Strategising LGBTQ health

Over the last decade, LGBTQ health has emerged as a distinct subcategory within Australian public health systems, evidenced by the development of LGBTQ health strategies by most state and territory governments. These strategies have arisen from decades of strategic advocacy on the part of government advisors, public servants, LGBTQ health organisations and advocates. This article is an analysis of Australian state and territory LGBTQ health strategies, published between 2019 and 2022. Along with overall analysis of their position within the formation and government of LGBTQ health, I pay particular attention to the historiographies they tell, their various commitments to epidemiological data collection, and how they constitute LGBTQ people as belonging to the imagined 'public' of public health. Through these examinations, I argue that LGBTQ health is a project of biocitizenship that makes possible certain forms of public recognition and the attention of public health systems but at the cost of narrowing focus towards the subjects, publics and problems legible and governable within the problem space of health and illness.