FEATURE Andrew Barr is Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory and Australia’s first openly gay state or territory leader. He’s also a husband and a “fairy godfather”, he tells Michael Donnelly.
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ave you seen the cool little capital of Australia lately? New buildings have shot up, and old buildings have come down, making way for carefully cultivated wetland parks. Sexy red trams zip out to the northern suburbs. Young people dress like they’re going on Tinder dates most of the time, and there are chic little wine bars. That bogan thing that’s so prevalent in other Australian cities? It’s not so strong in Canberra. “The Canberra of today is a very different place to what people who came here decades ago on their year six school excursion would have seen,” says the ACT’s Chief Minister, Andrew Barr. And despite the fact he’s been the ACT’s tourism minister for 16 years, this is not industry claptrap. It’s real. Canberra’s come a long way. The happily and openly gay 48-year-old Chief Minister, a bona fide “Ken Behren” since the age of four, is both a product of the city’s cosmopolitan transformation, and now also a symbol of it. Upon reaching the territory’s top job in 2014, he also became the first openly gay leader of any Australian state or territory, a milestone that was unthinkable not so long ago, even to himself. “I didn’t come out until I was 26,” he says. “I was president of Young Labor, rising through the political ranks, but there was this other side of my life that I was not being honest about, to myself and to other people. I was sick of making excuses as to why I wasn’t going to have a second date with [women]. And I liked guys,” he says with an easy laugh. “It became very hard to contain. You can’t sit on that forever. I thought I could either continue to cut all of that out of my life and just be this weird political animal, or actually it might be time to be a bit brave. It was time. My coming out experience was probably as amazing as you could possibly hope for.” That coming out process ran the typical gay gamut – from getting blond highlights to meeting a boyfriend. Barr met Anthony Toms at Canberra’s fabulously modest gay venue, The Meridian Club, in November 1999. Sadly, The Meridian was not to be a stayer, but the couple are: they civilly united ten years to the day after their meeting, and were married ten years to the day after that.
