'Victoria’s sex industry is about to undergo a major transformation with the state government vowing to introduce legislation to decriminalise sex work by the end of 2021. Sex worker activists have welcomed the move towards decriminalisation – as is the case in New South Wales (since 1995), Aotearoa New Zealand (2003) and the Northern Territory (2019) – as a crucial step in removing the stigma attached to sex work, and ensuring workers have the same human rights as people in other industries. It is a long-awaited departure from the current status of legalisation, which has created a two-tiered system whereby a select few brothels are regulated and licensed, while the majority of workers are forced to operate outside the law and without legal protection.' (Introduction)

'The late twentieth century witnessed significant transformations in the social lives and political statuses of gay men and lesbians. From the late 1960s, the international gay and lesbian liberation movements propelled discussions about sex and sexuality into the public arena as individuals demonstrated against discriminatory legislation and police harassment, and declared pride in their sexualities. It was during this period that 21-year-old Dennis Altman—who had recently left Hobart for New York as a ‘shy and naïve graduate student’ (p. 3)—became an ‘accidental activist’ by writing about the burgeoning gay liberation movement.' (Introduction)

'This article considers the significance of gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV or AIDS that were published in the gay press across the 1980s. Editors utilised individuals’ accounts of living with the illness to challenge mainstream media representations of gay men’s physical and emotional demise in the “final stages” of the debilitating illness. Such accounts conveyed the message that it was possible to resume one’s life after receiving a positive diagnosis. Gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV or AIDS evolved from anonymous anecdotes to articles accompanied by the narrator’s full name and photograph by the end of the decade. This shift is attributed to Australia’s Third National AIDS Conference in 1988, whereby people with HIV and AIDS publicly disclosed their positive statuses. This article locates gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV in a broader transnational shift towards the visibility of people with HIV and AIDS that was underway at that time.' (Publication abstract)