Bent Street 3. Tiffany Jones

      INTRODUCTION

      TIFFANY JONES

      Welcome back to Bent Street, a twisted tapestry of our time. In 2019 we have weavers well-known and new, spooling glittering gossamers into our web. We maintain a strong loom of redolent writers, poignant poets, enraged essayists and unflinching photographers. Nevertheless, for the first time we are now interlaced with gallant graphic novelists, defiant digital artists, and inspiring installation-artists. Bent Street 3 stays focussed on its role as an ‘annual’ publication: featuring works from LGBTIQA+ and allied creators in 2019, themes arising from 2019, and the view backwards and forwards as at 2019.

      Three thicker threads wend their way through the thinner filaments of this woven work. The first thread woven through our tapestry belongs to Australia’s First Nations peoples: the strengthening of public displays of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTIQA+ pride and visibility was a major 2019 theme. From Koori Gras in February (see Jamie James’ cover photo of Nova Gina, and Black Nulla Koori Gras Carriageworks photo essay); to Peter Waples-Crowe’s Koorie Heritage Trust art exploring Ngarigo and queer identity showing in Melbourne in May. Indigenous Queer Studies academic, Andrew Farrell, a Wodi Wodi descendant from Jerrinja Aboriginal community on the South Coast of NSW, describes their development of world-first Aboriginal Queer University Units. Bee Cruse, born and bred on Cabrogal country (a clan within the Darug nation), whose family comes from the Gomeroi, Wiradjuri and Monaroo-Yuin peoples of NSW) describes a first experience of Koori Gras which brought deeper connections to family. Mandy Henningham discusses complications to Queer Indigenous research.

      The second thread belongs to times of crisis: LGBTIQA+ people and our allies respond to ruination of our planet in the climate crisis and other types of crises. Michelle Bishop, a Gamilaroi woman from Western New South Wales (NSW) living on Dharawal Country south of Sydney, shares a poem about the devastatingly uncivilised impacts of so-called ‘civilisation’. Xavier, a Black Australian university student not yet out to family and inspired by the Extinction Rebellion climate protection movement, shares a triptych of poems ‘Colour’s end’ discussing the political and existential threats to the environment, queerness and people of colour. Jason Li writes of the crisis in Hong Kong, and how LGBTIQA+ people shape resistance cultures. Ayman Kaake’s refugee-inspired photo-stories explore travelling by boat to Australia when one’s own home is untenable. Lionel Wright watches his Mexican-American boyfriend’s family crisis unfold under Trump Administration immigration clamp-downs. Stephanie Amir discusses feeling on the fringes whilst navigating the discovery of disabilities. The Year in Queer includes Randy Rainbow’s cabaret covers and Toddrick Hall’s power pop as hyper-queer snap-backs to various crises.

      A third strand is the battle for religious accommodation of LGBTIQA+ people and women, as the line between freedom of religion and discrimination against LGBTIQA+ people was ferociously debated this year. Academics including Timothy Jones and Jennifer Power discuss the best pathways forward around Victorian and broader moves to ban LGBT conversion therapies. Clare Monagle offers a personal account of the fallout from the fall of Cardinal Pell in ‘The Church Herself’. Geoff Allshorn discusses gay and atheist liberations. Jocelyn Deane’s ‘Trading Saints’ triptych explores devotions, rituals and sacrifices. Young artist Hannah Buttsworth shares three artworks featured in the Art Express collection ‘Renascence’; representing a growing awareness of identity while within a condemning religious environment and the catharsis of being oneself.

      Bent Street 3 has many other cords curving through it from gender to romance. Wrap yourself in its fabric as a source of cover in battles, comfort in crisis, and the warmth of community …

      Tiffany Jones—Editor

      1 November 2019

      OUTSIDER. PETER WAPLES-CROWE

      InsideOUT

      PETER WAPLES-CROWE

      Why am I constantly on the outside? I’m so familiar with that position that it’s my go to, my stable, the way I see the world. I’m on the outside of the queer community because of my Ngarigo identity and I’m on the outside of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community because I’m queer. The Elders, from my experience, really hate the word Queer, because it has so many negative connotations for older people; but I’m really comfortable calling myself a queer Koori. I used to say gay but maybe gay is too soft or something. My thinking is queer and broader than just gay.

      I’m also a Ngarigo person, not a Ngarigo man, that’s all way too binary I feel now, and I need to be opening space up in the Community for trans- people and non-binary mob. We have a pretty rigid tradition of Men’s Business and Women’s Business and we need to make room. Cultures change and shift with time, they are not static things and maybe we need some new thinking around old modes of culture to create more space for the new.

      InsideOUT is the name of a short documentary and the name of a solo art show that ran in May 2019 at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne, and some of my prints were displayed at the Original BOX show at Boomalli Art Gallery for the Mardi Gras in Sydney.

      InsideOUT is the perfect title for me and really sums up my life in 2019. My art is from my inside, my livingness; but I’m very queer out and proud. I was adopted into a white family at birth and my journey back to my Ngarigo was from the outside to coming IN to the Community. That journey was made harder because I was queer, and it was already very tough and distressing at times. I thought it would be some linkup fantasy but no, it took me close to 25 years to find my connections in a real way and to settle my spirit. I was too busy being a queen really for the first part of my life in the AIDS era, which was enough for anyone to deal with. My Aboriginal journey came later and I’m so glad I survived both experiences and am strong and deadly today. I have my ancestors with me that’s for sure. I’m so bloody lucky for that, but I do try to keep them close these days.

      I’m known as Ngurran in my tribe which is the emu. And it a very apt animal for me because it bends the gender roles, with the male emu sitting on the eggs and raising the chicks. My Uncle gave me this name after he had a vision of an Emu sitting on a nest of eggs and carved on the eggs were pictures of Dingos. I think I really wanted the dingo as my name originally and was disappointed that I got the emu because I have painted mirrigang (wild dogs) all my life really and feel a close spiritual connection to all wild dogs. The dingo has come into focus in my art in recent years because I love using symbols, and to me the dingo is a marginalised native animal that in most parts of Australia is not protected, so it’s become a queer person emblem. I’m a queer native and not afforded all the same rights as the rest of the natives. Like the dingo I am seen, by some,

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