The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG) parade is supposed to be a celebration of queer culture, resistance, and the joy of liberation. Beneath the layers of corporate sponsorship and political public relations that now overwhelm Mardi Gras, this radical spirit may be difficult to see – but it has by no means disappeared, and it is on the cusp of breaking out again. At the upcoming AGM, Mardi Gras members will have the opportunity to vote on a motion that would formally prohibit the New South Wales police from marching in the parade. This is the biggest opportunity in decades to reclaim the radical history of Sydney’s queer politics.

Radical beginnings

Nobody can deny that Mardi Gras began as a serious political protest. The first Mardi Gras in 1978 was the culmination of years of pre-existing gay rights activism in Sydney. The Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) were the first to organise a gay rights demonstration in 1972. Also in 1972, a Gay Liberation Front formed, which fed into another organisation, Sydney Gay Liberation (SGL). Unlike CAMP, SGL was unabashedly radical, and saw the repression of gays as a product of a society that was fundamentally rotten. Early SGL demonstrations were deliberately confrontational, particularly against the police. In 1973 they held a gay pride week demonstration, where two hundred supporters fought the cops.

Members of SGL and its descendants were influenced by Marxist and feminist theory, with a significant number of activists belonging to far-left organisations. Gay activists set up groups inside trade unions, among victims of medical abuse, on university campuses and in a number of other areas. This rapidly developing Sydney scene was thus well placed to respond to a letter from San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Committee, calling for solidarity demonstrations with the Americans protesting the homophobic New Right. A committee was formed (Gay Solidarity Group, GSG) and demonstration planned to agitate for the end of police harassment, legal discrimination and workplace victimisation, as well as for the overall protection of the rights of gays and lesbians.

The first protest took place on the morning of the 24th of June, 1978, when hundreds of gays, lesbians and supporters marched through the Sydney CBD. The Mardi Gras parade itself took place later that night in Darlinghurst, where hundreds of marchers (often in drag, make-up and fancy dress) were attacked by the cops, with dozens thrown into paddy wagons, where they were then taken to Darlinghurst Police Station. Known “troublemakers” were singled out and bashed in custody. During the melee, a good number of marchers fought back with whatever was at hand, tossing rubbish bins and bottles at the police.

The angry protestors camped outside the police station for hours, demanding the release of the marchers. By Sunday morning, word had spread, and a solidarity movement developed. Hundreds of supporters confronted the police outside the courtroom where the arrestees’ cases were heard. Solidarity rallies in the coming weeks drew thousands of attendees and helped solidify a militant movement for gay rights, against the police and the state.

The recuperation of pride

The militancy of the GSG and the Mardi Gras campaign did not please all sections of the gay community. Gay liberation veterans talk about the hostility they received from “scene queens”, who thrived in the repressive subculture that the liberationists wanted to overcome. Conservative members of the community despised the links gay rights campaigners had built with the rest of the left; one wealthy gay man wrote in 1978 (.pdf document, reference p. 19) that he was distressed by the amount of drag queens at activist events, disliked the leftists who blamed homophobia on capitalism, and could not see why gay activists wanted to “confuse the issue with Aboriginal rights, black rights, socialist movements, women’s rights [and] police brutality”. Sound familiar?

Through the 80s, a more cohesive and “out” gay community developed. A greater number of openly gay-oriented businesses emerged, including clubs, fashion boutiques and saunas. This commercial rise helped facilitate a shift in gay politics – while the gay liberationists had viewed the owners of such businesses as exploitative of gays and criticised the subculture around them, the new establishment saw these pink-dollar businesses as the bedrock of a respectable community – one that could assert its political rights through lobbying and voting. Connections with other left causes were no longer as important as seeing progress through political assimilation and commercial influence.

While the original gay rights activists continued to organise throughout the 80s and 90s, the shift in priorities began to make itself felt on Mardi Gras itself. The parade began to orient towards an apolitical, party-first approach, and it gradually picked up commercial sponsors from mainstream Australian businesses. State and local governments began to support it, and political parties began to encourage their members to attend. An antagonistic relationship with the cops was replaced with a “collaborative” one. The political activism has continued on a lower level, but it has been dwarfed by the interests of the hospitality and tourism sectors that make a fortune off the parade. This broad development also occurred in other countries with significant gay pride movements, like the US, UK and Canada.

Resistance

The gradual moderation of SGLMG is by no means a sign that the queer community does not suffer discrimination, or that government repression is a thing of the past. Mardi Gras can only represent the gay community in this way if it speaks exclusively to the minority of the community who are financially comfortable, socially secure and do not face the brunt of police violence.

Queerphobic panics are not a thing of the past. The “no” campaigners during the same-sex marriage plebiscite were able to solidify and radicalise the minority that voted against marriage equality, establishing a base to launch further campaigns against queers. The religious right still systematically targets educators who teach children about sexual orientation and gender, while also attempting to ban queer-themed books from public libraries. The right wing of society, broadly, has launched campaign after campaign against trans people, and in a number of countries it has successfully passed legislation attacking trans youth in particular.

The corporate ties the SGLMG has developed have compromised the political goals that it began with. The current principal sponsor, American Express, is well known for blocking the financial activities of sex workers. In 2019, Pride in Protest had to fight against the sponsorship of Gilead, the pharmaceutical organisation that produces PrEP, as their price-gouging of the product in the US was (and is) resulting in preventable HIV infections.

The inclusion of the police in Mardi Gras is the most obvious insult to Mardi Gras’ radical history. Police repression of queers is no longer as severe as it once was – true. But many of the other problems the 78ers had with the cops still continue to this day. Queers regularly report transphobic and homophobic abuse from cops whenever they have to deal with them. The police still violently repress protests, and the anti-protest laws currently on the books are in many respects more authoritarian than the laws that existed in 1978.

The fact that there are now a greater number of openly queer cops in the police force means little. Neither can the reduction in police repression over the years be attributed to the “collaborative” relationship between the Mardi Gras organisers and the police, as defenders of cop involvement suggest. Police harassment of queers has not declined thanks to friendly meetings with the local police area commander – it has declined thanks to years of ongoing political activism. The “friendly relationship” only masks continuing harassment in a manner that is accurately called pinkwashing; it also diverts people from the political resistance required to fight it.

Support a radical Mardi Gras –  support Pride in Protest

The most significant organisation continuing the fight for radical politics within Mardi Gras is Pride in Protest (PiP). Founded in 2018 to contest the conservatism present on the Mardi Gras board, PiP has an avowedly class-struggle and anti-carceral approach to queer liberation. It proudly supports a range of political issues that conservatives deem irrelevant to gay politics – like Indigenous rights, sex worker organising, the liberation of Palestine, and union activism. PiP’s membership is pluralistic, comprising members of different organisations and collectives, and members of none.

It’s no surprise that the conservatives on the SGLMG board oppose PiP so strongly, and are willing to use bureaucratic pressures to attack it. While a number of PiP motions at Mardi Gras AGMs pass, their main centrepiece demand – the end of the police float – is yet to get up. In 2020, the explosive resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement made anti-cop, anti-prison ideas near-mainstream; it was in this context that the “cops out” motion got over 40% of the room.

Support then cooled off over the years, only to surge again in the wake of the murder of Jesse Baird and Luke Davies by police constable Beaumont Lamarre-Condon. Lamarre-Condon, who had actually marched in the police Mardi Gras float in previous years, used a police gun to commit his murders. In response, the Mardi Gras board panicked and temporarily agreed to kick the cops out. It then panicked again after pressure from state and federal politicians, and re-invited them.

In the wake of this, PiP has organised hard to keep the pressure on and get the cops out. The board is now under such pressure that they themselves are directly moving the cops out motion at the next AGM, and their position formally supporting the cops has been replaced with a calculated neutrality. The chair is also now committed to not direct proxies against the motion.

The next SGLMG AGM is on Saturday the 7th of December. For all its structural issues and corporate links, the Mardi Gras body is still a huge organisation with thousands of members and global links. It’s this reason and others that make PiP’s activity within Mardi Gras so valuable. If you’re interested in helping with this campaign, contact Pride in Protest on any social media platform.

Kicking the cops out would not just be a great goal in of itself – it would reinvigorate Sydney’s queer activist scene, and a reinvigorated queer movement would naturally flow on to Sydney’s other activist movements. Kicking the cops out of Mardi Gras could even be the first step in kicking the cops out of Sydney’s other progressive institutions – like Trades Hall. Our disparate social struggles are a lot more intertwined than we realise.

Thanks to David Fagan for feedback on this article.