Mardi Gras and the construction of Sydney as an international gay and lesbian city

The recent emergence of Sydney as the “gay capital of the South Pacific” and as an important destination in the itineraries of lesbian and gay tourists has been closely tied to the growth and development of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and to the concomitant expansion and rapid diversification of the Australian gay and lesbian tourism industry, especially since the early 1990s. Beginning as an evening street parade following a day of political protest in 1978—a local commemoration of the New York Stonewall riots at a time when male homosexual acts were illegal in New South Wales—and ending that day in a civil riot with at least fifty-three arrests, Mardi Gras has grown into a three-week international cultural festival that was estimated to have generated some AU$99 million (U.S.$55 million) in 1998 and that seems to attract more tourists to the nation than any other special event, as well as garnering the support of various corporate and government sponsors. This essay examines the contribution that Mardi Gras has made to the construction of Sydney as a world-class gay and lesbian city, a city that has changed from an industrial port to a cosmopolitan, global capital increasingly dependent, for the last two to three decades, on an economy driven by consumption and leisure. In particular, I will focus on the tensions that result from the competing demands placed on Mardi Gras by the needs and desires of its diverse gay and lesbian constituency and from the demands of global capital exercised through the gay and lesbian tourism industry. I will also show that Sydney’s treatment of its gay and lesbian citizens has been and continues to be deeply contradictory. Mardi Gras itself is a site where some of these contradictions are played out