Beads! Beads! Beads!

Mardi Gras is one of those holidays that many of us celebrate but few of us actually know why, and that's perfectly fine with just about everybody. I think it actually has something to do with Christianity and the last supper, or something about fasting, I clearly have no idea. I know it involves Lent, Fat Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, and a lot of drinking and vomiting, but outside of that, not a clue.

Most people's images of Mardi Gras don't center around the church, however...I don't have to tell you that. Most people picture Bourbon St. in downtown New Orleans, topless women on the shoulders of highly-intoxicated males, clamoring for highly-coveted purple, green and gold beads to wear around their naked necks like cheap, plastic badges of honor.

Quite a few miles from New Orleans myself, I was certainly surprised to learn that our own, beloved Sydney plays host to an annual Mardi Gras celebration to rival that of its American counterpart. New Orleans will always be the home of Mardi Gras, don't get me wrong, but Sydney's celebration was, allegedly, a party of epic proportions, and certainly a sight to behold up close and personal. Upon hearing this from a few people, I immediately did some research online, and quickly discovered there was one key difference between Mardi Gras in Sydney and the one in New Orleans. You see, Sydney is the home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras celebration, one of the largest homosexual festival/parade in the world. It's a celebration of gay culture in Sydney and the world, where all are welcome, but the festivities are noticeably, well, gay. My original surprise aside, I realized this was now, more than ever, a spectacle not to be missed. I marked the date on my calendar, March 3rd...I couldn't wait.

As the day approached, my friend, Tom (yes, he of the Jervis Bay trip) notified me that his internship with the Australian Green Party meant that he and any of his friends could actually be IN the parade itself! I jumped at this thought, I mean how many times do you get to be in any parade, much less the largest annual gay pride parade in the world?! The day of the parade finally arrived, and me, Tom and our Canadian friend Joelle took the bus downtown to the city hall/hyde park area where we met up with our Green Party parade float coordinators. We got our t-shirts, and then filed over to where our float was waiting.

The whole of downtown Sydney was a madhouse; I've never seen so many ridiculously-dressed people in one place in my entire life. There were people representing all kinds of organizations, ranging from the Gay Elderly, to the Free David Hicks (that Aussie soldier who became a Muslim and maybe a terrorist that the US captured and were holding at Guantanmo) people, to the Fuck Homophobic Religions group, to my personal favorite, the Kylie Minogue (I just can't get you outta my head...) worshipers. There were people from all walks of life who, during the day just blend in with the crowd at their jobs or on the beach or in the market, but this one night of the year get the strut their stuff for all of Sydney to witness. It was awesome.

We traversed the crowd and eventually made it to our float, which wasn't a float in the traditional sense (see: Animal House) but was a flatbed truck with green shit and posters all over it. Whatever, it's not like the Green Party gets a lot of funding for government, much less for gay floats. Anyway it was ours, which meant that it didn't matter what it looked like, we loved it. We met up with 5 other UNSWers that Tom knew, at least vicariously, who joined up with our party. I spotted a few of my friends in the crowd, yelling to them I could see they were baffled that I was somehow "inside the ropes".

The parade got underway around 7 pm, led, as they do each year, by the Dykes on Bikes, an organization whose name tells you pretty much all you need to know. It was just a lot of lesbians on Harleys. Other groups filed past, while our group, now about 40 strong, practiced our dance routine that we would do as we marched the two miles to the parade finish. It's hard to describe the dance, but it was 32 beats long and involved a lot of pom pom thrusting. I can't describe the whole thing, but ask me sometime and I'll do it for you.

Finally, around 9, it was our turn to go. The truck's engine fired up, the music was cranked all the way up, and we marched off. Somehow I managed to get to the front of our group, don't ask me how, but that meant that I had to lead us in our dance every 64 beats of the song. I'm not a dancer, let that be known, nor do I count myself among those who possess those foreign concepts of "rhythm" or "timing" or "coordination", but I think I managed pretty well.

We marched for what felt like hours, lurching along behind our exhaust-y float, inhaling what I'm sure was an unsafe amount of CO2, but it was a blast, all the same. Passing thousands and thousands of people, we trekked down the parade route, jamming to various drum & bass and techno songs...it was probably the most tiring thing I've done in the last five years, and I'm not even kidding. We finally crossed the finish line about 2 hours since we departed Hyde Park, thankful to see the boxes and boxes of bottled water available for parade participants, which we consumed in record time.

We caught a bus back to Coogee, and then quickly collapsed into my waiting bed, it was a night I won't soon forget.

Some of the highlights can be seen in the album below:

We're Here! We're Queer!...