KEEPING NEWTOWN QUEER

By Clementine Mills

A Socialist mate of mine once told me there were more pandas in Edinburgh Zoo than there were Tory MPs in the whole of Scotland. I told him there were more pandas in Wellington Zoo than there were lesbians in the whole of New Zealand. Or at least that’s how it felt as I clambered through adolescence in straight, suburban Auckland.

So you can imagine the bright-lights-big-city-hallelujah-montage moment when I moved to Australia aged 18 and set my little suitcase down in Newtown; all of the Birthdays and all of the Christmases rolled into one beautiful, tattoo covered, Smiths t-shirt clad, lesbian utopia.

But it wasn’t just the locals that hooked me, it was every damn thing about the place – it was boho heaven. People were impossibly friendly and open and they always looked after the little guy; a grass roots mentality meets a Woodstock culture somehow avoiding the hipster pretension, irreverently authentic and independent.

All Mecca, no Maccas if you will.

That was six years ago; Newtown today is a different place. I mean sure it still looks pretty much the same. There is still a shop devoted entirely to selling buttons – literally just buttons – that has magically survived the GFC; the skateboarding dude with the mohawk and the gargantuan snake draped around his shoulders like a terrifying scarf still cruises round from time to time; the old fella on the mobility scooter blasting Elvis from his stereo still rips up King St on a Friday night.

But the energy has shifted; the utopia’s been shattered and I don’t feel safe anymore.

Now before you call me a hippy harping on about bad vibes and some “I knew this place before it was cool” diatribe, I promise you it’s not like that; just let me talk you through one week in Newtown in 2015.

Sunday: I’m standing at the corner of King and Enmore with my girlfriend and a bus driver pulls up, opens his doors and shouts: “Can I watch?” drawing everyone’s attention to us. You’re in Newtown mate, you’re going to have a very long morning if you need to stop and yell out that corker of a pick up line every time you see a couple of lesbians.

Tuesday: It’s about 10pm and from my house on Mary St I see a man yelling at a group of girls. He throws a barrage of expletives their way. Then he calls them dykes. The girls turn around and he legs it back to Kelly’s. What a champion.

Thursday: I’m kissing my girlfriend goodbye and a guy comes up, wraps his hands forcibly around the backs of both of our necks, pushes our heads closer together and whispers “Yeah girls! I love it!” right in our faces. He laughs and continues on his seedy bar crawl without a backwards glance.

Friday: Stephanie McCarthy was due to play bass in her band at the Town Hall Hotel. Throughout the night a group of narrow-minded boy-men were giving her grief for being a trans woman. The men attacked Stephanie in an unmistakable act of transphobia.

Of course, a large percentage of people reading this will be more than familiar with Stephanie McCarthy’s ordeal and anyone who saw the heartbreaking photos that she posted on Twitter of the cuts and bruises that covered her face the morning after the attack will need no reminding of how that event shook our community.

The lock-out laws have brought a completely different type of people through to Newtown. The violence and fragile masculinity of King’s Cross has now seeped into this open, peaceful and accordingly assailable landscape. This new hybrid nightlife was never going to work. And when the inevitable conflicts do occur, time and time again we see them swept under the rug, the violence is palmed off with a blasé “boys will be boys” slap on the wrist – a social blind spot that is still so present in Australian culture.

In Berlin they don’t stand for this shit (Let’s face it, in Berlin they don’t stand for any shit – the McDonalds in Kreuzberg has been burned down by anarchist punks about three times now). Before Berghain became one of the most popular clubs in the world, it originally opened as the reincarnation of Ostgut- the legendary male-only gay fetish night. While Ostgut still happens once or twice a year, the club has now opened its doors predominantly to the mainstream. And though the history of the club goes right over the heads of the throngs of teenagers off their little tits on MDMA, the safety and integrity of the community remains uncompromised.

Berghain is infamously one of the hardest clubs to get into and it has nothing to do with what’s coursing through your bloodstream or the club reaching maximum capacity; it has everything to do with how the bouncer reads your energy. You just need to take one look at Sven Marquardt, the resident Berghain doorman, to know that if you’re a pack of homophobic, macho dickheads looking to start trouble, you are guaranteed to be turned away and walking back up that long dirt track with your cock between your legs.

Marquardt said in an interview with GQ Magazine (certainly the first and most probably the last time I’ll ever visit that website): “I feel like I have a responsibility to make Berghain a safe place for people who come purely to enjoy the music and celebrate—to preserve it as a place where people can forget about space and time for a little while and enjoy themselves.

Sing it Sven!

Where is our ultra cool guardian-bouncer-angel to protect Newtown from the impending plague of cretins and keep the local community safe? Even with the recent round of musical chairs in parliament, that seat remains depressingly empty.

Because the thing is: when you take any of the events from my week and consider them in isolation, they are just incredibly common examples of the discrimination that LGBTQI people around the world face on a daily basis. Transphobic and homophobic violence is reported with terrifying frequency across the U.S; queer people growing up in Uganda are bombarded with homophobic propaganda that places gay people in synonymity with pedophiles and lunatics; there are still pockets of the world that can legally “cure” people of their homosexuality as if the 1950’s never ended.

When you view the recent and ongoing decline of Newtown’s queer safe-space in the context of the grander scheme of things, it’s easy to get complacent; it’s easy to say “Wow, I’m being a real ungrateful, insular, privileged piece of shit right now, we really don’t have it that bad.”

But that’s the first mistake.

Experiences are relative but ethics and justice are not. We’re all fighting the same fight and it sure isn’t over just because we have gay bars and pride parades. The progress that LGBTQI activists have made over the past fifty years is astounding, but we have to keep it moving, we have to keep asking for what we need and want and we have to keep calling bullshit on anything that threatens what so many people have fought so hard for.