Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
Those of us who write regular columns have little time for introspection. We are too busy getting up the next article. But we are frequently prompted, sometimes by our disappointed readers, to ask what we are up to. Every now and then our readers deserve a personal response.
My Friend Dahmer, based on the memoir by John Backderf about his teenage friendship with the soon-to-be killer, is a complex character study of which Dahmer's troubled home life, repressed homosexuality, abuse of alcohol, and experiences of bullying and social alienation are motley features rather than defining characteristics.
No LGBT+ person can be certain how someone else is going to react. When I came out, I felt like I was risking my relationships. Whenever someone who didn't know about my sexuality told me they loved or cared for me, I mentally added a 'but': 'But that might not be true after I tell you.'
One of the challenges that faces any society is how boys will become men. In many societies the passage is mapped and enacted through ritual initiations or through military training. It also periodically causes great anxiety. Two recent books encourage reflection on different aspects of the passage from boys to men.
The #MeToo movement, exposing harassment and abuse through personal stories, was no surprise to me. I couldn't be less surprised at the scale and depth of subjugation women still experience. But we must also recognise that women's disadvantage is a continuum where sexism meets ageism.
For gay teens and those who known them, the film is vitally affirming. But there's baggage that comes with its treatment of these themes that undercuts its efforts to engage the experience of alternative sexual orientation. Simon may be gay, but he is also explicitly a privileged white man.
When Cynthia Nixon announced she was running for governor of New York the excitement was instantaneous. Not because she was a woman, as there have been no female governors of the state, nor because she once played Miranda on Sex and the City, but because she spoke in a way that captured leftie hearts the world over.
Nur Warsame hopes to open a gay-friendly mosque, quite a feat, in a country where mosque applications often face fierce resistance from non-Muslim locals. Gay Muslims are mostly rejected by the Muslim community for being gay and stigmatised by the wider community for being Muslim. Many cannot reconcile the two identities.
2017 has seen us stirring a large pot of sticky issues with our 14-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son. Old-school parenting used to play nice, with no discussion of sexuality, religion or politics. While recognising the need to speak appropriately to the ages and maturity of our kids, I disagree with that convention.
Governments can't legislate against hatred and intolerance. A friend stated on Facebook that 'No law can change human biology. No law can make natural what is unnatural.' Such rhetoric is a reminder that the realm of human rights is still a bloody battlefield in which certain groups continue to proclaim superiority over others.
During the month of Muharram, the No message was being handed out at mosques and spoken from the pulpits. Yet many Muslims voted Yes not because we wanted to reinvent the Islamic idea of marriage, but because the scriptures teach that we should stand up for justice even if it goes against our families and ourselves.
'Throughout this process I don't know how many times I've broken down crying, together with my partner.' ChatterSquare catches up with Benjamin Oh - co-chair of Equal Voices, a national LGBTI-affirming ecumenical organisation - as the marriage law postal survey in Australia closes.