Lesbian cabaret stars Chloe Rose Taylor and Natasha Veselinovic to put on Lesbian Love Stories at Feast Festival
Chloe and Natasha both thought they were straight, until they met each other. Eleven years later, they’re still going strong.
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Coming out publicly as queer is one thing, but the stars of Lesbian Love Stories first had to come to terms with their own mutual attraction and change in sexual orientation.
Chloe Rose Taylor and Natasha Veselinovic were both studying for musical theatre degrees at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, although in different years, in the early 2010s.
“We both thought we were actually ‘straight’ at that point – then met each other and confused each other a helluva lot,” Taylor says.
The mutual attraction was immediate, “and 11 years later we’re still going strong”.
Trying to rent a house as a lesbian couple was one of the biggest challenges that the singers and actors had to face after realising they wanted to be together.
“We always had to apply for a two-bedroom, to avoid people either rejecting our application or being weird about it,” Veselinovic says.
“That was hard because I just felt like I was lying all of the time – but I was, and I hated that feeling. I know that doesn’t sound overly wild, but it’s an everyday lie that you have to live with constantly, and a worry.”
Veselinovic says their story could also have been made into a play, “full of a lot of panic, and twists and turns, and drama”.
A few real-life anecdotes have found their way into their cabaret show Lesbian Love Stories, which is part of this month’s Feast Festival in Adelaide.
They wanted to create a show which avoided both the “angry lesbian” stereotype and the other, hypersexualised extreme, to share universal stories about love.
“People can just hear them for what they are. Some of them are funny, yes, some of them are angry … but most of them are just everyday things that happen to everybody in a relationship,” Veselinovic says.
“We do experience some of the same things that a hetero couple does experience,” Taylor says. “We also experience lots of other different stuff.”
“Generally speaking, there is no ‘average’ gay lady,” Veselinovic adds.
“People even get confused sometimes when they see us because both of us, I guess, are on the ‘girlier’ side.”
Lesbian Love Stories also stars former Brisbane drama student Ruby Clark, who was in Veselinovic’s year and at the same party where she connected with Taylor.
“She noticed and was like, ‘What is going on with you and Chloe?’ She has truly been there since the dawn of time … so she was the no-brainer third choice for our little combo,” Veselinovic says.
Taylor and Veselinovic first noticed each other in the kitchen between dance classes.
“We would just make strange faces at each other, for no reason, because we weren’t sure how to communicate beyond that for the longest time,” Veselinovic says.
“It was in some ways quite a beautiful experience to start our relationship, because we were able to go on that journey together,” Taylor adds.
“We went from ‘I just like you – it’s the person, not the gender’ through all the different phases of figuring out what we do like.
It’s really what built a lot of core, strong foundations for our relationship, because we had to keep fighting for it, we had to keep communicating, we had to do all of those things.
“Otherwise, it would have been so easy to just run away and not deal with it.”
Chloe was 18 and Tash in her early 20s when they realised their sexual orientation, and both had already moved out of home, which they say made the personal process easier, being adults. However, coming out to family and friends was still difficult.
“Most people that we thought would respond in a certain way, responded the opposite way,” Taylor says.
“Sometimes it was better than we thought, and sometimes it was worse than we thought.
“That was really hard to navigate, because we were shocked every time by people’s responses to things.”
Because they don’t fit a visual stereotype, the process of “coming out” is a continual one: “You can pass as straight … but because of that we still find that, 11 years later, we need to come out constantly,” Veselinovic says.
It took moving to London to pursue their careers from 2017-19 for the couple to come back “brave enough” to show their affection in public – let alone put their love stories on stage.
Performing at a bushfires fundraiser in 2020, they turned the song An Old-Fashioned Love Story – which is sung by a lesbian character in the musical The Wild Party – into a duet.
It was such a hit that they pitched the idea of a lesbian cabaret for a local theatre company initiative and were selected – giving them just three weeks to write the show.
They realised if they had “weird, wacky, interesting” love stories, then other lesbian couples must too.
Taylor says the stories in the show come from all around the world and were sourced through friends and associates, who spread the word, as well as social media call-outs.
“We tried to get a good scope of different ages, different experiences, and we tell them all verbatim – as if they’re our own.”
Clingy partners, specific gay categories, and weird dating behaviours all come under the microscope.
In between, the trio also put their own spin on contemporary pop, rock and musical theatre songs.
Not all of the stories are happy.
“We can safely tell people’s stories who are not comfortable to be out yet, which is really special,” Veselinovic says.
“It’s a non-aggressive way of educating an audience in terms of things that still happen in day-to-day life for queer people, without being too head-bashy about it.”
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