AustLit

'In his 2006 thesis, “‘Staying Bush’ – A Study of Gay Men Living in Rural Areas”, author Edward Green described his subject as the “largely hidden and untold story of gay men living in rural areas”. That was a pivotal year for gay men living in the bush, with Australian television broadcasters platforming two of their stories. In the space of one 12-month period, this cohort went from “hidden and untold” to prime time. From as early as 1989, rural politician Bob Katter had been declaring that he would “walk to Bourke backwards if the poof population of North Queensland is any more than 0.001 per cent”. Analysing media and popular culture, this article explores the visibility and portrayal of rural gay men in Australia prior to and after 2006. In spite of Katter’s minuscule population estimates, the rural gay cohort continues to defy assumptions.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay argues that we need ways to read unexpressed queer desire and the absence of sex in writing by gay authors that don’t fall back on the trope of the closet. It makes this argument through pairing Sumner Locke Elliott’s 1948 play Rusty Bugles with his 1990 ‘coming out’ novel Fairyland, two texts that draw upon Elliott’s time at an ordinance depot during the Second World War. Elliott’s work has often been read as out of step with the politics of gay liberation. However I will argue that both these texts reflect upon the queer potential of not having sex. In Elliott’s writings about the Second World War the structured sexual abstinence of the ordinance depot provides his protagonists with an escape from the burden of homosexual identity in the twentieth century and allows for new modes of queer intimacy and exchange.' (Publication abstract)

'Like many mid-century authors, Sumner Locke-Elliott fled Australia for more welcoming shores. From his first novel Careful He Might Hear You (1963), Locke-Elliott laid the foundations for a fictional self-authorship that suffused his writing with biographic detail and themes of origin, place and time. Despite his long absence from Australia and his naturalisation as an American citizen, his final novel and fictional coming out in Fairyland (1990) returns readers to the homophobic Sydney of his childhood. This blurring of biographic and fictional detail within the representational space of childhood creates an embodied literary network that connects Australia of the 1930s & 1940s and New York of the 1980s & 1990s, merging literary corpus and authorial life. Taking up this sense of presence, absence and connection, I argue that Locke-Elliot’s representation of childhood is a nostalgic point of interface that generatively refigures his oeuvre as an embodied queer and transnational literary network.' (Publication abstract)