The mollies familiar to London’s streets during the eighteenth century did not migrate to the hostile environment of the colonies, even if we occasionally glimpse exceptional cases of flamboyancy in the early records. Yorick Smaal: An urban queer lifestyle was only beginning to mature in Australia by the 1920s and 1930s. Justin Bengry: How would you characterize queer identities and communities in Australia before the Second World War? Smaal’s work offers not only an exciting local study, but one inflected by global processes, challenging us to think of queer history in the most expansive of terms. Sexual fluidities still characterised queer communities and male identities before a more rigid sexual binary emerged later in the century. Massive influxes of American servicemen transformed sexual communities, and even language, in Australia. Yorick Smaal’s recent book Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (Palgrave, 2015) looks to the dynamics of wartime to consider how sex and sexuality was affected by global conflict.
