In the telling of history, certain names are linked together. This is the case for Carmen Rupe and Dana de Milo, two transgender women from New Zealand. In the later years of her life, Dana was often interviewed and quoted in discussing Rupe and their friendship, which has led to the story of Rupe eclipsing that of de Milo. But Dana, as a woman who ran away at 13 and lived openly as a transgender woman, is an interesting person in her own right and deserves more attention in the discussions of New Zealand’s queer history.

Australian singer-songwriter Peter Allen is not only known for his success in the musical realm, but also for who he knew when he was alive. While the start of his life in small-town Australia, the son of an abusive alcoholic was not a glamorous one, he had his eyes set on stardom. Starting his act by copying a blackface performer at the age of five, and transitioning to playing the piano at a bar at the age of eleven, he was ambitious. Once graduating high school he would go on to join Chris Bell to create a duo act, claiming they were brothers who were from England. Through this, he would secure television performances and slowly work show to show to make his way in the competitive world of music.

Agnes Noyes Goodsir is neither well-known by studiers of queer history nor unfairly shunned. Instead, she falls into the familiar category of quiet lack of acknowledgment. Living from 1864 to 1939 and moving to France during the 1920s, it was not impossible for lesbians to be open about their sexuality, nor was it uncommon for them to choose to keep such information private. She made the completely normal choice of keeping her sexuality more or less under wraps. That is not, of course, to say that it was a well-hidden secret. With a beloved ‘companion’ she lived with and publicly said to be her muse, her frequenting of lesbian spaces, and connections to the lesbian community in France, she was not working particularly hard to hide this fact. Neither was she advertising it.

Within the story of every queer person lies a tangled web of connections offering a glimpse of the queer community at the time. From Emmeline Freda Du Faur, we find a couple: two women who spent their lives together and whose relationship remains mostly unrecognized. Freda and her aunt Emmeline Woolley shared a name and an orientation; throughout most of her life, Emmeline Woolley was in a relationship with famed Australian children's book author and musician Ethel Pedley.