Queer Discourses & Discoursing Queers exhibition at SciTech Library

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a complex system of norms and laws governed what could be said about queerness, and by whom. Institutions such as the medical, legal, and publishing professions acted as gatekeepers, producing authoritative texts which characterised same-sex attraction and gender non-conformity as pathological, criminal, and “deviant”. LGBTQIA+ people consequently adopted a variety of literary and publishing strategies to evade censorship and stigma, developing alternative, grassroots print cultures that enabled them to express their identities on their own terms.

This exhibition features works issued from positions of both power and marginalisation, including queer novels, medical texts, and periodical publications such as newspapers. Viewers are encouraged to reflect on the shifting and contextual nature of language, and the role of power and privilege in determining whose voices are heard.

Queer Discourses & Discoursing Queers will be on display in SciTech Library until July 2025.

Salome, by famed Irish playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde, was first published in French in 1893. While an English translation was published the following year featuring illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley—a portfolio of which can be viewed in the RBSC Reading Room—the play was banned in Britain due to its depiction of biblical characters, and was not performed publicly there until 1931. Wilde’s 1895 trials for “sodomy” and “gross indecency” attracted sensationalist media coverage, and his subsequent imprisonment served as a stark demonstration of the legal consequences of deviating from heteronormativity. Nevertheless, his Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)—written upon the completion of a two-year sentence with hard labour—drew attention to the plight of prisoners, and became a symbol of perseverance in the face of oppression for gay men around the world. You can view a first edition of this important text in the RBSC Reading Room.

In this repressive environment, queer authors adopted a variety of literary and publishing strategies to evade social stigma and legal consequences. Many works circulated privately for decades and were only published posthumously. One such work was an 1894 pamphlet entitled Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society by English socialist and poet Edward Carpenter, who elected not to include the pamphlet in his upcoming book after witnessing the public furore over Oscar Wilde’s trials. Another was E. M. Forster’s seminal novel Maurice, which was allegedly inspired by Carpenter’s relationship with his working-class partner George Merrill. Carpenter proposed the term “homogenic” as an alternative to “homosexual”, which he disliked, despite its increasingly widespread use in the late nineteenth century, due to its mixing of Latin and Greek etymology.

Authors of queer novels often sought to fend off criticism by narratively linking homosexuality with effeminacy, decadence, isolation, and moral decline—a strategy adopted by André Tellier in Twilight Men (1931). This was not always sufficient to evade homophobic censorship laws, and indeed, Twilight Men was one of many queer texts to be banned from Australia on grounds of "indecency" until the early 1970s.

By contrast, sexual freedom and gender fluidity led to personal and emotional fulfilment for the androgynous protagonists of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Robert Scully’s A Scarlet Pansy (1932). Orlando’s historical setting and fantastical elements acted as distancing tactics—necessary ones, given the widely-observed parallels between Woolf’s protagonist and her real-life lover Vita Sackville-West. By contrast, A Scarlet Pansy openly celebrated the queer and transgender subculture of early twentieth century New York City.

While Woolf was among a handful of queer authors to achieve critical and commercial success during her lifetime, the vast majority of queer texts produced in the early twentieth century were published under pseudonyms, by obscure presses, and consequently met with little fanfare. Woolf’s personal copy of her 1915 novel The Voyage Out, featuring handwritten notes by the author herself, can be viewed online and in the RBSC Reading Room.

The late twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of serial publications created by and for LGBTQIA+ people. Cheap to produce and ephemeral in nature, these magazines, newspapers, and newsletters comprised an alternative, grassroots print culture, which stood in opposition to the hegemonic (and often homophobic) discourse circulated via the formal publishing industry.

One of the first organisations for gay liberation in Australia was CAMP—their name both an acronym for Campaign Against Moral Persecution, and a playful allusion to the slang term “camp”, widely used to describe a range of queer identities in the latter decades of the twentieth century. CAMP organised the first public gay rights demonstration in Australia, and established a gay and lesbian counselling service, which continues to this day under the auspices of Twenty10.

CAMP also published a magazine called CAMP Ink from 1970-77, and donated a large collection of queer periodicals to the University of Sydney Library, including the Adelaide-based newspaper GALAH: Gay and Lesbian Australian Herald and the Boston-based Gay Community News. Often left-wing in editorial bent, these publications reported on legal, social, and political developments affecting the LGBTQIA+ community, while also frequently calling for solidarity with other oppressed populations, such as people of colour, prisoners, and sex workers.

The University of Sydney’s own student newspaper Honi Soit frequently waded into this discourse, with the 1972 issue featured in this exhibition sporting the headline “gay liberation comes out” alongside an Aubrey Beardsley illustration originally created for Oscar Wilde’s Salome—demonstrating the enduring resonance of queer art across generations and the LGBTQIA+ community’s ongoing efforts to recover their histories from under the shadow of censorship and repression.

In 1983, a refuge for at-risk transgender people was established in Petersham under the name Tiresias House, and a newsletter by the same name soon followed. Tiresias House was renamed The Gender Centre in 1993, and began publishing a new magazine named Polare. The Gender Centre continues to provide vital support services for Sydney’s gender diverse community, and Polare remains in print to this day.

Magazines like Polare and Lesbians on the Loose sought to give a voice to more marginalised members of Australia’s LGBTQIA+ community (respectively, transgender people and women). However, intersectional approaches did not always prevail, either in these publications or in the queer community at large. Furthermore, intracommunity debates over questions of oppression, solidarity, and liberation were marked by the ceaseless negotiation and renegotiation of language, as terms which had once been widely used came to be regarded as slurs, and others once considered offensive were reclaimed.

A 1971 CAMP Ink article called for “transvestite and transsexual liberation”, as these were the terms most widely used by drag artists and gender diverse people respectively at the time of publication. However, by the 1990s, trans-positive publications like Tiresias House were beginning to advocate for the term “transgender”. The increasing popularity of the latter term—with its implications of a socially constructed rather than biologically determined understanding of gender—was no doubt a response to the indiscriminate weaponising of transphobic language against drag performers and transgender people alike.

To avoid giving a falsely rosy impression of LGBTQIA+ solidarity, an example of this transphobic terminology has been included in Queer Discourses & Discoursing Queers, appearing in a 1994 edition of Lesbians on the Loose, in the context of a heated discussion over the inclusion of transgender women in the National Lesbian Conference. The frequent use of transphobic slurs in editions of Lesbians on the Loose from the 1990s demonstrates how power, hierarchy, and lateral violence can function within the queer community.

Nevertheless, publications from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal an increasingly inclusive approach. Crucially, the materials in this exhibition demonstrate the profoundly intertwined genealogies of LGBTQIA+ identities, and the queer community’s rich tradition of inclusion, collaboration, and acceptance.