The bisexual shark paradox

And all the nonsense we were forced to endure over September

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I’m recently back from the great Australian city of Adelaide, where I did a panel on bisexual writing with author and screenwriter Brydie Lee-Kennedy. It was great for many reasons, and has left me with the theory that Adelaide is a spiritually queer city. The Dymocks in Rundle Mall that we did the event in is absolutely gorgeous - it’s a converted former theatre, all high ceilings and crown moulding and friezes. Later on that night, our hosts took us for a ridiculous good dinner, in a restaurant that was a converted laundromat. After dinner, I went back to my hotel, which used to be the treasury building. Was everything in Adelaide once something else? Was everything adapting and transforming, in a state of flux from what it was once, into what it could be? Queer culture, I think.

Brydie is the author of the brilliant Go Lightly, which I think could best be described as a queer coming of age story, about a 27-year-old Australian living in London, navigating that weird liminal phase so common at that stage of your life, especially for queers. Re-reading it for the event made me so happy I wasn’t in my twenties anymore, and then deeply depressed that I was 40 and still navigating some of the same basic plot points as Ada in the book. Nothing really changes, our skin just gets less elastic.