On 23 January 2006, the US Navy's biggest military vessel, the nuclear powered USS Ronald Reagan, arrived in Brisbane for a five-day visit. With estimates that the 6,000 strong crew would pump around $5 million into the local economy, the media, businesses and politicians welcomed the visit as a fabulous opportunity for the city. The Brisbane Peace Convergence, a coalition of local peace groups, disagreed and attempted a water-borne protest. The police intercepted the flotilla of kayaks and rowboats before they even got close to the USS Ronald Reagan because the entire Brisbane River had been declared an exclusion zone. This action and other acts of public protest in response to the ship's rubbish washing up on the shores of Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast were given little press coverage.

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.

I wish I had said that. But it was written in 1988 by Casey Hayden, a female civil rights worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or ‘Snick’, in the American South of the mid-1960s, remembering that horrific/heroic time of bombings and burnings. In Brisbane, a distant metropolis on the historical bypass, it was nothing as bad as that. No one was murdered — not right then anyway, though there would also be threats, beatings, bombing and arson attacks (and the odd trashing) of leftist personnel, headquarters and bookshops. There would be moments to be afraid. But there is a purer applicability in Hayden's words to the local experience. For there was indeed a whole country trapped in the lie of Vietnam, of ‘White Australia’, of Aboriginal segregative gulags, of the biological fixity of men's and women's uneven positionings, of the sanctity of an intense moral and political censorship, tighter here than just about anywhere in the West: a place where Anzac ruled, sport and politics never mixed and the yawning gulf between Australian values and Australian practices was rarely noticed. A whole traffic-snarl of lies and deception really, and we were the only truth-tellers as far as we could see.

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.

Beyond just my bias as a participant, I see a need to place the understanding of the innovative and distinctive character of Brisbane protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s on solid analytical foundations. These protests remain excluded from satisfying historical debate: while acknowledged as the product of the Queensland legacy of illiberality (Lunn; Whitton; Fitzgerald 1985, 1986), their connections with broader national and international social movements are largely ignored. This essay provides important details but points to broader reflections as well in its analysis of the civil liberties movement (CLM). My discussion focuses on the period 1965–75 but places the Brisbane protests historically in the general moves for liberalisation in the aftermath of World War II

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)?