In the late 1970s, queer parents increasingly fought to maintain custody of their children from different-sex relationships. These mothers and fathers were responding in part to the gay liberation movement, which inspired them to come out and demand their rights. Also important was that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, which eliminated what had been an all-but-impenetrable barrier to custody. Courts were nevertheless reluctant to grant these petitions, fearing that the children would learn to be gay or lesbian from the adults in their lives. In response to these court cases, social scientists developed research studies that concluded parental homosexuality had no effect on the future sexual orientation of children. Based on that work, family courts around the country granted custody to lesbian mothers and gay fathers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, creating the first wave of visible queer-headed families.

This chapter discusses how writing emerging out of Gay Liberation in the 1970s offered an alternative to the masculine heteronormativity that dominated the Australian literary tradition. Emphasised that the personal was political, it foregrounded private sensuality, an exploration of the everyday, and a critique of gay discrimination. The chapter traces the development of a diversifying community in the 1980s through writing collectives, anthologies, and journals. A broadening of the spectrum of LGBTQ+ poetry in the 1990s and 2000s was informed by queer understandings of sexuality. It saw lesbian writers test the limits of lyrical poetry and an era of mainstream popularity, as exemplified in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. The chapter considers how LGBTQ+ poets of colour have critiqued ideas of national belonging and white subjecthood. It then discusses the exploration of embodiment, including the turn to autotheory by contemporary trans and genderqueer writers, resistance of ableist discourses, and the navigation of illness, such as AIDS, mental illness, and chronic pain.

This chapter explores those transformations in intimate lives that have been collectively shorthanded with the term “sexual revolution.” Whether thought of as a gradually evolving process spanning the 1950s to the 1990s or rather understood as referring to the briefer era of heightened incitement and excitement around sex that reached its heyday in the 1960s-1970s, the story of sexual developments in the second half of the twentieth century has long been written in a linear, teleological fashion. Scholars emphasize the rise of reproductive freedom, women”s equality, rights for sexual minorities, and a more general attitude of sex-positivism. However, by reconceiving the story of the sexual revolution as a global one, inextricable from tectonic geopolitical shifts in both East-West and North-South relations – from the Cold War to decolonization and development projects and obsession with the purported dangers of “overpopulation” in the global South, and from the eventual collapse of Communism to the rise of a neoliberal economic order – this chapter challenges the “liberalization paradigm” and instead explores the sexual revolution as a multi-form, multi-sited, but also profoundly ambivalent process, met with recurrent backlashes as well as marred by its own intrinsic complexities.

Drawing on examples from real life as well as fictional representations in literature, cinema, theatre, television and radio, this chapter interrogates the relationship of queerness to the British nation from the Great War to the present. Beginning with Rose Allatini’s 1918 novel Despised and Rejected, the first part documents how and why queers were framed as a suspect minority, a danger to the nation. The second part largely draws on the deliberations of the Wolfenden Committee in the 1950s in explaining why a shift towards a limited tolerance for discreet, respectable, ‘genuine’ homosexuals began to take place. The final part traces the proliferation of queer-themed representations in recent decades alongside the rise of gay liberation and the battle over gay civil liberties. It concludes that queers in Britain have made undeniable progress, but at the cost of co-option for a homonational consensus.