Sydney World Pride 2023

[Originally sent as email travelogue, Wedesday, March 8, 10:45 am Pacific Standard Time.] Saturday, February 25: Fleurs de Villees PRIDE I really, really love this shot, combining iconography of both World Pride and the City of Sydney itself: fabulousness all around! World Pride in Sydney 2023 took what is usually one annual weekend culminating in the Saturday night Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and expanded it to fully 17 days of Pride events. When I first learned that Sydney would be hosting World Pride in 2023, we were there for our previous visit, in 2020. I immediately made a note that I would thus want to return in three years for that very reason, having no idea that a pandemic would leave us wondering for a good two years or more how plausible a return that soon would even be. For a long time, I also assumed “World Pride” was just a jumbo version of “regular Pride,” or in this instance Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. But, once there was an established Sydney World Pride 2023 website, I learned that the 17-day festival would be associated with two signature events: the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade on Saturday February 25; and a World Pride March of 50,000 people across the Sydney Harbour Bridge (!) on Sunday of the following weekend, March 5.  So, would we stay in Sydney for eight days? do the Parade but not the March? visit Sydney twice on two separate weekends, filling the days in between with one of our other destinations? When I posed these options to Shobhit, he declared we shall take that final choice. Neither of us felt we needed to be in Sydney for over a week straight, but we did still want to experience those two major events.

As I just noted, World Pride consisted of 17 days of countless events, beginning with an opening ceremony February 17 in which the Sydney Opera House was lit up in Progress Pride colors. Sydney is more than a day ahead of us, so that was February 16 at home in Seattle, where I was when this happened; we didn’t even leave for our first destination, Brisbane, until Sunday, February 19. We spent a cumulative total of six nights in Sydney, with our time there overlapping with eight calendar dates—less than half the total length of World Pride. We still managed to experience a small sampling of the countless events, though, although we paid for tickets into only one, which had been high on my list: “Fleurs de Villes PRIDE,” a collection of outfits or gowns made out of floral arrangements. I’ve known about Fleurs de Villes for a couple of years now, thanks to two years of Christmas floral displays they have done at Pacific Place in Seattlle—at no charge; the displays are just out in the common area on the ground floor of the mall. They do these floral displays with different themes in many different cities, it turns out, including a series of Pride arrangements they did for Vancouver Pride at the end of July last summer. Those were spread all over downtown Vancouver, B.C., with no charge to view them either. I have no idea why we had to pay to see them in Sydney, unless there were some charity element in connection with the queer designers all the floral arrangements were celebrating. These were all gathered in “The Calyx,” the conservatory located inside the Royal Botanic Garden. It cost around twenty bucks AUD to get in, so it still wasn’t all that big a deal, and honestly worth the cost. We went in there while walking through the Royal Botanic Garden park after buying our Sydney Opera House tour tickets on Saturday February 25, so this was a World Pride event we knocked out quite quickly. We admired the 15 or so beautiful floral “outfits” or gowns,  and voted for our favorite one.

Saturday, February 25: 46th Annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras And finally: the main event—of both World Pride, and our entire Australian vacation: Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras! This was actually their first year back with a parade since 2020; even last year they were reduced to holding it at the Sydney Cricket Ground to cut down on crowds. Between that and it being World Pride, we really should have known it would be bigger than ever this year, but we arrived on Oxford Street “only” an hour early and the crowd was already seven people deep along the sidewalks behind the barricade fences. Shobhit was convinced that over time, we would eventually squeeze our way to the front of the crowd. I’d say we made it about halfway, maybe two thirds of the way there, by the time the parade ended, with its total 208 contingents, and an estimated 12,500 marching. (I could not for the life of me find any estimate of crowd size, although I did find sources estimating 500,000 as recently as 2019. Either wayI figure it safe to say it was in the hundreds of thousands.) Especially at the start of the parade, though, we were pretty far back from the street due to the crowd. This was one of many reasons I was really glad to have upgraded my iPhone shortly before we left for this vacation: even from that far away, raising my hands as far as I could above other people’s heads, I still managed to get some pretty damned good pictures. I also got a bunch of bad ones that I later deleted, of course, but that happens anyway. As with Pride Parades in the States, this parade kicked off with the traditional “Dykes on Bikes” contingent, and in a couple of cases, due to tracking the shot as a bike whizzed by, I got great shots with the background blurred by the passing riders in focus. I suppose "kicked off" sort of depends on how you define it: even preceding the Dykes on Bikes was the "Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony" by an Aboriginal man walking the parade route, as evidently happens at all of these parades.

I meant to get a better selfie with just myself and Shobhit during the parade, and never got around to it. The closest I got was this shot with Shobhit and a lesbian standing behind us who was eager to tell us how her soon-to-be wife has been to the United States. I think she had had a few drinks, but in all fairness to her, she was never obnoxious-drunk like the group of three or four straight couples behind us for much of the parade, a couple of them (both men) so wasted they stumbled into us—and into the lesbian couple—multiple times. There was yet another guy near us for a while who asked us for advice on what to do about his boyfriend of just a few months, who was hanging out with other friends instead of coming to the parade with him as promised. He was standing close enough to us that we could see the unhinged texts the guy was sending his boyfriend, things like "fuck you" and "have a nice life." It all seemed . . . very stable!

Yes! I admit it! I have a thing for hot young men! To such a degree, in fact, that for every single Pride parade or festival I attend, I have a “Random Hot Guys” photo album on Flickr, which I have been curating since 2005. What I love about this shot, among my very favorites from the parade, is how it demonstrates that I was clearly not alone in this particular interest. So. Should I be self-conscious about the fact that most of these men are now easily half my age? . . . Nah!

In 2023, just as in 2020, my favorite float in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade was the Sydney Opera House float. It seems always to be a neon outline of the Opera House’s official logo, just with different material occupying the spaces inside.

Saturday, March 4: "Pride Village": Oxford Street Party Fast-forward one full week: these “Pride Villages” were set up the weekends of both Mardi Gras and the World Pride March, much bigger on the second weekend because Oxford was reserved for the parade the first weekend—but it was not until Saturday of our second weekend in Sydney, the day of our arrival from Adelaide, that we managed to get down there to check it out.

In fact, we kind of had to rush down to Oxford Street as soon as we were checked into The York, our second Sydney hotel, as we had only until 4:00 Saturday afternoon to pick up the wristband that was supposed to grant us entry into the World Pride March across the Sydney Harbour Bridge the next day. The originally published dates for wristband pickup were just Wednesday or Thursday February 28 or March 1, and I had to email them about alternate arrangements because we would not be in Sydney those dates—and they responded that we could pick them up Saturday the day before the march. We made it down there shortly after 3:00, about 50 minutes to spare. The emails from my registry for the march on the World Pride Sydney website directed us to the “World Pride Info Booth” at the north end of the “Pride Village” (or Oxford Street Party) on Oxford Street, the link provided using a street address that turned out to be a nondescript, closed door next to what appeared to be a relatively standard restaurant. I think the address was maybe just the closest reference point, though, because once we found someone to ask where the info booth actually was, we were directed to an actual booth set up in a public space area maybe a quarter block up the road. The line already there was very long. We were standing in direct sunlight and, in my haste to get down there by 4:00, I did not think to put on any sunscreen. Thankfully I didn’t burn. When we got to the front of the line, where two people were inside the booth checking people in and handing out wristbands, and another two were taking people on either side of the booth, the young woman with an iPad that I came up to took one look at me and said, “You look stressed!” Funny. It was at that point I was no longer stressed, finally having made it to the front of the line in time! I’m guessing now that they continued handing out their wristbands well past 4:00. Anyway I took the above “portrait shot” photo of my Sydney World Pride March wristband from our 15th-floor hotel patio in the early evening the next day, well after the march itself was done.

Relieved to have our wristbands, Shobhit and I took our time meandering back through the Oxford Street Party, almost immediately going into a nearby beer garden to buy a seriously overpriced drink, which turned out to be a small can with only 4.5% alcohol for $14 (that’s about $9 USD—still way too much). But! The beer garden also had this little selfie booth, and that was where we got this spectacular photo. I do have to credit the kindness of a stranger also, though, because a guy saw me aiming my phone for a selfie and then offered to take the photo for us, and thus getting a far better shot than I could have gotten as a selfie. He actually took several, which was also nice because this was by far the best of them. The guy had an American accent, and we discovered both our groups were visiting from the States. I asked where they were from, and they said Washington, D.C.  “Maybe we’ll see you there in 2025!” said the guy who took our photo—because that is when D.C. will be hosting World Pride, which usually happens every two years. Hmm, maybe! I didn’t even know until recently that D.C. was hosting next, and that’s a hell of a lot closer than Sydney, isn’t it? Although I truly cannot imagine the city of Washington, D.C. openly engaging with World Pride with the stunning level of enthusiasm that Sydney did—not even if we still have a Democratic majority in Congress (and Congress exerts control over that city in a deeply ironically undemocratic way). I still think returning there for my third visit for World Pride would be really fun. Especially since, as it happened, my first-ever visit there had been in 2000, for the Millennium March on Washington for gay rights.

During our time in that same beer garden, Shobhit spied this person sitting at a nearby table and offered a compliment on that outfit. The person chatted with us for a bit, and then Shobhit asked if I wanted my picture taken together. Oh sure, what the hell!

Another picture Shobhit took, after some minor grocery shopping on our way back to the hotel where we made ourselves lunch, and then returning to the Oxford Street Party about four hours later, at 10:00. It was my idea to pose here; it was Shobhit’s idea for me to stretch my arms out, which really makes the pose. This may very well be my favorite photo from all of World Pride.

Still at the Oxford Street Party, watching a live performance by a very talented singer I had never heard of named Samantha Jade—while Shobhit reads my email travelogue of our days in Adelaide on his phone. (I had just written it up at our hotel room that afternoon.)

Sunday, March 5: Sydney World Pride March 2023 It wasn’t until Saturday, when we picked up our wristbands, that I learned the Sydney World Pride March would cross southbound rather than the other way around—from North Sydney Station, two stops after the bridge on the train. The woman who gave us our wristbands told us that transit would be free for anyone wearing one. Two different people we found to ask about it at Wynyard Station didn’t have a clue what the hell we were talking about. The machine at the station that we were supposed to use to “top up” our Opal Cards would not work. Shobhit managed to zip through one of the tap gates behind someone else, but the multiple times I tried, I was not fast enough. But then finally a lady paid to go through and said I could walk through with her. It was particularly fun riding the train northbound across the Sydney Harbour Bridge—it being predictably packed like sardines notwithstanding—as the World Pride March had already begun, and we passed marchers heading south along the closed traffic lanes of the bridge, some waving back and forth.

The whole means of organizing the Pride March, which stretched about two and a half miles (four km) from North Sydney Station to the park by Royal Botanic Gardens, was rather interesting. Even with signs and announcements that only people with wristbands could walk across, not one person was actually checked—the throng was far too thick for there to be any time for that. Our registration even had a “timed entry” of 9:10 a.m,, with the suggestion that we arrive half an hour before that, which indeed we did—barely. But the crowds were so huge then that we just moved with it like a human river, out of North Sydney Station, right onto the street and onto Pacific Highway, and then merging by foot onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There’s also a traffic tunnel that goes under the harbor, luckily for any non-marchers who needed to get across the water on Sunday morning.

Actual-selfie time! The Harbour Bridge is well in the background above Shobhit’s head. In the background above my head is the sort of satellite-skyline—one of several in greater Sydney—of North Sydney.

Once across to the south end of the bridge, the crowd veered left and walked along the Cahill Expressway (when I heard locals using this word, all I would ever hear was “Call” Expressway) due east to the park area of Royal Botanic Garden.

I found this couple in the park once we got there and immediately asked If I could take their picture. There was a few food booths, and a stage with no performers on it (yet?), but at about 10 a.m. this couple was the most exciting thing in the park.

Sunday, March 5: "Pride Village" Oxford Street Party We did walk straight from the Royal Botanic Garden back to the Oxford Street Party, along with the throng, as Oxford was far more happening than the park. But, we’d already gone twice and it would stay basically the same, so we walked back to the hotel again, stopping for some more light grocery shopping along the way. I spent some time editing photos (I have 83 shots from the March alone, as compared with 238 from the Mardi Gras Parade) and Shobhit prepared us lunch (I chopped some vegetables!). After exploring the Queen Victoria Building and Pitt Street Mall, we made one last trek over to Oxford Street, a bit mellower now that it was the final night of Pride Villages. Except when a couple of fabulous slinky-heads (or disco ball bots) walk by.

We walked the length of Oxford Street’s Pride Village and back one last time on Sunday evening, encountering this ballroom performance in the style of the FX series Pose on the main stage on our way back, complete with judges. (Pose actually honored a decades-long history of these kinds of performances, particularly with trans performers, so it’s actually more like Pose was in the style of this.)

Monday, March 6: Pride (R)evolution exhibit at State Library of New South Wales Again, World Pride consisted of countless events, ranging from free, to parties with tickets costing hundreds of dollars. The way I see it, we already contributed plenty to the Australian economy with the roughly $8,000 we spent on this entire, five-stop trip. Granted, when it comes to the local Australian queer community, we contributed almost nothing to that economy. Sorry, queers! We did meet multiple gay flight attendants, does that count?? We even met one from London at a liquor store on Oxford Street, but we didn’t give him any money. At least our plane tickets pay the salaries of the ones on our flights, right? #queersolidarity So anyway. On Monday, getting there about an hour before we were to take the guided tour at the nearby Sydney Opera House, we went to the State Library of New South Wales, which has this really great, free exhibit on the history of Pride in Sydney and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. We actually learned about the exhibit from the older lady who sat in the aisle seat next to us on the flight from Sydney to Adelaide on Monday, February 27. She said she had marched in many Mardi Gras parades over the years—she now walks with a cane so can’t anymore—and with the exhibit’s video footage of parades over the years, she saw herself in it more than once! I thought that was very cool, and even looked for her in the footage, but having met her briefly just that once, of course I had no way of recognizing a much younger version of her. The exhibit was well worth going to in its own right. Is well worth going to: stretching far beyond the dates of World Pride, this one will remain at the State Library of New South Wales through July 9! (Click here to return to first traelogue for this trip to Australia: Brisbane, Gold Coast)