Yes, some may ask why a fiercely heterosexual, crocodile-hunting, Harley Davidsonriding Liberal MP from Far North Queensland would fight for gay rights. The answer is quite simple. Discrimination is just not fair.

Contemporary Queensland has a flourishing GLBTIQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) scene which, although still suffering from discrimination in a society that is premised around a heterosexual norm, is a far cry from the years before 1990 when male homosexuality was a criminal offence. The queer generation has largely moved beyond binaries in gender and sexuality, and at dance parties there is a blending of cultures that knows few of the old boundaries. These new freedoms to express sexuality mean that relationships develop more easily with less fear of opprobrium. Classified advertisements in newspapers and on the internet, sex-on-premises venues and cybersex are all available to facilitate physical desires and as ways of meeting a possible future partner. Yet if one were to survey young gay men today, how many would know that between 1900 and 1990 a sodomy conviction could carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years with hard labour? Or that engaging in ‘gross indecency’ in public or private (usually oral sex or masturbation) could receive three years with hard labour? How many would know that the death penalty for sodomy was removed in 1865 or that between that year and 1899 the sentence for anal intercourse was 10 years to life imprisonment?

Dropsy is a puff. It is not the first time he has done it. I can bring a witness who will swear that he got ten bob from a black fellow that stuffed him. I knew what he wanted when he went up the stairs so I followed him … there are plenty of others in Brisbane who do it besides us mob, so I am not the first.

— Conversation between Albert McNamara and Police Constable Lipp, Brisbane, 1905

The emergence of modern queer identities is usually located in cities — initially the European and American metropolises, followed by provincial or colonial cities like Sydney. While the argument that a critical mass of people triggers the formation of new identities is compelling, a centralised, urban model of the generation of modern queer identities ignores an alternative theoretical model emphasising flow and connection between the ‘centre’ and the ‘margins’ that has emerged in writing about colonial and post-colonial cultures, but which has a wider applicability in understanding cultural change. In this paper, I argue that marginalised same-sex behaviours and relationships on the periphery of the empire or the nation are implicated in larger patterns of interconnectedness and reciprocity in the historical formation of modern sexual identities.2 Specifically, I use a family study to explore manifestations of same-sex attraction in early twentieth century Cooktown and the influence of these sexual role models on three subsequent generations.

My first contact with any organised gay and lesbian groups was with LINKS, the forerunner of the CAMP club. In 1968–69 we used to have social functions at private homes and once a year venture to the Queen's Birthday Ball. Lots of gay men were being targeted either by police provocateurs or by out and out ‘poofta bashers’ and very little effort appeared to be made to bring things before the courts. Feelings were also aroused by events interstate and overseas and people began to start organising to fight for legal recognition. Hence the Campaign Against Moral Persecution — CAMP — was born.

How do political activists begin? What is their motivation? For quiet Greg Weir, just graduated as a trainee school teacher from Kelvin Grove College of Advanced Education in 1976, it was being refused employment by the Queensland government because he was a spokesperson for a gay student support group. Minister for Education Val Bird said in Parliament that ‘student teachers who participated in homosexual and lesbian groups should not assume they would be employed by the Education Department on graduation’. With his future as a teacher destroyed, Greg became one of Queensland's best-known political activists. His cause was taken up by the Australian Union of Students and he became a catalyst in developing awareness of gay and lesbian issues all over Australia. Greg was then employed as a staff member in the office of Senator George Georges and later Senator Bryant Burns, and became a Labor Party activist, influential in the peace, anti-nuclear, education and civil liberties movements in the 1970s and 1980s. He also helped set up HIV/AIDS awareness groups in the 1980s, and went on to become one of the central organisers of the campaign for gay law reform in 1989–90, which culminated in the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1990. In 1991 Greg was involved in campaigns to include homosexuality as a category in new antidiscrimination legislation.

The early to mid-1980s were a time of great uncertainty about HIV/AIDS. As a gay male you were avoided, homophobia ran rife and social activities such as Gayskate, a social event held at the Red Hill skate arena, came to an end through fear. Efforts aimed at HIV/AIDS education were also severely thwarted by the state government, so much so that instead of cooperation we got the ‘Perverts and Deviants Act’.

Since the 1970s, there has been a strong and active gay and lesbian press in the southern parts of Australia. This press emerged later in Queensland than in the southern states but today it reaches many queer Queenslanders and performs a vital and multifaceted role. While this press provides essential representation and visibility for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (GLBTIQ) population of Queensland, it also embodies a number of tensions inherent in this community. This article charts the development and history of the print media run by and for the queer community of Queensland, particularly focusing on the two major GLBTIQ periodicals currently available in Queensland. These are Queensland Pride, published monthly, and Q News, published fortnightly. The article explores the conflicts that exist in that queer print media, arguing that Queensland's queer press has struggled to adequately represent what has become an increasingly multifarious and diverse GLBTIQ ‘community’.

The Brisbane Powerhouse was reopened in 2000, an election year for the Brisbane City Council, by then Lord Mayor Councillor Jim Soorley. Built in a decommissioned power station, the ‘Centre for the Arts’ was one of the culminations of Soorley's $4 billion Urban Renewal Program (‘About Urban Renewal’). It was also a major — $22 million worth, to be precise — addition to the Brisbane arts scene (Buzacott: 11). It is of particular interest, then, that one of the highest profile events of the Brisbane Powerhouse's inaugural program was the first screening of the Brisbane Queer Film and Video Weekend (now the Brisbane Queer Film Festival or ‘BQFF’). Now in its eighth year, and still screened at the Brisbane Powerhouse, the BQFF continues to be Queensland's only regular public film festival dedicated to explicitly queer films. But at a time when queer film festivals around the world are under increasing pressure to disband, given claims that ‘queer’ is supposedly such an accepted part of mainstream media that separate events are superfluous, what role — if any — does the BQFF have in Brisbane's and Queensland's queer culture (see Rich 2006)?

This paper produces the first mapping of ostensibly ‘lesbian’ spaces in Brisbane, focusing on lesbian bars and/or clubs. While cultural geographers have long noted the increased presence of ‘queerness’ within urban built environments, including how articulations of queerness within the built environment impact on the usage of those spaces both by queers and non-queers, few have applied this work to Queensland's capital. This paper addresses the gap. To do so, I begin contextually by ‘overviewing’ how queer space has tended to be ‘mapped’ in existing scholarship. I then consider how lesbian space, in particular, is mediated through interpersonal networks, queer media and, increasingly, virtual spaces. The point of this is to consider how lesbians go about the process of finding each other, and of finding community, through and in the spaces of Brisbane's built environment. Finally, and with these contexts in place, I move on to a brief case study of the three incarnations of one lesbian bar in Brisbane: namely, Mint cocktail bar. This case study raises a series of questions, including what, if any, are the aesthetic characteristics of these spaces? How are they contextualised within, and how do they interact with, the broader built environment? And what, ultimately, might these spatial interactions reveal about ideologies of sexuality within the built environment of Brisbane?

Dame Sybil is one of Brisbane's most famous drag personas. In 1962 Dame Sybil was one of the founders of Brisbane's annual Queen's Birthday Ball, the longest continuously running annual gay celebration in the world. The balls have become extravagant dance parties, far removed from their humble origins in a house at Mt Tamborine. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, gays and lesbians were a persecuted minority who held private house parties and preferred to stay out of sight. The groundbreaking Queen's Birthday Balls were an important part of the cultural and political ‘coming out’ of the modern queer community. It is difficult to appreciate the importance of the balls as ever more popular meeting places where Brisbane's gay and straight worlds mingled. Now the dance parties are attended by thousands of mainly young people, and rigid gender and sexual boundaries have become less obvious. The venues have changed over the years, moving through various nightclubs in Fortitude Valley and most recently to the Ekka pavilions. They are replete with great stage performances and wonderful costumes. With Dame Sybil and some of the original partygoers in attendance, the Queen's Birthay Balls remain a special marker of Brisbane's not-so-accepting past and the resilience of the city's gay subculture.

Gina Mather has been the president of the Australian Transgender Support Association (ATSA) for over 15 years. Her vociferous activism for social justice and equality has its roots in her work with Queensland Rail, which she joined in 1967. Gina quickly became entrenched in the union movement and soon afterwards became the secretary of the Australian Railways Union. During her time with the railways, Gina spent a considerable period of time in regional parts of Queensland, advocating for workers' rights. While her activities earned her the ire of the authorities — the police tapped her phone and the then premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, threatened to remove her as secretary of the union — she persevered undeterred.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a locally produced program on community television took the GLBTIQ community by storm. Running for seven years on channel Briz31, Tamara Tonite appeared in, and produced, 365 episodes, interviewing many locally based and national personalities. The success of the show has not been matched by any other privately produced show on community television in Australia. Tamara initially took on the show to promote her own ‘dial a drag queen’ business, but TamaraTonite took on a form of its own towards the end of 1997. While the show drew a few detractors — with some charismatic church leaders calling her an ‘evil cross-dressing transvestite’ using airwaves to spread her wicked message — Tamara remembers being absolutely floored when she threw the show open to a studio audience one night. Over 60 people turned up, and some had to huddle around TV cameras due to a lack of space.

This article reports an exploratory study that investigated domestic labour in same-sex households, to the best of my knowledge the first in Australia to do so. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 couples in Southeast Queensland reveal that these lesbians and gay men do not take on heteronormative gender roles when doing domestic labour, and that their practices reflect a variety of styles of sharing, with no pattern emerging as clearly dominant. Theoretical frameworks conceptualising gender as performative, and queer theory's figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions, suggest how the performance of gender may vary in different domains of social and cultural space, and in relation to other actors in those spaces. I have conceptualised this process by means of an analogy with the modulation of sound such that each person adjusts the balance between treble (conventionally feminine behaviours, attitudes and attributes) and bass (conventionally masculine behaviours and attributes). Rather than being ‘the man’ or ‘the woman’, or even displaying a single form of gay masculinity or lesbian femininity, lesbians and gay men can be seen to perform varying degrees of masculinity and femininity in the private space of the home, and in relation to their intimate partners, by the way they engage with domestic labour. Finally, I reflect on how the socio-geographical specificities of being situated in Southeast Queensland may have impacted on this research.