Mardi Gras
All the highlights of February’s big LGBTQIA bash
THE GLOBALLY RECOGNISED Mardi Gras Parade is known nowadays as one great big, sparkly, televised party (with a lot of corporate and political interests riding its sequined coattails). So, it can be easy to forget that it all began in 1978 with a moment of defiant protest. Getting back to its activist roots, this year’s theme – “What Matters” – asks everyone to consider the less shiny yet vitally important things beyond the Mardi Gras spectacle, from respecting the pioneers to affirming all the diverse identities under the rainbow, and inspiring the community leaders of tomorrow.
Throughout queer history, drag queens have often been the loudest agitators of the Pride movement. It may be true that today, drag has become pop culture catnip, but in decades past, queens were the courageous trailblazers of the complex spectrum of idenities we now acknowledge. Sydney’s drag matriarch, Miss 3D, has been involved in Mardi Gras since its origins – this showgirl turns 70 in 2020 and she has rarely missed a parade since the fateful protest in ’78. She has lead the procession multiple times – once on rollerskates, another time in a wedding dress. “We were marching to state that we’re gay and we’re here to stay,” she says. Two close friends of the legendary Sydney drag star were instrumental in elevating Mardi Gras parades and parties to the next level: artistic director Peter Tully, a Melbourne-based jewellery designer who worked with fashion
pioneers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson, and Doris Fish, a famous Sydney drag queen. “Peter and Doris were so artistic, they had lots of clever ideas. They really made the parade bigger and better than it ever was.”
But like many people in 3D’s life on the Sydney gay scene in the early ’80s, Peter and Doris were both lost to HIV-AIDS. Miss 3D says that once the crisis reached Australia in 1982, parades got even bigger. “We all got together, we had to be strong. I lost so many of my friends, it was shocking. All these gifted artists and people from all walks of life.”
Sydney may be ever changing, but the same community that drew Miss 3D here more than 40 years ago still resonates today. In 2016 that same energy brought a young queer person to Sydney who would become the queen known as Etcetera Etcetera. Bumping into the throngs of the parade night crowd at 17 years old, Etcetera thought: “I want to be part of whatever this is.”
“It was just really eye-opening to see that many openly queer people in a public space,” says Etcetera. “Growing up in Canberra, you see LGBT people but you don’t see them loudly expressing their right to proclaim their identity in such a, some would say, excessive way.”
Cultural phenomena like reality TV series RuPaul’s Drag Race (which is due to start an Australian season in 2020) have thrust drag into the mainstream. Mardi Gras is also an event where performers from the margins of society, and the safe spaces they exist in, are put under a public spotlight. “Drag exists in this beautiful liminal space between identities,” says Etcetera. “We’re playing with gender or playing with ideas. And it offers the alternative of ‘what if nothing was real and everything was dissected and taken apart and deconstructed, reconstructed and played with?’ For me, drag is so important to discovering identity, forming identity and preserving identity.”
As a gender non-binary person and a fulltime drag queen, Etcetera has a complex relationship with Mardi Gras: balancing the flashiness of Mardi Gras season with its political past. “I just want to make sure that whatever my involvement is, I’m existing in those spaces as a non-binary drag queen. I’m making sure that I’m recommending and asking if they have space to include more trans people or people of colour. I think when looking at throwing events and being at events during Mardi Gras, that should be really key in people’s minds: what is your idea of representation?”
■ àmardigras. org.au. Feb 14-Mar 1.
“We’re playing with gender, playing with ideas”