Well this is very exciting. I have been nominated as a finalist in the ACON 2023 Honour Awards media award for my collected writing about rural LGBTIQA+.

I am gobsmacked about the company I am in, including some of the giants of gay-hate crime reporting. I’m also extremely proud to be acknowledged for two decades’ writing about LGBTIQA+ issues.

It’s hard to explain the difficulty in getting work published about us. Certainly in my early writing career I had many bites, only for gatekeepers to get cold feet about the subject matter.

This was (and is) the era of #OwnVoices in which we are supposed to write what we know by lived experience. That’s all very well if the publishing and media industries have a tradition of publishing what you are… but in my case, they weren’t, so it was DIY or remain silent.

Change has finally come, although it’s still challenging to get agents, publishers and industry gatekeepers to have courage when it comes to platforming queer stories. Initiatives like the Honour Awards give our work a spotlight, thanks to media category sponsor NBCUniversal, which is a beacon of diversity and inclusion.

The gatekeepers who green-lit my work should really share in this citation: Margo Kingston and her No Fibs project; Anna Solding of MidnightSun Publishing; Gabrielle Chan of the Guardian Australia Rural Network; and James Bennett, co-editor of a special edition of the Journal of Australian Studies. 

Take a look at the two decades of writing that landed me this citation, in my bookshop.

If you’d like to come along to the 2023 Honour Awards, click through to my events page for all the details.

And, as always, thanks to readers!