By Ken Davis
SYDNEY: 25,000 people came to the Opera House steps on 29th January for the annual launch of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, this year celebrating its twentieth anniversary.
The launches have become significant political events within the month leading up to the parade. The key-note address was this year given by Rev. Dorothy MacRea-MacMahon, until recently National Director of Mission of the Uniting Church, and under fire from the reactionary big-business Wesley Central Mission wing of her church for publicly identifying as a lesbian. She - and all the other speakers - recognised the presence of Eora and Gadigal Elders, and their ownership of the lands on which festival events take place and called for solidarity with indigenous communities in their struggles for land, self determination, and compensation for the stolen generations.
The highlight of the festival is the parade, which with over half a million spectators in recent years, is the largest public event in Australia.
This year’s parade will feature people who took part in the first mardi gras parade in 1978, which was brutally attacked by police. The first mardi gras was called to complete a day of solidarity with the American gay movement, then fighting advances by the Christian Right. But anger at the police attack on that night’s revellers galvanised the largest gay rights demonstrations up to then in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.
A series of street protests throughout 1978 saw a total of 178 arrests, but by 1979 had led an embarrassed Wran Labor government to repeal the notorious Summary Offences Act, under which street marches and acts of same sex affection in public places had been illegal. The inclusion of homosexuality in the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act in 1982, and the partial reform of the anti-homosexual laws in 1984, could not have happened without the development of a confrontationist mass action politics within the Sydney gay community from 1978 onwards.
The first three Mardi Gras were organised by gay and lesbian activists, most of whom were supporters of communist and socialist organisations.
The move of the Mardi Gras to summer in 1981 allowed previously hostile gay business interests to take control, resulting in the temporary exclusion of lesbians. But by 1983 political demands and a community arts development focus were resurfacing within the mardi gras parades, and parade growth since has increasingly featured the diversity of groups within the gay and lesbian communities.
Now the Mardi Gras festival is substantially larger than the January Festival of Sydney, and so significant for the cultural and economic calendar of Sydney that the Herald issues a 24-page lift-out guide. There are dozens of commercial sponsorships, from airlines to dog food companies, but no government funding.
This year’s theme ‘20 years of (r)evolution’ recalls both the genuinely revolutionary impulse of the first parade, as well as the changes over two decades that have institutionalised a gay commercial and cultural sector in Sydney, and the annual parade as a highly controlled spectator event.
Mardi Gras as an organisation has often tried to obscure its own origins, asserting that it only became a vibrant cultural event under conservative leadership in the 1980s, and pretending that the earliest parades were boring leftist street marches. Veterans of the 1978 events have been organising to reclaim and retell the early history, through exhibitions, videos, a web-site and booklet. Our presence in the 1998 parade will reinforce messages that the oppression we rebelled against in 1978 has not yet been fully defeated.