When Scenes Fade: Everyday Investments in Sydney's Drag King Culture

Drag kinging refers to a consciously enacted masculinity by women (and sometimes other gender diverse individuals) within the recognisable context of a performance. While drag king culture has links to a longer tradition of live performance, drag king events were significant within the local lesbian social circuit in Sydney, Australia. Functioning as a site for a range of social activities generated in the vicinity of the performances, a series of drag king events between 2002 and 2012 provide the opportunity to explore the connection between social experience and collective consciousness as it becomes an intelligible cultural phenomenon. My research represents a departure from existing literature on drag king culture that works within the analytic categories of performer and audience. Instead of using the established framework derived from performance studies on one hand and a theoretical account of gender performativity on the other, I deploy cultural studies methodologies to reframe Sydney’s localised version as a scene. Analysing the interactive narratives between research participants in a series of focus group discussions, alongside my own experiences as a scene participant over a five year period, I offer a close examination of how everyday encounters coalesce around drag king events. From this data, I demonstrate the relationship of the individual to the collective, triangulate embodied intimacy to social, sexual and political configurations, and reveal the scene’s constitutive and representative dimensions. Whereas I was initially drawn to the scene’s charged particularity, in the end I had to confront its passing. Sydney’s drag king scene has all but disappeared in comparison to its vibrancy when I began my study. In offering the perspective of a scene ethnographically captured in the moment of its demise, my research reveals the complex process by which a contemporary social moment becomes layered with historical investment. In doing so, I bring together the theoretical tradition of scene studies with recent work on the affective potentialities of the archive. Overall, this research offers insight into the lifecycle of scenes: their emergence, to their expansion or contraction and, inevitably, their fading

Assessments of public health and community organisation responses to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases by LGBTIQA+ people and those living with blood-borne viruses

This research briefing paper presents preliminary findings from the ‘Diverse Experiences and Understandings of Immunity in the Pandemic Age’ project, conducted in 2022-2023. The aim of this research was to identify how Australians from specific at-risk social and community groups experience and understand the relationship between immunity and good health in an era in which the serious risks to health posed by existing viral infections and diseases are now joined by those from novel diseases such as COVID-19 and mpox. Thirty semi-structured interviews were conducted with four key sub-groups: people identifying as LGBTIQA+ and people with lived experience of HIV, hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV). These sub-groups were included in the study because they have extensive experience in dealing with infectious disease prevention and management. Furthermore, they are among those most at risk of further infection from other viruses. The paper covers the participants’ responses to the question ‘How have health communication, public health and community support initiatives helped or hindered participants’ efforts to keep well?’. It includes recommendations for how these agencies and initiatives can better support people and social groups faced with discrimination and socioeconomic inequalities in the future

Explicit Relationship Agreements and HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Use by Gay and Bisexual Men in Relationships

Relationship agreements are important for HIV prevention among gay and bisexual men (GBM) in relationships, with research earlier in the HIV epidemic often finding that agreements specified monogamy or condom use with casual partners. There is evidence that HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has shifted sexual practices among some men in relationships, such as allowing condomless sex with casual partners, but there has been little attention paid to relationship agreements among GBM who use PrEP. In this paper, we analyzed national, Australian, cross-sectional data from an online survey completed by non-HIV-positive GBM in 2021 (N = 1,185). Using logistic regression, we identified demographic characteristics, sexual practices and the types of relationship agreement that were associated with PrEP use among GBM in relationships. Using Pearson’s chi-squared tests, we explored whether PrEP users in relationships reported similar sexual practices to PrEP users not in relationships. PrEP use among GBM in relationships was independently associated with older age, identifying as gay, being in a non-monogamous relationship, having a spoken (explicit) relationship agreement, having a primary HIV-negative partner taking PrEP or a primary partner living with HIV, reporting recent condomless casual sex, reporting an STI diagnosis in the past year, and knowing at least one other PrEP user. We found that PrEP users in relationships had similar sexual practices to PrEP users not in relationships. GBM in relationships who have casual sex and who meet PrEP suitability criteria may be good candidates for PrEP. Our findings suggest that explicit relationship agreements remain important for HIV prevention, and they support PrEP use among GBM in relationships

[In Press] Sex in placemaking activism : lesbians' and queer women's sex-based sociality in Sydney, Australia

Following calls to engage more directly with the materiality of sex in geographies of sexualities, we draw on our overlapping research to explore how sexual desire and social intimacy were entangled in the emergence and consolidation of lesbians’ and queer women’s social spaces from the 1980s onwards in Sydney, Australia. Though largely applied in the context of understanding the formation of gay male communities, the concept of sex-based sociality offers a unique framework for examining the intersections between the practice of sex and the social formation of identities that are critical to placemaking activism. Yet, lesbians and queer women lacked the commercial infrastructure available to gay men that facilitated sex in social spaces, such as bars, bathhouses and nightclubs. Instead, women’s pursuit of sex took place within more mobile, ephemeral geographies but in which the production of social pleasure and sexual wellbeing were equally emphasised. Following sex within and across these mobile sites–and indeed, across our own research trajectories–we reveal how lesbians and queer women were attuned to the possibilities of sex-based sociality in such provisional geographies. Moreover, by tracing these mobilities and attunements over time, we offer a counterpoint to histories of sexual politics that have focussed on gay men’s experiences, and in doing so, provide critical correctives to the tendency to overlook women’s sexual experiences within placemaking activism