Written on commission for The Party Exhibition (Catalogue), UNSW Galleries
Sydney World Pride, March, 2023
At parties we come together to lose ourselves in a bewildering array of encounters, sensations and events. We know there will be dancing and mingling and flirting and snogging but the specifics are impossible to know in advance. Being part of the party requires us to give ourselves over to what is unknown about the adventures ahead—at once a thrilling and terrifying prospect. We prepare ourselves to become part of an adventure in collectivity, to be exposed to others, to move together, to be seized by passions, to become available to the event. Parties bring friends and strangers together in an occasion that compresses here and there, now and then. Space and time can collapse in a wormhole that transports you somewhere else, utterly unexpected. You find yourself in a present that draws familiar elements into unforeseen connections, collisions, rhythms, disclosures, synergies, attractions, incidents, surprises. At parties we laugh, we gasp, we shimmy, we scream, we swoon, we feel new things, we remember, we chatter, we forget ourselves, we pull ourselves together to replenish our lives and worlds.
In their book If Memory Serves 2012, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed share an account given to them by a gay friend:
“when someone stuck poppers under my nose for the first time, I felt like I was actually transported back to the Seventies. I felt like I was feeling what ‘they’ must have felt… I felt like I had tapped into some eternal, carnal, homoerotic AND brotherly stream of consciousness”. (1)
The passage evokes the heightened sensitivity of partying bodies to powerful impressions, fantasies, pasts and futures. A disco riff sampled into a techno track evokes a poignant memory and suddenly our dancing becomes a way of connecting lost friends, alluring strangers and queer predecessors—of bringing them into some new configuration in the apparent immediacy of the present.
In their book, Castiglia and Reed are especially concerned with the cultural impacts of AIDS on the intergenerational transmission of queer cultural memory. They worry that the gentrification of what were once lively queer urban enclaves has been accompanied by what Sarah Schulman has termed a “gentrification of the mind” that radically reduces our imaginations and limits our political possibilities.(2) The authors are careful to clarify that the loss of cultural memory they critique is not a natural or inevitable result of AIDS or the terrible loss of gay and other lives to the epidemic. Rather, the AIDS crisis became an occasion for the more conservative, “forward-looking” rights activism that emerged from the 1980s to cast the sexual liberationist 1970s as a phase of “immaturity” that the normalised gay and lesbian movement ought to forget, grow up from, move beyond.
If the aims and aspirations of the normalised gay and lesbian movement are predicated on a kind of social amnesia that requires we forget the culture, achievements and ambitions of sexual liberationist politics, it is striking that their friend’s account cites a hit of poppers as the catalyst for its fantastic reclamation of these cultural memories and the sense of sexual and political communitas they generate. This prompts us to consider that there are other, more embodied ways of remembering, conjuring, transmitting and reactivating collective histories and cultural memory. Might the party be one such vehicle? One that is all the more significant when one considers that queer history cannot rely on family, official monuments or biological lineage for its transmission, but must generate its own infrastructures of collectivity, participation and engagement.
This exhibition documents a period of remarkable exuberance in Sydney’s history but also loss. By 2002, over 3500 people had died from AIDS in New South Wales, most of them gay men. Is it a coincidence that the scale and intensity of the dance party form reached its peak in the years the community suffered its most devastating toll of losses? What were we doing at dance parties in those years if not processing this loss in feats of collective intimacy that put their wager on the power of communal pleasure, creativity and ecstatic solidarity to disarm the devastations that history was throwing at us? At dance parties, “the massed bodies, decorations, lights, drugs, costumes, and music combined to produce a powerful and widely accessed perception of presence, shared circumstance, and vitality at a time when the image of the gay man, dying alone, ostracised from family, was the publicly proffered alternative”.(3)
In an article written for the gay press in 1989, Terry Giblett takes stock of the epidemic’s first few horrendous years and stares down the oncoming decade by encouraging his peers to find ways of adapting to living with the disease. Alongside political and social involvement, he emphasizes the importance of realising “there must be time to just live—most commonly referred to in the gay community as a time to party!”(4) The statement is simple but profound: it provides clear insight into the meaning of parties and the part they played in the everyday lives of gay men and their friends over these harrowing decades. Giblett situates the party as a cultural mechanism that is capable of effecting communal change: from despair, shock and victimhood to living with HIV.
The burgeoning of dance parties over the ensuing decades powerfully enacted cultural continuity at a time when conservative forces would have us sever our connections with pre-AIDS cultures and politics. It extended the culture of disco and dance that first emerged in the 1970s in bars, nightclubs and sex venues clustered around Oxford Street, Darlinghurst. Disco culture borrowed much of its bolder attitude, style, paraphernalia and music from US gay urban enclaves, not least amyl-nitrite poppers, “the drug that defined an era, fuelling both the ecstatic twirl of the dancers at nightclubs and …sexual hedonism”. (5) Advertising materials of the time positioned poppers as a drug that was just as good for dancing and socializing as it was for sex: in the discourse of the time, amyl wafts ambiguously and suggestively between these zones of social practice. This give us a sense of the much looser distinctions between activities that we are in the habit these days of considering distinct and discrete—sex and socialising— and a better sense, in turn, of the recreational culture of disco and 1970s gay life. Sex unfolded on dancefloors—dance moves sprung gesturally from erotic impulses—in a collectively accessed, moveable feast of sexual sociability all set to the exuberance of bold, uplifting dance grooves.
But what sort of sexual culture does disco enact? For Richard Dyer, disco is not simply a musical genre but a sensibility replete with its own aesthetics, dance-styles, behavioural codes and forms of embodied knowledge. It replaced the compulsory hetero-coupling that had been a mainstay of social dancing in the era of rock with the roaming figure of the solo dancer who was free to move around and immerse themselves in the gathering encounters of the dancefloor. Meanwhile, disco’s successive, open-ended rhythmic patterning generated a whole-body eroticism that was more complex, modulated, polymorphous than the relentless phallic thrust–and–grind of rock. As Dwyer puts it, disco “never stops being erotic, but it restores eroticism to the whole of the body, and for both sexes, not just confining it to the penis …rock confines sexuality to the cock”. (6) Meanwhile, disco’s soaring melodic lines—sweeping violins, ecstatic vocals—evokes a kind of romantic utopianism that frequently takes the “intensity of fleeting emotional contacts” as its focus (think: the lyrics and melodies of Diana Ross). (7) In tracks that lamented but also celebrated passing relationships—that validated impermanence as a source of emotional investment and intense feeling—disco served as the perfect accompaniment to the romantic trajectories and affective complexities the participants in this emergent culture of sexual and social freedoms were experiencing: it sounded out its structures of feeling. At the same time, the soaring crescendos of utopian excitement that are a staple of disco conjured a world of emotional plenitude, dramatising the “gap between what is and what could or should be” (8): the fantasy of the dancefloor as an “elsewhere” of utopian abundance.
Over the 1980s the venues, sounds, beats, drugs and dance-styles began morphing and taking on new forms (more synthesised, higher energy and so on) but this remained: Only a very deep-seated commitment to the idea of the dancefloor as a radical break from the mundane world could begin to explain the elaborate infrastructures of pleasure that party producers began to create in the expansive pavilions of the Royal Agricultural Society Showgrounds for the early Mardi Gras parties, RAT parties, Sleaze Ball, and so on—and their sheer scale!—replete with creative design concepts, extravagant live performances, individual themes that fostered increasingly outrageous creativity and theatricality among their partygoers, community art installations, audio-visual effects that became more and more intricate and high-tech as the decade went on, and the extended hours of unrestricted license that lent themselves generously to a version of party-as-adventure/marathon.
All this creative labour on the part of party producers, DJs, performers, technical and artistic crew—but also punters, importantly—paid off: the cultural forms and sensibilities elaborated in Sydney’s disco years not only endured but grew into multiple offshoots that transformed life in Sydney against the odds and epidemic obstacles of these two tumultuous decades. A party can be thrown together on the spur of the moment but these parties took weeks if not months to prepare. The infrastructure required for collective pleasures of this kind is elaborate, extensive and carefully assembled: the bigger the scale, the greater the logistical challenges. For producers: the venue, the concept, the fit-out, the lineup, the performers, the DJs, the publicity, the tickets, the art, the playlists, the choreography, the lighting rig, the decorations, the coat-check, the medical team and volunteer emergency workers, not to mention liaising with authorities and noise-sensitive residents of inner-city affluent neighbourhoods. All this hard work leaves traces and artefacts, its authors are identifiable, and the pieces can be pulled together to tell the kind of stories “The Party” as an exhibition displays.
What is less readily available for archiving or historical analysis is the experiential multiplicity of partygoing, the informal, precariously assembled architecture that shapes our experience as partygoers. Like party producers, we set our sights on arranging our outfits, our drugs, our looks, our mindsets, our disco naps, our eating plans on the day and afterwards for recovery, our dance-card commitments, our makeshift itineraries of meeting points, our schedules for catchups with friends, our gameplans some time in advance. All the contingencies must be carefully prepared for but more often than not they are thrown out of whack. We pull things together, we entertain possibilities, we create workarounds, we try things out and see how they feel, we make plans and scratch them, we come up with new ideas and feelings and concepts and approaches and contraptions. On the day of the party we assemble ourselves, our looks, our outfits, our party pals, our attitude, our states of body and of mind, all the while knowing they are bound to come apart at the seams, get worn out, come undone, defy expectations, get rearranged, requiring reassembly, wit, improvisation. We concoct narratives of anticipation that get freighted with complex emotions that demand to be managed but defy easy containment: excitement, apprehension, impatience, frustration, preparation, self-inflation, overwhelm, keeping calm, downplaying, dissimulation, wishful thinking, anxious fretting, exhilaration, flights of fancy, a collective frenzy of conjecture, desire, doubt, longing, speculation.
Then the party comes around, where we come together to lose ourselves in a bewildering array of encounters, events and sensations. We chat with friends, we feel out the music, we join the dancefloor, we move together, we find our groove, we hit our stride, we try new moves, we dance our tits off, we gaze at spunks, we laugh and carry on, we shout indecipherable things into random ears, we say we can’t hear them, we love how we feel, we love how we look, we nick off to the dunnies, we laugh and chat with randoms and monitor cruise options in the queue for the toilet, we share drugs with someone, we go on missions, we get sidetracked, we lose our friends, we talk to strangers, we run into someone we haven’t seen forever, we talk their ears off, we remember connections, we have a moment, we love this song, we thrill to the music, we get all sweaty, we pash that hottie on the dancefloor, we enter the zone, we dance forever, the bassline vibrates us, we come to our senses, we lose something somewhere, we find our friends when least expected, they look unfamiliar, we look different, we feel ecstatic, emboldened, tingly, snuggly, exhausted, excited, energetic, refreshed, we tell each other outrageous stories about our adventures, we realise the time, we think about going, we forget where we’ve been, we forget how we got here, we forget where we left it, we won’t even think about it, the morning is beautiful, we forgive each other, a new day is dawning, we forget about leaving.
***
References
- Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If memory serves: gay men, AIDS, and the promise of the queer past, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2012, p 41.
- Sarah Schulman, The gentrification of the mind: Witness to a lost imagination, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2013.
- Kane Race, Pleasure consuming medicine: The queer politics of drugs, Duke University Press, Durham, 2009, p 22.
- Terry Giblett, ‘Dancing in the eye of the storm’, Sydney Star Observer, Sydney, 15 December 1989, p 15.
- Clive Faro, Street seen: A history of Oxford Street, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p 223.
- Richard Dyer, ‘In defence of disco’, Gay Left, Issue 8, London, 1979.
- Dyer, ‘In defence of disco’.
- Dyer, ‘In defence of disco’.
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, 
The federal government actively panders to these sentiments, withdrawing funding from anti-bullying programs offering sex and gender diversity education in schools, and more recently, announcing a parliamentary inquiry into whether provisions that make it unlawful to publicly “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” others on the basis of race impose “unreasonable restrictions on freedom of speech”. (Won’t someone please unfetter the poor privileged white darlings?).
Image: Cartoonist Cathy Wilcox’s critique of Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull’s intention to stall a vote on marriage equality by requiring a public plebiscite, and de-fund the Safe Schools program, February 2016.
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