On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway. Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with ...

Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically a...

**2024 Best Book of the Year Award by the GLBTQ Division of the National Communication AssociationFinalist for Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ+ Anthology**For a generation of gay men who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming sexually active meant confronting the dangers of catching and transmitting HIV. In the 21st century, however, the development of viral suppression treatments and preventative pills such as PrEP and nPEP has massively reduced the risk of acqu...

How and why branded bottles of water have insinuated themselves into our daily lives, and what the implications are for safe urban water supplies.How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become an economic good—no longer a common resource but a commercial product, in industry parlance a “fast moving consumer good,” or FMCG? Plastic Water examines the processes behind this transformation. It goes beyond the u...

Syncretism has been a part of Christianity from its very beginning, when early Christians expressed Jesus' Aramaic teachings in the Greek language. Defined as the phenomena of religious mixture, syncretism carries a range of connotations. In Christian theology, use of syncretism shifted from a compliment during the Reformation to an outright insult in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The term has a history of being used as a neutral descriptor, a pejorative marker, and even a cele...

All he wants for Christmas is a sexy little elf!When Leonardo Delgado fell in love with a woman who was already engaged, he resigned himself to loving her from afar. But when her fiancé ran off with another woman, he knew exactly what he wanted to make his Christmas merry!Amanda-Lyn doesn't believe in love anymore. She takes a job as an elf at the local mall, and starts to rebuild her life. A nice one-night stand without all that romantic nonsense is all she wants this holi...

The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies is a fan culture volume that deconstructs how and why Showgirls**, a 1995 drama with a female lead bent on becoming a famous performer in Las Vegas, became a much-contested cult film despite being a critical failure when it released.**The collection orchestrates a conversation between scholarly essay work and archival documentation off...