Sydney Pride!

For all of you who don’t know, it’s PRIDE month. This means it is that time of the year that drag queens and kings come out in thrives, dusting off their wigs, pantyhose and thigh high boots to PARTY! The city and night life truly come alive with a celebration for life, expression and remembrance.

While this is on a smaller scale here in NZ, growing up in Sydney PRIDE carries a much stronger and bigger holding in life and culture. It brings out a whole other side of what it means to celebrate.

Throughout the year there are countless LGBTQ+ events, clubs and shows in Sydney, however, none compare to one of Australia’s biggest and most loved celebrations of the community; Sydney Mardi Gras. From what many people know, the Sydney Mardi Gras is a celebration, a ‘hurrah’ to the extraordinary life that Sydney has developed and created as a defining moment for both Sydney’s and Australia’s cultural identity. But many don’t know that this grandiose event does contain a dark past. In 1978 a small group of protesters gathered in Darlinghurst, Sydney, in contribution to the International Gay Celebration; however, this resulted in excess police violence and many arrests. It didn’t end there. Over the following months, many more arrests were made, violence continued, and it eventually came to be seen that the authority’s actions were far too serious and excessive. By April 1979, NSW Parliament repealed the NSW Summary Offences Act legislation which allowed for such excess force and arrests. In that same year (1979) 3,000 people marched the parade incident free. The following year, in 1980, the postparade party was established, shaping Mardi Gras into more as what we know it as today. Over the years the Mardi Gras audience has grown from an estimated 200,000 in 1983, to over 500,000 in 1993 to now over 617,000 in 2019 with an online audience and digital read of over 7.7 million. It presents itself as the celebration of life and revolution that it has come to represent to many people in Australia and around the world, with a new theme every year. Alongside the part and parade, Mardi Gras now involves many more events including Fair day, Pool Party, Sissy Ball, Queer Thinking and Laneway; nowadays with the inclusion of a Smoking Ceremony (an Indigenous Ceremony to bless the land the Parade marches on) and with the Indigenous LGBTQ+ community being the first of the marches in the Parade.