The night after Bob Downe i was back up in Sydney again, Saturday the 12th of March. I met up with Marc at Rockdale and we made our way to Paddington, someone needs to remind me that EVERYTIME i go to Sydney the traffic is a nightmare, i guess where i live, i’m pretty lucky that a traffic jam usually only constitutes two cars bumper to bumper, but up there in Sydney travelling 10 klms’ can take you 3/4 of an hour.
Finding a park up there was another drama altogether, the world is starting to feel a little crowded to me. We met up with Australias answer to the ‘Weeping woman’ Beryl, making our way to the Chauvel cinema it was nice to be reminded that not all cinemas are monster multiplex’s, there are still some lovely and charming independant theatres around, in the lobby we ran into an old friend (mother) Warren, i’m not entirely sure he was totally over Mardi Gras.
Walking into the cinema i spotted a huge poster for the movie ‘Forty thousand horsemen’, this took my eye, as years ago, when he was very young, my dad actually appeared in this film. i remember him telling me how he had to run up one side of a hill dressed as a ‘goody’, then they would change clothes and run down the other side of the hill as a ‘baddie’.
The movie we were there to watch tonight was called ‘The hidden history of homosexual Australia’. I love history and wish that i’d chosen to study that instead of ‘Asian social studies’ .. i mean, what IS that!!??, but i digress. This documentary is one that any Queer Aussie should watch, and i’ wish they would play this in schools. It was really interesting to see an Aussie slant on our local gay culture, instead of being fed European and American gay history. Some of the moivie was pretty sobering, and a lot of it scarey, just the thought that only twenty
years ago homosexuality was decriminalised in New South Wales. To see the oppresession and fear that the community lived under relatively recently was unnerving, and lets not the forget the cruel and brutal coppers, and twisted politicians. The most sobering part of the movie was when they discussed how some people had been jailed for many years for being gay, and that they had been incarcerated in Darlinghurst Jail, which is now a college, but it struck me that this old Jail was only a couple of hundred metres down the road from where we were watching this movie.
After the film we decided to go for a little walk and stomp around Oxford st and Darlinghurst, it would have to be at least three years since i’ve been for a walk around Oxford st, and it was nice to be back, and feel the tinsel and glitter in the air, especially after watching that movie. For the third weekend in a row Beryl dragged us into the North Indian Diner, i’m SURE he has shares in that place, again we were served our now standard order of ‘Korma slops’.
A quick bit of shopping was done, and then we had to let Beryl go free, he needed to revisit a bit of his own hidden history i think. Below are a couple of snaps from the night, Paddington at sunset and a ‘wall doodle’ in Surry Hills. The last pic is a still from ‘Forty Thousand Horsemen’
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