The girls and gays party

I remember my first party. Will — a gorgeous kid with pockets like a pop-up pharmacy — makes his rounds on the high school lunch benches and invites the whole of Year 11 to his mansion in the backwaters of the northern rivers for his 18th. Vases of flowers upended onto the kitchen floor, an antique chair upside down on the lawn.

The people I knew had transformed. Some into terrible rampaging beasts, dancing like they were on fire, and some into eerie creatures who would whisk you away to some sequestered couch to talk in whispers and murmurs. After laying low for a few hours, I ventured out onto the dance floor and the enchantment fell over me too!

The lights, the music, the hot breath of my neighbour on my neck, they were intoxicating, and I danced the whole night. The rules of regular life seemed to float away and we became like animals, like gods. Utterly free. In ancient customs, straight folks hunt each other across the floor.

Fix his hair. Fix her earring. Glance up-down, stumble backwards into him. Catch her, lift her up onto your shoulders, so on. I thought, bewildered.

Do the Gays Know How to Party?

There is none of this for the queer teenagers. So what do we do instead? The rituals were alienating. The best you could hope for was kissing your same-sex buddy on a drunken dare to raucous cheers. No, thank you. Straight clubs, which I attempted, were even worse. Men, eager to initiate these rituals of seduction, hovered, waiting for permission.

They gyrate vaguely to the beat, edging in and out of your personal space like a boxer trying to engage in hand-to-hand combat. My hope began to falter. Perhaps, I was back to being a sensible, sober creature, who preferred a night in above anything else. But when I moved to Sydney, I knew I had to give it another shot.

Sydney Mardi Gras has been world famous since its inception. How odd that gay folks could be so famous for partying, and yet my friends and I had felt so shut out of most of it.