This chapter discusses how writing emerging out of Gay Liberation in the 1970s offered an alternative to the masculine heteronormativity that dominated the Australian literary tradition. Emphasised that the personal was political, it foregrounded private sensuality, an exploration of the everyday, and a critique of gay discrimination. The chapter traces the development of a diversifying community in the 1980s through writing collectives, anthologies, and journals. A broadening of the spectrum of LGBTQ+ poetry in the 1990s and 2000s was informed by queer understandings of sexuality. It saw lesbian writers test the limits of lyrical poetry and an era of mainstream popularity, as exemplified in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. The chapter considers how LGBTQ+ poets of colour have critiqued ideas of national belonging and white subjecthood. It then discusses the exploration of embodiment, including the turn to autotheory by contemporary trans and genderqueer writers, resistance of ableist discourses, and the navigation of illness, such as AIDS, mental illness, and chronic pain.

Digital poetry emerged in tandem with advances in the computer sciences in the mid-twentieth century, although we can trace its experimental impulses to earlier literary traditions. As Dani Spinosa argues, “digital poetry has its roots in a history of print-based avant-garde” (x). The recombinant and nonlinear conditions of electronic literature, broadly conceived, have led some scholars to attend to modernist works by writers and media visionaries such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Bob Brown in a search for the origins of the procedural play in contemporary innovative writing. “Early digital poems,” as Christopher Funkhouser notes, “can be conceptually interpreted as searching for their essence or as striving to make their essence apparent, as did modernist endeavors” (3). Media theorists, such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Lev Manovich understood the innovations of early media as cornerstones in the development of the digital revolution. The modernist transition to new communication and media technologies, such as cinema, radio, and the gramophone, fostered faster transmissions of information that in turn influenced novel approaches to structuring narrative time, visual language, and reading practices. Bob Brown’s 1930 proposal for a mechanized reading machine offers an intriguing example of this collision between media and literature. Invoking the “talkies” or sound films, Brown’s reading device proposed to deliver “readies” or a ticker-tape stream of prose or poetry to a viewer, thereby efficiently transmitting a visual spectacle of information. For Brown, the machine would “revitalize” an “interest in the Optical Art of Writing” and thus merge the act of reading with the technological innovations that were already modernizing society (27). With this background in mind, it remains a useful exercise to apprehend the radical experimentation of contemporary electronic literature alongside the visual, technological, and formal innovations of earlier avant-garde movements, including Futurism and Dadaism, as well as later literary groups, such as Oulipo, Fluxus, and language writing.