Festivals, Space and Sexuality: Gay Pride in Australia

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of gay pride festivals in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, in the wake of the emergence and consolidation of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras as one of the pre-eminent international tourism festivals staged in Australia. We argue that to understand the crucial role gay pride festivals play in processes of social change surrounding sexuality Down-Under it is essential to take spatiality seriously. We offer an interpretation of the sexual politics of festival spaces which is committed to relational thinking, openness and recognition of differences and multiplicities. Our interpretation draws on a discourse analysis of lesbian and gay media reports documenting reactions to the establishment of ‘new’ gay pride festivals. Discourses of pride have been negotiated and adopted in quite different ways by each of the festivals examined. Alert to the necessity to take spatiality seriously, gay pride events are shown politically to be ambiguous spaces, which may be sites of ambivalence, or ritualized resistance, or alternatively they may be contested sites.

Résumé: Festivals, espace et sexualité: gay pride en Australie

Cet article explore la mise sur pied de festivals gay pride (défilés gay) à Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth et Adelaïde à la suite de l'organisation et de la consolidation du Mardi Gras gay et lesbien de Sydney en tant que l'un des festivals prééminents du tourisme international, monté en Australie. Nous insistons sur le fait que, pour comprendre le rôle primordial des festivals gay pride dans les processus d'évolution sociale par rapport à la sexualité en Australie, il faut absolument prendre sérieusement en compte l'espace. Notre interprétation de la politique des espaces de festivals basés sur la sexualité est qu'elle encourage les relations ouvertes et la reconnaissance des différences et des multiplicités. Notre interprétation s'inspire d'une analyse des discours des médias gay quand ils rapportent les réactions à la création de nouveaux festivals gay pride. Des discours sensiblement différents ont été négociés et adoptés par chacun des festivals étudiés. Sachant qu'ils doivent prendre l'espace au sérieux, les évènements gay pride ont lieu dans des espaces politiques ambigus soit comme sites d'ambivalence soit comme sites de résistance ritualisée ou encore de contestation.

Zusammenfassung: Festivals, Raum und Sexualitaet: Homosexueller Stolz in Australien

Dieser Artikel erforscht das auftauchen von homosexuellen Stolz Festivals in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth und Adelaide als Folge der Entstehung des inzwischen traditionellen Sydney Schwulen und Lesben Mardi Gras als eines der herausragenden internationalen Tourismusfestivals in Australien. Wir argumentieren, dass es unumgaenglich ist, die Raumkomponente ernst zu nehmen, wenn man die Schluesselrolle von homosexuellen Stolz Festivals fuer die Prozesse des sozialen Wandels verstehen will, die Sexualitaet, Down under' betreffen. Wir schlagen eine Interpretation der sexuellen Politik von Festivalraeumen vor, die sich zu einem verbindenden denken sowie zur Offenheit und Anerkennung von Unterschieden und Vielheiten vepflichtet. Unserer Auffassung liegt liegt eine Diskursanalyse von Schwulen und Lesben Medienreportagen zu Grunde, die Reaktionen auf die Einrichtung von, neuen' Schwulen Stolz Festivals dokumentieren. Bei jedem der untersuchten Festivals wurde der Begriff, Stolz' unterschiedlich verhandelt nd angewandt. Mit dem Bewusstsein, dass, Rauemlichkeit' ernst zu nehmen ist, wird gezeigt, dass Schwulen Stolz Verantstaltungen im politischen Sinne zweideutige Raeume sind, wobei es sich um einen Ort der Ambivalenz, oder des ritualisierten Widerstandes handeln kann, oder, alternativ, um einen Raum, dessen Bedeutung umstritten ist.

Key Words:

• Festivals
• Pride
• space
• sexuality
• discourse analysis
• Australia

Mots-clés:

• Festivals
• défilé
• espace
• sexualité
• analyse de discours
• Australie

Stichwörter:

• Festivals
• Stolz
• Raum
• Sexualitaet
• Diskursanalyse
• Australien

Introduction

In this paper we use textual research undertaken on four Australian gay pride festivals to examine the importance of the spatial to help fashion gay and lesbian subjectivities in Melbourne (commencing in 1989), Brisbane (1990), Perth (1990) and Adelaide (1997). Our interest is not in measuring the economic impact of gay pride festivals in Australia (see Marsh et al. 1998). Instead, we have selected four annual festivals to illustrate the differences and similarities in discourses of sexuality and pride that inform the tourism geographies of these festival spaces. These festivals illustrate the complex way in which spaces and sexualities are networked into sophisticated social and material relations. Our interest is in the multiple and contested meanings of gay pride festival sites produced through the interconnections between spaces, subjectivities and sexualities, and the shifting frame of interactions that intersect across a range of geographical scales. We argue that festivals celebrating sexuality resonate differently not only between cities, but also within social groups, changing economic ideologies and addressing a range of issues, such as the rise of HIV/AIDS, same-sex marriage and lesbian and gay men parenting.

Our turn to the spatial arises in part from Picard and Robinson's (2006) eloquent critique of the social analyses of festivals. They argue that festivals research must break from the influential work of Goffman (1959), which has captured the imagination of festival social relations over many years. His emphasis on social life as a stage has kept much analysis of festival tourism prisoner to conceptual dichotomies of front and back stage – including the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ – ignoring the complex interconnections, fluidity and multiplicity that characterizes society. The aim of our article is to take-up Picard and Robinson's (2006: 21) call for tourism research to provide an analysis that can address the ‘complex, heterogeneous and dynamic political, economic and social webs’ of festivals. To do so, we draw upon Hetherington's (1997) ideas of festival spaces as ‘heterotopias’, that is, sites constituted as ambiguous or paradoxical due to socially transgressive practices. Alongside, Hetherington's work, we also draw on Massey's (2005) rethinking about ‘space’ and subjectivities as mutually constituted through social interrelations.

The article is divided into five sections. Initially, we review the conceptual arguments in which the social ‘impacts’ of festivals have been explained. Drawing on recent reworking of space by both Hetherington and Massey, we develop the idea of festival spaces as ambiguous, relational, performative, multiple and open. Next, we discuss our methods. Then we provide a wider social context for our analysis by exploring the dynamics between festivals and sexuality in Australia. The utility of our framework and context is shown here through our analysis of four Australian metropolitan gay pride festivals. Drawing upon a discourse analysis of lesbian and gay media, we provide an interpretation of these four festival spaces as historically contingent, contested, ambivalent, multi-scalar and ongoing. The breadth of analysis across these four festivals allows us to understand how the discourses of pride have been negotiated and adapted in very different ways to suit particular local contexts. The conclusion compels us to consider the importance of thinking about gay pride festivals in the process of reconfiguring sexuality through (re)making points of connection between people within an ongoing, uneven and multi-scalar network of social relationships.

Conceptualizing the Social Impacts of Tourism Festivals

Picard and Robinson (2006: 2) highlighted the social significance of tourism festivals, arguing that the ‘general pattern of tourism development in the developed world over the last 50 years or so intersects at numerous points with occasions of festivity, carnival and performance rituals’. Since the ground-breaking publications by Getz (1991, 1997) and Hall (1992), the social aspects of tourism festivals have received increased attention from scholars. We focus on two major strands.

In the context of economic globalization, one major strand of research has focused on the ‘buzz’ of festivals in the (re)making of place. Thinking of tourist festivals as sites of carnival and spectacle used by neo-liberal municipal authorities in the role of place reinvention and promotion strategies, Hall (1992: 1) described them as the ‘image builders of modern tourism’. Hence, much attention has been given to tourism festivals as a marketing pitch fashioned by boosterist economic policies of urban entrepreneurialism to attract increasingly mobile capital to cities in a globalizing world economy and to (re)image places that have slipped from the tourist circuit (Markwell 2002). As ‘world’ cities jostle to (re)establish profiles in a globalizing world economy, high profile festivals have become particularly crucial in (re)fashioning the imagined cityscape – including a World Cup or an Olympic Games (Waitt 2001). Equally, at the other end of the urban hierarchy, in the face of rural restructuring, non-metropolitan municipal authorities, informed by a cacophony of neo-liberal discourses about place-image, place-themes and place marketing, are encouraging often voluntary not-for-profit organizations to host tourism festivals (Paradis 2002).

To address the social implications of such strategies, theoretical interpretations of festivals often posit festivals as a mechanism to celebrate a collective consciousness to combat feelings of ‘insecurity’, ‘senselessness’ and ‘placelessness’ (Durkheim 1976; Falassi 1987; Giddens 1990; Frese 1993). Through embracing the neo-liberal ideology of city marketing, municipal authorities could not only provide a rally point to reaffirm citizen's identities but also enhance local loyalty or patriotism (Boyle 1997). Critiques of how festivals operate to forge a stronger place-based sense of belonging are apparent in the work of Britton (1991), Cochrane et al. (1996), Debord (1994), Hughes (1999) and Sorkin (1992). Harvey (1989) referred to the role of spectacle to conceal ongoing disadvantage against the socio-economically disadvantaged as that of ‘bread and circuses’, pointing towards how, historically, spectacle has been frequently deployed by the social elite as a form of social control. In short, these scholars agree that the outcomes are less predictable than the rhetoric of the politics of spectacle, and that once a festival becomes combined with entrepreneurial approaches designed to encourage people to spend money, the sense of collective identity can only be illusory or, at best, a public relations exercise.

The second strand draws on the concept of festivals as extolled in medieval Europe by Bakhtin (1984) as one of social protest against ‘norms’. For Bakhtin, festivals are conceptualized as offering the potential for occasions of ritualized social transgression. Daily routines and experiences are temporarily suspended, creating whatTurner (1988) termed liminal space through the blurring of boundaries between the private and public, spectator and participant as well as inside and outside. From this perspective it is suggested that festival spaces offer creative possibilities through temporarily suspending social relations and sustaining playful practices that may challenge established society norms. Festivals become a potential site of protests, resistance and transgression. Yet, if officially sanctioned, festivals are argued to become sites of ‘ritualised rebellion’ (Gluckman 1954). In other words, as a sanctioned event for participants to ‘let off steam’, the status quo is overturned only momentary.

Drawing on the work of Foucault, Hetherington (1997) reworked the notion of liminality through thinking about festivity as producing socially ambiguous spaces, ‘heterotopia’. For Hetherington, heterotopia is a site where normative assumptions are brought into question through the performance of alternative identities, such as how the ideologies naturalizing heterosexuality are brought into question through the camp performances of drag queens and kings.

Feminist geographers have also extended this notion of festival spaces as ambiguous by demonstrating how axes of identity never operate outside of space through drawing on Butler's notion of performativity (Rose 1999; Johnston 2001). Responses to festivals are therefore highly complex, given the pluralism of urban social life through the co-constitution of space and axes of identity, such as class, gender, age, ethnicity and sexuality. In other words, the social implications of a festival are always dependent upon how an individual sense of self is negotiated in and through a particular place. Gibson and Davidson (2004) and Duffy (2005) each demonstrated that the social implications of festivals are multiple and bounded by changing economic relationships within the polyphony of identities that are negotiated through the festival time-space. Equally, this focus has been adopted by a number of authors who have examined festivals and events within the specific context of gay/lesbian and queer sexualities (see, for example, Johnston 2001, 2005; Markwell 2002; Waitt 2003, 2004; Stevenson et al. 2005; Hughes 2006; Rowe et al. 2006).

Johnston (2005) has made good use of the concepts of performativity (Butler 1990), camp (Binnie 1997) and the abject (Kristeva 1982) to examine the instability of sexuality at festivals and to denaturalize taken-for-granted social practices and norms. Here, to make further trouble for naturalized assumptions about sexuality at festivals, we found Massey's (2005) conceptualization of space/spatiality helpful. There are three elements to her rethinking of space that we found particularly helpful: (1) if space and subjectivities are mutually constituted through an ongoing set of multi-scalar, open, incomplete and ongoing interrelations, then political subjectivities are understood as embedded practices negotiated through the ‘power geometries’ of space; (2) if space is the product of interrelations, then space is a sphere of the possibility of multiple rather than universal social impacts; and (3) if space and subjectivities are always in a process of becoming, then the future is always open to change rather than set on a preconfigured path.

First, Massey encourages us to think of how festival spaces and subjectivities are co-constituted around a set of practices that are always negotiated within ‘power geometries’. By power geometries she means the importance of recognizing that the interrelations through which subjects and space are mutually constituted are neither benign nor egalitarian. Massey therefore alerts us to the politics of festivals in remaking social worlds (social power) as constituted spatially.

Secondly, the idea that festival spaces are shaped by power geometries also suggests that individuals and social groups are differently positioned in relation to the ongoing flows and interconnections that underpin festival spaces. This perspective offers the possibility of the co-existence of a multiplicity of distinct narratives about festival spaces. In other words, there are many different lived experiences of festivals depending on how an individual is embedded in these crisscrossing flows of social relations underpinning sexuality, ethnicity, ‘race’, class and age. Consequently, conceptualizing space and multiplicity as co-constitutive alerts us to thinking about the spatial politics of Pride festivals in ways that may be understood by participants as simultaneously destabilizing and fixing assumptions about sexuality. On the one hand, there may be those who voice the belief that Pride festivals reinforce stereotypes of homosexuals as ‘sexually promiscuous’, ‘flamboyant’ and ‘raunchy’. On the other hand, other voices may position their lived experience of the parade as ‘empowering’, ‘euphoric’ and disrupting sexual boundaries. In short, acknowledging multiplicity suggests that the highly sexualized liminal Pride festival spaces can disrupt, subvert or ‘queer’ conventional boundaries of sexuality imposed by the dualism of Western thought (straight/gay), and at the same time reinscribe them.

Finally, Massey encourages us to think of festival spaces not as single, closed, bounded entities, given that they are interconnected to ideas, finance and movements that stretch beyond their particular time–space frame. Instead, festival spaces are constituted through multi-scalar interrelations. For example, many Pride festivals rely upon stretching feelings of connection and belonging and the scale of ‘community’ across transnational space. Altman (1997) argued that the interrelations of Pride festivals have played a crucial role in fashioning what he terms the ‘global gay’ subject. However, Massey does not conceptualize space as a closed network where preconfigured identities are transposed across space. Instead, there are always ‘loose ends’ and possibilities for future disruptions. Such ideas entertain the existence of a degree of autonomy and variation between Pride festivals.

Methods

May (2003) and Hannam (2002) argued that newspapers critically influence people's knowledge of their world and called for social and cultural researchers to pay closer attention to the way places are represented through newspapers. Miller (2005) and Gorman-Murray (2006a) have specifically paid attention to the way that the local lesbian/gay ‘community’ print media has assisted in representing and circulating certain places as ‘tolerant’, ‘safe’ or ‘gay’. Consequently, they used these sources to understand how certain places are invested with a particular understanding of gayness (for further examples, see Binnie (1995) and Hughes (2006)).

Hence, it is possible to examine how the local lesbian and gay media help to discursively constitute gay pride festival spaces. We are particularly interested in examining the different discourses of pride that help attract people to the festival. Gay pride festivals are held in a number of metropolitan centres along with smaller regional centres (see Table 1). Seeking to move research beyond the frame of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG), a systematic examination of the lesbian/gay community newspapers held at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives revealed that the most extensive records were held for the cities of Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. Hence, our sample is a pragmatic one. For each festival, articles were compiled into an archive. Working from an assumption of the importance of intertextuality to conduct the resulting thematic and discourse analyses, we also drew upon other sources, such as letters to the editor columns, festival programmes, gay travel guidebooks. Through a process of familiarization, indexing and coding, each item was then subjected to thematic and discourse analyses to develop insights into the social, cultural and political factors underpinning the interrelationships fashioning Pride festival spaces, subjectivities and politics. Our interpretation of these empirical texts was guided by Waitt's (2005) discussions of discourse analysis, who suggests an approach based on Foucauldian methodology. Such an approach rejects essentialism and adopts a constructionist approach in order to explore how discursive structures and practices operate to produce ‘authoritative accounts of the world’ (Waitt 2005: 168).

Table 1 Summary information for Australian gay pride festivals

Festival name, location, month and duration	First festival	Funding sources	Route of Pride parade/march	Paid admin. staff
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Sydney, New South Wales, February/March (four weeks)	1978	State, Local Gvt; Corporate	Barricaded parade since 1980s along Oxford Street, Darlinghurst – ends with a $A120 ticketed dance party	Yes
Melbourne Midsumma, Melbourne, Victoria, February (three weeks)	1989	State, Local Gvt; Corporate	Since 1996, Fitzroy Street, St Kilda –ends with a free concert in Catani Gardens	Yes
Brisbane Pride, Brisbane, Queensland, June/July (three weeks)	1990	Limited State Gvt funding; Corporate	Ann Street, The City – ends with a $A18 ticketed Pride Fair Day at Musgrave Park, South Brisbane	No
Perth Pride, Perth, Western Australia, October (four weeks)	1990	Local Gvt; corporate	Barricaded parade since 1994 along William Street, Northbridge – ends with a ticketed dance party	No
Adelaide Feast, Adelaide, South Australia, November (two weeks)	1997	Federal, State, Local Gvt; Corporate	Since 2004, from Torrens Parade Ground to the Lion Arts Centre, The City – ends with festival launch	Yes
ChillOut Festival, Daylesford, Victoria, March (four-day programme)	1997	Corporate	Since 2000, Vincent Street, Daylesford – ends with a $A12 ticketed Fair Day at the Showground	No
SpringOut Festival, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, November (four weeks)	1999	ACT Gvt; Corporate	None	No
Darwin Pride, Darwin, Northern Territory, May (two weeks)	1999	Northern Territory AIDS and Hepatitis C Council	Parade not organized since 2004 because of low attendance	No
Alice is Wonderland Festival, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, March (one week)	2000	Corporate	None	No
Rainbow Festival, Newcastle, New South Wales, October (one week)	2003	State, Local Gvt; Corporate	None	No

Festivals, Sexuality and Australia

In order to understand the wider contexts that brought these four festivals to life we turn first to explore gay pride festivals; Australian geographies of sexuality; and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. We argue that resonance of a gay pride festival in each of our four case studies is woven into wider debates about ‘Pride’ and sexuality in Australia.

Gay Pride Festivals

Given sexuality is crucial in the construction of self (Fuss 1991), festivals celebrating different expressions of sexuality are not new (see Drucker 1996; Vyras 1997). However, as Waitt and Markwell (2006) argued, contemporary lesbian/gay festivals are both quantitatively and qualitatively different. Contemporary festivals celebrating non-heterosexualities have not merely enjoyed an increase in the total number of events, participants and spectators. As at January 2006 there were 184 annual ‘Pride events’, representing the involvement of nineteen different nations (Interpride 2006). Further, festivals have been transformed by the ideology of ‘Pride’ and, more recently, by financial arrangements often underpinned by lucrative corporate sponsorship deals.

According to Interpride, the International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered Pride Coordinators Inc., a Pride event is:

a parade, march, rally, festival, arts festival, cultural activity or other event/ activity organized for people identifying as lesbians and/or gay men and/or bisexuals and/or transgender persons and/or other emerging sexual identities and promoting the visibility and/or validating the existence of those persons and commemorating the Stonewall Riots or a similar historic event/annual/periodic festival as organized by apride organization (Interpride 2006).

Jagose (1996) and Reynolds (2002) have rightly criticized the somewhat romantic notion that the modern gay liberation movement began with the so-called ‘Stonewall Riots’ which took place at the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, New York on 28 June 1969. However, the modern ‘Pride Movement’ did arise from the three nights of public disturbances following police harassment of patrons, and its subsequent commemorations. The Pride phenomenon began in 1970 when gay activists in several American cities, including New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, organized marches to publicly mark the anniversary of the Stonewall incident. Each event was organized to bring attention to the sexual oppression of lesbians and gay men through a public display of solidarity, and pride in a collective identity, while simultaneously commemorating a politically and culturally significant occurrence (see Howe (2001) for a discussion of San Francisco Pride). The Pride March, while initially an American metropolitan concept, has its variations in a number of African, Asian (Sanders 2002), Australasian (Johnston 1997) and European cities (see Duyves (1995) for the Gay and Lesbian Amsterdam Festival, and Hughes (2006) for the London Pride and Manchester's Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender festival).

From the late 1990s the international profusion and heightened visibility of Pride festivals must also be put into a context where many local municipal authorities began embracing the ‘arts’ and ‘culture’ as a mechanism of urban economic policies (Knopp 1995). Courting the ‘pink dollar’ was one means for local municipal authorities to generate new sources of income at a time of great fiscal strain. This meant that ‘being proud’ and ‘out’ was also about entertainment and pitching cities as ‘gay capitals’ of somewhere (Markwell 2002). While the possibilities for transgression may not have been lost, they may have been significantly modified by how sexual identities are constituted within the economic interrelationships of Pride festivals and neo-liberalism (Binnie 1995). For example, during the SGLMG the ‘permitted’ display of buff chests, bare bottoms and breasts has become deployed by Tourism New South Wales to pitch Sydney as a ‘fun’, ‘sexy’ city, rather than a challenge to the norms of heterosexuality.

Australian Geographies of Sexuality

Despite the SGLMG and the decriminalization of homosexuality by each Australian state over the past thirty years, people who fail to conform to the socialized heteronormal practices of sexual citizenship may still be subjected to physical and emotional violence as they go about their everyday lives. This contention has certainly found support in research that describes how many lesbian and gay men experience ‘everyday’ spaces of Australian metropolitan suburbs (Kirby and Hay 1997; Costello and Hodge 1999; Gorman-Murray 2006b), regional centres (Waitt and Gorman-Murray 2006) and country towns (Flood and Hamilton 2005; Gottschalk and Newton 2003). Public expression of same-sex desire is rarely accepted or regarded as ‘normal’. Even in the Australian state capitals of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, cities with established ‘gay suburbs’, physical assaults and verbal abuse are almost everyday occurrences for people whose bodies are read as homosexual. Further, Australians with a heterosexual identity continue to enjoy rights denied to marginalized sexual subjects, including marriage, parenting, adoption, superannuation and tax benefits (Baird 2006). Not surprisingly then, festivals celebrating various sexualities remain crucial not only in sexual politics but also role in sustaining narratives and subjectivities of many non-heterosexual people.

The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG)

In Australia, while protest rallies for sexual equality predate festivals (Figure 1), the spatial politics of gay pride festivals begin on the 24 June 1978 with the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras (as it was called then) along Oxford Street, in the known gay neighbourhood of Darlinghurst (Wotherspoon 1991). This evening parade was to be both a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and as a public celebration of homosexuality. The initial idea for a more celebratory Mardi Gras came from a handful of Sydney gay activists who had some experience of North American pride marches (Carberry 1995). While the SGLMG is clearly related to the Pride Marches of North American and European cities, it also significantly differs. The SGLMG distinctiveness is somewhat stylistic: it is a form of street theatre, performed in the evening and comprises a melange of flamboyant theatricality, costume and parody, embodying what might be called a ‘larrikin spirit’ eager to test authority, if not necessarily to overturn it (Seebohm 1993; Markwell 2002). As Altman (1997: 420) noted, the SGLMG is ‘uniquely Australian’. From the outset, a celebratory night-time march which incorporated the flamboyance and camp sensibilities that characterizes the parade today were evident.

Figure 1 Time-line of Australian gay rights protests, inaugural year of gay pride festivals and the passing of state and territory acts to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting men.

In 1981 the shift in emphasis (rather than focus) from protest per se to celebration was underscored when Mardi Gras disconnected itself from the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots on 28 June, and relocated towards the end of the Australian summer, February and March. This shift in timing away from the anniversary date of Stonewall enabled the exposure of more bare flesh, adding to the sexualization of the parade. This was an important factor in helping to refashion Mardi Gras as a mainstream tourism event. Prior to the change of date the total number of participants (including on-lookers) averaged around 1,500–2,000. By 1987, the crowd was estimated to be 100,000 which continued to climb each subsequent year, with 400,000 estimated in 1992, and peaking at around 600,000 in 1994 (Carberry 1995).

During the 1980s, increased attendance at the SGLMG can also be attributed to the festival becoming almost a rite-of-passage for many Australian gay people. As Faro and Wotherspoon (2000) and Murphy and Watson (1997) discussed, for many Australian sexual minorities, Oxford Street and Taylor Square became imagined as a homeland, a place-of-origin instead of San Francisco or New York. Participants would travel thousands of kilometres to enable this confirmation of their sexual identities. At this time, increased attendance might also be explained by the devastating impact that HIV/AIDS had on Australian gay communities. The SGLMG played a crucial role in simultaneously bringing attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis and demonstrating the community's tenacity and determination to survive its onslaught. Further, the SGLMG responded to the grief and bereavement generated by HIV/AIDS. Ironically, attendance at the Mardi Gras parade increased as a backlash to calls from a variety of ‘moral’ spokespersons and organizations to cancel the parade and dance party as a response to the AIDS crisis (Carberry 1995). Equally, however, the political and social climate during the early to mid-1980s was not conducive to the emergence of new large-scale public events that had (homo)sexuality as an explicitly celebratory focus. Yet, towards the end of the 1980s, the AIDS crisis fostered significant gay community building which might have helped create the necessary social and political interconnections that were conducive to the emergence of new celebratory festivals in other states. State AIDS Councils played a major role in community education and in establishing a collective identity, while local lesbian and gay organizations mobilized to raise funds for people with HIV/AIDS (Dowsett 1996; Willett 2000). During the 1980s and into the 1990s, the struggle to combat HIV/AIDS provided the focus for the emergence and strengthening of a stronger and more discernible collective that operated across sexual diversities

In the late 1990s, the seamless and perfect version of gay identities (and lifestyles) that were depicted in the parade was increasingly questioned as both mainstreaming certain gay sexualities and as ‘wallpapering’ over the systemic social inequalities that continued to be maintained. As gay activist and commentator Rodney Croome argued, ‘lying just beneath the dazzle of the Mardi Gras and white, inner-city, middle class gay and lesbian life there is injustice, poverty, powerlessness, alienation and a mountain of resentment’ (Croome 1998: 10). Markwell (2002) identified within gay communities three key sources of tension: (1) a loss of community constituency; (2) the interests of business apparently privileged over the interests of gay communities; and (3) perhaps growing irrelevance to a society in which understandings of sexuality had moved on from those forged in the 1960s and 1970s. The perception that the festival was seemingly working towards an exclusive gay community rather than an inclusive gay movement threatened to undermine the event.

In 2002, the bankruptcy of the original Sydney Mardi Gras organizing company resulted in the new organizational structure New Mardi Gras Ltd (NMGL), re-examining the purpose of the event (Maher 2002). Attempting to distance the festival from corporate sponsors, the NMGL (2003) claims the fundamental object of the SGLMG is to ‘affirm identity of GLBT people and enhance self-esteem’. Yet, the NMGL still continues to rely upon corporate sponsorship that seeks marketing opportunities from gay and lesbian ‘consumers’ and so there is an ongoing ambivalence that stems from the intersections of the temporary claiming of space through the parade with the fiscal desires of the mainstream economy (Gould 2005).

Four Australian Gay Pride Festival Spaces

We now turn to four particular gay pride festivals. As such, these festivals sustain exceptional social relationships in everyday locations – the streets, parks and public venues of Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. In each case, the festival is connected into a host of wider cultural, political and economic networks, but the critical focus here is how the lesbian and gay media frames discourses about gay pride and sexuality.

The Perth Pride Festival

Amongst the other Australian Pride festivals, the spaces of the Perth Pride Festival are perhaps now most similar to the SGLMG. Perth Pride opens the festival in iconic cultural sites to enhance claims for sexual citizenship, such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia, just as the SGLMG has used the Sydney Opera House and Hyde Park. Perth Pride now includes a night-time street parade through Northbridge, attracting crowds of about 100,000 who cheer the passing parade of commercial and community floats.

In Perth, the merging of discourse of Pride as ‘out’, ‘proud’ and ‘visible’ with entertainment, consumption and neo-liberal forms of citizenship can be traced to the early 1990s. In 1991, the Pride Collective encouraged participants to publicly celebrate Perth as a place where they could freely express their sexual identities. Following the format of the SGLMG, the march comprised about 350 participants who took on a more celebratory than protest tone, with local commercial venues sponsoring floats and, significantly, the parade was also held at night. (Westside Observer 1991). Yet, interestingly, reflecting a rather narrow and introverted focus of lesbian-gay sexualities, the local gay print media lamented ‘its [the parade's] lack of drag costumes and bare buttocks …’ (Westside Observer 1991). However, by the following year, the sexuality scripts popularized through the SGLMG resulted in both drag queens and scantily clad young men and women becoming a feature of the march. 1992 also signalled a sizeable increase in participation to about 1,500 people, including Dykes on Bikes and Greens politicians (Westside Observer 1992). The inclusion of drag queens, the scantily clad and the injection of corporate finance appears to have had considerable local resonance within the gay community. This is reflected in a statement in the media, describing the march as the ‘Perth Gay Mardi Gras’ (Westside Observer 1992). While assumptions of Peth as a heterosexed city were overthrown, if at least only for one night, to do so required calling upon a very constricted definition of sexual difference.

In 1994, the spatial dynamics of the parade changed substantially as the enhanced visibility generated by the new co-ordinating and promotion organization, Gay Pride WA Inc, necessitated introducing barriers to separate participants from the increasing numbers of spectators, estimated in 1993 to be between 40,000 and 60,000 (Westside Observer 1993). As elsewhere, the barriers facilitated the marking of a border between those parading and those watching as spectators. Moreover, physical barriers, Johnston (2005) argued, operate to fix and reinforce seemingly natural boundaries between the ‘gay space’ materialized through the performances of parade participants and the heterosexual street. When understood as an entertaining spectacle, spectators can affirm their own (hetero)sexuality. The presence of barriers clearly segregating paraders from spectators perhaps accounts for the increased popularity of the Perth Pride amongst heterosexual spectators. Visibility, spectacle and the materializing of a gay/straight division brought not only larger crowds of heterosexual spectators, but also the spectre of homophobic attacks. Consequently, to assist with ‘crowd control’, more marshals (a total of 60) were trained ‘in ways of dealing with any threatening situations through non-violent intervention’ (Westside Observer 1994a). Yet, the very naturalness of gender and sexuality norms that underpin the unitary subject is called into question through the costumes and practices of the participants. Assumptions of the stability of heterosexuality are challenged ‘with flamboyant drag costumes very much the order of the night’ (Westside Observer 1994). Pride festival spaces are simultaneously exclusionary and liberatory.

Illustrating the paradoxical qualities of the spaces of Perth's Pride Festival, some lesbian and gay Perth residents increasingly questioned the value of Pride festivals refashioned by discourses of entertainment and celebration as a mechanism for challenging heterosexism. Such criticism is apparent in this letter to the editor from Queer Radical (Westside Observer 1996: 10):

Pride is a celebration of being out and proud and visible, but is it yet time for a celebration of freedom? In a year when anti-discrimination legislation is not passed in state parliament, when suicides, bashings and job losses continue to increase, should we really be treating Pride as a celebration, or as an urgent cry of anger?

With the failure of amendments to anti-discrimination laws, the entire gay/lesbian/queer community should be furious and Pride should be the forum to display that fury. The origins of the Pride march are in dissent and anger towards an apathetic and uncaring community and state; if it wasn't for the radicalism of the early Stonewall protests (eg SUSWA) there would be no Pride march or party.

Queer Radical reminds us of the earlier American discourse of pride that emphasized challenges to heterosexism. Indeed, the first Perth Pride Festival in 1990 showed particularly strong links to North American discourses of pride. The first festival included a day-time rally through central Perth with representatives of ACTUP Australia, a radical AIDS direct action group. The march, whilst reported as ‘colourful’, was primarily a protest space with around 200 participants chanting pride slogans (Westside Observer 1990) and receiving a degree of ‘police harassment’ (Willett 2000: 206). Under the gaze of police offers patrolling the street, even the large numbers of lesbian and gay people did not provide safety from heterosexism.

Against the view that Pride festivals as a site of spectacle are now an ineffective mechanism to social transformation, Pride W[estern] A[ustralia], rather bravely, called upon a local government referendum to determine the level of mainstream support for its event. In July 2000 the City of Perth held a referendum on the parade as part of a local government by-election. A referendum was held because Pride WA had given serious thought to relocating the parade route to another local government area following the rejection of a funding application for the 2000 Pride Parade to Perth Council for $A1,000. Perth's constituency was asked: ‘Should the city of Perth support the staging of the Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade?’. Fifty-five percent of the vote was in favour (Westside Observer 2000a). The Pride Co-President interpreted this outcome as demonstrating the progressive politics of pride: ‘The Parade was also a success as far as getting the message across that gay men, lesbians and their supporters – like it or not Dr Nattrass [the City of Perth Lord Mayor] – are a part of the WA community’ (Westside Observer 2000b). The Pride WA parade has undoubtedly helped towards a more inclusive sexual citizenship within the broader metropolitan West Australian community. Yet, the concern is always what particular understanding of gay sexualities are constituted as worthy of citizenship, within and through the spaces of state- and corporate-sponsored Pride festivals. When aligned with corporate sponsors, Pride festival spaces have been increasingly critiqued for prioritizing particular understandings of gayness framed as affluent, white, stylish, monogamous and clean-cut.

The Melbourne Midsumma Festival

Melbourne's Midsumma was proposed initially by the Melbourne Gay Business Association in 1988, unlike Pride festivals in Perth, Sydney and Brisbane, which had their genesis in the mobilization of pride discourses. Possibly due to the involvement of business people from its inception, Midsumma is also the most professionalized of the gay pride festivals, with a fulltime festival co-ordinator employed by late 1989 ( Melbourne Star Observer 1989). Gill (1988: 1) interpreted this alliance between Pride and pink capital as a ‘new way of gaining increased national and international profile for the gay scene in Melbourne. Tourists coming to Sydney for the Mardi Gras might be tempted further south by a festival in Melbourne’.

Midsumma was explicitly a commercial decision aimed at enhancing Melbourne's place-identity as a gay tourist destination. Again, unlike the Sydney experience, where business owners and operators have been strongly criticized for ‘hijacking [the parade] for the purposes of making a profit’ (Carberry 1995: 31), in Melbourne, gay business people and venue owners played a role in the creation of the festival. Seemingly, in the late 1980s, being ‘out and proud’ at Midsumma was, in part at least, about business, pink dollars and gay consumption.

Further, to a certain extent, the festival spaces of Midsumma were also a response against the critiques of previous alliances between gay politics and the pink dollar being exclusionary. The organizers of Midsumma sought also to contest the sexuality scripted by a Mardi-Gras styled parade. Interestingly, during the mid-1980s, prior to the initiative put forward by the Gay Business Association, there had been discussions between the Victorian AIDS Council (VAC) and Vic[torian] Tourism to stage a ‘gay mardi gras’ in St Kilda (Carter 1986: 3). However, there were concerns expressed strongly by members of VAC about the use of the words ‘Mardi Gras’, which would set up expectations of a Sydney-styled event. Responding to critiques of exclusion on the basis of cost or lack of conformity to a certain conception of ‘gayness’, a decision was taken that no ‘Mardi Gras parade’ would be incorporated into Midsumma in order to differentiate it from the SGLMG ( Melbourne Star Observer 1988). This became a strategy to strongly differentiate Melbourne's Midsumma from the SGLMG, although it was clear from the outset that Melbourne business organizers wanted their festival to rival Mardi Gras.

Consequently, in 1995, when a parade was incorporated into Midsumma, the alliance between pink capital and gay politics gave careful consideration to respecting sexual differences when celebrating being ‘out’ and ‘proud’ on the streets of Melbourne. In October 1995, the Melbourne Star Observer (Jones 1995: 1) carried a story headlined ‘Celebrate Pride, Community Group Plans Pride March’. The march was a joint initiative between Midsumma and the ALSO Foundation, (a Melbourne-based gay community organization, the Alternative Lifestyle Organisation). Organizers, who had initially rejected the concept of a parade, were keen to differentiate their march from critiques of the Mardi Gras parade. Consequently, this march would be ‘community-based, rather than a Mardi Gras style parade with floats’ (Wilkinson 1995: 1). Interestingly, the discourse of pride that is mobilized is one that embraces the grassroots diversity within the gay community. For example, one of the organizers is quoted as saying: ‘Ideally we want to educate ourselves, not educate the heterosexual community. We own this march as this is our concept’ (Dean 1995: 5). Organizers distanced themselves from critiques of the commodification and commericalization of the SGLMG and emphasized that their march was not a ‘tits, arse and crutch spectacular. It is not a recruitment drive. And it is not a protest rally. Pride March is a vehicle for every individual to express completeness, united by a communal bond, a bond of pride ( Melbourne Star Observer 1998, Midsumma Lift Out, np.).

Organizers tried to distance the march from transgressive sexual politics. Where once the discourse of pride being ‘out’ and ‘proud’ was understood as an act of defiance in the wake of compulsory heterosexuality, the organizers underscored that the Midsumma march was ‘not a protest rally’. A former Pride President is quoted as saying that the organization ‘adopted a non-political stance in order to focus on sexuality and to avoid alienating the many groups which participate’ (Bell 1998: 3). In 1998, to underscore an apparent disassociation of the political from the sexual body, political groups were prevented from selling newspapers and other material. The discourses of Pride have clearly shifted amongst the Melbourne organizers of Midsumma. Pride was no longer about visibility and defying the norms of heterosexuality, but a common point of connection between diverse sexualities. The assumption was that this identity-pride connection can sustain both individual sexualities and a collective pride movement.

The discourse of pride that embraced ‘diversity within the community’ and ‘being oneself’ over defiance, commercialization and commodification rang true for many people. Estimates suggest that more than 11,000 people marched in the inaugural Pride march, watched by approximately 3,000 spectators (Jones 1996: 1). In the following year, 23,000 participants were estimated (Jones 1997: 1). In 1999 more than 40,000 attended the march and, by 2000, an estimated crowd of 52,000 watched the march, making this afternoon event one of the largest public displays of gay sexualities in Australia.

Willett (2000) expressed surprise at these attendance figures. However, thinking spatially, perhaps one reason for the greater number of participants over the SGLGM (which usually attracts around 4–8,000 participants) is that at a time of increased lesbian and gay visibility and social acceptability, the Midsumma festival space has always opened multiple points of connection by requiring modest financial resources for an individual or group to participate and does not necessitate the need to ‘look right’ for the march. The absence of highly visible sexualized bodies has also reduced the need for physical boundaries that separate marcher from spectator, as is the case with the SGLMG. As one Midsumma representative was quoted ‘I think accessibility is definitely a big thing … There are no officious marshals to move people on during the parade, no barricades to separate “us” from “them” and no glitzy corporate floats to make cash-strapped community groups look inferior’ (McKenzie 2001: 3).

For this representative, the absence of physical boundaries that are actively policed is understood to work towards a more inclusive and equitable gay movement. Without material boundaries, the social borders that differentiate the heterosexual from the homosexual apparently disappear. Yet, in a heteropatriarchal society, the disappearance of social borders along a march route does not imply equity. The geometry of power is so uneven in the interconnections that sustain public streets, that without highly visible, sexualized bodies, gay bodies once again become invisible through the stability of assumptions regarding heterosexuality.

Further, the question about the political effectiveness of establishing a collective community of sexual differences through the discourse of identity-pride connection is now frequently asked about all Pride festivals (Johnstone 2005). Probyn (2000) argued how the overkill of pride, at the expense of feelings of shame, may operate to prevent alternative points of connections between participants. Pride relies upon the politics of essentialism to fashion a sense of belonging around notions of a collective ‘we’ of the gay community that tends to work against difference and multiplicity. In contrast, the politics of shame makes possible different points of connection by the way that shame always demands recognition of the uneven geometry of power and difference. Drawing upon the HIV/AIDS crisis, Probyn pointed towards how the personal effects of feelings of shame, rather than pride, are perhaps more effective in opening up points of connection that work towards a more inclusive gay movement.

Brisbane's Pride Festival

In contrast to Melbourne's Midsumma, the discourses of pride that challenge heterosexism are what underpin the connections between participants that in turn fashion spaces of Brisbane's Pride Festival. As with the other state capitals, events such as a Gay Ball have a long history in Brisbane, with the first Queen's Birthday Gay Ball held in 1962 (Moore 2001). Yet, only in 1990 was the first ‘Pride Festival’ held. Queensland's Pride Festival is organized by a community-based collective that stages Pride to ‘bring about social change and cultural development, political action and visibility and women and men working together’ (Bannister 1994: 1). In 1998, the collective rejected the idea of becoming an incorporated organization to prioritize the ongoing aim of social transformation of a heteropatriarchal society through a collective structure. This collective remained cynical about the role gay business can play in facilitating social change and attaining ‘rights’. Consumption activities that might help constitute a gay festival space may offer a temporary retreat from a heterosexist public sphere, but do little to challenge the naturalness of heterosexuality.

With a focus on pride as a mechanism of social change, the Brisbane Pride Festival creates a choice of safe, non-commercial spaces where gay people can be, become or celebrate themselves, including a mix of art exhibitions, community events such as a ‘women's bushwalk’ and a men's pool comp, the 30th annual Queen's Birthday Ball and, on Stonewall Day (28 June), a rally, march and fair (Queensland Pride 1991). In 1992, initial attempts to forge links between the Brisbane Pride Festival, politics and personal experience are illustrated by a talk based on a ‘socialist analysis of gay and lesbian movements’, and a film night at the Resistance Centre, which included the film ‘Sex and the Sandanistas’ (Queensland Pride 1992). The daytime march is equally based on questioning institutions or social policies that are deemed to be heterosexist. Each year, as the march proceeds across Victoria Bridge, a one- or two-minute ‘demonstration’ takes place, which has included a ‘die in’ in 1992 and a ‘dance in’ in 1994. To enhance a gay collective movement, Brisbane's Pride March is preceded by a rally, and ends at a park for a community fair/picnic, rather than at an expensive and exclusionary ticketed dance party. The daytime march through central Brisbane seems to have peaked in the mid to late 1990s at about 2,000 participants. While the Brisbane Pride Festival may no longer have the same novelty and never have received the media coverage or corporate sponsorship of the SGLMG, or Midsumma, the event spaces are crucial in extolling a local critique of how heterosexism continues to constrain how a person living in Queensland can express their sexuality.

Adelaide's Feast Festival

Adelaide's Feast Festival is somewhat of an anomaly as the discourses of pride do not feature strongly in fashioning the points of connection between participants. Prior to the establishment of Feast, the discourse of arts and well-being informed a weekend ‘mini-festival’ called the Festival of Life. Beginning in 1989, this festival was organized by the Adelaide Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service. It comprised a community picnic and dance party (Purcell 1998). By 1995, a community group called UFO (Unity Foundation Organisation Inc), a ‘non-profit organisation established to promote lesbian and gay culture/lifestyle in South Australia’ (Adelaide GT 1999) began organizing a range of events to support gay community groups and capacity building, such as a queer film festival, the community picnic (that began in 1989) and a Sleaze Ball/dance party.

Equally, when Adelaide's Feast Festival commenced in 1997 the event was underpinned by the discourses of entertainment and tourism. Illustrating this point is a headline from Adelaide GT proclaiming, ‘Move over Mardi Gras: UFO's picnic a feast of entertainment’ (Adelaide GT 1997). This is perhaps not surprising, given the Feast was established at a time when many municipal authorities were actively targeting the pink dollar. Hence, the organizers of Feast highlighted how they aim to offer an alternative consumption space to the SGLMG. Furthermore, unlike the other Australian gay festivals spaces, those of Feast were constituted through an administrative structure based on an arts industry model with an appointed board of management. Since its inception, this Board has had strong representation from professionals working in the arts and creative industries and has included theatre directors, venue managers and event organizers. There are also a range of committees that focus on special events, the ball, visual arts, literature, fundraising and sponsorship.

Not surprisingly then, given the composition of its Board, the three-week festival has an explicit focus on art spaces sustained by cultural performances and community arts/cultural practices. Promotional material for the 1998 Feast was very explicit in conveying the arts/cultural spaces of Feast: ‘From October 20 to November 12, the fourth Adelaide Lesbian and Gay Cultural Festival showcases a huge range of the Arts – performing and visual, film, special events, picnics, parties, literary events …’ (Adelaide GT 2000b).

Given the professionalism of the Board and its connection to the arts industry, Feast was successful from its inception in gaining funding support from both Adelaide City Council and Arts S[outh] A[ustralia] as well as from federal sources of arts funding. For example, in 2000 the then South Australian Minister for the Arts, Diana Laidlaw, congratulated Feast on becoming the first Australian gay festival to gain annual funding from a state or federal arts funding body:

Since its inception in 1997, Feast has operated at the cutting edge of arts practice. Always Feast has provided development, presentation and performance opportunities for South Australian artists. Now, for the first time, Feast has secured annual funding through Arts SA's Industry Development Program (Adelaide GT 2000a).

Clearly, it is tempting to offer a critique of Feast as an alternative consumption space that reproduces notions of gayness aligned with creativity, fashion, style and affluence. Participants in the Feast festival would appear to enable the expression of a neo-liberal sexual citizenship through commercialization and commodification of sexuality within the context of an arts festival. Yet, this would be an oversimplification. As Kates and Belk (2001) pointed out, consumption activities at festivals have ambiguous qualities. While consumption activities may not be a mechanism of transgressive politics, it may be one way to result in the social legitimization of gay communities. Further, working against the assumption of Feast as exclusive space for affluent, white gay tourists, the Community Cultural Development Fund of the Australia Council also funded ‘Trump Cards’, a Feast initiative aimed to foster arts/cultural creativity in the gay and lesbian Indigenous and NESB communities (Adelaide GT 1998). Feast delivers an inclusive rather than elitist arts/cultural festival spaces, with a commitment to discourses of gay creativity as enhancing rather than threatening or subverting social stability. Furthermore, discourses of protest and dissent are still very evident in the festival spaces, but they are discerned in the artistic and cultural productions exhibited and performed during the festival.

Our sample illustrates the diversity of lesbian and gay festivals in Australia. The Brisbane Pride festival remains firmly embedded in discourses of protests, grassroots and is communally derived. In contrast, Adelaide's Feast Festival has always been aligned with state sponsorship and the ‘Arts’ funding, while the Perth Pride Festival and Midsumma in Melbourne are perhaps most closely aligned with corporate sponsorship. Further, our sample suggests that the concept of heterotopia helps understand the ambiguous qualities of lesbian and gay festivals spaces. At the same time lesbian and gay festival spaces in Australia are moments and sites of political subversion, opening up a critique of the state and religious institutions, they are also now embedded to different degrees in mainstream economics through prioritizing the spectacular, commodification of lesbian and gay culture and the presence of the mainstream media. Equally, this ambivalence is in part created out of the multiple and sometimes conflicting roles of a single lesbian and gay festival – as place-maker, celebration of community and tourist attraction. Hence, the same festival can be spoken about often in very different ways – depending if you are talking to an organizer, performer, accidental visitor, or festival attendee. It is vital to remain alert to the multiple realities and conflicting meanings of festivals when reflecting on their social functions and outcomes

Conclusion

Gay pride parades play a crucial role in debates about sexuality and the remaking of social worlds. Spatializing gay pride festivals highlight how a multiplicity of narratives about sexuality is generated through the negotiation of sense of self through the points of connections made possible at these events. It is precisely through the multiplicity evoked by a spatialization of sexuality that gay pride festivals are opened up to the possibilities of novelty, new narratives and alternative futures. This kind of creative politics is clearly evident in Australian gay pride festivals. We have argued that the Pride March idea initially transposed from the metropolitan context of the USA to Sydney has helped give shape to the various gay pride festivals that have emerged in Australia. However, the discourses of protest and resistance that characterized the North American examples continue to be reconfigured in the various Australian metropolitan contexts.

In Brisbane, gay pride remains rooted in non-commercial spaces and discourses of social change. In Melbourne and Adelaide, the decision to hold a pride event was a conscious gay business association decision to attract tourists, while, in Perth, the gay pride festival has began to mirror that of the SGLMG through generating a highly sexualized space through a night-time parade. In Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide, where gay pride festivals have become aligned alongside heterosexual institutions of state government and/or corporate sponsors, tensions arise from the uneven power geometries within and through which gay pride festival participants and space are mutually constituted. One trap which can be fallen into is to envisage the corporate and state finance as establishing heterosexual control over the festival space (see Seebohm (1993) or Pritchard et al. (1998) who evoke this argument for the SGLMG). Rather, drawing on Massey (2005), we argue that thinking about the ongoing sexual politics of gay pride festivals spaces requires recognizing their spatial interrelatedness, connectedness, multiplicities and openness. This enables us to acknowledge how the discourses that help to constitute gay pride festival spaces are not only contested sites of sexuality, but they also envisage the ongoing possibilities for challenging mainstream ideas about sexuality.

Notes on Contributors

Kevin Markwell is Associate Professor in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Southern Cross University, NSW, Australia. His research interests are focused on the relationships between sexuality, place and leisure/tourism, wildlife tourism and nature interpretation.

Gordon Waitt is Associate Professor in geography at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. His research interests include cultural geographies, tourism geographies and the relationships between sexuality and place.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the three anonymous referees for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This research was funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Grant program (Project ID: DP0342731). Thanks to the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Melbourne for generously making available their collection; and to Allen George for research assistance.