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Comprised of an exhibition, a forum, a website ('www.pridebrisbane.org.au/qt'), and a giant opening party, Queer Transgressions (QT) offered a glimpse at the state of queer Brisbane arts and thought. Curated by Edwina Bartleme, and staged as a group show that had each artist defining his or her own 'transgressive site', the thirteen physical works alongside the website (designed by Ken Lyons), evoked a huge conceptual lexicon. QT fell under the larger rubric of the Brisbane Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride festival, and within this, was positioned as 'queer'. This implies an agitation around points of identity, and an acknowledgement that sexuality necessitates transgression, through defying what 'it' attempts to describe: as Foucault articulated, sexuality is a set of limits which is continually 'made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it'.1
Taking into account the events and the website alongside the physical exhibition, the scope of QT almost seemed without boundary. In the autumn/winter 2000 edition of Eyeline, Andrew McNamara drew attention to the challenge of curating huge shows 'against the drift of diversity into distraction and a lack of relatedness, one must strive to build possibilities of relatedness and coextensiveness'. 2 Although he was referring to exhibitions on the scale of the Asian-Pacific Triennial, conundrums like this are often raised where the organising principle is queer, and it is desirable to resist a homogenising perspective, while not losing total perspective.
Numbers through the exhibition on opening night were estimated at 4000 by Powerhouse staff, and whilst a proportion of those were there ostensibly for other events, most took the time to really examine what was on show. A couple of weeks later, Virgin Blue airline had a company