In Australia, pride is still something to fight for

In early 1978, gay rights activist Ken Davis (now 66) received a letter from a friend from the United States. It has been nine years since the riots at the Stonewall Inn gay bar in New York. Then, after years of harassment and police brutality, gays and lesbians fought back against the police for the first time. “My American friends asked them if we could organize a solidarity action in Sydney,” he says. The first Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras was born.

The parade will be held for the 45th time this Saturday, and the port city is even the pride capital of the world for a while. Sydney hosts World Pride, a global LGBTIQA+ festival that has been taking place every two years since 2000. More than half a million visitors have descended for the festival, which lasts seventeen days, with more than three hundred events on the program. The Mardi Gras parade is the big highlight.

The first Mardi Gras

Today’s party is in stark contrast to how that first Mardi Gras went, says Davis, who was 21 years old at the time. He wears a T-shirt with the text ’78ers, the first Mardi Gras’. He addresses a group of visitors who are participating in a tour organized by ’78ers’, the original gay rights activists. The tour takes you past the places where it was 45 years ago got horribly out of hand.

The first stop on the tour is Taylor Square, the square where about five hundred people had gathered at the time. Davis stops at an abandoned building, which at the time housed an illegal gay bar. “We went into the pubs and called on people to come out, to out and proud to be,” says Davis.

That was very unusual at the time. In the 1970s, homosexuality was still illegal in Australia. Men who had sex with each other could be sentenced to 14 years in prison. “For comparison: rape was then seven years in prison,” says Davis.

People could also be fired on the basis of their sexuality. Many people therefore remained anxiously in the closet. People met in hidden, illegal gay bars.

But that night they went out. A procession of people followed a van blaring music, the song ‘Glad to be Gay’ by Tom Robinson was on repeat. “I still remember how it felt to openly celebrate our identity together. We were ecstatic,” Davis recalls.

Beaten

About twenty people have joined the tour, which continues by bus. Like a seasoned tour guide, Davis takes over the microphone from the driver. “Here we were trapped by the police,” he says as the bus drives past Hyde Park.

Although they had a permit from the municipality, the atmosphere soon turned grim. The party turned into a protest march. “The police pushed us in a direction. That was the moment I realized: this will be our own Stonewall.”

The demonstration was brutally crushed by police. This is still a source of trauma for many people who were there, says Diane Minnis (71). She was one of the few openly lesbian activists in Sydney at the time and had organized many demonstrations before, but she had never seen such violence before. She hid in a doorway and watched as her friends were beaten up. “I had never seen such a ruthless attack by police,” she says.

“We stood out here all night, where we could hear our friends being beaten. But there was nothing we could do,” says Minnis, pointing to the facade of a Victorian building with thick sandstone walls. It is the former police station where dozens of activists were detained and then mistreated.

We could hear our friends being beaten. But we couldn’t do anything

Diana Minnis (71) Lesbian activist

A few days later, all arrested demonstrators were listed in the newspaper with name, profession and address, making their sexual orientation suddenly public. “Many people lost their jobs and were rejected by family,” says Davis. In 2016, the Sydney Morning Herald before that apologiesand also the state government went through the dust.

Gay rights movement

The heavy-handed police crackdown shocked Australians and sparked a revival of the gay rights movement. Many heterosexual allies also joined. The persistent activists were successful: in 1982 it was forbidden to exclude someone from the labor market because of their sexual orientation. A few years later, in 1984, homosexuality was decriminalized. Mardi Gras became an annual event.

Read also Hard campaign against same-sex marriage in Australia

Yet the road to greater acceptance was not without fits and starts. Church organizations are still exempt from the anti-discrimination law, which means that LGBTQ+ people can still be fired if they work at a Christian school. And in 2004, the Conservative government amended the constitution, defining marriage as ‘a union between a man and a woman’. But after a fierce campaign and a consultative referendum in which more than 61 percent of Australians voted in favour, marriage was opened to same-sex couples in 2017.

Homohealing therapy

Although the freedom of LGBTQ+ people in progressive metropolises such as Sydney and Melbourne now seems self-evident, this is not the case everywhere in Australia, says 30-year-old Blake Royden. He has traveled to Sydney to celebrate Mardi Gras and is joining the tour. “I grew up in a village, where I didn’t know anyone who was gay. I had a lot of internalized homophobia.”

It was only when he moved to the city that he dared to express his sexuality. Royden gets emotional as he thanks the 78ers at the end of the tour. “Every LGBTQ+ person in Australia should know the history of Mardi Gras,” he says. “Thanks to the 78ers, I now have the freedom to be myself.”

The movement is still fighting for emancipation and equality. At the moment, ‘gay healing therapy’ is high on the political agenda. In the state of New South Wales, where Sydney is located, it is still legal, just like in the Netherlands, to perform this so-called ‘conversion therapy’, with the aim of changing someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

New South Wales holds state elections in March. The polls predict a minority government, making the support of independent MPs crucial to policy making. Independent MP Alex Greenwich has drafted a bill to ban so-called ‘conversion therapy’, saying he will only support the party that endorses the bill.

Read also For some, the Canal Parade has become too much party and too little protest

In recent years, criticism of the commercial nature of the Sydney Mardi Gras has grown. Many companies participate in the parade, while they contribute little to gay liberation, says Ken Davis. Pinkwashing, he thinks . “It’s just good marketing for them. The ‘gay dollar’ is worth a lot.”

He is afraid that the original purpose of the party will be forgotten. “Mardi Gras started out as a way to challenge power. If we don’t do that anymore, the parade is pointless.”