OH4579/15: Audio Part 1. Interview with Carl Gopalkrishnan in 2023 by Helena Cohen-Robertson.

Summary

Visual artist and community policy advisor Carl Gopalkrishnan shares his life experiences as an Asian man in the gay community. He talks about his childhood and family, being born in the UK before moving to Sweden, then New York and eventually settling in Australia, and experiencing casual racism in Australia as a child. Carl came out to his family in 1982 and found the experience challenging for him and his family, and talks about the lack of safe spaces for the gay community, until he found the local gay scene. He talks about his career in the arts, including his study and work in graphic design, and gaining recognition as an artist. He also talks about his growing politicisation at university in his twenties, and how open he felt his university was. In the late 1990s, Carl returned to university to study sociology, and talks about his studies and the impact his work had on his personal life. Carl's Honours thesis was about Asian men in the gay community, and he discusses some of the perceptions of Asian men, and some of his trauma related to racism in the LGBTQIA+ community. Following on from this, he worked in Victoria as a senior policy officer for Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria and senior policy advisor for the Islamic Council of Victoria, while still keeping up with his art career.