Hello and welcome to Queer as FACT, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice.

I'm Irene.

Today we have some special content for you that we've produced in conjunction with Camp Magazine,

the University of Melbourne's newest autonomous publication for queer people.

For those of you who have joined us today from Camp Magazine, welcome to our podcast.

I are two of the four ex-Melman uni students who run this podcast, and we all love queer history.

We have a bit of Melbourne uni-based queer history to share with you today,

featuring the poetry of bisexual labour activist Lesbia Harford, who studied here in the early 1900s. For our regular listeners,

you might have already heard our episode on Lesbia, but we're going to do a quick recap of her

life and share one of her poems which we haven't read before. She was born Lesbia Keough on April 9th, 1891 in Brighton. My favourite thing about her

is that her parents genuinely unironically named her lesbian at birth.

A lot of this just seems to have been a popular name in the early 1900s. Like, we need to bring

that back. Yeah. Yeah, let's bring that back. I'm naming my baby Lesbia now. Lesbia grew up

in Armadale. Her house she grew up in is still there. You can go and see it

and creepily take pictures of it, if you like. Which we have done.

In 1912, she went to Melbourne University to study law, making her one of the first women to do so.

While she was there, she started exploring what she called free love,

but today we would usually call polyamory. She started a relationship with Ormond College

philosophy tutor, Kate Lush. Yes, she did date her own tutor. I'm so proud. And wrote several

love poems for Kate, including this one, featuring some relatable content about checking out her girlfriend in the library.

Standing on tiptoe, head back, eyes and arm, upraised, Kate groped to reach the higher shelf.

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