Speaking Secrets

Speaking Secrets is a non-fiction work which explores voicelessness and the media. It focuses on sexuality secrets and explores what happens when these secrets become public property. Each chapter is written in a literary journalistic style. The genre is used here to intimately explore stories which have - for various reasons - fallen below the radar of mainstream journalism, despite some prior media exposure. This is a book of interviews with people who have disclosed publicly, sexual and sexuality secrets within their lives after sometimes as many as 50 years of never talking about these matters. The interviews in Speaking Secrets, all conducted in Australia, incorporate rape, disability, racism, illness, child sexual abuse, and sexual reassignment. Each interview is framed by the media and secrecy and disclosure. The chapters are first person literary journalism, accompanied by black and white photos. Some of the subjects are well known - others not - but each has reached out publicly via the media to tell and retell their stories, for various and varied reasons