This article examines the impact of antibisexual attitudes on 60 selfidentified Australian bisexual men and women, in terms of their perceptions of, and participation in, the gay and lesbian community-the broad network of groups and events held by and for gay men and lesbians. The author examines the range of antibisexual attitudes that exist within the gay and lesbian community and then examines how these are understood by bisexuals, and the impacts these have on their participation in the gay and lesbian community. It was discovered that though some participants were active within the Australian gay and lesbian community, many were not, due to the belief that they would be rejected or discriminated against as bisexual. Furthermore, those who did participate in the gay and lesbian community tended to keep their bisexuality hidden, for fear of being made unwelcome. The findings of this research suggest that bisexual men and women have an ambivalent and complex relationship with the gay and lesbian community in Australia. This raises a number of issues about the maintenance of a bisexual identity, including the impact of secrecy and staying closeted on self-esteem and mental health.

In discourses about gay, lesbian and bisexual identity, and in the models of sexual identity development that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, coming out is marked as one of the crucial steps in developing a healthy sexual identity. In these discourses, coming out is positioned as `good' as it enables the healthy development of sexual identity, while non-disclosure is positioned as `bad'. As such, there is a disclosure imperative attached to living as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Using empirical evidence gathered from in-depth interviews with 60 Australian bisexual men and women, this article argues that, for bisexuals, the decision about whether to come out is influenced by several factors not often taken into account in sexual identity development models and coming out narratives. These factors make it inherently more difficult to come out to others as bisexual, and significantly challenge the notion of the disclosure imperative.

No abstract

The map (1:1,218,987) accompanying this report is the first to depict the distribution of same-sex couple family households across Australia. The map and the report contribute to emerging scholarship combining critical geographies of sexualities with quantitative techniques and GIS in order to advance the political claims of sexual minorities. The data were collected through the 2006 Census and obtained via consultation with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. These data included the number of same-sex couple family households for all Statistical Divisions across Australia and for Statistical Sub-Divisions within metropolitan capital cities. Geographical concentrations of same-sex couple family households were determined by calculating the proportion of couple family households that were same-sex in each Statistical Division and Statistical Sub-Division, since the Census defines cohabiting same-sex couples as a subset of couple family households. To visualise where the proportions fell above and below the national average, and thus where concentrations were found, these ratios were converted to location quotients using the Australian average as the denominator. The map combines different scales -Statistical Divisions and Statistical Sub-Divisions -to illustrate distributional patterns between inner-city and suburban areas, as well as between urban and regional localities. While high concentrations are found in inner-cities, there are also significant suburban and regional concentrations, thus contesting assumptions about same-sex couples' inner-city residential choices. Moreover, since same-sex couples were found in most Statistical Divisions, areas below the national average cannot be considered devoid of these families, with implications for constitutive identity politics and the operationalisation of equal rights legislation.

The practice of 'coming out again'*relinquishing a non-heterosexual identity and having to subsequently come out again as something else*can have an enormous impact on feelings of belonging in particular social spaces, such as in the gay and lesbian community. These feelings are manifested through the perceived boundaries around sexual identity categories and the specific rules and expectations about how sexual identities should be performed in particular communities. Drawing on interviews with seven Australian women who once identified as lesbian but who had subsequently relinquished this sexual identity, this article examines the boundaries around lesbian identity and the role of the authentic lesbian discourse on women relinquishing their lesbian identities. I describe the consequences that these discourses had for participants on their sense of belonging within both lesbian identities and lesbian communities, and argue that these boundaries are responsible for some women seeing identity change as their only option when they cannot fit into the authentic lesbian discourse. Furthermore, the particular boundaries around lesbian identity contain the space available for the performance of sexual identity, rather than allowing for a genuine fluidity of sexuality and the inclusion of diverse ways of performing sexual identities within non-heterosexual communities.