Mardi Gras 1978: the straw that broke the camel’s back

Who would have imagined that Sydney’s first gay Mardi Gras would turn out to be one of Australia’s biggest tourist drawcards, Sydney’s second-largest annual event, generating much needed income for the State? As Lance Gowland remarked some years ago, Mardi Gras keeps on getting bigger and bigger; it keeps blowing our minds away.

How times have changed and continue to change! Same-sex marriage is within reach but, more importantly, many of the rights that come with marriage are already there. There is even talk of a parliamentary apology to the 78ers. And year after year, the celebration of the anniversary of Sydney’s first gay Mardi Gras attracts messages of support from federal Prime Ministers, State Premiers, leaders of the federal and state Oppositions, leaders of political parties, mayors and other prominent Australians. Who would have imagined the Sydney Opera House hosting the launch of the Mardi Gras season?

Mardi Gras is more than a parade or a party, more than buffed bodies or costumes. It takes us back to where it all began, to a time when New South Wales still retained anti-homosexual laws, to a time when our celebrations, demonstrations and marches were not always seen to be newsworthy. As Lance Gowland once lamented, “We’d have a procession with thousands of people in Oxford Street, up to 50,000 people, and there would be nothing on the radio... nothing in the newspapers.... apparently nothing happened. Perhaps it was all in our minds…”

Mardi Gras reminds us how far we have come; it recaps our achievements over the past decades. We have found new friends in the parents of gay men and lesbians, and in bisexuals and transsexuals. We have made more and more straight friends because straight friends have always been with us. But as we celebrate who we are and what we have achieved, we reflect on others like us who have not been so lucky, members of our extended community in other countries who continue to face persecution and prosecution.

Most of us still find it hard to understand how an event with no fixed identity changed the course of our brief history of activism. The mobile disco on the run on the back of a Hertz truck, driven by a Communist along Oxford Street, with gay men and lesbians wriggling their bodies to the sounds of Tom Robinson’s ‘Sing If You’re Glad To Be Gay’ and Meg Christian’s ‘Ode To A Gym Teacher’ should have ended how many feared it would... a mere footnote to the history of gay and lesbian liberation in Australia. But it turned into a riot, the most significant political event in Australia’s brief gay and lesbian history.

Sydney’s first gay Mardi Gras was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Gay men and lesbians fought to have their voices heard, their stories told, their rights acknowledged. Seeing no light at the end of the Liberal and National coalition and fed up with a conservative Labor Party government preoccupied with its survival and the appeasement of extremists like the Festival of Light, gay men and lesbian lost all hope in the political system and a do-nothing Labor premier, indifferent to police brutality, with a knack of fobbing us off.

Mardi Gras today has come full circle, arguably closer to what Ron Austin had envisaged: a celebration of our identity without any political haranguing, stripped of any political dogmas. Yet critics remain. During the 1970s, most of them were drawn from conservative ranks, often Christians of the Bible-bashing bastard variety. Today’s critics tend to come from within our community. They are the prophets of doom with their own reworked version of the Apocalypse. They see not the final destruction of the world but the end to fixed categories of identity, the ‘end of the homosexual’; and this in a world that is seeing increasing violence towards sexual minorities!

Yet just as Mardi Gras survived the conservatives, the celebration of our sexual identity will prevail over these killjoys. When the final curtain is drawn on Mardi Gras, for all good things must come to an end some day, sometime, most gay men and lesbians would have been better off for the experience. The walk to the park that turned into ‘a civil war in the middle of the night’ might have caught all of us unprepared; even so, we have emerged all the stronger for it.