The other side of Sydney Mardi Gras: Not a party but a month of continual protest

Protestors carry a rainbow flag with the words “no climate justice without social justice” on it. Pride in Protest Mardi Gras rally, Sunday 18 February. Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari.

250 queer activists took over Newtown’s main thoroughfare on Sunday in an attempt to bring Mardi Gras back to its radical roots.

Speakers at the protest emphasised the need to harness union power in the fight for queer rights and condemned the Israeli “pinkwashing” of genocide in Palestine.

The rally went ahead as authorities cancelled Fair Day, a key Mardi Gras celebration slated for the same weekend, due to the discovery of asbestos in soil at Victoria Park.

The annual street demonstration, organised by Pride in Protest, a vocal queer rights group, usually falls on the same day as the official Mardi Gras Parade. Prior to the rally, Pride in Protest attempted to funnel support for Fair Day towards their own counter-protest, advertising the event as proceeding “rain, hail or mulch”.

“We’ve never needed an official sign-off before from corporate sponsors to be gay together, so why start now?” Luc Velez said, a Mardi Gras board director from Pride in Protest.

The protest represented the launch of an alternative Mardi Gras, one distinctive from the vision presented in tourism advertisements and postcards. This Mardi Gras is more about protest than party, more about kicking cops out of safety meeting talks and parades than welcoming a police force with a documented history of turning a blind eye to gay hate crimes. It’s also a return to the origins of Mardi Gras in Sydney on June 24, 1978, as a mass protest and commemoration of the Stonewall Riots.

Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari.

The “pinkwashing” of the Gaza conflict was a common theme among speakers on Sunday. Resentment was rife towards the apartheid state of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which have marketed the mass ethnic cleansing event as an effort to protect the West’s liberal values and queer tolerance, despite Israel’s own history of blackmailing queer Palestinians and denying them asylum. 

“We want First Nations rights from Gadigal to Gaza,” the rally MC told the crowd.

A speaker representing SWOP NSW (Sex Workers Outreach Program) highlighted the barriers sex workers face in accessing essential services and their lack of legislative anti-discrimination protections in NSW. While sex work has been partially decriminalised in NSW since the 90s, antiquated laws mean it is still lawful to deny past and present sex workers rental accommodation, employment, banking services and more.

Speakers from the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and Unionists for Palestine urged attendees to organise in the workplace to support queer rights, pointing to the introduction of gender affirmation leave at the University of Sydney in 2021 as evidence of union capabilities.

Chants of “no bad whores, just bad laws” and “out of the bars and into the streets” rang out as protestors marched down King Street in Newtown following a series of impassioned speeches.

This commotion, a very public display of visibility and frustration featuring pride placards, trans decorations and Palestinian flags, comes at a time of escalating violence towards queer communities in Sydney.

Across the last twelve months, emboldened far-right religious groups have targeted safe spaces for queer communities across the country, gate-crashing queer rights protests and causing a series of councils to cancel drag story-time events over security concerns.

In March last year, religious fanatics from the Christians Lives Matter movement surrounded and assaulted a group of queer activists, who were protesting against a Mark Latham event outside a Catholic church in south-west Sydney.

Speakers at Sunday’s rally urged those present to protest this Friday, 23 February, during the opening of the Qtopia Museum on the site of the old Darlinghurst Police Station where police infamously assaulted rainbow community elders in 1978.

The opening of the controversial new cultural centre, which documents Sydney’s vibrant queer history, is a cause of celebration to some. But the institution has divided public opinion. Queer activists intend to make a ruckus during the political Kodak moment which, they believe, serves as a pinkwashing opportunity for the museum’s key donors and supporters.

The Murdoch media mogul family has donated $1 million to the museum. Supporters including NSW Premier Chris Minns, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and former ABC Chair Ita Buttrose all have questionable track records on Palestinian rights in the wake of an unfolding genocide.

“Israel continues to bomb museums, cultural institutions and children in Gaza,” an NTEU member told the crowd on Sunday. “I will not stand by while politicians open a museum here and paint themselves as progressive.”