AustLit

'Since Multicultural queer: Australian narratives (1999) edited by Peter Jackson and Gerard Sullivan, the book Living and Loving in Diversity: An Anthology of Australian Multicultural Queer Adventures. is Australia’s most significant anthology on and by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people from multicultural-multifaith (MCMF) backgrounds. With essays, commentaries, and narrative prose and poetry, this anthology straddles different genres and cultural spaces. It is a compendium of multifarious stories that speak to and seek to reckon with experiences of living in (multicultural) Australia as an ethnically, culturally or religiously diverse LGBTIQ person. At its core, it is a repository of memories and recollections, a composite of narratives that describe the challenges and triumphs, and joys and pain of lives lived on the boundaries of belonging and not-belonging; this is a book that charts how the boundaries and parameters of MCMF, ‘mainstream’ Australian, and queer social, cultural and political paradigms – and the values and conflicts that define these paradigms – have shaped the lives of LGBTIQ MCMF individuals. In a sense, this is a confessional compendium; disclosure and revelation serve to intimately narrate each author’s life history to the reader. Each of the authors demonstrates an invigoratingly honest approach to telling their stories.' (Introduction)