Positive Life NSW

Ross recalls the long history of Mardi Gras parade and party, and its reflection of our response to HIV in Australia.

Mardi Gras season is coming around again. There was a time when I found the prospect incredibly exciting – when I was of that age where Mardi Gras was the annual gathering of your ‘gay family’. There is still a need for a ‘gathering’, but now I play cards with a few older friends and reminisce. Having been at the first Mardi Gras and attending every party in the 1980s and 1990s (but none this century), I have a lot of reminiscing material.

You can’t tell the history of Mardi Gras without also telling the parallel story of HIV and our response to it – although the juxtaposition of the two has not always been comfortable. This is a personal story constructed from my memories and anecdotes.

By the time 1984 came around, we knew AIDS was here but most of us hadn’t really started to take it seriously. Storm clouds were on the horizon and it felt like this was going to be the last ‘pre-AIDS’ Mardi Gras – so we’d better party hard. It definitely felt ominous.

I was living in a house with someone who was a mad Elton John fan. We were shocked that he suddenly got married on Valentine’s Day in Sydney, just before the Mardi Gras parade. Our response was to go into the parade mocking this sham marriage. We got four white T-shirts, put large letters on each one to spell P-O-O-F, wore large Elton glasses and just wandered up with the parade.

Our cheap and simple costumes had an enormous response. Parades in some way seemed more creative, participative and less controlled than they do now. Sadly, two of the four ‘Eltons’ had HIV already (or got HIV soon after), although they didn’t know it, and didn’t get to see Mardi Gras in the 1990s.

All night at the party people would approach me and ask “where’s the F?” (He was the cute one.) His usual way of doing the Mardi Gras party was to arrive, spend a bit of time seeing friends and then head for the stables, a sacred place where a lot of on-site sex happened. Of course, once HIV arrived, and was taken seriously, we could have none of that.

Reality strikes
A year later, the reality of HIV was well and truly accepted and the gay community response began. The first phase of AIDS was an epidemic of conferences and meetings and, of course, if you could schedule national meetings around the time of Mardi Gras, people from interstate loved you. If you lived here, however, it meant a week of meetings and organising.

In 1985, there was a small set of ‘HIV’ floats. The main theme was the Bobby Goldsmith float, ‘so many men, so little time’, which was a clever use of an existing slogan to be both pro-sex and sad depending on how you read it. I was involved in organising the AIDS Council of NSW’s first parade presence.

HIV put a new set of political pressures on Mardi Gras. In the era of HIV, an event so associated with sex and drug taking was bound to come under scrutiny. Indeed two doctors at one point called for Mardi Gras to be closed theorising that it would lead to ‘50,000 HIV infections’. Some 25 years later, there have been just over half that number of infections in Australia. Mathematical modelling is sometimes a very precise ‘science’.

Paradoxically, it was sometimes HIV organisations who encouraged Mardi Gras not to give in to anti-sex moralism. It was sort of inevitable that the immense on-site sex spaces had to go in the era of HIV, but in reality it just shifted them off-site.

In 1985, the size of the parade and the watching crowd felt huge. The parade had begun to transition from ‘street party’ to ‘show’. For me, the street party was more fun.

The first year we handed out condoms was 1986. This has become a somewhat tedious ritual, in my opinion, but hey it was new and different then. It was also the first year the Reverend Fred Nile prayed for rain. On the day of the parade it rained all day. About an hour before the parade was due to start, the rain stopped. Just as the parade ended it began to pour. Seems like someone was sending a message that they like parades.

The few of us handing out condoms at the entrance were besieged by thousands fleeing the rain. Drag queen make up is very sensitive to rain! Most weren’t interested in condoms; they just wanted to know where they could change. Many just gave up and stripped to their underwear. It made for a great party.

Water was involved in another Mardi Gras and HIV beat up. There was concern that the Mardi Gras swimming festival would infect the hallowed waters of the Andrew Boy Charlton swimming pool. During the first decade of HIV, paranoia and misinformation about HIV transmission was rife and the traditional homophobes were never loathe to use misinformation.

A growing presence
Each progressive year, the educational and HIV presence in the parade got larger. When I got diagnosed with HIV, my interest changed from prevention to the experience and politics of positivity.

In those early days, if you were positive and had a lot of friends who weren’t well, Mardi Gras took on a totally different meaning. It became the event you stayed alive for, and, as the years went on, an event that was inevitably filled with sadness and memories of who was not there. How I remember those conversations with positive friends about ‘making it to another Mardi Gras’ or ‘I think this will be my last’. It certainly put a different sort of pressure on the event to work for you.

The first year I switched from ‘prevention’ to ‘positive’, I was involved in helping some people who weren’t well participate in the parade. We pushed them along the parade route in wheelchairs. The response from the crowd was overwhelming. Somehow having thousands of people scream ”We love you” jarred badly. The person I was pushing told me that if one more person told him they loved him he would “lose it in their face”. But these were the years of major psychic disturbance as the reality of AIDS hit.

I had begun working in the HIV Support Project. It was a project that thrived on black humour – a humour that would probably jar shockingly in 2010. David McDairmid helped the project create a float and costumes that were incredibly well designed. We all went as individual diseases or drugs in these simple costumes that matched the main design; there was a collection of “Teresa Toxoplasmosis’ and ‘Paula Pentamidines’. We later realised running around as a disease or a drug wasn’t a good pick-up strategy.

There was sometimes a tense relationship about how much HIV should be represented in the parade. We didn’t want being gay to be defined by HIV, but in the 1980s that’s sort of what happened. Gradually gay and HIV got disentangled as AIDS went from epidemic to endemic.

In 1991, when deaths had started to peak and when the Australian drug approval system was still hopelessly slow at providing access to life-saving drugs, Mardi Gras to its credit put ACT UP at the front of the parade. ACT UP formed in Sydney in the early 1990s and was significantly involved in agitation to change Australia’s archaic drug approval system.

The transition years
During the 1990s, the HIV presence became mega, but its impact seemed to be less and less. It was usually all together in an ‘AIDS section’ of the parade that often took 30 minutes to go past with hundreds of volunteers. Somehow, a yearning for the separation of ‘gay’ and ‘HIV’ meant we didn’t want to see Mardi Gras and HIV so inextricably linked.

PLWHA NSW (now Positive Life) was involved in setting up a time out room for people with HIV. I had a couple of my best parties just hanging out there. The condom and health presence got larger and more creative, but also increasingly tedious and repetitive.

In many ways the best part of this story is that ‘gay’ and ‘Mardi Gras’ have both survived the ‘AIDS crisis’. I could never have imagined we’d have effective HIV treatments and that I’d still be alive; nor could I imagine we’d reach this moment without some huge celebration.

Maybe we haven’t celebrated because there is a deep unresolved sadness that is so often unspoken about the impact of AIDS from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. And maybe that same sadness is what prevents me from dusting off the party frock, looking for biscuits and slapping my friends into revisiting the past. But, I’m still so glad Mardi Gras is here and I hope for those of you who still enjoy it that it is indeed happy.