DIARY OF MOMENTS ❖ the meaning of celebration

the parade of gay pilgrimage

Keith Haring, Pop Shop Quad 1 (1987)

I love ritual celebration. Mardi Gras has come in Sydney. A momentous occasion where the queers and hedonistic straights flood down Oxford Street; they are on pilgrimage.

Each one is different. Last year I went to a 24-hour party. This year I went to a workshop during the day, went home, and slept until 10pm to rally for the rave. I don’t have any glitter or pink to wear; I wear earthy gold and flick my cat-eye on with minimal forethought. I have no proclamations about my sexuality to assert through my appearance, maybe it’s because I have a boyfriend, making my gayness again imperceptible, or maybe because I feel the security granted by indifference about how others interpret me.

I can hear the music from inside my house as I get ready. My Uber pool pulses along the outer nerve of the city into the heart which is beating with rainbow confetti. The passenger in the front seat is clearly coming up on molly and she’s gripping her girlfriend’s hand tightly for reassurance. Her girlfriend is butch and extroverted, she likes to make her fellow passengers giggle. She sticks her head out of into the commotion on King Street: “Fuck, Sydney has a stink about it, hey?”, and she expands with excitement as we pull into USyd Manning Bar, lit up vividly, “It looks like fucking Hogwarts! Look!”. She disembarks with her woozy girlfriend and gifts me with a smooch: “Have a good day, beautiful.”

On Mardi Gras, everyone and everything is beautiful. Connection courses freely and rapidly like electricity. The appetite for fun is never ending. At Mardi Gras there is always another party to go to, another group to float amongst.

Parties are frivolous, yes. I’m saddened by the mass of squashed cans and broken bottles on the road, and how the rainbow confetti merges into anonymous mud. But frivolity also feel increasingly rare - precious. In Sydney, New Years and Mardi Gras are the only two times of the year where Sydneysiders ritually party in the streets.

Celebrations ask nothing of us except that we are alive and witnessing; that we go and gather our friends around to gaze at the same bright spark in time. They are not networking events, they are not political rallies, they are not transactions. War reminds us that we are animals and so do celebrations: together needy for a tribe, easily amused, and nothing but a handful of basic needs for food, love, safety.

Celebration marks notches on an expanse of time that would otherwise be endless, we know this from COVID, and it holds us face to face with what has changed, and who we have loved and left.

A few years ago I spent Mardi Gras am crying in a shitty pub with L, the first year I came out to myself. Other Mardi Gras’ were mostly parties with my friends but that was the first one where I feel the trail of history behind me. It’s like being one of those fuckers in Christmas movies discovering the true meaning of Christmas, you know. I loved even the feminists I hate the most for producing stacks of paper and walking in this streets to make myself slightly more legible to myself.

Another Mardi Gras I spent drunkenly dressing down a barely post-pubescent guy hitting on me and my girl friends in the park by bragging about studying philosophy (bachelor’s).

I love Mardi Gras, I will miss it.

So this ritual frivolity is everything: it celebrates the most basic thing which is so deep and dear to the queer person - existence, and nothing more. New Years has this in common: a pointless marking of time to exalt in existence, nothing more.

What a gift it is to exist, and in fact, be enabled to exist by the love and effort of someone else. For queers in Mardi Gras it is theorists, artists and activists who came before and lovingly carved out their permission to exist — but isn’t this true in some way for everyone, that we have been loved into existence by so many forces into this very moment? It’s worth sitting with, and it’s worth celebrating.

We launch fireworks into the sky, litter the road with our excess, shout excitedly at strangers, for what? Because we are alive, safe, not happy all the time, but happy for now.

Rest, as opposed to the commotion of everyday life, is part of the essence of the festival: a silence in which the intensity of life and contemplation are united, that can even still unite them when the intensity of life grows into exuberance.
— Kereny, Antike Religion (trans.: Daniel Steuer)

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Take care,
Marlene