Each year Mardi Gras shimmies onto the Sydney circuit. Aside from a mild shuffle in its entertainment schedule and a growing awareness of its environmental impacts, the formula remains relatively stable. A parade, an always surprising number of floats, awful EDM remixes of pop songs, a week’s rent in ticketed parties and angry online queers looking to mobilise around their own idea of proud authenticity.
Each year we debate all the same things. The history of Mardi Gras and the broader value of Pride. Should police get to march, and is it a march or a parade? Who invited the bankers and why does L'oreal have a float?
And each year I wonder why we keep having the same conversations. Perhaps it’s pointing to a loss of history in our community’s consciousness. Maybe the legislative gains and a creeping societal tolerance are creating an environment of political complacency. Do people just not care enough?
In her debut book, Queer Intentions, writer Amelia Abraham notes that these discussions reverberate into the global queer politic. London’s Pride sees several alternatives with UK Black Pride, Peckham Pride, Queer Picnic and the newly minted Trans Pride March, promising a more diverse, less sanitised day of resistance. New York City, the home place of Pride marches, saw a fierce competitor in 2019 with Reclaim Pride, ‘the annual Pride parade has become a bloated, over-policed circuit party, stuffed with 150 corporate floats. This does not represent the ‘spirit of Stonewall’ on this 50th anniversary year,’ wrote the organisers. Even Berlin, a city sweaty with kinks and politics, has the Dyke March, Radical Queer March and (the late) Kreuzberg Pride as distinct surrogates to the more commercial CSD Berlin.
Pride is politically messy. When you stir together an alphabet soup of people all of which have other intersecting identities (race, class, religion, political allegiance), you will invariably plate up a political mess.
And the 2020 Sydney Mardi Gras dished quite the menu.
'While I can certainly empathise with the desire to feel proud in one’s identity against all odds, that inclusion shouldn’t come at the expense of the exclusion of the most marginalised. Pride shouldn’t come at the expense of another’s fear.'
The NSW Police Force arrested three members of the ‘Department of Homo Affairs’ after protesting against the Liberal Party Float. They tweeted that they were ‘disappointed with their actions, which did not comply with the conditions of the event or the spirit of the celebrations.’ Senior journalist Andrew Taylor in The Age reported that Mardi Gras ‘began in 1978 as a protest against discrimination.’ Both claims are laughably false.
‘The first #sydneymardigras in 1978 was not “a protest against discrimination”, it was a march in solidarity with victims of police violence. The main chant was “stop police attacks on gays, women and blacks.”’ tweeted activist and lawyer, Paul Kidd. Queer activist/author Sally Rugg also provides an excellent rundown.
Indeed, the first Sydney ‘mardi gras’ was organised as a protest to commemorate the NYC 1969 Stonewall Riots. Parallel events were observed in cities such as LA, Chicago, London, Stockholm, and West Berlin. Gay pride began from anti-police sentiment.
It was with this logic that the Auckland Pride organisers banned police from marching in their uniforms at the 2019 event. ‘It became really apparent that there are members of our community that didn't feel like they could be included in Pride while the police were marching in uniform because the uniform's a symbol of an institution that has a long way to go by their own admission,’ said Pride chair, Cissy Rock. The decision looked to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable, those disproportionately targeted by police: Māori and the trans community.
The decision splintered Auckland’s Rainbow community. Many maintain, like here in Australia, that Pride is about ‘inclusion’ and that queer police should have the right to feel proud in their uniform. It’s a pride hard fought for. In 2018 the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission reviewed the Victorian Police for workplace harm on LGBTI employees. The review found that gay men in Victoria Police were six times more likely to have been sexually harassed by a colleague, with homophobia, transphobia and a hypermasculine and heteronormative culture driving hostile behaviours.
While I can certainly empathise with the desire to feel proud in one’s identity against all odds, that inclusion shouldn’t come at the expense of the exclusion of the most marginalised. Pride shouldn’t come at the expense of another’s fear. Institutionalised forms of power shouldn’t be privileged over those at the very fringe.
But what disturbed me perhaps the most was this relentless and emotional bondage to one’s professional identity and a sense of pride. Why did our queer police want to march as police so damn badly? For that matter, why did bankers, lawyers, Uber employees feel so strongly about their corporate identity?
Much gets written about pink-washing and the corporatisation of Pride. Gay sandwiches and camp mouthwash are merely two examples in a growing suite of products marketed directly at queers by companies looking to exploit our identities for extra profit margins. They target us because they know we’re hungry for representation in a society that has long invisibilised our existence.
'When we decide to march with corporate interest — flaunting our professional identities on the world’s gayest stage — we march as the foot soldiers of capitalism. We fundamentally define and reduce our worth as a community to our working lives and the conditions that our employers set for us.'
Yet not all representation is created equal. The private sector’s growing interest in diversity, inclusion and equality isn’t a result of understanding our human rights or an appeal to our humanity. No, it’s because they finally see value in us as both workers and consumers.
This year ANZ truly took the cake with their #lovespeech campaign: a Google chrome extension which replaced derogatory language with rainbow and unicorn emojis — called The Hurt Blocker, can you believe? — and a campaign video showing queer youth repeating all the stuff that gets yelled at us on the street.
When we decide to march with corporate interest — flaunting our professional identities on the world’s gayest stage — we march as the foot soldiers of capitalism. We fundamentally define and reduce our worth as a community to our working lives and the conditions that our employers set for us. This is at the antithesis of a liberation movement that spat in the face of respectability, looked to forge its own road, and found pride in identities as resistance to the state and its status quo.
The literal translation of Mardi Gras from French is ‘Fat Tuesday’, marked as the last opportunity to devour rich foods before the beginning of Lent. Pride is therefore a coming together of community, a breaking of bread to nourish ourselves and one another with that messy alphabet soup.
Yet, I fear that our hunger is being exploited, that our identity is conditional to our consumption and employment, and increasingly our Pride walk can only be done purse first.
Dejan Jotanovic is a freelance writer based in Melbourne, whose words spin around feminism, gender theory, queer history, policy and pop culture. Flick him at a tweet at @heydejan.
Main image credit: Sydney Mardi Gras 2020 person holds up sign with the colours of the Aboriginal flag reading, 'Our lives matter' (Getty Images/Brendon Thorne)