“It’s all going so fast”, I said to my colleague to the left of me. We were walking / marching / dancing along Oxford Street, as part of the “ABC Pride” float in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Even though ABC Pride is a staff-led initiative (it was not an “official” ABC float), it was awesome to have Managing Director, David Anderson on the float, and ABC Chair, Ita Buttrose came along to…
“Is that it? Is that all there is?”, I overhead some visitors say, a bit surprised at how “short” this year’s Tropical Fruits Street Parade was. I was a little inclined to agree, as I remembered the last parade I attended seemed to be a little larger, and there were more people on the streets watching. This time around the crowds were down compared with the last time I attended – it was Sunday afternoon,…
I felt like a double-agent as I sat and quietly had a beer at one of the local pubs in Lismore this afternoon. It’s a pub which has been traditionally a very “working man’s pub”, but which seems to have embraced the LBTIQ+ Tropical Fruits celebration this year, with lots of rainbow flags. They also seem to be running regular LBTIQ+ drinks on Fridays, at other times of the year. As I walked in, I…
“Does anyone know the last time there was a drag show here at the Newtown Hotel?”, Minnie Cooper asked the crowd tonight. Instantly, my friend Graeme and I knew the answer. On a Sunday afternoon in November 2007, Graeme and I were due to catch up for a beer, but to our surprise, the night before was the hotel’s final night after many years as a gay bar, and many years with drag shows. For…
I can’t decide if I was more angry or more sad (I was both), as a few of the speakers at a talk I attended this morning spoke about “faking disability”. Something I didn’t know about until this morning’s talk, was that if you go through some “stock photograph” libraries, you can actually find groups of models alternating between standing up and being seated in a wheelchair. If you use a wheelchair, or you have…