself, listening to this music, seeing these performers live, witnessing the act of creation at, say, the Make it Up Club in Fitzroy, I see through the ongoing immensity of my own sense of being—something no other scene really offers me—and I find myself, awash in the noise.

Other performers who you should check out right now:

Shallow

Military Position

Caustic Grips

Lisa Lerkenfeldt

Abby Sundborne

Fia Fiell

Maria Moles

Rama Parwata

Rohan Rebiero

Other Joe

Claire Rousay

Kaho Matsui

More Eaze

Lucy Liyou

Female Wizard

Otay:Onii

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Simone Anders is a queer writer living in Brunswick. They have written numerous articles for Melbourne publications as well as producing content for stage and radio.

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

We could blame lots of things for the delay. The dearth of queer representation in the 90s and 00s (we had to rely almost entirely on subtext, hello Xena), society, my brain. But looking back, there were clear signs. How much I liked Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Missy from Bring it On. So basically, how much I liked Eliza Dushku. My witch phase. My obsession with The Craft. How I really *wished* I was a lesbian because lesbians were super cool. Yeah, the signs were not subtle.

The thing is, on some level I must have known, but it felt so impossible. I immersed myself in fantasy and sci-fi as an escape from reality and the idea of genuinely liking someone who liked me back (not just pretend liking because it’s what you’re meant to do) felt exactly as possible as discovering that I had magic powers and a companion dragon that would let me ride on its back. I’m not even alone in that experience! I’ve bonded with people at parties about this.

These are five fantasy (and sci-fi) novels that should have given me some hints that my own identity was not of the hetero variety, despite the fact that these books do not, so far as memory serves, contain any characters that are not canonically heterosexual.

1. Alanna the First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

For those poor souls who are unfamiliar with this literary masterpiece, it is about a girl who dresses up as a boy in order to learn to be a knight. Do I need to explain further? She was a girl. Who looked like a boy. But underneath her boy like veneer: boobs! Which she strapped down with a binder.

She also absolutely kicked arse, was the BEST fencer in all the land, and had to wrestle with the tragedy of puberty. Not only an icon but highly relatable. Sure, she has some boyfriends, some male loverrrs, (three in her life, the SCANDAL of more than one) but that just made it all the more queer.

2. Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody

A cult classic in Australia, this is about a girl in a post-apocalyptic future with telepathic powers that include being able to talk to animals (the queer dream, or is that just me?). Okay so we need to unpack the levels of exactly how gay this series is (without in fact, being gay at all).

Firstly, the most important relationship Elspeth has is with a cat. Like, sure she makes some friends, gets a boyf later and all, but I think we can all agree that Maruman (the cat) is really the most important secondary character. This is extremely gay. I don’t know if you’ve seen lesbians with their pets? But you can just trust me.

Then, Elspeth and anyone with powers is called a “misfit”. And she bands together with a group of other misfits and creates a found family and a community that engage in social justice warrior actions. And are pacifists. Is it possible to get more lesbian than that? I really should have had an inkling.

3. Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

Sure, on the surface this looks like a beautiful fairytale based heterosexual romantasy. And when you dig deeper it kinda looks like that too. But! The trauma! The angst! The soul destroying pain and “no we mustn’t” of it all. This is what queers live and breathe. True story: one time on a date, me and my date told each other our childhood trauma and then immediately hooked up, (okay, fine, it was more than one time). This is our LANGUAGE.

4. Dragonclaw by Kate Forsyth

So first of all, this series is about Witches. I could just stop there really; witches are intrinsically gay.

These are also witches that are outlawed and tortured if they are caught which makes it even gayer. But also, our main character, Isabeau, develops an intense and fraught relationship with our mysterious, sexy and beautiful antagonist Maya. (WHO is mainly a villain due to the patriarchal oppression she experienced growing up). While our other protagonist is a martial arts expert, a scarred warrior and a total badass. And she can (sort of) fly! Okay, that part isn’t really that gay, it’s just cool.

5. The Ancient Future by Traci Harding

Honestly, maybe this book should have been first on the list? I mean, it has the whole witch thing with a nod to the triple goddess. But also, it involves a cool tomboyish martial arts expert (she has a black belt in tae kwon do, she’s unstoppable) going back in time and basically training the knights of the round table in kickboxing. But first beating them all in unarmed combat. Sure, she marries sort-of-King-Arthur (I think his name in this was Maelgwyn or something?) but we didn’t come for that. We came for the badass kickboxing and the girl who takes pride in her muscle gains.

In these enlightened times, sometimes we get fantasy novels that actually contain canonically queer characters, and it’s AMAZING. Tamora Pierce (see above) has a major character realise she’s a lesbian in a later series, there’s Priory of the Orange Tree and She Who Became the Sun, it’s waking up! But back in the day all we had was vibes and subtext, and we lived on them.

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Since rewriting 'Jack and the Beanstalk' at age two to feature a heroine named Lisa, Samira has been both seeking and creating stories with powerful female protagonists. A graduate of the University of Wollongong's Creative Writing and English Literature program, she was shortlisted for the 2020 Write It Penguin Fellowship. In her science fiction and fantasy writing, she creates complex heroines navigating extraordinary worlds, with queer characters at the heart of her stories. Her debut post-apocalyptic novel, Wastelands, is forthcoming in 2025.

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

This beautiful array of trans experiences is nothing new to the community, but emerging into the cisgender world so quickly when the cultural perception of a trans person was still stuck on Kim Petras (yeah we staaan!) created an apparent wealth of confusion. A major part of our campaigning is centred around the fact that restrictions on transgender healthcare would be life-ending for many trans people, but the existence of trans people who have never accessed transgender healthcare, and thus live on the hormones that their body already produces as cis people do, seems to contradict this.

Of course, there are multiple problems with this.

For one, the trans experience is not universal, and all of us interact with our body and identity in unique ways. And the suggestion that something needs to be life or death for us to be considered a “human right” by the cisgender majority is typical paternalistic bullshit.

It’s a troubling sign that our society has lost itself so much that human rights are regarded as the bare essentials to keep a person alive, even if that life is one trapped in a cruel, exploitative system. Why instead, don’t we focus on quality of life, humanity and the beauty inherent in freedom of choice?

What is a human right?

In my opinion, one of the best Australian movies ever is Mad Max: Fury Road. Not just because I’m gay and Furiosa exists, but because it has such a compelling villain. One of the first scenes features cult leader Immortan Joe opening his floodgates, dropping fresh water to the dehydrated people below. After a few seconds, he closes them again, and advises his cult “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water!”

It’s a chilling dystopian moment, brutally effective for many reasons. The most obvious one is that water addiction is a natural part of being human. But also, because fresh water access is genuinely limited in many parts of the world, a lot of which is thanks to the efforts of companies which profit off of restricting fresh water access and selling bottled water, such as Nestlé. In 2000, Nestlé was a major part of the World Water Council changing its statement of access to drinking water from a “right” to a “need”. Playing Immortan Joe fifteen years before he was cool.

This is a particularly severe example in fiction and in real life where the use of language from powerful individuals can change the way we think about human rights. When someone controls the distribution of a resource, it is their prerogative, not ours, that determines how much we need and will reprimand us when we desire more. In the case of Immortan Joe, because his weak-willed cultists were “addicted”. In the case of Nestlé, because we don’t work hard enough to pay for the water they extract and hoard.

Drinking is a biological requirement, and dehydration causes all kinds of health issues. However, not every human right is biological. Take Internet access, for example. The Internet has become a crucial part of everyday life, from socialising, education, community, employment, and so on, and human rights organisations recognise this. In 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a non-binding resolution condemning the intentional disruption of internet access by governments. Not because the human bodies biologically demands Internet access, but because it’s a core component of quality of life.

A year after this resolution, I found myself in a situation where my human rights were breached. I was in Sydney and living in a mixture of social housing and homeless shelters. I was desperate for any roof over my head, but couldn’t help but complain when I realised that the services I was settled in didn’t provide internet access. I communicated this to the management of these spaces and every single person told me a variant of me being a typical entitled screen-addicted child, that I should learn how to read the books provided, and that I was ungrateful. My sister told me “internet is a luxury”.

The irony of my sister, living in a house that she owns, with two televisions with Netflix, telling this to me, a transgender girl in a homeless shelter, was not lost on me. This was also a wake-up call on that the difference between a “right” and a “luxury” are usually determined by people with limitless access to both. It didn’t matter that stress relief, talking to friends, or finding a secure place to live, were all unnecessarily harder for me. What mattered was that the institutions themselves decided that it was a luxury and therefore they didn’t have to bother providing it to me. I might be distressed, but at least I wasn’t dying whilst in their care.

This brings us back to the topic of hormones. The question is less, are hormones a human right, and more, who actually decides if they’re a human right? Not trans people, obviously.

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It might surprise you to learn that even though I am a lesbian woke to the point of insomnia, I genuinely believe that people can joke about anything, if it’s done right. But I am also a comedy writer, a comedy lover, and what I will never ever believe, is that you can wield the sentiment “you should be able to joke about anything” to justify the most hack, unfunny, mean-spirited, boring jokes that have ever existed.

Earlier this week, comic Nikki Glaser became the first woman to host the Golden Globes in its 82-year history. It’s an insanely hard job for any comedian to walk the right line in a live awards show, but she did a great job and received pretty much unanimous praise, delivering jokes like:

“Squid Game is a show where people starve themselves while ruthlessly competing for the ultimate prize. Oh, wait, no, sorry, that’s this show.”

“I did not know much about Wicked going into this year because I had friends in high school. I loved it so much. Everyone loved Wicked. I loved Wicked, my boyfriend loved Wicked, my boyfriend's boyfriend really loved Wicked.”

Previous host of 3 Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais, who was obviously entirely unbothered by this, chose to spend the whole evening posting previous clips of his own jokes, as well as some he would have said instead of Glaser’s. Here’s a couple:

"Justin Timberlake was convicted of Drink Driving. If he’d have gone to jail, he’d have heard the words ‘Sexy Back’ a lot more often”

"Kevin Hart said that being at one of Diddy’s parties was uncomfortable, as he wouldn’t leave him alone. Eventually he had to shout 'Imma Midget, not a child.”

God, I’m ROFLMAO. Sure, he was probably just posting off the dome because he’s insecure and wanted attention, but those jokes suck. Someone call the Golden Globes and get this modern genius back on STAGE. If you are thinking the jokes he actually worked on for the Globes were better, here’s a standout:

“Dame Judi Dench defended Cats saying it was the film she was born to play because she loves nothing better than plunking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her own minge. (Coughs.) Hairball. She’s old school.”

Okay.

The most controversy came when he hosted in 2016, and joked about Caitlyn Jenner (who had been involved in a fatal car accident the previous year), saying:

“I’m going to be nice tonight. I’ve changed – not as much as Bruce Jenner. Obviously. Now Caitlyn Jenner, of course. What a year she’s had! She became a role model for trans people everywhere, showing great bravery in breaking down barriers and destroying stereotypes. She didn’t do a lot for women drivers.

The joke got pushback, focused largely on Ricky referring to Caitlyn by her deadname. Ricky had the chance to take a small lesson from the pushback to that joke, to listen to trans people, and slightly refine his joke to make it better and not hurtful. But he wasn’t interested, because that would require growing as a human, and putting in effort. Instead he doubled down, confirming his true colours two years later, when he revisited this situation in a special:

“But I’m willing to learn. I found out my crime was that I dead-named her. I’d never heard that term before a day after the Golden Globes. And that was saying her old name, and even acknowledging she used to be a man. But she did! I saw him on the Olympic Games!”

Then he launches into extended bit where he deliberately deadnames her over and over and over again, acting out a scene in which Caitlyn goes to see a doctor, is manly, and discusses wanting her “pole vault” and “shot puts” gone. That’s the entire thing. These jokes are not upsetting to me because they are edgy; they are upsetting because they are nothing, at the expense of something.

This successful professional comedian had two years to ruminate on how to respond to the backlash, and he came up with… this? He claims to understand what the hurtful part was, and not only doesn’t give a shit, but goes harder with a surface-level, stupid, obvious, unfunny joke. A mean-spirited, small-minded joke. This is your hero?

How does anyone who respects comedy begin to defend this? How can you possibly respect his recent specials, where he tests whether his audience can “take a joke” by coming out with things like:

“Comedy should punch up. You should never punch down.” Sometimes you’ve gotta punch down, like if you’re beating up a disabled toddler. Know what I mean?”

Surely anyone can see that these are about as edgy as a slug. If your instinct is to defend these as out of context or better when performed, I have put myself through watching and I can tell you that they aren't.

Gervais is resting on his laurels so hard they are now unrecognisable as laurels. In his specials where he obsesses about trans people or says racist things, he loves to claim he’s playing a character, or being ironic, or that we’re too stupid or sensitive to get what he’s doing. What I am, actually, is extremely fucking bored.

It’s not just Gervais, there are a bunch of high profile comedians who have decided to take this path, the road more travelled. These are not untalented people, they are not unfunny people who have had no success. They are previously funny people who have become deeply lazy, and stand for nothing except exploiting divisiveness to make more money.

In Jimmy Carr’s 2024 special he did a substantial “bit” which started with:

People say, “You can’t joke about anything these days.” Watch me now. We’re gonna kick off our evening with some short, edgy jokes, get the measure of each other, see if we’re gonna be friends.

He then proceeded with a list, including these:

“I bought my girlfriend a bath bomb. I say that… toaster.”

“I was in a grocery store a couple of weeks ago. They had a special on. He was collecting the carts.”

And then:

The first few weeks after the birth of the child can be incredibly tough, so pro tip, to avoid postnatal depression, try not to see your wife naked.

Toothless.

Gervais and Carr and the rest of the anti-woke crowd like to claim that even though you can’t say anything anymore, THEY will be brave and defiant and forge ahead - to deliver these weak old nothings. They aren’t pushing boundaries, because those jokes crossed the boundary so long ago it’s now a gentrified area. It’s even more pathetic because for straight white men like Carr and Gervais, there is zero risk in actually trying edgy comedy. It bums me out to see comedians no longer caring to progress their craft, and resorting to lazily kicking out at marginalised people for a few easy laughs. Then when pushback comes, they proudly claim to have offended the woke, they are being silenced, and like bulls to a red rag, the free speech warriors jump madly into the ring – regardless of the quality.

Often people who complain about cancel culture are not actually mad about cancel culture, they are mad that they are expected to work harder, be smarter, find new approaches. Comedy is meant to evolve with society, and with the audience. It’s not courageous to bushwhack backwards down a path that’s already been cleared.

And this pattern of laziness and incuriosity is trickling down as a tactic for people who are trying to build their careers. Some comedians are now joining the movement before they even get any notoriety, in a desperate attempt to gain some. Rising Tiktok star Matt Rife recently caused controversy when, after a career of releasing crowd work videos in which he is (allegedly) handsome, he released a catastrophically bad stand up special, which started out of the gates like this, talking about a waitress with a black eye:

My boy, who I was with was like, “Yeah, I feel bad for her. I feel like they should, you know, put her in the kitchen or something… where nobody has to see her face, you know.”

And I was like, “Yeah, but I feel like if she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.” So… [laughing]

Following the all too familiar pattern, after that “joke” he says he was just “testing the water, seeing if y’all are gonna be fun or not. Just wanted to see.” Just wanted to see if the audience would like not only a domestic violence joke, but one that is at least three decades old. After the backlash to the special, instead of listening and learning, Rife doubled down, taking the trodden, so trodden, so very trodden path.

In the last couple of weeks we have seen this with Australian Biddy O'Loughlin, who received media coverage (because her mother is Fiona O’Loughlin) when she was “cancelled” for a “joke”. It is disgustingly racist, so be warned:

“A lot of woke people we know in Alice Springs call it Mparntwe these days. I think it's highly highly disrespectful. The traditional way to say Alice Springs is “Alapring” - and you have to say it with a mouthful of methylated spirits”

This is deplorable, and as a joke it is also shockingly bad. It is based on old prejudices, and it sounds like Biddy got it from her Joke Book for Racist Uncles (1979).

Biddy, who is also extremely transphobic (coincidence!), is now trying to build a career out of the backlash she got for that disgraceful joke. She has the support of Graham Linehan (former comedy writer and now one of the world’s most obsessive transphobes) as well as many Twitter users who care soooooooo much about good comedy and just happen to also be obsessive transphobes, or are men with Australian flags as their profile pic who talk longingly about the days of Rodney Rude. Biddy fled to Sky News (where else?) to complain, saying, "I do think we are losing our ability to joke about sensitive topics because of cancel culture."

First of all, you can’t be cancelled if you didn’t have a career to begin with. Secondly, how can anyone in their right mind believe that was just a “joke about a sensitive issue?” What are you talking about? You aren’t worried about losing the ability to joke about sensitive topics, you’re worried about losing the ability to say dipshit racist things. Wrapping racism in an old joke doesn’t make it not racist, and it certainly doesn’t make it funny. We aren’t losing our ability to joke about things, we are losing our ability to tolerate someone going on stage, saying something bigoted and not funny, and then whinging about cancel culture.

Biddy goes on to complain to Sky News that people have only seen a couple of minutes of her set: "I've got dumb Dad jokes, fat jokes, one liners, women's rights jokes and these so-called 'edgy' jokes.” Sorry mate but we sampled one of your jokes, obviously the one you thought was best and funniest because you released it, and it absolutely sucked. In so many ways. I don’t like the chances for the rest. Especially since I looked at another set of Biddy’s online, and her first joke was “my pronouns are fuck/off”. Another decade-old joke. Come on now.

This is what really blows my mind about all this. People are whining and frothing at the mouth to be able to “say what they want,” and what they desperately want to say is… the same old jokes we’ve heard over and over for years.

If these people have so many edgy opinions about society and its downfall, if there is so much there to delve into, if there is an army of enemies, why are the jokes so unoriginal, uninspired, and dull? You are really going to fight for the right to be racist or homophobic or transphobic on stage, you are happy to deeply upset people for your cause, and this is the kind of comedy you are going to deliver? There is so much scope to make funny jokes about liberals and woke people, and the myriad ways people like us suck. There is so much material, but it would require consideration, and work.

If anyone complaining that cancel culture is ruining comedy actually cared about comedy at all, they would be pissed off that these people are trying to skate by with underwritten, out-of-date rubbish. This is not about being offended by a dark joke topic, or something taboo. These comedians are not punching down – they are leaning on. They are leaning on hack jokes, leaning on tropes, leaning on the easiest option, doing the least possible, and then conveniently claiming they are restricted by wokeness.

When comedians attempt to begin or extend their careers specifically on terribly written, not funny, unoriginal bigoted jokes, it’s disgraceful, and any actual comedy fan should think so. The people who claim they are being silenced by the woke agenda are impairing their own comedy. Their attitudes are making their world and their work smaller, more insular, more blinkered. They go to the same wells over and over again for the same bad jokes about the same issues, the same boring takes. They obsess over pronouns, over trans people, over queer people, people of colour, over an invented army of woke people that are preventing them from… what, exactly?

Meanwhile, in the land of the actually funny, comedians who aren’t straight white men are dominating, and they are doing it without dusty old joke books. They are doing unique and funny things.

Patti Harrison is a trans woman of colour, and is one of the most interesting and funny and unhinged performers we have, your favourite comedian’s favourite comedian. The last bit of hers I watched was when she sang a song in the style of Stevie Nicks about leaving her baby in the sun for too long and it becoming like a sweet potato.

Vic Michaelis is a non-binary comedian who was just declared MVP of the year for Comedy Bang Bang, the most popular long-running improv podcast in the world, creating characters like a Pokemon trainer and a mime, which is very funny on an audio medium.

Chris Fleming is a lithe gender fluid genius who recently released a bit about society and attractiveness, which included Chris pretending to kick Barry Keoghan to death under a bathroom stall.

And when these comedians do talk about identity, it’s funny and fresh, like Ziwe’s satirical talk show where she interviews other liberals, asking them charged questions to make them uncomfortable, and poke fun at all sides in a nuanced way.

When these comedians tackle sensitive issues, such as Ricky Gervais’ favourite topic of AIDS, they do it in a new way. The show The Other Two features an episode where the cast attends a four-day, multi-part play of ‘8 Gay Men with AIDS: A Poem in Many Hours’, and everyone is too scared of being judged to leave. It is complex and multi-layered and poking fun at both sides and hilarious.

None of these [“woke”] comedians, these fresh, exciting, hilarious people, are sitting around obsessing about other people telling them what they can and can’t say. Nor are the straight white male comedians who have done the work to build their humour on things other than bigotry, and are therefore thriving. These comedians are working hard to make sure their comedy is actually funny. If they want to push boundaries, break taboos, experiment, they remember to put jokes in. They work to make sure it walks the right line, or at the very least they admit when they have gone too far, and keep fine-tuning. They don’t double down. These comedians aren’t ruining comedy, they are respecting the craft.

The ones we need to worry about are the comedians who dedicate their time to scoffing at wokeness instead of writing better jokes. They don’t have anything to say, so they need to make the issue about free speech instead. If someone claims to find this brand of comedy funny, they automatically identify themselves to me not as someone who likes comedy, but as someone who likes getting to be bigoted. If you’re actually manifesting physical laughter at jokes that have been repeated ad nauseam for decades, you can’t claim you’re enjoying them for comedic value. It’s like guffawing and clapping because someone told you about a chicken that crossed a road.

Anthony Jeselnik is one of the most successful “dark humour” comics in the world today, and this is what he had to say:

They say. I'm a comic. I'm allowed to say whatever I want'...but they don't want any pushback, and that's wrong. As a comedian, you want to make people laugh. This is a quote attributed to Andy Warhol that I love, 'Art is getting away with it.' If you put out a special and everyone's pissed, you didn't get away with it. You need to make everyone laugh so that they’re like, 'Yeah, he talked about some fucked up stuff, but we're all happy.' That’s art. Otherwise, you’re just a troll.

There are successful edgy jokes being made all the time, but they are by comedians who haven’t decided to make woke culture their entire focus. By people who are still trying to push comedy forward. By people who respect their craft.

This cancel culture facade that these people continue to piss around behind is just an excuse. Nobody is stopping you from getting on stage and saying funny jokes – except you.

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

For some time now, transphobes have been weaponising the high statistical correlation between trans people and autism, as well as other mental illnesses to assert that trans people are just delusional about our need for affirming heathcare.

This is an old propaganda method, taking advantage of the social ableism that encourages us to treat people with disabilities like children, (often for the purpose of abuse, but sometimes out of a misguided sense of care,) as well as the long history of psychology invalidating trans people by pathologising our dysphoria as a variant of psychosis instead.

As an autistic, non-binary trans woman with several diagnosed and stabilized mental illnesses that more or less continually affect my life, this is one of the more frustrating and baffling lies that transphobes spread. They argue that my neurodivergency makes me less qualified to discuss my own experience or less likely to be trans in an authentic way than a neurotypical person. The transphobic propaganda site Transgender Trend makes this argument extremely clear:

“When you are autistic you often don’t realise that your thought processes aren’t the same as everyone else. Autistic people don’t cross-reference every thought against a neurotypical one to analyse if we are correct. We simply think, make decisions – and sometimes it goes horribly wrong because our thought processes have clashed with the way the rest of the world processes information.”

There two assumptions working here that strike me as immediately and fairly obvious false. First of all, I don’t know a single person diagnosed with autism (especially from childhood,) who is unaware their thought processes are different to people without autism. Notice I don’t use the phrase neurotypical to describe these people here. While the term “neurodivergent” originally referred exclusively to people with autism, its definition has been widened in the recent years to encompass any kind of neurological divergence from others, including, but not limited to ADHD, bi-polar disorder, learning disabilities, and psychotic spectrum illnesses.

It should really go without saying, but anybody with a disability of any kind, including autism, would find it really difficult, if not impossible, to fail to understand and very deeply internalise their difference to others from an early age. In a 2019 article on childhood disability for the ABC, disability activist Ellen Fraser-Barbour writes:

“When I was about eight years old, I was out in the school yard with my PE class. One minute I was in the middle of a game with my classmates, the next minute there was an adult running towards me, then in front of me, wailing and stroking my face. She sobbed. I stood frozen, unable to move. The PE teacher eventually came and ushered her away.”

These kinds of humiliating and dehumanizing violations of your bodily autonomy are common for disabled people from an early age. For autistic children, who may lack any physical differences to their non-autistic peers, we are singled out and diagnosed because of differences from other children in terms of both our social habits and our sensory reactions.

These differences are also noticed by our teachers, and our fellow kids. Studies also show they lead autistic children to have more traumatic experiences, on average, to neurotypical children their own age. The idea that it’s even possible for us to suffer like this and not notice that we think differently to other people is infantilising to the point of sheer delusion. But the second part of this argument, the idea that neurotypical thought processes lead to better outcomes for autistic people because they’re how most people think, is even more offensive than the first part!

It’s victim blaming, sure, but beyond that: the only way autistic people have to emulate neurotypical thought processes, aside from letting them do all our thinking for us, (opening us up to the very real risk of someone taking sexual or physical advantage of us, whereupon we’re unlikely to be compensated or believed,) is through masking, literally pretending to be neurotypical to avoid discrimination or abuse.

The trouble with this is, not only does it never fully work, but also, it leads to extra stress, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and exhaustion. Symptoms that are all eerily similar to the ones that trans or gay people experience from being closeted, which is the biggest reason why conversion therapy is always undesirable and never actually succeeds.

Transphobes like these kinds of arguments because they help them wash their hands of the fundamental fascist contradiction in their underlying ideology: if being trans (to them,) is a perversion or contagion, but it’s one that trans people hang onto even if our lives are actually endangered by it, the only way to deal with it “humanely” is through encouraging repression via conversion therapy and subsequently, masking for transgender people.

It makes more sense when you consider the close financial and rhetorical ties between the contempary anti-trans and evangelical Christian movements, both of which promote the repression of what they would call our deviant or immoral desires. These desires, in the case of right-wing Christians, are ones that go against the will of God, or, in the case of purely political transphobes, ones that go against their gender essentialist image of what men and women are supposed to be.

We live a profoundly, multi-laterally ableist society, where disability is seen as ultimately less of a social, more of an individual concern. We expect disabled people to only ask for “reasonable accommodations,” and we allow able-bodied neurotypical people to define what reasonable is. We take it as a given that they’re more equipped to do so because they don’t have an apparent disability or need for care.

The truth of the matter is though, as when it comes to transgender issues, only disabled people really understand the disability experience. If our ability to describe our experience is impaired by our subjective experience of our disability, that doesn’t mean that able-bodied, neurotypical people running off their external perceptions of it understand our own experience better than we do. It definitely doesn’t mean they should be trusted over us to decide, as a society, how we manage it.

I was kept from learning that I was a girl for years because I grew up when we didn’t have the language we have now to talk about the transgender experience. I was alienated from the stories I did hear, not just because I’m a lesbian-attracted, non-binary woman, (who were almost entirely excluded from the traditional narrative of what transition is and who trans women actually are,) but also, because of how my neurodivergency primed me to expect that I was different to everybody else, and should be punished for it.

It should be obvious by now that keeping trans children from transitioning and questioning the validity of the experience of trans adults who are traumatised or mentally ill is intended to stop more people from realising the problem with all this. Even if the sensory symptoms of my autism were largely unchanged by transitioning, many of the social symptoms were actually alleviated.

Even in the year before I went on hormones, choosing to start out with a purely social transition, that lifelong sense of otherness and difference went away because, I simply made more sense to other people on an intuitive level when I approached them while looking like a girl.

Neurodiverse people know our own experience with a level of intimacy and clarity that truly neurotypical people will only ever be able to listen to and learn from, never reach. We should be allowed the right and the responsibility to be the arbiters of that experience.

The reason why transphobic people are attracted to these kinds of arguments is ultimately the same reason that draws them into transphobia itself: they believe that their experience is a natural, desirable default, which trans people have moved away from out of choice or trauma.

The pity that they have for us as a result of this “decision” heavily depends on the type of fascist that they are. But ultimately, the outcome is the same. This is why we need to centre and prioritise the voices of neurodivergent trans people when it comes to the discussion of the issues that affect us.

The truth is that you can’t repress your disability or your dysphoria safely. We should aim to build a world where nobody is expected to either.

Mx Maddison Stoff (she/her) is a neurodivergent non-binary essayist, independent musician and author from Melbourne, Australia. She writes unapologetically leftist, feminist, & queer fiction set in a continuous universe which blurs the line between experimental literature & pulp sci-fi. Follow her on Twitter, Patreon, & Bluesky

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

There is this question around not only “what is success?” that links all the way back to the title of the show - what makes a “hack” exactly? How does that differ to success? Is it perception? is it personal drive? - but also what success is worth. It’s something I find deeply interesting, and in a year where I’ve reached some new personal goals that I’ve been working towards for a very, very long time, I find it a fascinating story.

The show’s demographic odd-couple premise is such a clever way to approach this mission around interrogating creative success too - we get two ends of the spectrum of a career, with hungry and relatively new Ava Daniels contrasted to the success and dissatisfaction of the established Deborah Vance.

**some minor spoilers follow**

At the end of season 2, Ava had guided Deborah into a new realm of creative experimentation, helping her write an immensely successful comedy special that both moved away from more “hacky” jokes, and used deeper material from Deborah’s life to elevate her away from being considered a hack. In many ways, you could have ended the show there - superficially, she’d reached the end of the arc established in the first episode of the show. They end with Deborah cutting Ava loose, ostensibly for a tough-love reason, making her go out and achieve her own success. It’s all wrapped up quite nicely, and they didn’t particularly need to continue the story - or so I thought.

In season 3, both Deborah and Vance have reached a new plateau of success, and the question becomes what to do with it. For Ava, that’s taking a risk and following passion, that could be seen as illogical - she’s on a path already, why jeopardise that? For Deborah, it’s also about risk - now that she’s dragged herself up, does she dare to dream about attaining a milestone she’s always wanted? Unlike the previous season, Hacks season 3 takes on all the energy of a heist film, when it becomes about campaigning to get Deborah as the host of the late night show that she’d failed to achieve earlier in here career. The most compelling part of this story is the FEAR, the knowledge that she could reach for this and come short again, and have to live with that.

Season 3 also continues the great tradition of being absolutely loaded with genuinely funny jokes. Part of that risk that the show writes about so well is inherent here - imagine the pressure of writing a show about two funny comedians and then not sticking the landing with the jokes? I think one of the funniest episodes of this season is called Par The Course, where part of the host campaign means that Deborah plays golf with a bunch of execs to try and impress them - which ends with Deborah realising that they’ve given the job to someone else, and she goes full Galadriel dark queen on them. Ava’s plot is also perfect during this episode too.

The show is also just gorgeously queer, without any real point or agenda behind it, which I adore.

There’s also a great episode where Ava and Deborah accidentally go hiking and get lost, which I think is a great example of how they managed to go deeper in this season - by giving more space for the main character’s relationship, rather than shying away and trying to go ensemble like many other shows do. By literally stranding them together, we’re given a beautiful (and still funny) recalibrating of their relationship and an upheaval of the traditional power dynamics.

Which leads us to the finale. The status play between Deborah and Ava has always been one of the driving energies of the show, and where much of the humour comes from. Watching is change has been part of the character growth for the both of them. Ava clawing her way to small victories over Deborah have been gratifying, Deborah humbling herself to ask Ava for help or to rely on her, has often been both funny and touching. But oh my god, that season 3 finale is the best status shakeup I’ve ever seen, and ends a brilliant season with more than just a flourish - it paves the way for a necessary fourth season.

GOD I LOVE THIS SHOW. I love the fact that each season it gets more dangerous to continue reaching for a higher, more nuanced type of success, that it seems like it doesn’t want to settle, to challenge itself.

It’s a show that not only explores success, but continually asks itself what success will mean for itself.

Patrick Lenton is an writer and author, and editor of Nonsense Newsletter. His new book ‘In Spite of You’ is coming out in 2025.

I’m sure this is a familiar feeling to all you readers out there. But fear not. I’m here to tell you that actually, I’ve decided that the numbers don’t matter. What reading is about is the quality, not the quantity. It’s about what the books made you feel, who the characters reminded you of, what niche micro-obsession they sparked. And once you realise that, no one on the internet who supposedly read 100 books this year is allowed to make you feel bad about yourself.

In the interest of this novel (ha) metric, this “quality”, I’ve compiled a list of what I would describe as the best queer and queer-leaning books I read in 2024 (and a few I read before that, in the interest of transparency).

Go forth and read, readers. And remember, it’s not a race.

The Rachel Incident – Caroline O’Donoghue

Rachel and her best friend James live together in County Cork, Ireland. Though they have many things in common (a love of reality tv, cheap alcohol), at the top of the list sits an unearthly, very much not platonic, obsession with Rachel’s university professor Dr Fred Byrne.

Possibly one of the most beautiful, honest and particular friendships ever written, The Rachel Incident is unflinching in its painting of longing, morality and infatuation in your early 20s.

Buy it here.

Holding The Man – Timothy Conigrave

We’re in 1970s Melbourne, and Tim has a crush on the captain of the Xavier College football team. Not one to push his desires to one side, Tim follows his heart, and a twenty-year-long love-affair with John begins.

A beautifully constructed work of autofiction, Holding the Man carves into sharp relief a vision of Melbourne in the 70s and 80s, of the secrets queer men had to keep to survive, of the families that ripped apart and of the love that knitted chosen family together.

Buy it here.

Green Dot – Madeleine Gray

Hera is lost in the sea of her mid-twenties. Her friends are more successful than her, she still lives at home, and no one seems to understand the deep and intelligent irony of her Rupi Kaur jokes. In the grey and corporate office she works in to pass the time, things are no better. Until she meets Arthur. Arthur is funny, warm, and great in bed. Arthur is also married. Hera is at once in love and drowning in anxiety, guilt and denial.

Green Dot expertly encapsulates the modern anxiety of relationships and the internet. What happens to your mind when you’re chasing something you can’t have, knowing that it’s not good for you?

Buy it here.

Big Swiss – Jen Beagin

Greta’s life is one-note: she is forty-five, recently divorced, and new in a tiny town. She lives with her Jack Russell (whom she won in the divorce), her strange housemate Sabine and, naturally, a large colony of bees. One-note, that is, until she meets Big Swiss. On order to get closer to Big Swiss, real name Flavia, Greta finds herself living a double life of her own creation, and having to uphold it is becoming increasingly difficult.

Big Swiss is bizarrely wonderful book. Beagin’s world is rich with the kinds of details that would ordinarily bog a story down, but here they augment her characters, her settings, their realities. The longer you read the deeper you will sink into the story Greta and Flavia write for themselves. How much does the truth really matter?

Buy it here.

Briefly, a Delicious Life – Nell Stevens

Blanca, fourteen, spends her days bored, haunting the Mallorcan convent in which she died in the 1500s. Monks, renters, and landlords move in and out over the centuries, weaving and compressing time together. That is, until George Sand, with her peculiar manly clothes and her cigars, takes up residence in one of the small cells on the edge of the convent with her lover, Chopin, and her two children. Blanca’s obsession with George intensifies, becomes otherworldly, and the spools of her own life, and death, begin to unravel.

Briefly, a Delicious Life is a sublimely written queer ghost story. Stevens manages to skirt the delicacy of the curious teenage mind while wondering what it means to love, and to live a meaningful life, even after death.

Buy it here.

Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos – Nash Jenkins

Foster is fifteen. Immediately upon arriving at one of the most expensive and exclusive boarding schools in New York State, he is thrust into a world of unreadable power dynamics and explosive secrecy.

Jenkins explores what happens when queerness is hidden, yearned for, and locked away from prying eyes, when young men find themselves beholden to the delicate construction of so-called masculinity.

Imagine The Secret History, except set in 2010, and everyone has a Blackberry.

Buy it here.

The Bee Sting – Paul Murray

The Barnes’ are successful, and everyone knows it. There’s Dickie’s garage, the biggest in town, there’s Imelda, the glamourous housewife, and Cass and PJ, who will be fine, because the kids are always fine. But, as is so often the case, all is not as it seems. The garage is haemorrhaging money, Imelda is trapped in the tragedies of the past, Cass is hopelessly in love with her best friend Elaine, and PJ is stuck in the middle of it all, treading water. Secrets smoulder, lies pile up and affairs bubble below the surface, threatening to rip everything apart.

A family chronicle of epic proportions, The Bee Sting examines the lengths that people will go to protect themselves, their families, and what they hold dear.

Buy it here.

Lead Us Not – Abbey Lay

When Olive, a girl from Millie’s year twelve class, moves in next door, Millie is immediately transfixed. Between their second-storey bedroom windows a friendship blossoms, and soon nothing is more important to Millie than what Olive is doing, when Olive will call, what Olive’s plans are for the future and whether they will involve her.

Parties, family tensions, boys, and the unspoken rules of female friendship and desire work their way between the girls, weaving an intricate web that neither of them seem to be able to escape.

Lead Us Not so accurately portrays the chaotic shorebreak of late adolescence and high school that I almost felt eighteen again.

Buy it here.

Devotion – Hannah Kent

Hanne’s family is emigrating to Australia. It’s Prussia (modern day Germany) in the 1800s, and religious persecution has pushed them onto a heaving ship, and everything they’ve ever known - their home, their community, their congregation - fades into the distance. But Hanne is not alone. She has Thea.

Kent’s prose is lyrical, soft; it lulls you into a sense of security and then drops you off the edge of a cliff. This might be, if I may be so bold, the best queer historical novel I’ve ever read.

Buy it here.

Penance – Eliza Clark

After midnight in a sleepy beach town in the UK, a teenage girl is lit on fire in a beach box by the girls she once called friends. How did they arrive at this juncture? Who scorned who, and who is to blame?

Tumblr, fan culture, true crime, and the guile and devastating subtlety of teenage bullying combine to form a tangle seemingly impossible to unravel.

Buy it here.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post – Emily M. Danforth

It’s the nineties, and after being caught with her best friend Coley, teenaged Cameron Post is sent off by her aunt to a secluded religious conversion camp in the northern United States. All contact with the outside world, including with Coley, is forbidden. Miserable and consumed by betrayal, Cameron resists the routines of the therapy. But she finds herself amongst an unlikely group of friends, all doing their best under the circumstances, and she finds herself forming bonds that rival her connection to home, to Coley and to her family.

Cameron Post is a fresh and intimate story, adorned by dusty carpets, sun-bleached timber, compulsory gospel karaoke and the fresh mountain air of upstate Montana. Danforth’s writing is as devastating as it is hopeful.

Buy it here.

Julia is a writer living in Melbourne, Australia. She spends a lot of time in her local bookstore, plucking her eyebrows, and putting stickers on things.

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The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

I’d made friends at the junket with the only other Australian journalist, who was equally as jetlagged as I was, and we’d gone back to the fancy hotel HBO was putting us up in and drank three martinis each. I discovered she’d never seen a musical, and convinced her to come to Wicked with me. In return she said I should come to the cool underground invite-only dance club she was going to at 3am that night. I told her I’d rather die.

“What’s it even about” she asked, as we waited in line.

“It’s about the witch from Wizard of Oz” I said wisely, “I assume how she got so evil or whatever”.

“I’ve never seen the Wizard of Oz either” she informed me. She wrote for a cool hip-hop magazine. I’m not really sure why we alone represented Australian media at the earlier junket, but I am still firmly looking away from this gifthorse and its gaping maw. We blearily settled in our seats, an air of boozy cynicism stinking around us.

By the end of No One Mourns The Wicked, I was bolt upright in my chair, absolutely blown away, riveted. I adored the show, my tiredness washed away, literally grabbing my face in my hands at the effect of Defying Gravity. When the lights went up, I looked over at my new friend and she was sound asleep. “That was great!” she lied, leaving the theatre. “There’s another half” I told her, and she pretended not to hear.

I’ve since seen Wicked again, and have maintained a genuine love for the musical - which means like many others, I approached the movie adaptation with great caution. A woman singing beautifully in green makeup while being whisked around the stage on a rope is awe-inspiring. On a movie screen, it’s not even notable - how would they capture that magic?

So, it was with great delight that I basically replicated the same experience from my first time seeing the Wicked musical in the cinema - all my cynicism blasted away with absolute delight. This time I saw it with my friend Mariota, who also hadn’t seen the musical before, but managed to remain awake. Since seeing it, we’ve sent each other a constant stream of Wicked memes, mostly about my obsession with Jonathan Bailey.

I’ve basically lived in the soundtrack (original cast recording mostly) since the film - attempting to sing every part at once to such an effect that Basil, my dog, slunk out of the room at one point. I thought my airpods had broken because they were cutting in and out, until I realised that I was just scream-singing so loudly that I was kicking off the noise awareness function.

I think it’s all a testament to the movie’s ability to capture all the delight of the musical - the beautiful dance between the characters, the subversive yet silly storyline, and the incredible songs and dancing, and make them shine on screen instead. I think the entire cast were incredible, and as people have noted before, could have easily been sent awry by a rogue James Corden style casting, tipping the balance of whimsy and darkness irrevocably into the tacky. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were both exceptional, and brought more nuance to the enemies to lovers relationship than I’d expected - what a gift closeups can be. Jonathan Bailey is perfect. My friend (unexamined parasocial relationship recipient) Bowen Yang was wonderful.

Grande in particular delighted me - she embodied Glinda, not only bringing some beautiful pathos and depth to a character designed to seem shallow, but hit every comedic moment with amazing skill.

I think the film basically says - what do we have the opportunity to embellish that a live performance physically can’t? Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, or just replicate the musical, it creates some unexpected moments of brilliance. For example, I think the film’s version of What Is This Feeling is one of the best movie musical sequences I’ve ever seen, and outstrips the musical. On the flip side, I think it tried too hard to give gravity (lol) to Defying Gravity, and ended up dragging it out too long. It was still great, but doesn’t compare to the musical’s impact.

When you combine the success of the actual film with the brilliance of the original musical and the absolutely delightfully batshit press tour, which gave us such beautiful snacks as the holding space meme and the Ariana Grande/ Ethan Slater showmance infidelity (this essay on The Cut just came out from Slater’s ex-wife…) we’re given more than just an enjoyable piece of art, we’re given a cultural MOMENT, which really rescued the last half of 2024.

Plus the only other films I can remember watching this year were Gladiator 2, which made me incredibly mad as a history nerd and is a huge stinker, Challengers, which I loved because I too am horny and bisexual but docked points from because it’s about “tennis”, and Madame Web which I watched on the plane home from the UK while doped up on a cocktail of drugs and briefly thought was the best film I’d ever seen. Congrats to Wicked.

Patrick Lenton is an writer and author, and editor of Nonsense Newsletter. His new book ‘In Spite of You’ is coming out in 2025.

In 2024, my everything show was very clearly and definitively Dropout’s Make Some Noise, which began as a nice little improv treat and became a kind of constant whispering dialogue in the background of my house, like ghosts in the wall committed to some funny bits, or voices in my head doing very niche impersonations. My texts with several of my friends have gone from discussions about the events of our lives and our emotional wellbeing and the health of mutual friends, to random 3am quotes like “give me your teeth”, with no further context.

It’s the show I watch before dates to help put me in a performative and witty mood (gotta fool them into believing i’m fun for as long as possible), it’s the show I watch when I’m in a good mood and about to hang with friends or go to a party, and yet it’s also the show I watch when I’m feeling like shit to make myself feel better. It’s the show I watch before I do improv, and then it’s also the show I watched when I quit my improv team because of my needy dog and began to go loopy from lack of attention. From depressive to manic, my everything show is always there for me. Due to the structure, you can just kinda always watch random episodes on repeat - it’s rare that I’ve ever thought “Oh no i watched this one too recently”.

Make Some Noise is essentially a short-form improv game show, where three players are given prompts which they have to perform, either by themselves or in combinations with the group. The prompts are part of the genius of the show, as they are inherently funny themselves, but always leave room to expand the gag - and could be anything from dialogue heavy concepts like “two sea captains competing for who loves the sea more” to physical prompts like “spilling an entire lunch tray one item at a time”. The decision of where to take it - high concept, horny and blue, absurd and nonsensical - is entirely up to the performer.

While it’s a short-form improv format, which relies on the quick game style prompts, it never feels shallow to me like some examples of that genre can be. The majority of the performers have come through more long-form style training, and are often able to ground the prompts into the kind of character or narrative foundation from long-form that elevate it above “gag only” stuff. That said, every contestant is really funny, so some of the gag only stuff is just really good too.

Originally a popular segment of the flagship Dropout show, Gamechanger, Make Some Noise has since been spun off into its own three season show, hosted by Sam Reich, and each season beginning and ending with the original cast, the “Noise Boys”, Zac Oyama, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Josh Ruben. They are also producers of the show, so their humour is pretty obviously fundamental to it. If you’re looking for a place to start, I’d recommend going through all their episodes, even starting at Gamechanger if you can be bothered.

The Noise Boy episodes are great examples of the brilliance of the format - each of the players has a distinctive flavour to their comedy, and while they’re hilarious on their own, mixing them together gives us moments of brilliance. For example, Josh Ruben, whose work I’d previously not been exposed to is an accomplished physical comedian and impersonator, able to do wild sounds and mimicry, like his famous “1000 Batmans”, which is almost impossible to describe. Brennan is ridiculously funny at improvised monologues and huge conceptual swings, while Zac is a master of restraint and deadpan comedy. One of my favourite scenes ever is where Brennan is improvising a long monologue as Zac’s lawyer, and asks rhetorically “is my client a perfect man?” and Zac pipes up at the perfect moment with “No, I killed him yeah”.

As Zac says at one point: “sometimes it’s not about doing a bunch of stuff, sometimes it’s about not doing a bunch of stuff. And then sometimes, points reflecting, no it’s not.”

There’s also a scene where the prompt was “a sommelier who has never tasted wine before” where he ends it with “but it was cool hanging”, which has weirdly become part of my lexicon.

The interplay between each performer is beautiful - and in the regular format of the show, we’re constantly given different setups of different people, with all sorts of wildly differing energies. It becomes exciting when you recognise different performers, and wonder how they’ll react and combust with new combinations.

There’s literally nobody who I’ve ever disliked, and my list of absolute favourites has begun to spiral into an unmanageable length - I get very excited whenever there’s a Jiavani, Jacob Wysocki, Lisa Gilroy, Anna Garcia or Izzy Rowlands episode just to begin to name a few, as well as the original Noise Boys. It’s definitely some of the fun to almost Fantasy Football different combos of them.

@makesomenoisedoOkay, so what're we thinking? Wanna have fun? 🏥 #makesomenoise #jiavani #vicmichaelis #dropout

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One of my absolute favourite guests is Vic Michaelis, who also hosts the Dropout show Very Important People. Their style of humour is utterly ridiculous and surprising, but also so poised and accomplished. It’s this kind of confident commitment to the bit that gets me every time. Cassandraaaaaaaaaa.

@makesomenoisedoListen, there's been a little bit of an incident - oh no... #makesomenoise #vicmichaelis #improv #dropout #samreich #femmefatale

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Make Some Noise doesn’t just rely on the same style of prompts - in fact every so often they’ll also have episodes devoted entirely to musical improv performers or impressionists - and will often have mini games with different conceits. It’s in one of these, where the performers get to quickly dress up in costume prompts and create a character from them, where Vic managed to create probably my favourite Make Some Noise moment, and definitely the hardest I’ve laughed. While everyone else came up with lots of different, funny, characters, Vic just kept putting two fish on their hands and being the character “Edward Fishhands”. Then, after promising to “take it seriously”, came out dressed as “just a normal lady, regular hands”.

Kills me. The final instalment in the gag, which I won’t spoil, is perfect. GRANTED.

@deadwelshkingi can't find this clip anywhere on tik tok so here's my favourite vic michaelis bit from msn #vicmichaelis #makesomenoise #makesomenoiseseason3 #minigame #whatareyousupposedtobe #edwardfishhands #dropout #fyp #funny

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I think the longevity of the show comes from a simple, repeatable premise that can’t get tired soon, and the ever-changing roster of new performers (including more high profile special guests like Ben Schwartz and Paul F Tompkins), plus the fact that people WANT to see their old favourites back.

As a long time member of the cult, it’s really cool seeing more improv on screen, and especially stuff that I think is completely enjoyable for those poor souls who haven’t devoted their lives to the pyramid scheme. It does feel unnatural - improv is a shameful secret that should live in the dark corners of our souls, not out in the public like this. But I’m glad it’s cool now.

I hope we get 10,000 more seasons, personally.

Patrick Lenton is an writer and author, and editor of Nonsense Newsletter. His new book ‘In Spite of You’ is coming out in 2025.

Here’s a simple run-down. Currently, anti-vilification laws only protected those who were attacked on the basis of racial vilification. These changes will expand it to include queer people and disabled people, and also lower the threshold of responsibility not just when someone is being threatened on the basis of a protected characteristic, but when a statement is considered “inciting hatred, serious contempt, revulsion or severe ridicule” on the basis of a protected characteristic. Offenders risk up to five years imprisonment.

To quote the law itself, it intends to: “Protect more Victorians from vilification – which is the worst kind of hate speech or conduct that profoundly hurts people and undermines social cohesion”.

Sounds great! But you might be thinking “wait… social cohesion… why does that sound familiar?”.

That’s probably because the Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan used that term only recently whilst threatening a pro-Palestine protest outside Melbourne’s Myer Christmas display. Jacinta Allan, as with her predecessor Daniel Andrews, has routinely defended Australia’s support of Israel’s war crimes, and accused those protesting it of stoking antisemitism, division, and general “hatred”.

For example, in the aftermath of the protest against the Land Forces International Land Defence Exposition, in which police were accused of extreme levels of brutality against peaceful protesters and journalists, Jacinta Allan stated “hate will never win” and “violence will never win”. Aside from the chilling irony of stating “violence will never win” whilst defending a militarised police force and a weapons expo, the Premier also conflated the act of protest, and retaliation against police brutality, with hate crimes on marginalised communities. She used social justice language as a shield to protect her own political interests in a public statement that follows on from much of the rhetoric that surrounding the genocide in the Middle East this year, which incorrectly suggests that any expression of solidarity with the victims of genocide is inherently hateful and antisemitic.

This raises the question: if the Premier is shamelessly using the language of anti-vilification to silence criticism of her government, could these laws also be exploited against journalists and protesters? How will these laws be enforced anyway?

Ah, you’ve already hit upon the catch in these laws, and the reason why this article exists!

Why these laws won’t work

There are two ways these laws can be employed. If you happen to have won the lottery recently, you can hire a lawyer and take the offender to court. Or, if you don’t have a pretty decent Porsche collection, you can theoretically press criminal charges, which you can do through the famous queer allies, Victoria Police. Oh no…

The current federal anti-vilification laws have been used on a few, rare occasions. We saw them play out earlier this year when the federal court found that One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson had racially vilified Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi in a tweet that stated she should “piss off back to Pakistan”. This was celebrated a win for racial cohesion and migrant Australians, but it took two years, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and certainly hasn’t done anything to slow down Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant sentiments or racially charged commentary, nor is Senator Hanson the only high-profile political figure to be accused of racism. The federal Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has been accused of many racially charged statements over his political career, including characterising two children of asylum seekers as “anchor babies” back in 2019, but the parents of these children never took Dutton to court. I don’t think asylum seekers have the capacity to sue one of the most powerful men in the country.

The other approach is lodging a criminal complaint. This is the route that involves taking the issue to Victoria Police, who have also been empowered by these new laws with the threshold for police to bring criminal charges being lowered. Omg cops slay!

These laws mean that if neo-Nazis unveil their “DESTROY PAEDO FREAKS” banner again, we can press charges for vilification and Victoria Police might actually arrest the neo-Nazis this time instead of pepper spraying trans people in the face. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee it. Police can do what they like, they resist any attempt at accountability, and they are well-known for not handling trans people with respect. Victoria Police refused to assist the search for missing trans woman Bridget Flack when her sister was desperate to find her in 2020. It’s hard to believe they would ever assist us in arresting someone who said something gross towards us on Twitter. Again, they literally pepper sprayed us while neo-Nazis were publicly calling for our mass-murder. Do you think many of us are ever thrilled about going into a police station?

At least we might be able to take the neo-Nazis to court I guess. Anyone know an incredibly rich trans person with two years to spare?

The anti-vilification laws theoretically grant us another trick up our sleeve we can use to keep us safe from the growth of far-right hatred. In practice, however, it’s highly unlikely it’ll actually change anything about the lives of most queer people at all. It doesn’t empower us in any real, tangible way. It does, however, empower police, and its a convenient scapegoat for the Labor Party to use whenever they need to pretend that they’re supporting our community when, actually, they’re not.

In all likelihood, queer people will deal with vilification the same way after this bill as we’ve done for decades. We don’t have the money or time for a court proceeding, and we don’t trust cops, so we’ll just shake it off and move on.

High-profile figures have vilified our community openly in the media for years now. J.K. Rowling has launched tirades against trans women to her millions of followers. Graham Linehan has blamed us for the loss of his career, marriage and self-respect. Here in Australia, a federal Liberal candidate stated that half of all trans women are sex offenders while a state Victorian Liberal MP described the creators of the Safe Schools program as “pedophilia apologists”. I’d love to believe that Victoria Police would arrest Moira Deeming if she said something like that again after this bill is passed, but somehow I doubt it.

Real protection comes not from begging politicians to help us, but from us protecting ourselves. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: when police failed to help Bridget Flack’s sister, it was the community that came together and made the search happen. The transgender community is so tight-knit and protective because it has to be. When neo-Nazis threaten us online or on the streets, it’s up to us to protect each other and ensure it doesn’t impact the welfare of our most vulnerable.

When the UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently anncounced a ban on puberty blockers, the amazing Trans Kids Deserve Better began an encampment outside his office. When trans rights are under attack, we stand up and fight back.

They’re another cheap opportunity at generating headlines, at our expense.

The real concern is how Victoria Police might use these laws to further legitimise their brutality. Jillian Segal, ardent Zionist, the Chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, and the Labor Party’s pick to be the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, used the language of the new laws themselves when calling for pro-Palestine protests to be “pushed out of the CBD”: “social cohesion has frayed and antisemitism has escalated and become more violent”.

Human rights groups, including the Jewish Council of Australia, have called on the government for months to show support for Palestine, and yet the government’s attempt to rebuild ‘social cohesion’ is to encourage police to break up protests through laws ostensibly aimed at protecting marginalised communities. Bweh :(

So these laws function in two key ways: they’re an opportunity for the Labor Party to fill headlines claiming they’re working for queer community, whilst sneaking in a law that will enable police to break up pro-Palestine protests, all in one red-hot go. In the meantime, how are things actually going for queer people? Well, uh… as with the rest of the poorest in the country, not great.

Sure, in the last ten years, we’ve had marriage equality, self-ID and bans on conversion therapy in several states, and a bisexual Bachelorette, all of which were lavishly covered in the media. But how much do these things actually impact the lived reality of queer people? When Queensland’s former Minister for Women was posing for photos in Queensland Parliament House celebrating herself for legislating self-ID, how many trans people were actually paying attention, and how many were just panicking about where their next meal was going to come from? While Jacinta Allan was posing for group photos inside the Victoria Pride Centre, how many queer people were outside those walls, dreading another night sleeping rough on the street? Neighbouring Albert Park and Prahan are in the Top 20 homeless suburbs, funnily enough. And how many of us can even afford a frickin wedding anyway? Certainly not most of my friends, who are trapped on various types of welfare that would be taken away if they got married.

I’m deeply disappointed to see queer NGOs Equality Australia and Transgender Victoria spruik these new laws too, but I wish I could be more surprised. As with the government, these organisations appear much more heavily invested in fighting for the next Instagram tile than anything that would actually improve our living standards. It might be easier to swallow, if it didn’t mean selling out our community to the police.

I wish I could say that activism is a unified struggle, but it’s not. As with all aspects of society, there’s a class hierarchy that exists within it, and that class divide is getting larger. We need to recognise this, or else we allow our community to be sold out to the police even further.

Natalie Feliks is a writer and activist originally from Adelaide, now living in Melbourne. She's written for the likes of Junkee, Crikey, and Overland, and spends her time listening to pop music and eating chocolate.

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

In now infamous scenes, anti-trans demonstrators held a rally on the steps of Parliament that was attended by a contingent of Nazis. As a defamation case, the legal issue turns on what was said after this event, by whom, when, and with what intent and effect. The judgement therefore focuses on interviews, press conferences, and leaked documents.

Deeming claimed that Pesutto defamed her by implying that she is associated with, sympathises with, and supports Nazis. In response, Pesutto insisted that he did not believe these points and that his words did not convey this meaning. Instead, he argued that the problem, as such, was her involvement in the organisation and promotion of an event with speakers with links to Nazis.

Pesutto presented several defences, including public interest and honest opinion. However, in a comprehensive 249-page judgement that cited dozens of cases, articles, and social media posts, Justice O’Callaghan rejected these defences, awarding Deeming $300,000 in compensatory damages.

Court cases revolve around a technical dispute of fact or question of interpretation, but in the real world third parties vest them with greater significance. Legally, the Court decided that Pesutto hurt Deeming’s reputation with vague utterances. However, Deeming’s supporters, such as former PM Tony Abbott, have spun the decision as a “vindication” of Deeming and, by extension, her anti-trans views.

The Court’s decision has already influenced how media outlets discuss the 2023 rally. While most coverage at the time stated that the National Socialist Network (NSN) attended the rally, news pieces since the ruling, including those from The Guardian, now describe the Nazis as having “gatecrashed” [sic] the event.

One can appreciate that editors are anxious about legal action but this is revisionism of an odious kind—the Nazi’s were explicit in their support of the event and the views of the speakers. New Zealand’s media watchdog ruled that it was fair to say that NSN supported the organisers and a former NSN member opened and closed a copy-cat anti-trans rally earlier this year.

For what Pesutto insinuated to be accurate, Deeming needed to have worked with individuals who identified themselves as Nazis or had invited the NSN to the rally. She did neither, and so his implication that she “associates with Nazis” was, the Court decided, careless and defamatory. However, a forensic investigation of what one man said on handful of occasions hardly proves that Deeming’s views are correct, justified, or reasonable.

Here, the fault lines emerge between what the judgement says as a matter of law and political spin. The Court’s decision that it is untrue to say that Deeming’ associates with or supports (self-identified) Nazis’ does not mean that Deeming’s views are, in substance, different to those held by Nazis.

On the steps of Parliament, the Nazis claimed that schools “teach sodomy” to children, a more assertive version of Deeming’s claim that Safe Schools, an LGBT inclusive anti-bullying resource for teachers, was “sleazy drivel” that taught porn to minors. The Nazis also displayed a banner vilifying Queer and trans people as paedophiles, a view comparable to her claim that the authors of the program (several of whom are gay) are “paedophile apologists”.

Deeming is a longtime opponent of story-telling events hosted by drag performers, which she describes as a “radical policy”. Last year, local government cancelled more than a dozen storytime events across Victoria due to threats from fascists and pickets attended by right-wing extremists and Nazis. It seems fair to say her comments contributed to a hostile milieu and that the parties share an antagonist attitude toward LGBT-inclusive children’s events.

NSN speakers at the rally also argued that Queer and trans people were “infiltrating” institutions and that they wanted to ensure “preservation” of White people. The decision uses similar language when it accepts Deeming’s status as an advocate for the “preservation” of so-called “sex-based rights” [sic], particularly concerning women’s change rooms and bathrooms which trans people are presumed to be “infiltrating”. In her inaugural speech, Deeming implied that trans women enter women-only spaces to sexually harass cis women.

Deeming also advocates against gender-affirming healthcare and has previously expressed “disappointment” about the ban on conversion therapy. Sexual orientation change efforts cause serious bodily and mental harm to its victims and risk the destruction of gender and sexual minorities. So, while Deeming couches her views in polite terms, their real-world effect aligns with the Nazis’ stated desire to “destroy” Queer and trans people.

This is all to say that an ordinary person familiar with both Deeming’s and neo-Nazi’s attitudes toward Queer and trans people could reasonably form the opinion that Deeming and various Nazis share similar views without implying any direct association or relationship. Indeed, many Queer and trans people formed such an opinion well before Pesutto weighed in (a fact not considered in the judgement).

Charitably, the narrow terms of reference of a defamation case do not permit a nuanced consideration of context. What was in question was the validity of Pesutto’s words on specific occasions, not of Deeming’s views. In this sense, the ruling itself is immaterial: what matters is how it is being (mis)interpreted.

In framing the outcome as a blanket “vindication” and by inserting distance between the parties after the fact (a la “gate crashed”), the media and political classes are either incompetent and participating in misinformation or malicious and engaging in disinformation. Either way, the dangers are twofold.

On the one hand, this deception creates an even more permissive environment for bigots to vilify trans people, a grim prospect given that trans people are still excluded from Federal vilification protections. On the other, it discourages discussion of the actual and well-evidenced links between anti-trans politics and Nazism.

The inescapable fact is that, whether they admit it or not, anti-trans crusaders have Nazis on their side.

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

Which is why I’m so glad that the absolute FEAST of a show, Interview with the Vampire on AMC not only got a second season off the back of some rave critical reviews, but an uptick in popularity thanks to a Netflix deal in some countries. So many streamers are going conservative, safe, milquetoast as a result of the competition, but Interview with the Vampire is just the absolute opposite of that, a melodramatic opera of a show, that leans in so hard to every choice that you’re almost overwhelmed with the emotion, the sumptuousness of it all. It’s beautifully written, impeccably shot, exquisitely paced, and season 2 zooms in on the character drama at the unbeating heart of the show.

The show follows journalist Daniel Molloy (who gives me a kind of grumpy Bourdain vibe?) as he gets an interview with the brooding vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), in a tell-all about his immortal life, including his torrid and incredibly hot relationship with Lestat de Lioncourt (Australia’s Sam Reid). There are other very important relationships and characters, including the unstable child-vampire Claudia and Louis’ new paramour Armand, but at its heart the show is about the obsessive love between these two ancient boyfriends.

At the end of the first season, there’s a very dramatic breakup (it’s murder), and the way that Louis spends the next hundred years or whatever (I’m not good with time) obsessing over his ex is absolutely the epitome of queer culture. I can’t tell you how confronting it was to see all my pettiness and anguish and misplaced passion after a breakup blown up into a century spanning epic. He even moves to Paris and finds an emotionally manipulative (and how) rebound! Queer culture! The grasping, vindictive, passion of this immortal queer breakup story is something I haven’t really had a chance to immerse myself into before, and in a year that has personally been ruled by big queer passions, something I needed in juxtaposition to the starry eyed optimism of something like Heartstopper. I needed a story of love turned into heartbreak so black and passionate that it had gone septic, forced to lived long past its due date thanks to the vampires who carry it.

It doesn’t just stop there - we get love triangle, we get betrayal, we get a queer friendship group imploding and ending in a Parisian motorcycle battle. Come ON! This show has EVERYTHING. Oh god and the Parisian vampire fashion???

Anne Rice has always written her vampires as being cursed. This has led to the more insipid popular versions like True Blood and even Twilight, which fundamentally miss the reason Rice shows immortality as an affliction: having to feel emotions forever, unending, at such height and drama that they will send you mad. It’s not the bloodlust, it’s not (just) the loneliness - it’s the horror of feeling, anything, forever.

There’s so much about this show that thrills me on a fundamental level, such as the incredibly hot gay sex that we’re treated to on screen. But ultimately the show goes so big, so operatic in its scope, that it edges into camp. The fact that much of the season is spent in Paris in a vampire’s coven that performs terrifying vampire-specific theatre of the cruel is just this ridiculous choice that is justified into brilliance every step of the way. It’s a confronting story at times, with a deep sadness and violence at its heart. After one particularly heartbreaking episode, I had to take a break from the show for a week, even though I had another episode to look forward to.

There is also a twist on a twist in the season that while not truly out of the blue, it’s done in such a clever way that it changes your perception of the entire show, stretching all the way back to the first episode of season 1.

The plot demands that you take it seriously, and I don’t think it would be possible considering some of the more outrageous elements of melodrama, without every actor absolutely hitting every beat with everything they have. They’re all amazing, not a weak moment among them - but Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid are so charismatic that the obsession they feel for each other spills over. In season 2, Sam Reid’s Lestat blows into another level of insane magnetism - which only makes me look forward to the next season, which will focus mostly on him.

I can’t wait.

HONOURABLE QUEER CULTURE MENTIONS:

Challengers: thank you for the bisexual churro scene.

Agatha All Along: thanks for some gay witches who sing.

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

Though he’s currently focusing on Youtube and longer form content, I first came across Charlee on TikTok. The (ever mysterious) algorithm knew that I wanted quality book recommendations and reviews, and it certainly delivered.

@grandpasbookclubSome if my favourite books that you must read #booktok #literarytok #literaryfiction #gaybookreviews #queerbook #queerbook #queerbookrecommendations #queerbookrec #reading #queerbooktoker #reading #booktokrecommendations

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Hailing from the Victorian coastal town of Torquay, approximately 1.5 hours from Melbourne, Charlee’s content understandably has that soft, sleepy quality you might associate with an off-season beach holiday. Authentic, simple and pared-back, his quiet straight-to-camera style is a welcome antidote to the overstimulating chaos that BookTok can often become. Ever sensitive and thoughtful, his content about queer books and authors captured my attention immediately.

@grandpasbookclubPlease at least read the Rachel Incident! I LOVED IT #booktok #reading #bookrecommendations #bookrec #bookreviews #australia #lgbt #lgbtbooks #readinglist #queer #queerbooktok #litfic #literarytok

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A paramedic by trade, in his spare time twenty-two year old Charlee Brooks is a lot of things: Youtuber, Booktoker, reader, poet, the list goes on. His content, which comprises reviews, recommendations, rants about Patti Smith, book hauls and book-related outings and vlogs, is compassionate, slow-paced and refreshing. 

BookTok, a subgenre of TikTok, tends to be flooded by American and British creators, and it’s refreshing to see an Australian perspective, especially a young one unmarred by the publishing industry or having studied literature. Charlee is for the “everyman”. Watching him talk about books is like taking a breath of crisp morning air. 

What came as a surprise to me as I listened to Charlee talk about his upbringing was that he hasn’t always been a reader: “I didn’t really start reading until first year uni.” A bookish person myself (as much as a hate the twee-ness of the word “bookish”), I thought that all of us grew up reading under the bed covers with a torch, or spending winter Sundays curled up in front of the electric heater ravenously reading the last few chapters of Breaking Dawn. Charlee’s later-in-life literary awakening was two-pronged: “I read Call Me By Your Name, and that was sort of my gay awakening, and from there on I just fell full force into trying to accept myself.” 

There’s certainly something magical about Aciman’s novel, because I too adored it before I realised I was queer. I remember lying in a hot bath listening to the audiobook, Armie Hammer reading out that scene through my speaker, hoping to god that my housemate couldn’t hear it through the wall.

“I also read Billy Elliott” he tells me, laughing. “Liking that a little too much maybe was a sign… that maybe there was something a little fruity going on.” It reminds me of how I perhaps liked Stick It a little too much in primary school.  

I’m always interested in why people start reading, and Charlee’s reason is a common one: “I wanted to get away from what I was studying.” I can relate; I remember procrastinating during my undergraduate degree by reading the entirety of the Outlander series (nine whole books if you’re wondering). “Towards third year I was completely absorbed by books and the bookish community.” 

Discovering literature and then taking the leap and posting about it online seem two very different things, so I ask Charlie what made him want to delve into the wide world of the internet. As it turns out, his sister has quite the following on TikTok (I immediately picked up my phone and found her page, and I already followed her - small world). “She definitely urged me to post, and…made it a safe space to post.” 

@grandpasbookclubPart two will be up tomorrow. I hope you get some good recs from this list! #booktok #reading #bookhaul #bookshopping #bookunboxing #bookbuyingproblem #litfic #bookrecommendations #readinglist #books #bookunboxing #poetry #poetrytok

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Despite TikTok’s meteoric growth in the last few years, making engaging content is deceivingly hard. A lover of Videostar and iMovie when he was younger, making videos came quite naturally to Charlee. There are 35.9 million posts (and counting) under the booktok hashtag, and I can think of only a handful of creators that resonate with me as much as Charlee does. Remarkably, he tells me he really only started posting for something to do, “then it sort of just ended up where it is and I’m still doing it and I love it and I’m very lucky that people resonate with it…I’ve really been able to gain confidence in myself and other people through talking about these stories.”

There’s something circular there, where queer stories are something for him to confide in, and they also provide the gift of community. It’s about the inner and the outer, the multiple parts that make up the whole. 

Of course, online book discourse is (unfortunately) not all sunshine and rainbows. Intrigued by Charlee’s thoughts on the tricky beast that is the internet, especially since making content about queer books can be a lightning rod for homophobia, intolerance, and honestly, plain stupidity, we chat about how TikTok can quite easily devolve into what is basically a toxic wasteland of opinions and algorithms. “My videos get flagged…because I’m talking about queer subjects…There’s nothing explicit in them whatsoever but because they’re queer they get reported and TikTok takes them down.”

He says that people also tend to be quite quick to assume. They “judge and jump on…and put their opinions out there” where they aren’t necessarily welcome. Although TikTok is where most of Charlee’s influence lies and where has built his community, because of the toxicity of the platform he’s started posting a lot more on Youtube, where he can speak more directly to a dedicated (and kinder) audience.

A hot topic online for a while, and one he’s explored in his content before, I was keen to delve into Charlee’s ideas on non-queer authors writing queer characters and stories. Emphatically, he tells me that “historically in art… people need to tell other’s stories sometimes for them to be heard.” I have to agree. Surely we can’t expect queer people, especially those who have experienced trauma related to their identity, to write about that trauma purely for the benefit of those who want to read about it. 

“I think it’s very narrow minded to say ‘well you’re not queer so you have no right to tell a story about a queer person’,” he says. He also highlights the importance of separating someone’s work from their personal life: “we don’t know everything that goes on in one person’s life and I think that idea of separating art from the artist is very very important.”

I bring up the example of A Little Life, a queer tragedy of epic proportions (if you know you know) written by American novelist Hanya Yanagihara, who herself is not queer. Online discourse around the book has been frustrating. Charlee zones in on one of the most discouraging things about the internet: how quick people are to jump behind a misguided cause. “People are very quick to judge…and box things in as trauma porn this and trauma porn that, and jump on authors’ backs and boycott things and cancel people.” 

Charlee describes A Little Life as an “exquisitely written book… [and] very intentional.” He goes on: “just because something is traumatic or it deals with taboo or hard to navigate topics doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be written at all.”

@grandpasbookclubCrema is the most beautiful place #crema #italy #somewhereinnorthernitaly #callmebyyourname #callmebyyournamemovie #stickypeach #peachscene #timotheechalamet #elio #booktok #elioandoliver

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On the prevalence of stories about queer suffering more generally, Charlee says that yes, reading it can be confronting and upsetting, “but it’s the harsh reality.” Refreshingly, he says that “to turn a blind eye and say I don’t want to read any of this because it’s so sad and makes me feel horrible, well [those] were the things that our community had to deal with.” He finds value in the sad stories, value in terms of the historical significance and in the power that is taken back by the writing of them. 

As a reader who becomes very invested in whatever book is currently on my nightstand, I find myself walking through the world slightly differently with every story I consume, and I’m relieved to find that that the same is true for Charlee: “My whole life is obviously influenced by what I’m reading and consuming, everything is to do with books.” 

Whether I’m reading a Diana Reid novel and find myself glamorising the plight of the middle-class uni student, or I’m absorbed in Eliza Clark’s Penance and reliving my Tumblr years, I see the way I think about my life warping, and the way I write morphing, as I read. Charlee explains that he finds himself going down literary rabbit holes too, which is a comfort to me. “My life becomes consumed by whatever the period [the book] is set in…I am very obsessive too…once I find [an author] I like I really lean into it.”

I ask him if any authors in particular inspire him, and in true bibliophile style, Charlee has a hard time narrowing down his list. I provide him with an example of my own (Hannah Kent, Australian author of queer historical novel Devotion, and possibly my favourite author of all time), though I soon learn that I didn’t need to. He offers a few of his favourites: Phillipe Eson, Olga Ravn, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Joan Didion, but for Charlee, it all comes down to Patti Smith. 

“She is my life,” he says, “The light of my life.” I can do nothing in this moment but admire his passion. “I love the way she writes, she’s so honest…I’ve read almost every book she’s put out. It’s my goal to get every book in her collection.” He also speaks adoringly of the work of Patti’s best friend and former partner Robert Maplethorpe, a queer photographer who passed away due to HIV-related illness in 1989. His voice lights up as he tells me of the queer themes in Patti’s work, and that she’s still very much working in the literary space: “She’s very active in the community as well…it’s so rare to get that from someone of her age… with so much life experience.” 

“I could rave about her every day,” he says, and I believe him. “If you haven’t read any Patti Smith I implore you to do so.”

The last question I have for Charlee is about his writing. I start by asking the obvious: asking him what he writes about (a somehow simple yet very intimate question). “Lots of different things,” he tells me. “I write everyday in a journal,” he says, and a pang of envy shoots through my heart; I never seem to be able to keep a journal for more than a few months. “I do wax and wane,” he adds, but when he’s feeling inspired he writes a lot of poetry. In fact, he’s got close to a full collection, which he is very keen on getting published. 

“I’ve also started writing my first piece of fiction,” he continues, “which is obviously very early days but I find that I’ve been inspired by growing up in Victoria and the people I’ve begun to surround myself with in my early adult life.”

In terms of inspiration, Charlee leans on the work of the authors he loves, as we are all wont to do, but warns against falling into the trap of replication. “I definitely find myself taking bits from what I’m reading which is…a dangerous trap,” and a trap that I absolutely fell into when I first started writing.

Someone needs to tell younger me that the only person who can write like Sally Rooney is (spoiler alert) Sally Rooney. He tells me that to write well, you have to lean into your own voice, and that voice comes from reading. He tells me that above all, what he doesn’t understand is writers who don’t read. Read, read, read. “To write well you need to read, and read widely,” he says. 

—

Julia is a writer living in Melbourne, Australia. She spends a lot of time in her local bookstore, plucking her eyebrows, and putting stickers on things.

As well as creating content on social media, Charlee runs his own online book club through Bindery and Discord, where members can read along with him and then engage in discussion at the end of each month.

You can find Charlee on TikTok here, Instagram here and on Youtube here.

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The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!

The first time we harvested carrots, I was too giddy—well at least for the simple action of pulling a vegetable out of the ground. I remember the lead-up—L. was sitting on her chair on the porch you could see the whole street on (The Porch of Judgement, we’d call it) I came around the corner with my dog, and by the time I made it to the top step, L. says “It’s time.” 

The time was either late August or early September, kneeling, I remember the dirt was warm from the afternoon sun. I grasped the leafy green tops of the closest carrot to me and with both arms pulled it up. Bright orange and about as long as my middle finger to my wrist, I was baptised in its girth. “Damn, I think I want this carrot as my husband,” I told L. She looked at me and I looked at her and we both rolled over in the garden, busting at the seams—though I was careful not to snap my freshly plucked prize. The “Husband Carrot” sneaked its way into every one of our convos. Cylindrical vases found while thrifting were always compared to the first “Husband Carrot.” Carrots at the grocery store were especially compared to the first “Husband Carrot.” Men jogging in sweatpants past the “Porch of Judgment,” were, of course, compared to the first “Husband Carrot.” Even the next year, that year’s Husband Carrot was compared to the first “Husband Carrot.” 

But here, at that moment, like a straight man holding up a freshly caught fish, I displayed The Husband Carrot proudly in my tank top and jean shorts. I’d later use the photograph on my dating profiles, which garnered responses like: OOOH, he’s a gardener, Good with plants?, and my favorite, I love beets. L. would say, “The last one is a red flag, he doesn’t even know what beets look like.” 

My grandparents always had a garden, where the canning season came with its own weather advisory. My parents had a smaller garden, strawberries mostly, that would only get bigger the moment they moved out to the country. Before moving to Omaha, I was in college in Iowa City, followed by a brief stint in Chicago, where I rented and never felt fully established or had enough space to make a garden. (And looking back at these landlords, I can see them saying NO before I finished my sentence). 

Before helping L. with the garden, the last garden I ever thought about was the one in Fun Home by Allison Bechdel, having read it my senior year of college. Bechdel’s father a closeted gay man (spoiler alert) poured himself around his house, fiddling and perfecting the old home. He tended a garden in jean shorts and sometimes no top, manicuring his dirt of weeds and planting vegetables that would triple in size. The portrayal of Bechdel’s father highlights that projects (like a garden) can also be life in terms of the effort it takes to preserve your hard work.

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Planting a garden is not glamorous work. It’s hard and it’s hot out and the gloves stick to your sweaty hands. But the lots of tomatoes, sunflower seeds, onions, chives, peppers, and green beans won’t grow and eat themselves. With gardening there is a certain non-physical gift, tilling up the dirt makes for good cardio, planting the seeds and tending to the vines help you track time throughout the season, but there’s something for making a space for yourself to be yourself. There’s a certain satisfaction of putting up a Pride flag in the garden and knowing that someone won’t fuck with it. At least for now. In states like Iowa and Nebraska and beyond in this US hellscape, frequent legislation makes it farther than it should be targeting queer people, and sometimes it’s hard to justify staying, knowing the passing of such homophobic laws will impact your mental health. But to fight, I’ve found, you need to tag out, take your time, replenish yourself, and make yourself whole again to get back on the frontlines. 

The next year, L. found an artisanal seed mix, featuring purple, yellow, and red carrots. We’d joke we were growing my future husband from seed like some gay fairytale. We pulled The Husband Carrot (version two) the same day we had to sex the corn (rubbing together the male and female parts). It's hard to forget such a gay-filled-gardening day. I gripped my hands around the leaves and thought for a moment, what if there isn’t a Husband Carrot this year? What if the first Husband Carrot was as best as it’s going to get? No, I say, and give it a great pull. Though the carrot crop was smaller than the year before, the purple, yellow, and red carrots dazzled in the sun once washed off with the hose. L. yelled “Taste the rainbow!”

I’d sit with L. on the porch—cooling down after grabbing a coffee—to discuss our personal lives and how small the dating pool of qualified candidates is in the Midwest. Smaller if you’re gay. The smallest still if you’re looking for someone working on their shit. Impossible it seems if you’re gay and working on their shit. We’d never reach any definitive conclusions only that coffee in good company followed by tinkering with the garden is the closest slice of heaven you can get to.

We were good at naming things too. We called the porch the “Porch of Judgement.” We called the garden “The Garden of Eatin,” riffing off its biblical inspiration. I called the dummy-thick root vegetable “The Husband Carrot,” and L. never forgot it. Growing up in the Midwest and now living in Omaha, I’m used to carving out space for my queerness to thrive. I just never pictured a garden, tended by a friend, would be such a place for me. 

I still call the garden with L. a home. 

Harrison Cook is a writer and potter living in the Midwest. His work has appeared in Gay Mag, Foglifter Journal, Essay Daily, TriQuarterly Review, and elsewhere. His Essay “Atlas” was recognized as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2021. 

The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!