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.

On 31 March 1965, Ro Bogner and I went into the public bar of the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane's Coronation Drive and tried to order a lemonade each. Because we were women, we were refused and ordered out, but we did not leave. We chained ourselves to the bar rail instead. The barman, then the publican, then police — first uniformed then plain-clothes — tried hard to get us to leave without force. When they failed, they unexpectedly left us to it. At once there followed a storm of publicity, even extending overseas, and public response ranging from passionate support to hostile opposition right through to threats of violence and even death.

Forty-one years later, in the Museum of Brisbane in the City Hall, I saw photos, press clippings and texts about this first, and subsequent, demonstrations in the campaign to admit women to public bars in Queensland. The context was the recent Taking to the Streets Exhibition, an extensive and well-researched showing of the radical movements in Brisbane in 1965–85. Looking back, how do I now view the Regatta demonstration and the subsequent campaigns for change for women in which I was involved? Where do they stand in relation to changes since? Do they still have relevance to goals for women now?