QUEER UTOPIAS
“Queerness is not here yet.” It’s something to strive for, always on the horizon.
In this issue of Poslink, which coincides with Melbourne's Midsumma Festival and Sydney World Pride, we draw on the concept of queer utopia as a way to describe and imagine solutions to problems like HIV stigma and other forms of oppression. Brent Allan shares their story of building a community of chosen family in regional Victoria, Fiona Kelly McGregor’s essay transports us back to the queer alternative party scene of 1990’s Sydney, and Dean Murphy envisages new ways of discussing HIV status within sexual cultures.
Art by Andrew Chan, a weaver and knitter working in Melbourne.
Giving Thanks @ Buggery Acres
by Brent Allen
To say the weather has been a bit “wet” of late is an understatement.
In regional Victoria, where I live, it’s been so wet that stepping outside both sounds and feels like walking on a sponge. Even though the grass is waist high and desperately needs a cut, the deluge forced my partner and I to cancel long laid plans for our friends and family to help us prepare for the coming bushfire season. Coinciding with Canadian Thanksgiving, it used to be an annual gathering. Before the rains, we had COVID-19 restrictions.
Although I’m not the only one who has had to cancel an event or two over the last couple of years (and we certainly haven’t experienced catastrophic floods like so many regional communities) the loss has had me thinking about what community means to me.
We lovingly call our place ‘Buggery Acres.’ It’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to what perceptions of queer identity and relationships are often reduced to in such a heteronormative world. But over the past 17 years, our home has become a haven for an ever-growing collection of chosen family, their non-human companions and a plethora of associates, colleagues, and friends.
It’s a bush block, off grid, with vegetable gardens and orchards, bees, goats, chickens, and constant reminders of the Australian forest – kangaroos, echidnas, cockatoos as well as the snakes and spiders.
The ‘Acres’ has hosted far too many celebrations over the years. From Eurovision parties, birthdays, Thanksgiving, and other festivals (denominational and otherwise), we bring “the family” together. Nights around the bonfire, the table, in front of the screen for movie nights and excursions into the bush have become the most cherished memories of what community means to me.
A number of family members are people living with HIV, just like myself and my partner of 23 years. We tend to attract activists, agitators, and champions of social justice from all types of backgrounds, ages and genders.
Perhaps because this place is so special, the people it attracts create an environment where trust and respect, expression and authenticity are highly valued and encouraged.
We hope that it is a place than not only normalises HIV positive identity but embraces all of the nuances and intersections of what it means to live with HIV.
In short, this work includes: anticipating responses and expectations (in a general sense as well as on specific occasions); making decisions about the best time for such discussions; providing opportunities for rejection that were considered to minimise negative effects; and tailoring to the context and individual.
Undoubtedly, it is because of this place and the people it holds so dear, that I found the belief in myself to acknowledge and come out recently, after 50 plus years, as a gender non-binary queer person living with HIV.
Exploring my gender identity started off as play and experimentation. At first, a dress-up box was shared among family members and their participation in the act of dressing up was something I strongly encouraged at The Acres. I adopted a persona of Mama Muu Muu and even set up an Instagram account where I could dip my toe in the possibility of a public face.
One day our chosen son, Tyler, asked, quite innocently, “where does Mama Muu Muu end and Brent begin?” It was a simple question that had a cascade effect on how I saw myself and who I wanted to be seen as in the world.
Knowing who you are and projecting that image is not always congruent.
I always knew I was same-sex attracted. Although at first, I didn’t have the words to describe it. Like many gay men of my age, there were no role models or points of reference. Early on in my life and I lacked the understanding how to be ‘gay.’
And even when I did claim it as an identity I struggled through the tribes and archetypes that remain today. Was I a twink? Into the leather scene? A party boy? A bear? Just some of the outfits I tried on at different stages. Perhaps that is why when I received my HIV diagnosis in 1998, I decided to be brave and face this truth. I claimed my identity as HIV positive.
I always knew that although my gender was male, there was something so limiting about this. Like the sub-cultures I tried over the years, it fitted like an awkward suit. A fashionable suit which always seemed to pass the test at work, at functions and family events, but still it was uncomfortable and restrictive. I have always had colleagues and friends who were transgender and yet, this identity too was just ‘not me.’
Like so many coming out stories, your family often sees it before you do. So this story goes. (Perhaps, in hindsight, given my enthusiasm for ‘dressing up’ it was no wonder so many of them knew). A number of the Buggery Acres family encouraged me to see my gender identity and my expression of it not as either this or that or something else, but just as what it is: me. They helped me craft the words around my identity and encouraged me to perform the public piece of being proud. The first time going out with members from my chosen family to a night out dancing in the city as myself was a powerful experience that can only be summarised as gender euphoria.
Finally, I could act and respond from a place of power, and that ill-fitting suit that I thought I had to get used to was ditched for a kaftan and the bold and bright accessories that I always longed to wear, and I was me.
This is the third year in a row that we have not been able to hold our annual Thanksgiving event. What I have missed more than anything is just being able to see The Acres family, en masse, working alongside each other, laughing and telling our stories, sharing our sense of who we are and where we have been. Of ending the day in front of a bonfire, with our bellies full and our glasses in hand while we progressively give thanks (as is the Canadian tradition).
So, in the absence of Buggery Acres Thanksgiving this year, I want to give thanks to my community -- my chosen family -- for supporting my journey in discovering who I can be to live more authentically.
I acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations as the traditional custodians of the land where Buggery Acres exists and no matter who may ever call this home, we are only the caretakers for this land for a brief moment of what has always been and forever will be Aboriginal land.
Looking for Lanny K
by Fiona Kelly McGregor
An extract from Fiona Kelly McGregor’s essay on friendship, liberation and the protean, ephemeral nature of Sydney’s queer dance party scene of the 90s and early 2000s.
It begins with a faint rolling tom. Enter some chords, the sounds metallic, elusive. Then comes a whisper:
The future’s dark, cold and full of sounds (uh-uh-uh-uh-uhuhuhuhuhuh), the future’s dark, cold and full of sounds…
It’s a chilling, seductive opening. There are no coherent vocals for almost forty minutes. The rhythm stays in the bass, gradually builds, then flings you off a bridge to a burst of a melody: a joyous, raunchy liberation. After about an hour, over a pounding kick drum, comes
Positive…Positive…Positive –
The ambivalent mot du jour, when so many of us were HIV or Hep C positive, struggling with that, but starting to see we would live, maybe even a long time. Then over Positive, a preacher invokes an infamous Baptist homophobic sermon…
Beware of dogs, beware of evil-doers…
Lanny is right. We were privileged. Often great culture blossoms on the cusp of oppression and liberation, like jazz at the turn of last century. Our community was mostly white but only recently decriminalised. We had the best health system in the world but were still dying of AIDS, estranged from our families, getting sacked, unable to hold hands in the street. Coming together to dance was a celebration, a lament, a political statement. Parties habitually gave part-profits to AIDS or other queer charities. Maybe tough guys don’t dance because, well, they don’t have to.
All of it, DJing, the gay scene, like rock’n’roll before, was male dominated. But Lanny was one of those men who liked us women coming through.
He recognised that the way we were shaking things up was good for him and his brethren. The Sodom boys in general loved the new, the daring and unusual, and that is what dykes like us brought to the gay scene. The implicit sexism of many of the Sodom boys becomes more obvious to me as time goes by, at the same time as the legacy of women’s contribution to alternative queer culture; ‘They’re old school,’ Julie says, diplomatically. To this day, attendance at the official Mardi Gras party would be around 95% cis gay men, 3% heterosexual women, 1% trans and 1% dyke. At alternative parties it would be more like 50-80% cis male. Put simply, you can’t be truly queer unless you’re a feminist.
With jazz’s aleatoric imperative, Lanny played off the cuff so there was no definitive version of a track. The mixes he made, often after a gig when home and hyped, are true snapshots. Shazam them now, you won’t get much. The deep sound he favoured often came from Germany. His library was full of white labels so it was hard to tell what he was playing but with popular artists like Green Velvet or Primal Scream you could hear how much was his work and how thin the same track sounded in other hands. Chris Liberator, UK techno svengali, could drive me off the floor with his laddish voiceovers and relentless banging; Lanny kept him funky, even funny. It boiled down to good editing. A DJ could go broke paying $20 for a 12” that contained only two minutes of worthwhile music. (Rent c. $150 pw, coffee $2, speed $50–60 gm. NB: smallest inflation on drugs.)
He didn’t just connect tracks end to end, he interwove them everywhere. He would use the cross fader for a warning staccato of drums – a few bars of percussion that you yearned for – then tease it out over a whole track so when it finally shot forth it was like lightning, igniting the whole floor. That favourite snippet might reappear deeper in the set or be its coda.
Hostility to techno ran deep in the Sydney gay scene. It was a mental block, because Detroit producer Derrick May was always popular yet so much of his music was techno. If I said that Lanny played techno, heads would shake, and so I would say instead deep house. I honestly didn’t know – I had no money to buy music, my education came from DJs’ mixtapes – nor did I care. I have always been a genre slut. Pop, in its tribalism, divides as much as joins us. In the punk scene you couldn’t like Jackson 5, any more than you could like AC/DC in the gay scene. Feminists were disallowed cock rock; fluoro kids Tom Waits. And you couldn’t admit anywhere – still can’t – that you think Nick Cave’s a ponce.
Lanny, Greg and Oberon took inspiration from leather bars in Amsterdam and Germany where the music was progressive. In the UK as well you could drink, fuck and dance to DJs in one venue. If you were a man, that is. They wanted to bring that hard, dirty feel to their hometown dancefloors but even the leatherfolk in Sydney favoured handbag house. It could be a national tendency to abjure darkness in cultural expression. ‘It’s a crime to be sad in Australia,’ Nick Cave once spat, and I have to admit I do like him sometimes. And the night I first heard Allkins weave AC/DC into his set at Sublime remains a top ten dancefloor moment.
Conservatism was an inevitable by-product of the advance in LGBTIQ rights. If you fight for the freedom to be whoever you want, some will inevitably choose neoliberal Christianity.
The flipside was an extraordinary efflorescence of alternative queer culture.
The performative aspect was unrivalled: you saw it in the Mardi Gras parade. Michael began a series of techno parties called Ffierce, and Filthy. Performance artist Groovii Biscuit, DJs Gemma and Jonny (Seymour Butz) began Klub Kooky, which still runs today, with Georgia Pea producing. Sex and Subculture, Jamie and Vanessa’s, Poke. Bad Dog, circus performer Yos Worth’s baby, the longest running party after Kooky, where I performed with my partner AñA. It’s impossible to name everybody. Most pertinently there were The Sodom Circus’s Homo Eclectus parties, where we also performed, as bizarrely art-directed as Satyricon. It was probably here that I heard Lanny at his zenith. He would grab you by the scruff, drag you to the dancefloor and keep you there till you wiped it with your arse.
Day and night there was good music on 2SER. I still have tapes from Tranceport. The tempo rises, Lanny’s mix keeping pace. The music is furious hair-raising voodoo fever. Think Duke Ellington’s crazy Charlestons, Elvin Jones’s polyrhythms, Paganini.
Like I said, you can’t write to it. Excuse me while I go and dance.
Fiona Kelly McGregor is an award-winning essayist, performer, critic, and novelist. ‘Looking for Lanny K’ and other essays are collected in Buried not dead.
Pictured: Fiona Kelly McGregor, AñA Wojak, Dr Sperm and Julie Callaghan at 'Marilynomania', a Sodom Circus private birthday party, circa 2000. Photograph: supplied.
The ethical labour of discussing HIV status
by Dean Murphy
Kirby Institute, UNSW, and Alfred Health, Central Clinical School, Monash University.
I start off this contribution by drawing attention to some of the utopian visions of the future that have been tempered somewhat in recent years.
While it was hoped that PrEP and TasP would lead to a withering away of HIV-status differences, studies have found that “expectations that the wider use of PrEP and TasP will dismantle or repair the ‘sero-divide’, reducing HIV stigma and the fear of sex with HIV-positive partners, may [still] be exaggerated or only partially realised” (Holt et al. 2018). As Kane Race (2020) also notes, “While undetectable status may eliminate the risk of transmission, it is not yet widely regarded […] as eliminating the risk of sexual rejection or sociosexual avoidance when it is disclosed to prospective hookups”.
I use the term ‘moral labour’ to draw attention to the work undertaken by people living with HIV in relation to discussing HIV status.
I came across the term in a research article covering very similar issues, i.e. the practices shaping HIV status discussions among young gay and bisexual men living with HIV in the United States (Dong et al. 2021). I therefore can’t claim to have invented the term, and in fact I have a preference for something like ethical labour, which would provide a more explicit link to discussions within the HIV field (Race 2003). I am attracted to the conceptualising of these practices and discussions as work, however, because it draws attention to the specific practices involved. It also raises the question of who benefits from this labour.
Our study is an ongoing qualitative project comprising in-depth interviews with people recently diagnosed with HIV (since 2016). It explores experiences of seroconversion, diagnosis, HIV treatments, clinical care, support, and sex and relationships. In our study, like in countless others, we found that experiences of rejection by potential sex partners based on HIV status were common. However, anticipated rejection was universal, meaning that it was a constant consideration or concern of participants. We also note that fear of rejection by potential sex and relationship partners is one of most important and immediate concerns of people when diagnosed with HIV.
Participants also had concerns about the control of personal information (i.e. HIV status) they shared with sex partners. They often noted that sharing this information is not necessarily confined to a specific exchange, encounter (or reading). Instead, information about positive HIV status – whether revealed in person or online – can extend across time, and be shared or seen by both potential future sex partners and previous partners.
People in our study therefore engaged in numerous strategies to manage responses, which is the labour referred to earlier. In short, this work includes: anticipating responses and expectations (in a general sense as well as on specific occasions); making decisions about the best time for such discussions; providing opportunities for rejection that were considered to minimise negative effects; and tailoring to the context and individual. Many participants also noted that delaying discussion of HIV status with a new partner would undermine the possibility of that ever developing into a relationship, because their partner might consider the delay to be deceptive (or participants themselves felt they were not being authentic).
Something else that’s become obvious over the past few years, and is also very much present in the accounts of the participants in our study, is the more widespread use of PrEP by HIV-negative participants in sexual cultures. In fact, among gay men PrEP has become the dominant prevention strategy in Australia.
I suggest however that PrEP’s dominance has had – or is having – other effects.
Most notably, PrEP seems to have now also so discursively overwhelmed the space of HIV status/prevention discussions, that the most common way for potential sex partners (usually on PrEP themselves) to initiate these discussions is to formulate questions like, “Are you on PrEP?” Participants recounted these questions to be so common that they described them as typical (i.e. recounting them in general ways rather than drawing on specific examples). What is striking is the way such questions assume (or privilege) an HIV-negative respondent, and require quite a degree of mental gymnastics for positive people to even begin to answer. It might even be possible to think about these encounters as micro-invalidations (a subset of microaggressions) (Berman et al. 2021).
I am therefore really interested in the strategies of resistance to expectations that participants used to operate within negotiations around sex. One of these strategies was to draw on the evidence related to undetectable viral load (and the impossibility of transmission to sexual partners, as outlined in the U=U messaging), as well as contemporary legal framings, to challenge the idea that PLHIV should reveal their HIV status in sexual settings (especially on hook-up apps).
Another very creative strategy was to experiment with different ways of introducing HIV status into discussions. For example, some participants described proactively asking potential partners about their use of PrEP and then challenging either explicitly or implicitly any discomfort they had about the idea of sex with positive partners by emphasising the logic of PrEP (i.e. to prevent HIV acquisition). As one participant recounted,
“I’m like, your profile says you’re on PrEP.” [“Oh, yeah, I am.”] “Well, you understand what PrEP is?”
Not revealing positive HIV status to (potential) sex partners can therefore be understood to be both a practical response to other risks associated with sex for PLHIV (i.e. exposure, judgement, and the possibility of rejection), and as active resistance to expectations of (potential) sex partners in sexual settings (and interface/design of hook-up apps). However, playing with the language, categories and logics of biomedicine, including biomedical prevention, offers some opportunities for creative experimentation and activism.
Based on the findings from our study, I offer three suggestions. The first is somewhat conventional, being a call for more research on the familiarity/belief/willingness nexus regarding U=U among non-positive people. However, I am specifically calling for a greater focus on attitudes towards PLHIV as sex partners, noting that in the last few years, surveys have tended to investigate the elements of the nexus above as if they are a cascade measuring only technical information rather than being a complex mix of beliefs, attitudes, and affects.
My other two suggestions relate to language. I believe we need to intervene in (or shape) the language used in sexual negotiations (for example to problematise the default question, “Are you on PrEP?”, by offering other possibilities). Finally, I question the appropriateness of the term ‘disclosure’ in relation to HIV when referring to discussions about HIV status between potential sexual partners.
Given ‘disclosure’ is so freighted with its legal history and context, I propose that researchers, practitioners, and policy makers move away from that language.
In an effort to comply with my own recommendation, I have tried to avoid the term here. It’s not always easy, but I think worth the effort at least.
Acknowledgements: Co-authors Nathanael Wells, Steven Philpot, Jeanne Ellard, Garrett Prestage. We thank the study participants – people recently diagnosed with HIV – for generously sharing their experiences.
REFERENCES
Berman, M., Eaton, L. A., Watson, R. J., Maksut, J. L., Rucinski, K. B., & Earnshaw, V. A. (2021). Perpetuated HIV Microaggressions: A Novel Scale to Measure Subtle Discrimination Against People Living With HIV. AIDS Educ Prev, 33(1), 1-15. doi:10.1521/aeap.2021.33.1.1
Dong, W., Muessig, K. E., Knudtson, K. A., Gilbertson, A., Rennie, S., Soni, K., & Lisa, B. H.-W. (2021). Moral practices shaping HIV disclosure among young gay and bisexual men living with HIV in the context of biomedical advance. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 23(12), 1641-1655. doi:10.1080/13691058.2020.1790039
Holt, M., Draper, B. L., Pedrana, A. E., Wilkinson, A. L., & Stoové, M. (2018). Comfort Relying on HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis and Treatment as Prevention for Condomless Sex: Results of an Online Survey of Australian Gay and Bisexual Men. AIDS and Behavior, 22(11), 3617–3626. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-018-2097-2
Race, K. (2020, Nov). Unimagining Transmissibility. Paper presented at Australasian HIV and Sexual Health Conference.
Race K. (2003). Revaluation of risk among gay men. AIDS education and prevention : official publication of the International Society for AIDS Education, 15(4), 369–381. https://doi.org/10.1521/aeap.15.5.369.23822
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"This piece is a tribute to Leigh Bowery and the lives that were lost during the AIDS pandemic. U=U is Undetectable = Untransmittable. It means that, People living with HIV today, when they are on effective medication with a suppressed viral load, they can’t pass on the virus to their loved ones or their sexual partners. I want to create the conversation around this."
For the last three decades textiles have been intertwined with HIV. The Memorial Quilt remains the most impactful visual reminder of the loss of life brought about by HIV. So in that vein, it seems fitting that textiles are part of our shared visual language asserting the new stage of the HIV pandemic. Drawing on the visual language of iconic Australian artist Leigh Bowery, Andrew Chan (otherwise known as @thecatwhoknits) presents an engaging visual work asserting the message of Undetectable = Untransmittable.
Despite the works defiant and boldly spoken message, it’s evocation of the memorial quilt and Leigh Bowery is a reminder of the foundations on which this message has been built; the activism, creativity and tragedy of the HIV era. Andrew’s work is a reminder of the struggle to bring U=U to a wider audience, and the struggle of the HIV positive community to escape the stigma and discrimination of the past. By bringing his work to Melbourne Fashion Week and as part of his exhibition Rebuilding Queerness, the piece brought its message to a new audience and sparked a new conversation for those who have not yet engaged with what has been known medical knowledge for over six years.
ISSN 1448-7764
Credits:
Cover photo: The Memorial Quilt. Garment by Andrew Chan (The Cat Who Knits) for Queer Voices, Melbourne Fashion Week Capsule Collection.