By Joel Meares
I experienced my first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras from the comfort of my living room couch in suburban Sydney, snug in my pyjamas and slurping noisily from a freshly delivered container of short soup.
It was a Sunday somewhere in the mid-'90s, I was about 10, and I had stumbled across the ABC's broadcast of the parade accidentally.
A spectacular feathered costume during the 2016 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
It was a lot for my Catholic schoolboy eyes to take in. So much colour and music and leather and glitter. And so many questions. Why, I wondered, were those men wearing make-up? And why were those other men wearing very little at all? What was a dyke, why were they so fond of Harleys and why were they not so fond of this craggy Reverend Nile bloke?
Watching the parade was like staring into a kaleidoscope for 50 or so minutes – transfixing, confusing, brilliant – and when I put it down, I wanted to pick it up again. And I would, tuning in the next year, and the year after. It wasn't that I suddenly found my tribe; I wouldn't really understand the fundamental thing I had in common with these parading free spirits for well over a decade. But I had found a corner of the world I hadn't seen before.
Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has had a profound impact on many people's lives. Credit: Janie Barrett
In this foreign patch – actually just a few kilometres up Anzac Parade – gays weren't poofters to be mocked or avoided. And they weren't just the handsome young men I'd sometimes see on the news, their photographs floating behind some frowning newscaster before a quick cut to grieving loved ones wondering why they had been viciously attacked. They were none of the things that had defined homosexuality for me, having grown up not knowing anyone who was actually gay.
That Sunday night on the couch was one of the first times I'd seen that being gay could be joyous. Something to celebrate. It retooled my idea of what homosexuality meant. And I owe that discovery, as they say, to the power of television.
It's easy to forget now, with a gay bloke running around Ramsay Street and the majority of Australians supporting marriage equality, what a revolutionary move it was for the national broadcaster to first air the parade in 1994. Four years after the start of a spate of gay bashings in Sydney's suburbs and three years before Tasmania would decriminalise homosexuality, the ABC's decision to broadcast an edited cut of this beautiful and politically charged event was a real stand, and a risk.
The decision was met with the usual noisy pearl-clutching. That Nile bloke sure wasn't happy, nor was the Catholic Church, which organised a letter-writing campaign against the broadcast. Nor were the 90 federal ministers who petitioned for the 8.30pm broadcast to be banned or pushed back to a timeslot well past my 10-year-old bedtime. The broadcaster persisted, however, with then managing director David Hill saying "Mardi Gras is now a major Australian and indeed world festival and the parade is the centrepiece of it." He echoed sentiments from the NSW tourist commission, which had said the festival, and parade, reinforced "Sydney's image as a vibrant cosmopolitan city." The ABC earned its best ever Sunday night ratings to date.
Hill and the tourism board might have been reaching for the attention - and into the pockets - of people in urban centres across the world, but a huge power of that broadcast, and those that followed, was reaching people like myself, closer to home. And, probably more importantly, those kids who didn't live in Sydney or other big cities, a quick bus trip away from hubs of gay culture if they decided to take the trip and discover the foreign patch for themselves.
Watching the parade on the ABC, and then from 1997 until 2001 on Channel 10, during my pre-broadband tween and teenaged years, was an education. Not just in gay pride and revelry. I would soon go beyond the feathers and floats to learn and understand the parade's history, its fiery birth in protest, the legend of the '78ers. Gay life could be joyous, I discovered, but that joy rarely came without struggle.
The Mardi Gras parade disappeared from national TV in the early 2000s. The festival went into receivership around the same time, before recovering, and resurfacing on cable TV and then as a program viewable on the festival website. SBS has aired the parade since 2014, and will do so for the fourth time this week with an online livestream on Saturday and an edited show on Sunday night.
I'll be watching the stream from my home in New York, short soup in one hand, something bubbly in the other. And I hope I'm joined by young people back home who've been drawn to their computers and phones by curiosity or, the next night, who stumble across this kaleidoscope on TV.
They won't be as naive as I was. Today, the culture is saturated in all things rainbow; it would be hard to find a 10-year-old who didn't know his LGBTQIs as well as his ABCs. So much of that saturation, though, centres on the fight - for equal rights, for protection, to let kids know it gets better. In the colourful, loud and moving images of the parade, I hope they see there's also plenty of joy and community to be found in all those letters.