Gay and Lesbian Writing and Publishing in Australia, 1961-2001

T HE first Australian gay and lesbian writing anthology, Edge City on Two Different Plans: A Collection of Lesbian and Gay Writing from Australia, was published in 1983. In the Foreword to that volume, Dennis Altman identified gay and lesbian writing as ‘literature that quite consciously seeks to explore the experience of being homosexual’ (12–13). He pointed to the ways in which ‘the development of a gay community extensive enough to support its own writers’ had been much slower in Australia than (by implication) the United States, and suggested that this was due to the smallness of the population, the closetedness of writers, and the ‘ideological rigidity of the gay movement’. Altman argued against the view that the lack of Australian writing was due to homophobia in Australian publishing, but accepted that a perception this was the case might inhibit would-be writers. By the early nineties, however, community commentators – writers, reviewers, editors, publishers, booksellers – began to speak of an emerging ‘boom’ in gay and lesbian writing and publishing in Australia. Though limited in extent, the discussion was vigorous, and sometimes tendentious. Much of the discussion focussed on novels and anthologies, and credited gay and women’s movement small and independent presses as the primary creators of gay, lesbian and female readerships and markets. It minimised both the significance of non-fictional prose in the creation of gay, lesbian and crossover readerships, and the role of mainstream publishing. Mainstream literary