Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras 2020

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: Realizing I have neither the time nor the energy to write full posts about my two-week trip to Australia, especially when I have already written fairly extensively in my email photo digests / travelogues, I decided the smartest and most efficient move would be to post the content of those five emails here, backdated. The following was posted on Tuesday, March 10 PST, but was originally sent to my email list just after midnight Tueaday, March 3, local time in Melbourne, where we were when I sent it.]
Saturday, February 29, 2020 Listen, I know it means nothing that Sydney’s Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras parade happened this year on Leap Year Day. I still thought it was cool, and no one’s going to kill my joy about it! It made me feel better about postponing this trip a year after we were initially considering going. It would not have been on Leap Year Day in 2019! (Last year it was on March 3.) Shobhit and I had been up quite late on Friday night, and then I spent quite a lot of time Saturday late morning and afternoon writing up my previous photo digest email, about the first four days of our trip to Sydney. I’m not sure I had ever spent so much of a given day just staying in my hotel room while on a trip before: we did not leave for anything until it was time to head over to the parade, and we did that at about 5:30 p.m. Our hotel was less than half a mile from where the parade started, and we walked over there first, then meandered down Oxford Street (on which the first portion of the parade route goes) until we found a decent viewing spot. The parade starts at 7:30, the only gay parade I have ever attended that occurs in the evening (and which clearly lends it a much greater party atmosphere than others), and people begin lining the streets by mid-afternoon. Unsurprisingly, we did not find any open space behind the crowd barriers lining the sidewalks, but we did find a spot behind just one line of people—so we were only two people deep; it was not too long into the roughly three-and-a-half-hour parade that Shobhit managed to squeeze us forward enough that I was indeed right at the barrier and able to get pretty great pictures. Shortly before the parade began, a group of aboriginal people walked the length of the parade, blessing the event. Apparently this is tradition, and it seemed in keeping with what also occurred before the play Shobhit and I went to see Thursday night, which began with an announcement acknowledging the native land we were on and the people originally occupying it. This is increasingly common practice at events in Seattle as well, acknowledging Native American land, and when it’s always done by white people I can never decide if it is truly respectful or if it’s eye-rollingly disingenuous. It could even be elements of both. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
Even on the other side of the world, the parade otherwise begins with the traditional Dykes on Bikes. This is probably my favorite of the shots I got of them. Written in rainbow lettering on her chest is LOVE IS LOVE.
Vertical video! Someone take this bitch’s phone away from her, she clearly does not know how to use it.
This is a bit different from American Pride Parades, though: following the Dykes on Bikes is “Boys on Bikes”—a whole lot of them super hot (this quickly became a noticeable theme of the entire parade: the truly rampant hotness).
Another tradition: once the floats begin immediately after the procession of bikes, the first one is called “ACON First Nations.” The Mardi Gras parade organizers published a full list of all 188(!) contingents online—something I rather wish Seattle Pride would do—and in the blurb for this contingent it reads in part, “Organized by ACON [AIDS Council of New South Wales], the Frst Nations peoples LGBTQI community are always the first to be seen in each and every Mardi Gras Parade.” It continues, “Mardi Gras acknowledges the Gadigal people of Eora nation, who are the traditional owners of the land on which our celebrations are held. Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.” As for “What Matters?”, that became evident as the broader theme of the entire parade, as the phrase was used by a great number of contingents. I suppose this would not be the most appropriate place to bring up whether punctuation matters. Moving on!
More flavor of local culture and history: a Perth-based suicide prevention contingent called “Haka for Life,” engaged in the Indiginous Maori dance “to form a self-expression that breaks them free from the constraints of depression, anxiety and suicide ideation.”
Pictured here are members of the NSW Rural Fire Service; they were followed by a Fire + Rescue contingent. Given the past season of national bushfires bringing unprecedented devastation, these guys all got huge cheers from the crowds, as you might imagine. The large group marching behind the Fire + Rescue truck even did a bit of their own synchronized choreography—a common element among easily 80-90% of the contingents. The amount of creative effort across the board at this parade was like nothing I have ever seen in any other Pride Parade.
This group of dancing angels, their wings even lit up with lights, marched behind a fairly elaborate, multi-section float for the Qantas Airlines contingent. Side note: this parade was not exempt from the corporate presence many people feel now bog down American Pride Parades, but there were still two key differences. First, most corporate contingents in the States feature little more than a group marching and carrying a banner; very few actually get creative with floats. Second, the sheer number of such contingents in the Mardi Gras parade was much, much lower. There were still contingents for both Amazon and Facebook, but no Microsoft, for example. And although there was a Sydney Airport contingent, I don’t recall any other airlines besides Quantas. And with just a few exceptions (Amazon and Facebook among them, actually), even the corporate contingents tended to get pretty creatively elaborate. I mean, if you’re going to insist on a corporate presence in the parade, the least you do is be uniquely fun about it!
Aww, Koala Cop!
I ♥ mouth-watering pecs!
Okay, I have an obvious bias toward hot young men, so now I’ll throw another bone to the lesbians (and they don’t even like bones! You see how I am?). A quick old-timey dance between a couple in mid-twentieth-century dress.
I was delighted to see on the GAY PRIDE AUSTRALIA float, at least once in this parade, Sia represented. I don’t know who the other “Aussie icons,” as they are called in their little blurb in the schedule, are though. Is one of them supposed to be a sheep? I did just learn that Australia is the highest wool producing country in the world, producing 25% of the world’s wool.
From gay party company Daywash’s “Candyland” float: a giant inflated lollipop.
The Sydney Opera House gets its own contingent! This was my favorite float.
On the Chinese LGBTQI Community float. I just love the composition of this shot. That’s a statue of a stallion behind him on the right.
You would think this Golden Girls Float would be spectacular enough in its own right, wouldn’t you? It was followed by a small crowd of people marching all dressed in Golden Girls drag. Done by “DIY Rainbow,” which is apparently “a Sydney based community group that chalks rainbows for equality.”
One of several contingents in a row of swimming groups or clubs of different types, again doing their own dance choreography. Unlike the Seattle Pride Parade, which can get genuinely tedious about halfway through, this parade was eminently entertaining from start to finish.
Sunday, March 1: last day in Sydney Second nude beach day! Cobblers Beach, which we had gone to on Thursday, was across the Harbour Bridge and then on the north side of a peninsula (one of a great many in the Sydney area; the topography really reminds me of Seattle and Puget Sound, although we’ve got a lot more larger islands) northeast of Sydney’s CBD. Lady Bay Beach, pictured here, is on the west side of yet another peninsula, this one also northeast of the CBD but slightly less so and part of the land south of Sydney Harbour. It features a great, panoramic view of the Sydney skyline.
Our transit out to Lady Bay Beach consisted first of Light Rail from just around the corner from our hotel to Circular Quay station, where we then took a passenger ferry out to the peninsula on which we had nearly a mile to walk to the beach. I took this fantastic shot on our ferry ride back to Circular Quay, after a few hours of warm sunbathing and skinny dipping. It was fantastic.
I took a really excessive number of Sydney skyline shots on this day, we just had so many great views of it, both from the beach and from the ferry. This is just a particularly nice one that also includes the Sydney Opera House.
[All Sydney photo albums on Flickr here; all overall Australia 2020 photo albums here.