Soft Cunts and Salty Sirens: Finding a Space to Nurture Your Identity

Just around the corner from Ipswich train station is an intimate bar that serves as a gallery, workshop, and live music venue, as well as a reminder that intersectional, inclusive spaces can be found everywhere. I’d come to see a punk music show but discovered a beautiful expression of the joy of community. The walls […]

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Local Queer Musicians

Queerbait For those lucky enough to have seen Queerbait at last year’s Pride Ball (or when they opened for Bikini Kill, still not over that), you’d know Queerbait’s perfect harmony of driving drums, rhythmic bass and guitar, and commanding vocals. You can’t help but dance! Support their single ‘Clock’ on Bandcamp! Red Hill Red Hill’s […]

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The Art of Packing

If you’re a trans masc or a gender-nonconforming person, chances are you’ve heard of or even tried packing. For those unfamiliar with the term, packing is when someone adds a prosthetic penis to their crotch to create a bulge to achieve the look and feel of having a penis (FolxHealth). Transgender men aren’t the only […]

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Coming Out: A Memoir

My heart races, thumping a staccato rhythm through my chest. My palms slicken and sweat seeps through the fibres of my t-shirt. Mum and dad sit across the dining table from me. Our dirty plates sit in front of us almost cleared of the meat and three-veg that was mum’s specialty. I had barely tasted […]

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POEM: Passport X

Between F and M  And warnings that   Deviation  May betray my safety in certain countries,  I choose ‘other’,  Unspecified,  Undetermined.  I *am* other.  I am outside and both  And nothing all at once and  Fluctuating // deviating  From expectations:  From the ‘safe’ route.  X is who I am.   I am willing to forfeit my ease […]

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POEM: Eulogy of Old Carden

When I think of you, I think of the poem ‘Simplify Me When I’m Dead’ by Keith Douglas, specifically the lines, “Thus when in a year collapse particular memories, you may deduce, from the long pain I bore the opinions I held, who was my foe and what I left, even my appearance but incidents […]

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Ali’s Aerie (Queer Edition)

The primary subtractive colours of cyan, magenta, and yellow can be mixed to create all the colours of the rainbow. For our Queer Edition, I’m gifting you birdies proudly displaying these colours. Cyan – Superb Fairywren (Malurus cyaneus) A recently-published study, ‘Personality predicts song complexity in superb fairy-wrens’, reveals that superb fairywrens’ beautiful songs hold […]

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