Category: Opinion
Award-winning choreographer Oli Mathiesen explores queer archetypes, Māori identity and what happens when culture is appropriated by the politics it once resisted I haven’t always been intrigued by the Village People. In fact, their hyper-masculine personas, cheap choreography and recent political alignment have done everything to deter me. Yet the culturally irrelevant group, whose timeless […]
Jess Lewthwaite is trying to embrace reclamation, but some wounds take time to heal. I remember the first time someone called me a dyke. I was on the school bus, which I always hated. The school bus was where a lot of my bullying happened because you are trapped there, and all the kids were […]
Jessie Lewthwaite reflects on her lesbian rugby coach and why today’s transgender bathroom debate echoes a longer history of LGBTQ+ suspicion and exclusion. My high school girls’ rugby team was very bad at the sport. We were from a poor school; most of our players had to drive over an hour to get to practice, and […]
Jessie Lewthwaite wants a drink, as she reflects on NZ’s history of lesbian watering holes and why we still need them It’s 2010, and a 21-year-old Jessie had just graduated from university as a high school teacher. Having grown up in central Queensland and been to uni in north Queensland, my first priority was to get the fuck out of Queensland. With […]
Jessie Lewthwaite welcomes baby gays to the world of queer women’s dating and offers some tips on behaviours to leave in the straight world I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been out in a queer space and run into a baby gay who is very new to this whole queer thing. Whether she is bisexual in […]
If NZ First’s bill passes into law, InsideOUT Kōaro’s CEO, Judy O’Brien, believes it is not only rainbow New Zealanders who will be hurt by it, but all of us Vibrant, resilient rainbow rangatahi packed into the iconic queer youth balls hosted across Aotearoa this summer. The Wellington event, a collaboration between Wellington Pride, Massey […]
For most of his life, Bill Costello lived behind what he calls a mask. Born and raised in Whanganui, Bill knew he was gay as a teenager, but the world around him made that truth feel dangerous. When he was young, his mother noticed how close he and a male friend were becoming and threatened […]
From Sally Ride to Billie Jean King, Jessie Lewthwaite celebrates the queer women whose brilliance, courage, and innovation changed history on Earth and beyond Last month, the world held its breath as the astronauts of the Artemis mission safely returned to Earth. Seeing such an impressive feat of science in a world that, at the moment, seems to […]