Graham Willett & Yorick Small - Intimacy, Violence and Activism

In this, the latest in the Gay and Lesbian Perspectives series, researchers explore the rich history or queer Australasia, uncovering photographic records of small-town male intimacy, cases of police entrapment, the mysterious suicide pact of Charles Marks and Edward Feely, ASIO attempts to grapple with ‘persons with serious character defects’ and previously unexamined political and culture expressions of gay/lesbian/queer activism over the last four decades.

The results is an original and important contribution to understanding a history that is all too often shrouded in secrecy.

Graham Willett is a historian of Australia’s gay and lesbian past. He is the author of Living Out Loud, a history of the movement, and co-editor of, and a major contributor to, Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne. He is a long-time committee member of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

Yorick Smaal is a historian and a Research Fellow based at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security at Griffith University. He has published on numerous aspects of homosexuality in Australian. York is currently working on his first book, Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific.