'The author puts forward the idea that identities-even those that are understood as belonging to a "post-gay" era in which subjectivity is less rigidly defined in binary and oppositional terms-scaffold upon the lives and experiences of the past, in both political and poetic ways. Whenever I leave my home in coastal Victoria to visit Melbourne I encounter the city as an uncanny space: it is both familiar and alien to me, rich with memories of people and events, of sex and love and disappointment, of study and work, of endless coffees and conversations, bars and clubs, buildings which have been demolished or repurposed, trams that are now almost silent... Whoever I was with, whoever- mates, my mum, a whole fucking form of spotty-faced teenagers- whoever I was with I had to fool, linger at that newsstand snaking down the flank of Spencer Street Station, where some fella, some rat-haired fella, sold me a copy of OutRage: stuffed it in a paper bag, like he was posting my hard-on home. For me, the magazine I bought regularly from that newsstand at Spencer Street Station signalled a kind of gay habitus-a whole world of homosexuality-that was layered on and over the city, a space where anything might-could-would-happen.' (Publication abstract)
