The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is an annual pride parade in Sydney, New South Wales attended by hundreds of thousands of people from around Australia and overseas. Mardi Gras is the largest gay and lesbian event in Oceania. It first began as a protest for gay and lesbian people in 1978. In 2019, an attempt was made to alter the name to include more groups under the queer umbrella, but this was voted down by the gay and lesbian members, who wanted the event to remain exclusive. This decision was met by disappointment from especially bisexual Australians, who consider it a form of Bisexual erasure.
The Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is one of Australia's biggest tourist drawcards, with the parade and dance party attracting many international and domestic tourists. It is New South Wales' second-largest annual event in terms of economic impact, generating an annual income of about A$30 million for the state.
Since the mid 1990's the parade has had an average of around 200,000 to 250,000 people viewing it along the parade route with around 150 to 180 floats and around 10,000 to 12,000 participants in the parade each year. The entire Mardi Gras festival, which runs for around 2 to 3 weeks in conjunction with the parade each year, has around 30,000 visitors who travel from outside Sydney to attend each year. In 2023 when Sydney also hosted Sydney WorldPride the Mardi Gras festival had 310,000, people attend its events, which included large scale events such as the WorldPride opening ceremony in the Domain, Fair Day, the Mardi Gras after party and Bondi Beach party. In 2023 there were also 103,800 people who visited Sydney for the festival and 21,000 of those people were international visitors.
The event has grown from gay rights parades that were held annually since 1978, when numerous participants were arrested by New South Wales Police Force. The Mardi Gras Parade maintains a political flavour, with many marching groups and floats promoting gay and lesbian rights issues or themes. Reflecting changes since the first Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, participants in the Mardi Gras Parade now include groups of uniformed Australian Defence Force personnel, police officers from New South Wales Police Force, as well as interstate and federal police officers, firefighters and other emergency services personnel. However, this remains a controversial topic among the community, with many objecting to the inclusion of police. Marriage equality was a dominant theme in the 2011 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade with at least 15 floats lobbying for same-sex marriage.
Since 2009, the NSW government Labor and Liberal have both given funding to The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
In 2019 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras submitted a bid to host WorldPride 2023 competing against Montreal, Canada and Houston, Texas. InterPride chose Sydney, Australia to host WorldPride 2023 at their Athens October 2019 Annual General Meeting of three hundred delegate organizations, the first time WorldPride was held in the Southern Hemisphere or Asia Pacific region.
History
The term Mardi Gras
The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, or Sydney Mardi Gras, is a celebration of gay and lesbian history and culture. It was named after, but is unrelated to, the Christian holiday of Mardi Gras.
When the first event was organised in 1978, it was conceived as a street party in an effort to host a more "positive celebration"; the term Mardi Gras had become synonymous with street festivals and so became the name for the event. Mardi Gras derives from the celebrations held on Mardi (French for "Tuesday") when Gras (French for "fat") is eaten prior to the Christian abstinence period of Lent preceding Easter.
1971 to 1973
The first LGBTQIA+ demonstration in Australia was organised by CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution) and occurred on the 6th of October 1971. CAMP, which had first been established in 1970, organised the protest to take place outside the Liberal Party’s Sydney headquarters in the Sydney CBD and around 70 people turned up to protest in support of Tom Hughes, a pre-selection candidate who supported homosexual law reform.
Following this first demonstration in October 1971, CAMP continued to participate in further demonstrations for law reform challenging discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community.
In July 1973 another LGBTQIA+ group, Sydney's Gay Liberation, came up with the idea for a Gay Pride festival to be held over one week in Sydney and they spoke about their ideas for the festival in their August 1973 issue of the Sydney Gay Liberation newsletter and after contacting groups in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide similar LGBTQIA+ festivals also occurred in these cities. The festival in Sydney took place in September, and it included a festival in the Domain, a public meeting and a speak out. The final event at the end of the week was a demonstration which included about 200 LGBTQIA+ people who marched from Sydney Town Hall to Martin Place and the 200 participants held black and pink balloons, banners and streamers and yelled out chants including "Out of the beats and onto the streets" and a total of 18 people were charged for taking part in the demonstration.
It has been commented that " ...the events of 1973, with its melding of pride and politics, formed the model on which Mardi Gras and similar pride festivals around Australia are based."
1978 to 1979
The first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras occurred on the 24 June 1978 and it consisted of a series of events that called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in employment and housing, an end to police harassment and the repeal of all anti-homosexual laws and these events included a morning protest march in commemoration of the Stonewall riots as part of a global network of Gay Solidarity events as well as a night-time celebration that began on Oxford street in Darlinghurst.
Ken Davis one of the organisers and participants in these events has described what occurred on that day as follows "We sought and received police permission and hired a modest sound truck. Press publicity for gay liberation and the planned Mardi Gras was prominent in the campus and socialist newspapers, and in the then-progressive Australian. The organisers relied on letters to groups, phone calls, posters, leaflets and word-of-mouth. The Saturday morning march from Town Hall to Martin Place with 500 people was larger than any previous gay protest in Australia... ...By 10.30 pm, outside the court at Taylor Square on a cold night, we were unsure if we could get critical mass for our experiment in celebration, but eventually we set off with the small sound truck..." and as the group marched down Oxford street towards Hyde Park, the number of people rose to around 1,500 as revellers in Oxford Street bars and clubs responded to the call "Out of the bars and into the streets!".
Ken Davis further comments that "...Apart from the truck, there were no typical protest placards or banners. Only a small percentage of participants were dressed in carnival costumes..." and then "...the police decided to not observe the permit... ...The police pushed the parade fast down Oxford Street and arrested Lance Gowland, the driver of the sound truck, to prevent the planned dispersal into Hyde Park, so the 1500-strong crowd spontaneously marched down College Street and up William Street to Kings Cross. By the time the crowd was dispersing near El Alamein Fountain..." in Kings Cross 53 people were arrested. Two people who were arrested were fined. The rest were released without bail and the charges dismissed.
Although most charges were eventually dropped, The Sydney Morning Herald published the names of those arrested in full, leading to many people being outed to their friends and places of employment and many of those arrested lost their jobs as homosexuality was a crime in New South Wales until 1984.
The police response to a legal, local minority protest transformed it into a nationally significant event which stimulated gay rights and law reform campaigns and it has been commented by Ken Davis that "...the first gay Mardi Gras... ...on Saturday 24 June 1978 was a pivotal moment... ...Though there had been gay and lesbian groups and protests after 1970, for the first time gay and lesbian rights became a significant public issue, creating a momentum for reforms."
A documentary, Witches and Faggots, Dykes and Poofters, produced by Digby Duncan in 1980 tells the story of the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and in 2018 a restored version of the documentary was screened at the 25th Mardi Gras Film Festival in Sydney, Brisbane's Queer Film Festival and at the National Film and Sound Archive's Arc cinema in Canberra.
The second Mardi Gras Parade occurred the following year in 1979 despite receiving opposition from gay media, businesses and groups and it again recognised the Stonewall Riots of 1969 as well as commemorating the first mardi gras the previous year. It had the theme of Power in the Darkness and there were 3,000 people who participated in the second parade. While there was a large police presence for it there were no arrests made. In 1979 the Labor Government of New South Wales, led by Neville Wran, also repealed the Summary Offences Act 1988 (NSW) under which the arrests in 1978 were made.
1980 to 1999
In 1980, after the third successful Mardi Gras parade, at community consultations, decisions were made to move the parade to the summer. In 1981, the parade was shifted to February, with the name changed to the "Sydney Gay Mardi Gras". An increasingly large number of people not only participated in the now summertime event, but a crowd of 5,000 came to watch it. 1981's event saw a split develop between lesbian and gays over the inclusion of floats representing businesses. For most of the decade many lesbians excluded themselves from the event. A large post-parade party was held in 1982, which 4,000 people attended. This would continue to become an integral part of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras. 1983 saw 44 floats participate with 20,000 onlookers. Footage of the 1984 event appeared in the music video for the Cold Chisel song "Saturday Night". In 1987, an estimated 100,000 people came to watch the parade. The mid-1980s saw considerable pressure placed to the Mardi Gras Committee following media controversy regarding AIDS. Despite calls for the parade and the party to be banned, the 1985 parade went ahead with the theme Fighting for Our Lives. In 1988 the parade was renamed the "Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras" at an Extraordinary General Meeting.
1991 saw the eighth annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Film festival, a Mardi Gras event, included in a national film festival for the first time. In this year the parade had become the largest ever held in Australia. In 1992, the festival lasted for four weeks, making it the largest gay and lesbian festival in the world. Also in 1992, Fiona Cunningham-Reid filmed a documentary about the history of the Mardi Gras called "Feed Them to the Cannibals!". By 1993, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade had become the largest night time outdoor parade in the world. Mardi Gras' Economic Impact Study found that the total Mardi Gras impact into the Australian economy was around A$38 million. In February 1993 an Umbrella Event of the festival was the play "Nothing Personal" designed by Arthur Dicks. In 1994, Mardi Gras Festival adopted the theme We are Family, a nod to it being International Year of the Family. That year there were 137 floats in the parade with 600,000 spectators. For the first time, the parade was filmed by the ABC TV and shown on Sunday 6 March at 8.30 pm. It won its time slot and earned ABC TV its highest ratings in history. The 1997 parade was covered by Libbi Gorr's current affairs show McFeast on ABC TV.
In 1988, Aboriginal Australian dancers Malcolm Cole (1949-1995) and Rodney Junga-Williams (1962-2011), in collaboration with artist Panos Couros, enacted the story of the First Fleet, with Cole as Captain Cook, and Junga-Williams as Joseph Banks – the first ever Aboriginal float entry in the parade. A boatful of black sailors was pulled by a white man, with this leading float commemorating 218 years after Cook's landing and claim on the land. Cole died of HIV/AIDS, and in 2024 his twin brother Robert recreated his costume in order to march again in the parade to commemorate his life.
Criticism of the Sydney Mardi Gras was perhaps at its strongest during the early years of the AIDS crisis, and flared again when in 1994 the national broadcaster ABC telecast the parade for the first time.
In 1996 there was criticism over the inclusion of bisexuals and heterosexuals as members of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. It was claimed that the subsequent requirement for those people to correctly answer specific questions, created two classes of membership – namely (1) gays, lesbians and transgender people and (2) bisexuals and heterosexuals.
In 1997 a small group of people who were part of the 1978 events contributed to planning the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Sydney Mardi Gras parade in 1998. This group became known as the 78ers and has led each year's Mardi Gras parade since 1998.
2000 to 2009
The 2001 Parade was broadcast on Network Ten and had a theme of gay and lesbian parenting. The 2002 event saw a loss of A$400,000. In August the organising company was bankrupt. In 2003, the festival organisers responded to claims that the event was becoming too commercialised by implementing a scaled-down, grassroots approach. The 2009 performance figures indicated about 9,500 participants and 134 floats were part of the parade, making it the largest ever. Up to 300,000 spectators from Australia and overseas turned out in 2011 for the celebrations.
Mardi Gras, at different times, has attracted criticism from its own members, LGBTQIA+ communities, and a variety of religious and political groups. Some argue Mardi Gras is inherently subversive to traditional Christian, Islamic and Jewish values. Each year the event is held, Fred Nile, a former member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and a former minister of the Uniting Church in Australia, leads a prayer for rain on the event.
In January 2008 Robert Forsyth, the Anglican bishop of South Sydney, condemned Corpus Christi for opening the Mardi Gras because it depicted Judas seducing a gay Jesus as well as Jesus' administration of gay marriage between two apostles. Director Leigh Rowney accepted that it would generate discussion on homosexuality and Christianity and stated: "I wanted this play in the hands of a Christian person like myself to give it dignity but still open it up to answering questions about Christianity as a faith system." Playwright Terrence McNally, a gay man, received death threats when it was played in the United States.