101 Notes on the LA Tenants Union
1. First of all, there is no housing crisis. 2. Housing is not in crisis. 3. Housing needs no trauma counselors. 4. Housing needs no lawyers. Housing needs no comrades or friends. Housing needs no representatives. Housing needs no organizers. 5. When we call this crisis a housing crisis, it benefits the people who design…
A highly opinionated taxonomy of librarianship
To think radically is to get to the root (radix) of something. Six years ago Erin Jonaitis made a proposal on Twitter that I still think about regularly: “If knowledge is power, then a key part of professional ethics for info professionals should be: Who are you empowering?” In some ways, it’s the only question in librarianship…
Against realism
Dystopia does not require much imagination; as I have said elsewhere, it already has a postcode. It is Nauru, Manus Island and Don Dale. It is deaths in custody. It is the NT Intervention. It is family violence, defunded shelters, no escape. It is punitive welfare systems and robo-debt (all debt). It is feudalism in…
Beyond Buggery
Beyond Buggery: Digging Up Stories of Sex Between Men on the Victorian Goldfields. An exploration of the language used for queer acts in colonial era newspapers, including many stories from the Victorian gold rush era.
How can we lower Ballarat’s suicide toll?
Content note: suicide. There’s a Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System going on at present. Yesterday, I spoke to the Ballarat Courier about statistics that show high rates of suicide in Ballarat, especially among men. Ballarat’s Alex Bayley, who identifies as non-binary, also believes that communication could be an issue, saying: “When I see…
“The Gay Lothario of Wagga Wagga”
I was following a trail from an alleged diamond thief caught promenading in drag around Melbourne’s Exhibition Building, to a well-known gang of queer larrikins in Sydney, when somehow I wound up in Wagga Wagga. This story seemed too good not to share, so here’s an article from the Toowoomba Chronicle and Queensland Advertiser, circa 1871.
“It is not possible to achieve justice in a vacuum.”
If June is Pride Month, July is Wrath Month. Here’s what I’ve been reading. Three decades later, despite some genuine efforts to increase diversity, especially in progressive movement circles, exclusivity and elitism still divide us. We have won rights and achieved recognition that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago, but many of us continue…
Disgusting, degrading and hateful: we need to stop the online abuse
Content note: transphobic abuse Today the Courier posted a followup editorial, after the article in which I spoke about transgender rights received hateful comments on the newspaper’s Facebook page. Mx Bayley had spoken with The Courier about the proposed changes to the way the gender diverse, transgender and intersex community in Victoria may soon be able to…
‘The more legal recognition we get, the safer we are’: proposed changes welcomed by gender diverse community
‘The more legal recognition we get, the safer we are’: proposed changes welcomed by gender diverse community Gender diverse, trans and intersex Victorians who wish to alter the sex listed on their birth certificates will soon be able to do so without surgery, if the state government votes in favour of amending an out-of-date legal…
All the queer commune feels…
I was wrong about what it meant to build queer community when I was younger. I was so obsessed with the idea of unconditional love as a moral litmus test, I forgot about the practice of actually building community, of showing up every day even when it doesn’t come from the heart. It’s a less…
New resource pages
My favourite resources and links on a various topics, from independent scholarship to focus and productivity for the ADHD mind.
Support my work on Patreon
If you appreciated the Ballarat queer history display and tour, you’ll be pleased to know I’m doing more work on this subject! I’ve got a few things in the works, ranging from a blog post about how to do colonial-era queer history research in Trove, to digging deeper into Chinese-Australian queer history during the Gold…
Ballarat’s queer history: two recent projects
Two queer history projects presented as part of Ballarat Heritage weekend: a visual display on the theme of “We Have Always Been Here”, and a walking tour around central Ballarat covering the town’s queer past during the gold rush era.
Autodidacts Anonymous
My name is Alex, and I’m an autodidact. (“Hi, Alex!”) I spent the summer break setting goals for my side-project(s), as I think of this work I’m doing: the writing, the educating, the community building, and whatever comes along with it. It turns out that if you want to write the sort of things I…
Here I am.
The only thing more boring than blogging about how you haven’t blogged lately is blogging about how boring it is. And yet here I am. I’ve had a rough few years. Very rough. Finally, in the back half of 2018, it started to turn around. Without the oppressive weight of anxiety and depression I managed…
