Reuben Kaye, a comic and cabaret performer made infamous by a joke he made on The Project about Jesus Christ, cancelled a show that Enmore Road had scheduled at the end of April due to threats made by far-right Christians. This follows other cancellations, including the Chelsea Rebel Cafe’s children’s craft event featuring the drag queen Millie-Anne Problems, as well as Glitter Nova, at the Victorian Pride Centre in St Kilda, following threats from neo-Nazis.
This string of reactionary victories against child-friendly community drag events follows a wave of judicial and legislative misogyny, transphobia, and anti-queer actions in the United States. In an attempt to import this bigotry to so-called Australia, conservative politicians such as Katherine Deves, who compared comprehensive sex education to the Holocaust, and Mark Latham, whose stated aim is to “prohibit teaching the ideology of gender fluidity to children in schools”, seek to promote a false ‘groomer’ narrative as a means to popularise anti-queer sentiment. Such bigotry hardly ever receives sanction on the right – it took the Victorian Minister, Moira Deeming, to be seen with literal sieg heiling neo-Nazis before the Liberal Party would even consider evicting her from their ranks.
This bigotry is not without bipartisan support, however, as while in opposition, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) sought not to vote against the blatantly queer-phobic Religious Freedoms Bill but merely amend it. During the 2022 federal election leaders debate Anthony Albanese said that a woman was an “adult human female”, a known (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) TERF dog whistle, a statement the now PM repeated recently during an interview with Piers Morgan. Further, now that they hold power in the Commonwealth Government, Labor held an inquiry into the Religious Freedoms Bill whose findings were published on the eve of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Despite this lack of support for sexual and gender minorities from the major political parties, two thirds of so-called Australians were found to support gender diverse identities in a poll conducted by Pollinate and Fifty Acres last year, showing that the pro-queer sentiment that won Marriage Equality continues to hold strong. This can also be seen from the courageous and vehement community support that has turned out against bigoted transphobic and anti-queer attacks. These include community defence groups coming out in scores to stand by a gender inclusive swim night at Ashfield, a welcoming show of support for a Manly Library Drag Story Hour which vastly outnumbered TERFs and neo-Nazis, and the awe-inspiring counter campaign against hateful anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay ‘Posie Parker’ Keen-Minshull.
However, a hateful minority remains staunch in their attempts to wind back the clock on civil rights, much of which are from suburban and ethnically diverse areas that were shamefully neglected by the 2017 Equality Campaign. The failure to address the demand for queer liberation in its entirety returns to bite us now, with queerphobes in power taking advantage of the situation to build a far right base both electorally and in the streets.
The linkages to the right’s failed opposition to marriage equality and the current wave of anti-trans bigotry is a direct one. Binary Australia, a hateful transphobic organisation, was originally called Marriage Alliance, a group dedicated to opposing marriage equality. The name change occurred as a direct response to their defeat in the plebiscite. The connection of this organisation to anti-trans bigotry is made clear by the example of Kirralie Smith, a spokeswoman for the organisation, being served an Apprehended Violence Order due to her online harassment of trans women.
Another such example of an anti-trans group emerging from the marriage equality campaign is the violent homophobic and transphobic hate group dubbed as ‘Christian Lives Matter’ (CLM). It apes the name of Black Lives Matter – a movement against police brutality under a white supremacist state – to instead reinstate theocratic standards of morality to oppress queers, using children as a pretext for their bigotry. Though this group was initially founded in the wake of the religious right’s defeat on the marriage equality question, it made itself infamous for its actions amidst World Pride Sydney where a group of young men, escorted by the police, marched up King St in Newtown reciting the rosary, spitting at passers by, and making threats to their physical safety. They have also made coalitions amidst the congregations of conservative churches and mosques amassing in their thousands in Hyde Park, cutting down from St Mary’s Gates the ribbons of clerical abuse survivors during Pell’s Funeral, targeting early childhood centres with queer employees and, most notably, physically assaulting queer activists in Belfield.
Carrying the same energy from the conspiracy theory fuelled Freedom Australia movement, this formation should not be mistaken for some ignorant bigotry of a disenfranchised ‘lumpenproletariat’ reaction. One of the group’s founders, Charlie Bakhos, is a small business owner while Christian Sukkar, the man who plead guilty for inciting and committing violence against the queer community, is a real estate agent. Another organiser Charlie Taouk is the Managing Director of Citiwide Group, which is an National Disability Insurance Scheme provider. A significant block within CLM are Maronite Catholics, many of whom are supporters of fascist Lebanese political parties such as the Lebanese Forces. Their protest at Hyde Park featured congregations being bussed in from churches and mosques with printed shirts and placards; the crowd catered by food trucks. It should be made clear that the motivation behind this movement is not that of workers but that of the petite bourgeoisie and clergy – neither of which is of our class.
In contrast to anti-trans group’s bourgeois origins, their targets are members of the queer working class. Performers such as Alexander McKween, Belial B’Zarr, and Randy Roy whose events have been cancelled is in a very public way endangering their and their peer’s incomes. During the height of the lockdowns, many service workers from retail to hospitality had their capacity to work for a wage either restricted or removed. Live performers were some of the most heavily hit workers of all, with the entire industry being completely shut indefinitely. Now their ability to work is being put in jeopardy again by the threat of violent bigotry. The attempt to shutdown drag shows is not just an attack on the community but a direct attack on queer segments of the working class.
The response by governments from all levels has been woeful and only continues to reinforce the violence that is experienced by minorities in this country. In April there was a violent incident where drag queens were subject to verbal abuse on Oxford Street and despite the presence of police, it was the police who let the aggressors get away without consequence or accountability. The response was only to increase police presence, proudly announced by independent Alex Greenwich, despite the inaction of the police that evening and the continued violence experienced against the queer community by police to this day.
This contradiction in the state’s response is only furthered under the Andrews regime as the Victorian Labor government continues to increase funding to VicPol in response to the National Socialist Network (NSN) marching in the streets during the aforementioned Posie Parker’s event there. This is despite the fact that not only that day VicPol did not intervene against the fascist display as they held back and were even violent towards counter protestors, but also that VicPol has a continued history of fascist ties within their own ranks. Most recently one of their officer’s published a picture of his son, NSN member Nathan Bull, wearing Nazi memorabilia. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
The state’s tactic of trusting police risk assessment when it comes to the far right is a mistake that will only increase the threat over time. Giving the far right victories will only embolden them to continue the tactic of threatening more shows. We’ve seen this recently with Monash Council cancelling a drag storytime event that was to take place on International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT). The fact that a show was allowed to be cancelled during IDAHOBIT shows that the police don’t have any interest in protecting the queer community. Instead the community groups must be proactively reached out to by the parties putting on the event and invited in to help mobilise the community to defend its own cultural events. The queer community and its supporters have shown time and time again that they have the capacity to do this. It must be stated frankly that if councils and venues want to put on an event, but shirk the responsibility of dealing with the fact that bigotry is an active force in this country, then all they’re interested in fundamentally is pinkwashing themselves. At the very least drag performers should be guaranteed cancellation fees for events, otherwise they risk being impoverished by other people’s cowardice.
As we have seen with The Voice where the state’s tokenistic attempts to appease these minorities only furthers the state’s ability to oppress them (such as Aboriginal Legal Service having a funding crisis in the same year as the referendum), so too do we see this contradiction where Victoria funds the oppressive police force that enables neo-Nazis to help combat the neo-Nazis present on the streets. We see that the Voice has the backing of both big business, including mining firms who would seek to exploit the resources of the First Nations’ land, and the state, which continues to domineer over Blak land whose sovereignty hasn’t been ceded. This reflects the carceral state response and police endorsement of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, rife with corporate endorsement and rainbow capitalism, with the Police Accords and the police floats. Both instances demonstrate that bourgeois and state support ultimately mean little in the way of ensuring minorities’ safety, if not detrimental their liberation.
As we continue to see, these transphobic interests are within the state and so it is not the state we should turn to to address this issue. It is only through our community’s capacity to mobilise in the streets and in social spaces that we are able to fight for queer safety. Queer liberation is ultimately opposed to bourgeois interests and so cancellations of queer, family-friendly community events must be frustrated on the ground. We can already see this happening, with the community organising a storytime event outside Eltham Library in the face of violent threats. Each official cancellation is a reactionary victory however and so social mobilisation to ensure that not only do these events go ahead but that they are proliferated needs to continue. Not until every city council can endorse a drag story hour without risk of capitulating to reaction can we ease pressure on this issue.