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In a crawlspace at the offices of Switchboard, a queer helpline in operation since 1974, lies dozens of log books kept by volunteers across four decades, describing the phone calls they had taken. These logs were traces of tens of thousands of queer lives, a bridge to a past hidden from people like Tash Walker and Adam Zmith in their youth, captured by people who lent an ear to those in need. Walker and Zmith came of age in the time of Section 28, a law which banned councils and schools ''promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship''. Confused about who they were, they did not know where to turn, nor would they have been able to find the words to articulate their feelings even if they did. Recovering what was concealed from their generation, they found people grappling with questions and problems both familiar and different: a teenager whose parents had kicked them out of home for dressing as the wrong gender; a lesbian terrified of having her baby taken away from her; a man arrested for chatting up another man in a public toilet; a young person wanting to know how to come out. Charged with joy, gossip, sensuality, humour and sometimes fear, these stories are brought together in The Log Books ; Walker and Zmith capture queer lives as never before, discovering their ancestry and propelling it into the very foreground of our national history.
