Viewing place: Australian queer screen audiences born in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This article investigates how viewers born in the 1970s and 1980s recall Australian film and television LGBTQ+ themes, characters and narratives they viewed while they were growing up. Aspects of place and space were centred in these accounts, from memories of watching a shared television in the domestic family setting to the physical artefact of the video tape. Participants emphasised the theme of mobility toward the city and a rural/urban distinction in the film and television they discussed, and the role of city contexts in providing better access to screen media that represented LGBTQ+ lives – for example, through access to independent cinemas. These memorial accounts were considered formative and often provided the framework by which participants perceive and navigate everyday life as members of minority communities. At the same time, these place-bound accounts of encounters with LGBTQ+ screen texts expressed a complex attachment to domestic spaces, tangible objects and narratives of mobility.

Introduction

LGBTQ+ characters, narratives and themes in screen texts have long been understood as significant for self-identification (Lipton, 2008; Padva, 2004) and the formation of a sense of shared culture for gender and sexually-diverse subjects, who are often perceived as growing up without knowing other LGBTQ+ people (Horvat, 2021). However, there is still only limited empirical research on the experiences of gender- and sexually-diverse audiences (McKinnon, 2016; Cover and Dau, 2021), and the broader social significance of LGBTQ+ screen representation in Australia over time. This article explores the recollections of 21 gender- and sexually-diverse people born in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to the place and spatial dimensions of accessing and engaging with Australian LGBTQ+ screen content while growing up.

The availability of screen content during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s as described by our participants was one of increasing LGBTQ+ on-screen representation, particularly in mass-circulation film and television in Australia. However, for many people growing up in those decades, increased representation was not always something to celebrate but involved negotiating the material spaces of viewing, which occasionally involved the risks associated with watching LGBTQ+ characters, themes and stories as social practices with families or in public cinemas (McKinnon, 2016) contrasted with the more solitary but arguably ‘safer’ practices of reading LGBTQ+ books and magazines. Physical spaces of media engagement such as the domestic living room, video shops and cinemas were all important contexts for understanding how LGBTQ+ film and television was experienced and for how it played a role in constituting gender- and sexually-diverse subjectivities. Likewise, concepts of place marked by rural/urban divides and mobility towards the city were significant in participants’ accounts.

We begin with a brief summary of the AusQueerScreen study and its key findings, before analysing interviewee responses in each of the three themes: (1) the articulation of identity and viewing practices in the context of memorial accounts as future-oriented rather than nostalgic; (2) the role of domestic spaces and the tangibility of the VHS format in mediating participants’ viewing experiences; and (3) the significance of independent cinema spaces and an associated emphasis on the rural/urban distinction and mobility towards the city. While contemporary young people experience media engagement, viewing practices, growing up LGBTQ+ and frameworks of place in markedly different ways in the digital era, the experiences of our study participants are important not because they reveal cultural formations of past generations but because they play a constitutive role in the lives of this age-group as they navigate their lifecourse, and thereby inform on the experiences of a discrete social generation.

The AusQueerScreen Study

Australian screen creative production has a rich history of representing sexual and gender diversity on-screen with greater than 19 mass-circulation films since 1993. Wikipedia lists 34 Australian films since 1970 with substantial LGBTQ+ content (approximately one every 18 months, on average), and this list is not exhaustive. Australian television series that represent LGBTQ+ characters and stories have been broadcast with considerable popularity since the 1970s and 1980s, with at least 14 ongoing characters or storylines on Australian-made television during the 1990s (Monaghan, 2016). Fictional stories representing gender- and sexually-diverse subjects, depicting identity struggles and minority health outcomes, constitute a major and ongoing part of Australian film and television production, as has been noted in regard to other national and regional screen industries (Vanlee et al., 2018; Vanlee, 2019; O’Brien and Kerrigan, 2020).

The AusQueerScreen study investigated LGBTQ+ characters, themes and narratives in Australian film and television from 1990–present, and their impact on health, identity and culture. The study provided one of the first comprehensive accounts of Australian media production’s contribution to gender and sexual minority representation, incorporating archival research and in-depth one-on-one interviews with 20 film and television stakeholders, and 38 audience members (aged 18–50) representing a broad range of gender and sexual identities. Although the dominant mode of research in queer screen studies is interpretive readings of film texts (Cover and Dau, 2021), this is a cultural studies investigation that sought instead to understand the roles that LGBTQ+ representation, and audience engagement practices play in informing wider Australian culture about gender and sexual diversity, changing social attitudes, and the function of screen entertainment in constituting minority identity.

This article analyses audience members’ discussions of their memories of encountering and engaging with LGBTQ+ on-screen representation while growing up. The study interviewed 38 Australians born between 1970 and 2000, and this paper concentrates on the 21 participants born in the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of LGBTQ+ history, media representation, education and policy, this period was pivotal for a number of reasons: firstly, mass-circulation ‘mainstream’ film and television media were beginning to represent lesbian and gay characters, albeit often problematically and stereotypically (Cover, 2000). Secondly, people coming of age in that period had generally become sexually active after the advent of HIV and thereby had access to knowledge about its transmission, significance to sexual identity practices and its place in the wider discourse of alternative sexualities (Hillier et al., 2010); thirdly, decriminalisation of consenting same-sex sexual acts was completed in all parts of Australia during this period, reflecting the growth of a liberal-tolerance framework (Altman, 2013). Fourthly, this was the period in which LGBTQ+ support was professionalised, shifting from informal social groups to practices grounded in healthcare (Rasmussen et al., 2020). Finally, this period pre-dates the introduction of Web 2.0 internet, marked by broadband access to video, social media and discreetly accessible resources, information and texts on LGBTQ+ life, health and politics. Only two participants born in the 1980s mentioned accessing online sites or forums, or using early blogging platforms during their adolescence, whereas participants born from the 1990s onwards often discussed their experience of film and television in the context of access to streaming services, social media and digital cultures more broadly. Conversely, although some participants also mentioned other mediums with LGBTQ+ themes, narratives and stories such as books, magazines, zines, street press, radio and music, most accounts suggested that these were significantly less influential and formative than screen entertainment for participants’ reflections on LGBTQ+ identity, place and space. We theorise that this may be due to the spatiality of the medium itself as a visual one depicting LGBTQ+ lives in the filmic and pictorial settings of geographic space.

Interviewees were recruited via online advertising, and snowball sampling via participants’ peer networks. The sample represented a diverse range of sexualities and gender identities, however, was limited insofar as the majority were tertiary educated. Participants were interviewed in Australian cities (Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide), although about one-quarter had grown up in rural and regional towns. Participants took part in semi-structured interviews in person or via the Zoom video meeting platform, averaging about 1 hour in duration. They were asked about their memories of LGBTQ+ characters, themes and narratives in Australian film and television while they were growing up. Although memorial accounts are, of course, narrativised in the context of conversation and available discourses, they are recognised as foregrounding the non-linear and gradual formation of identity as reflective and subjective (Horley and Clarke, 2016). Memorial accounts in this study are apprehended principally in the context of objects, places and spaces in which screen culture operates as nodes of recognition of identity formation. Participants were also asked about their perception of the importance of LGBTQ+ visibility onscreen, examples of ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ representations, and comparisons to any international LGBTQ+ content they engaged with while growing up. Participants were encouraged to discuss how they watched film and television, with whom and whether it was discussed, and about other media they consumed during this time. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, then segmented and analysed using NVivo software, using a thematic approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

LGBTQ+ screen audiences, memory and identity

Recent scholarship on LGBTQ+ audiences has utilised memory as a central framework for understanding the relationship between screen representation and LGBTQ+ identities and cultures (Horvat 2021) and focused on the way sexually-diverse people reflect on their early experiences of LGBTQ+ screen texts (McKinnon 2016). The relationship of LGBTQ+ communities to screen culture is often understood as unique and significant because gender- and sexually-diverse people unable to depend on familial lineage for shared memory in the same way that other minorities might (Horvat, 2021). Horvat draws on the utopian queer theory of Muñoz, who wrote of the ‘world-making potentialities’ of ‘our remembrances and their ritualised tellings’ (cited in Horvat, 2021: 12) and its parallels with recent memory scholarship, which understands memory as ‘temporally unstable’ (Horvat, 2021: 12), reaching into the future as much as recalling the past. For Horvat (2021), queer screen memory is valuable for what it can reveal about how the LGBTQ+ community understands itself and is remembered by others in the present.

At the same time, memory is central to the reflective framework by which minority gender and sexual identities are articulated in the present, lending an identity consistency by recalling the past as ‘always having been’ a queer past, including particularly a queer childhood (Sedgwick, 1993: 42). Often this involves a form of painful nostalgia in which a subject refers to an awareness of their own difference or marginalisation without having necessarily had access to the cultural logic, symbolic language or terminology to understand and describe that difference as a matter of gender or sexual identity (Probyn, 1996). Typically, memorial accounts of a gender- or sexually-diverse childhood involve three core tropes: firstly, a reaction to the unpalatability of gendered scripts utilised in education, media and family settings (Walsh-Childers and Brown, 1993); secondly, an ‘encounter’ with the discourses of gender and sexual diversity that made available a cultural logic by which to describe, understand and articulate an LGBTQ+ identity (Cover, 2002); and finally, a recalled instance of ‘coming out’ both to the self and others (acknowledging that the concept of coming out is no longer recognised via the same passing/outness scripts that were available in the previous century).

The pivotal moment is thus the encounter with discourses of gender and sexual diversity, and often discussed in both pedagogical and formative terms. That is, the narrative by which gender- or sexually-diverse childhood memory is articulated involves the suggestion that one really did know but nevertheless required the ‘resource’ of sexuality discourses in order to name one’s LGBTQ+ identity. This is a claim that there is indeed an ‘inner core’ of sexual subjectivity that is actively felt or recalled as having ‘always been’ in spite of the gap between birth and the moment at which one encounters the discourses providing the necessary cultural codes for the ‘outer’ denoters of that sexuality, serving later as shared experiences that indicate belonging among a minority community (Probyn, 1996: 111).

Several AusQueerScreen participants who were born in the 1970s and 1980s noted the significance of the ‘encounter’ with discourses of gender and sexual diversity as occurring in the context of watching films and television, and typically remember it as a pivotal moment of identity formation which confirmed a sense of selfhood and difference that was otherwise not available to them. For example, one participant noted first encountering bisexual characters in the Australian television series The Secret Life of Us (2001–2005). Participant Jess described seeing a same-sex relationship for the first time on television as a child in the Australian soap opera Number 96 (1972–1977), and was able subsequently to put a language to perceptions of norms:

that was discussed in my family as, oh, this is very, you know, this is sort of out there for this to be on TV .... I knew it was something that was different, that was .... not perceived to be normal, as a child.

Here, Jess offers a memorial reflection on an encounter with a screen media text that provides a framework for social norms. The triple relationship of viewer, text and family arose often in our audience interviews, demonstrating the ways in which memorial accounts of growing up in relation to media texts often implicate the domestic viewing space of the living room as performing a central role in the production and inculcation of norms.

At other times, interviewees discussed relating to a film or TV program from the perspective of a minority gender or sexual identity, even though it was the first time it was encountered. For example, Kristin noted that watching the film Bound (1996) and encountering LGBTQ+ characters in Degrassi Junior High (1987–1989) was ‘the first time where I saw that stuff represented, and I could relate to what was going on …. I probably picked up on some queer vibes along the way there somehow, but it wasn’t explicit by any means’. Similarly, Max recalled a moment of recognition in their first encounter with a representation of a trans man in the film Boys Don’t Cry (1999): ‘I was like, “Oh my God, that’s me.” That was the first time I saw myself and went, “That’s me”’.

Participants often recalled their first encounter with discourses of gender and sexual diversity as a deeply meaningful aspect of growing up that came to produce a recognition of their identity. However, that temporal instance can be theorised not only as a moment of recognising the self in the media text but a re-orientation (Ahmed, 2004: 8) of identities of difference and an ‘entry’ into discourses of sexuality and gender. The act of describing memory always deploys the discourses that have subsequently become available to the participant, making the description – as Jacques Lacan (1968: 17) noted, ‘doubtless a reproduction of the past, but it is above all a spoken representation – and as such implies all sorts of presences’.

Those presences include, therefore, the linear trajectory of identity normativity, coherence and intelligibility, such that the encounter with those screen texts is not just a way of framing a past event in which one recognised one’s ‘true identity’ but also a re-cognition (or re-thinking, re-configuring, re-organising) of the past encounter, in order that the present self is thinkable as a coherent, always-having-had-been LGBTQ+ subject. Indeed, McKinnon’s study of gay men’s early memories of movie-viewing (2016: 196) shows how such memories ‘often connect to the broader memory of the “community” and become, in their narration, a performance of identity’.

While past acts of remembering a first encounter with discourses of gender and sexual diversity were previously often described in the context of seeing other LGBTQ+ people or reading about stories of diversity in books (Plummer, 1995), in the screen media culture of the 1990s and early 2000s – when LGBTQ+ representation was beginning to proliferate on film and television screens – the screen becomes central to the recollections of minority identity formation. As this occurred for our participants in the pre-digital and pre-networked era of broadcast and analogue media, the domestic, physical and geographic settings of these viewings emerge as central tenets of those memorial descriptions. Indeed, in a recent study, LGBTQ+ members of this generation framed their experiences of isolation as gender- and sexually-diverse teenagers in terms of its ‘pre-internet’ status (Cover et al., 2020). We describe in the next sections some of the ways in which participants in the study foregrounded place and space in their discussions of encountering LGBTQ+ screen media.

Domestic screens: Young LGBTQ+ audiences at home

A common experience among our participants born in the 1970s and 1980s was a sense of scarcity in media content with gender and sexual diversity they had access to as kids or teenagers. Many interviewees in our study described growing up with very little or no LGBTQ+ screen content – Australian or international – with their viewing access limited to broadcast television, video rentals and mainstream cinema releases. In this context, it was a rare experience to encounter texts with gender- and sexually-diverse themes, characters and stories in the domestic and familial space of television viewing. Such encounters were often memorable in part because they invoked a sense of deep attachment and meaning, and also because of their radical juxtaposition to the otherwise cisgender and heteronormative space of the living room and the television screen. Indeed, in McKinnon’s study of gay men’s memories of gender- and sexually-diverse screen content, the practice and context of viewing and their later recollection function as ‘sites in the construction of personal narratives’ – sometimes more significantly than the content of the texts themselves (2016: 146).

Several participants also described attachments to ostensibly ‘straight’ texts whose characters or scenarios could be ‘read’ by the viewer privately as queer. This fits with, for example, Vito Russo’s (1981) contemporaneous identification of a vast number of film and television texts that are coded queer for those positioned to recognise such codes or otherwise available for a queer reading. In this sense, a practice of ‘passing’ in the domestic space of viewership through one’s reading and appreciation of ostensibly cisgender and heterosexual storytelling indicated that the living room space and the temporal act of viewing was not always, in itself, an exclusively cis- and hetero-activity. Leo, a gay/queer cis male participant, spoke about seeking out films with strong female characters or proto-feminist themes, such as period films about constrained women’s lives. Clea, a queer bisexual cis woman, noted that female film and TV characters who were strong-willed, ‘alternative’, ‘outrageous’ or ‘bad girls’ were coded as bisexual in a sometimes positive and admiring way by herself and her school friends. Indeed, several participants noted that an interest in independent, alternative or ‘grunge’ cinema could disguise the pursuit of LGBTQ+ screen content to others. Australian film in the 1980s and 1990s was also noted by interviewees for its characters who, while not LGBTQ+, were transgressive or resonated with a queer sensibility, such as Noah Taylor in The Year My Voice Broke (1987), or Rachel Griffiths in Muriel’s Wedding (1994).

The Australian public broadcast network Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) played a significant role in our interviewees’ young viewing lives, with many participants mentioning its screenings of Queer as Folk in the early 2000s, or the curated short films of Eat Carpet (1989 – 2005) that were screened by SBS late on Saturday nights. As one interviewee said, these films ‘always had glimmers of other types, kind of mind-expanding types of experience …. people and bodies that weren't the ones that primetime mainstream TV was offering you’. SBS was the place to view foreign language films such as The Hunger (1983), and campy genre films: as participant Liza noted, ‘they were appalling, terrible movies, but you never watched them for the quality of the movie, you just watched them for representation’. For Stevie, a lesbian/gay cis woman, SBS provided her first exposure to a screening of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras:

I’ve got a pretty strong memory of the Mardi Gras being on SBS and that being—very large protests about that, people saying that it shouldn't be screened. I was quite young, I was in primary school .... and then being like, well, that's not—I was thinking maybe I was gay, but that’s not me. I’m not that. Which is ironic, because I've grown up to be exactly that.

In Stevie’s memory, this moment of LGBTQ+ recognition is entwined with an awareness of homophobic backlash. For Benjamin, a gay man, SBS film and television programming compounded a sense that LGBTQ+ people were elsewhere: he noted, ‘SBS became an absolute lifeline …. international queer directors like Almodovar and Todd Haynes …. [yet] Australian content, local content was so sorely lacking’.

For many of our participants, the physical shared space of the family home was the most common site to encounter gender- and sexually-diverse screen content. The 1990s constituted a transition period in the design of Australian housing and in the availability of multiple television sets, screens and VCRs per household. While those with greater household income were beginning to separate the entertainment and living spaces of a household’s adults and children, and provide older children with private spaces for viewing in other parts of the home (Davis, 1997: 2), for most households television viewing spaces remained the place shared by whole families whereby public discourses entered the private home, in the form that became normalised in the 1960s and 1970s (Williams 1975). The shared entertainment space and singular household television sets and VCRs meant, therefore, that many of our interviewees recalled encounters with LGBTQ+ screen content as embarrassing when other family members were present, and in some cases resulted in painful interactions with family members. Further, given the absence of LGBTQ+ screen texts made for pre-teen or younger teenagers prior to the 2000s, a few participants commented on how any LGBTQ+ screen representation was at the time often perceived as being ‘sexually explicit’. Many of our interviewees sought out and watched LGBTQ+ content alone late at night, because of the discomfort of watching with family.

Indeed, only two participants mentioned parents’ attitudes to LGBTQ+ themes onscreen as affirming or neutral. Much more often, interviewees described homophobic or awkward comments by family members – for example, several described family members making ‘disgusted’ noises or ‘tutting’ at the screen during SBS’s annual coverage of the Sydney Mardi Gras parade. Sex scenes between women in films broadcast on television could prompt homophobic responses from mothers or ‘gross’ comments from fathers. Family members’ comments about television personalities recognised as gay—such as Australian music journalist Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum—were often derogatory, and some participants spoke about the presence of camp characters and drag queens on television as comic relief, and the difficult experience of watching these characters with family. Those who grew up during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s recalled family attitudes to gay lives as aligned with HIV risk, ‘paranoid’, or tinged with ‘tragedy and judgment’. In many of these shared memories, then, participants negotiated a tension between the experience of recognising the self in LGBTQ+ themes, characters and storylines onscreen, alongside an awareness of homophobia within the domestic space (via comments from family) or in broader society (e.g. the backlash to the Mardi Gras broadcast).

Like the shared loungeroom television, the video cassette recorder (VCR) was a nexus for the complex negotiation of shared living space with family members while growing up. The development and widespread uptake of the VCR in the late 1980s and early 1990s introduced a significant shift in the cultural practices of screen entertainment, primarily because it provided the facility to break the dominance of television programmers’ flows of entertainment and control over the time of viewers, allowing viewers to time-shift viewership (Cubitt, 1991). The VCR also allowed users to develop new configurations of viewing such as recording and binge watching (Cover, 2005), playing with texts through crash editing (Cubitt, 1991), and watching films in the private space of the home that were otherwise primarily available in the public space of the cinema (O’Regan, 1991). The video rental shop or library was also noted as a key site of identification for our participants, with the ‘foreign’ or ‘arthouse’ section the place to find local and international queer or queer-adjacent film. Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 broadband networks that made downloading films and television possible, video stores were important points of access for arthouse, international and independent film. Scholars have noted the significance of the VCR to young LGBTQ+ adults as a tool for exploring identity (e.g. McKinnon, 2016), and the physical space of video stores, and the potential for browsing and receiving recommendations from clerks, as central to the way video stores are memorialised (Williams, 2018). Interviewees named specific queer or arthouse video shops, as well as state and council libraries as spaces they remembered for discovering or first encountering gender- and sexually-diverse screen content on VHS during the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.

The tangibility of VHS cassettes is also key to these memories as an object that is geographically-located and can be moved, engaged with physically and vulnerable to destruction – all observations of VCR technology that become more marked in the digital era of online viewing and the reduced ephemerality of the digital video text. This tangibility and vulnerability was reflected in our interviews. For example, one participant described a significant moment in her queer identity formation, when an attempted viewing of The Devil’s Playground was thwarted by the VHS getting stuck in the household video player. Another spoke about housesitting for an older gay couple as a teenager and finding a lesbian-themed film on the video shelf, hidden with the spine inwards, and then secretly ordering a copy for herself. As these examples make clear, showing interest in queer or queer-adjacent content risked rendering their queerness visible, and the material object of the VHS cassette thus took on heightened significance. Laura, a queer cis woman, recalled the presence of a rented copy of Head On causing tension in the family home:

it resulted in an enormous amount of angst. And it was with some relief that that VHS was returned to Blockbuster .... I think once it was out of the house, my mother felt like we could move on from that – from an episode of – I don’t know, queer performativity or something, like you know, trying on hats – I think this is how it probably felt for her .... So yeah, the object itself had a certain power, and not just the film, in my home.

In this anecdote, the physical artefact of the VHS cassette signals to the parent her daughter’s possible queerness, understood as a ‘phase’ that is both trivialised and seen as potentially dangerous. Indeed, this is reflected in screen representations of queer girlhood: as Monaghan (2016: 4–5) has noted, ‘attractions [between teenage girls] are dominantly depicted in ways that emphasise the transitoriness of queer desire and subjectivity’. It is thus notable that in recalling their engagement with gender- and sexually-diverse content and discourses, the video cassette was not always a solution to the difficulties of family viewing but could, in some instances, solidify a sense of non-normativity by providing the trace of a queer sexuality or gender.

While many of our participants utilised a discourse of cultural and social generationalism to understand their experiences growing up in contrast to their expectations of those presently growing up in the era of the internet, several drew on cultural generationalism’s alternative understanding of youth – transitionalism (Wyn and Woodman, 2006) in order to describe periods of change that were marked by shifts in their viewing practices. For many, the process of transitioning from teenager to young adult also signalled a welcome shift away from watching queer (-ed) content when alone, or anticipating negative reactions from relatives: as Benjamin said of watching TV in his first share house, ‘[not] having to change the channel when I heard someone coming into the room was just so fucking liberating’. This made participants’ experience of viewing gender- and sexually-diverse content in the family home more marked as a painful experience in contrast to the possibilities of viewing in private or among peers, showing how the figurative concept of domestic and familial space dominated their recollections of screen media encountered while growing up.

Public places, the rural/urban divide and mobility toward the city

In addition to the domestic spaces that dominated AusQueerScreen participants’ memories of encountering LGBTQ+ content, their discussions of viewership and place were often framed in terms of movement towards the city. This trope of a transition from rural to urban locations was also reflected in the themes of LGBTQ+ screen texts they engaged with. Participants also highlighted the significance of arthouse and independent cinemas – aligned with city life – in mediating their experience of viewership, and characterised such sites as affirming, community building.

Experiences of growing up LGBTQ+ in western cultures are often made intelligible through narratives of mobility, movement and migration (Cover et al., 2020). These narratives most commonly depict an isolated young non-heterosexual person growing up in a small rural or regional town, and moving to a larger city, and have appeared in film and television texts as well as being a staple account in older coming out stories compiled in anthologies that were published during the period our participants were coming of age (e.g. Shale, 1999; Gray, 1999). More recent accounts of young LGBTQ+ people growing up in rural settings are, of course, markedly different, with a widespread acknowledgement that the desire to leave a small town and live in a lesbian/gay urban ghetto are not borne out by lived experience (Gray, 2009; Cover et al., 2020). Nevertheless, during the period in which our participants grew up, their encounters with screen media invoked a rural/urban distinction in two ways: (1) the sense that an LGBTQ+ life was more available, palatable and liveable in cities, and (2) the availability of screen media texts that could be viewed in cinemas in urban settings. We discuss these two aspects of mobility and place in turn.

For those interviewees who grew up in rural settings in Australia (approximately one quarter of the participants), screen representations contributed strongly to their sense that LGBTQ+ lives were more viable in cities: some participants spoke about Australian television (The Secret Life of Us, 2001–2005) and film (Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, 1994) as key texts influencing their decision to move to Melbourne and Sydney, respectively. Others spoke about cities feeling ‘safe’ because of greater anonymity than what was afforded in smaller towns, particularly in relation to access to sexual experiences, gay magazines and bookshops.

Screen narratives viewed while growing up influenced participants’ temporal association of city spaces with an imagined queer future, and this was viewed as important to participants who were unable to access these narratives. As Kristin reflected,

[young LGBTQ+ people] just need to be able to see that there are people out there like them and that there is some future for them in that respect. And that if they go off to the big city or whatever, that they can find people that are like them, and that they can connect with them, because I really didn’t know that until my 20s. That was hard.

Here, we see the ability to envision a future for oneself as enmeshed with the imaginary of the city as a key queer screen trope. Jack Halberstam (2005: 36) coined the term ‘metronormativity’ to describe the well-worn narrative that queer lives are unfulfilled, or even unliveable, outside of cities. Pointing to the way in which ‘metronormative’ accounts of queer life collapse the temporal and the spatial, Halberstam shows how queer migration from regional areas to cities is entwined with the idea of identity intelligibility, with both assumed to be the only viable trajectory for regional gender- and sexually-diverse subjects (2005: 36). For some participants, this alignment of LGBTQ+ life with cities made being a gay teenager in rural areas more difficult, with some discussing the film Priscilla as significant for its depiction of the Australian outback as an obstacle to be overcome by returning, in the film’s end, to the relative safety of Sydney.

Extending Halberstam’s concept of ‘metronormativity,’ Kelaita (2022) has explored the role of ‘cultural attachment’ in complicating the binary of repressive regional Australia versus fruition as a ‘queer adult’ in the city. Kelaita notes that ‘attachment to international media and local place modify metronormativity along suburban lines’ (11). In this respect, Australian film and television depicting gender- and sexually-diverse stories, themes and settings was marked by a familiarity for those who lived in the cities depicted, and a ‘foreignness’ for those who grew up in rural towns. For example, interviewees who grew up in suburban Melbourne spoke about the significance of identifying familiar local streets and landmarks in the film Head On (1998). For Laura, this allowed queer life to feel possible:

it's just always powerful to read about the streets you've walked on and grown up in, and to imagine a story that you didn't know was occurring on a street you know, rather than in some other location. It's being located in your context, and you can’t ignore it, and I think that matters.

Similarly, Leo described how Head On helped him to re-map Melbourne as a space of queer possibility during the 1990s when Melbourne was becoming more metropolitan, with increased movement between the outer suburbs and inner city. However, seeing queer lives depicted in familiar places could also be confronting in its localness: Leo also described being scared by Head On as a teenage viewer, and Sarah discussed the homophobic and transphobic violence depicted in the film: ‘I just remember being very terrified. like, that was shot in and around places that I was routinely going to. At times, it felt very hostile socially’.

The second aspect in which participants discussed the rural/urban distinction and their practices of viewing related to the kinds of films that were screened in urban cinemas as opposed to what might be available in smaller town, regional and outer-suburban theatres. Arthouse cinemas were a key feature of city life that allowed access to queer selfhood outside the restrictions of the family home. As McKinnon notes, ‘The act of remembering the movies … holds value for what it tells us about cinema-going as a social experience and about the place of cinema within personal narratives of individuals’ (2016: 16). Benjamin described feeling initially ‘terrified’ when his sister took him to see a queer film at the cinema while visiting her in the city as a teen, followed by relief when she made her support of him clear. Some participants described viewing the same film multiple times in the cinema as young adults: Sarah said of Love and Other Catastrophes (1996), ‘I actually went to the cinema to see it three times by myself’. Just as queer film festivals have been significant sites for building a sense of community (Rich 2013), for some of our interviewees, this also captured their experience of encountering queer films in urban cinema settings more broadly. Laura described discussing Walking on Water (2002) with friends after viewing it at Nova, an independent cinema in Melbourne: ‘I was buzzing with it … it was partly also being among people that one could have those conversations with, that one could not have at home’.

The simultaneous depiction of the city as a space for both LGBTQ+ life and queer audience culture coheres with scholarship from other countries about the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s which found that urban settings were the site of queer belonging, dichotomously opposed to rural life as a site of exclusion (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Skeggs et al., 2004). In that respect, the experience of media while growing up LGBTQ+ was one which inculcated a sensibility of necessary mobility towards the city. For those living in suburban areas, identifying familiar streets in Australian film and television fostered a sense of the proximity of LGBTQ+ life. However, while the idea of the city converged with that of a fully realised LGBTQ+ subjectivity, for some participants it also signified the potential vulnerability of gender and sexually-diverse visibility.

Conclusion

This paper has presented an account of the way in which LGBTQ+ Australians born in the 1970s and 80s articulated memories of their screen media reception practices while growing up. Participants’ memories were understood both as formative and futural, giving a sense of the significance of media engagement in the formation of identity and belonging, and in their current understanding of LGBTQ+ subjectivity.

Access to LGBTQ+ content in screen media and social support for our participants while growing up are substantially different from that of young people today who are experiencing an era of networked connectivity, digital streaming services, greater social tolerance and acceptance of diverse sexualities and genders, and marriage equality. Discussions of place among our 1970s and 80s-born participants related to the difficulty of viewing gender- and sexually-diverse screen texts in domestic settings during a time in which family viewing continued to dominate, with the risk of exposure to homophobic attitudes or of leaving the ‘trace’ of a nascent LGBTQ+ identity in the form of VHS tapes. Participants also reflected on place in relation to the city, in which diverse screen media could be better accessed, and discussed the geographical emphasis on mobility towards the city that was commonly depicted in representations of LGBTQ+ life in this era. Yet they also noted the city’s positioning as a site of violence in LGBTQ+ screen texts, and the pain of identifying with content that highlighted the vulnerability of visibility among gender and sexually diverse people.

Just as access to LGBTQ+ content via broadcast television and VHS was expressed as both affirming and potentially exposing within the family home, participants imagined the geographical space of the city and the visibility offered therein as both liberating and potentially dangerous for gender- and sexually-diverse subjects. These place-bound memorial accounts of encounters with LGBTQ+ screen texts express a complex attachment to domestic spaces, tangible objects and narratives of mobility. In this way, our participants’ stories reflect their temporal context as both pre-digital and on the cusp of an era of LGBTQ+ screen media proliferation, both in Australia and internationally.