The original Sydney Mardi Gras participants at the 30th anniversary parade in 2008 (Image: AAP/Jane Dempster) When feminist and homosexual activists in the 1970s asserted that “the personal is political”, experiences and identities once excluded from public life by ideas of privacy and shame became features in Australian national culture. A set of campaigns arguing for profound legal reforms and government protections produced an array of new political battlefronts. In the 1970s this was a radical change.
As we regularly witness now, storytelling about intimate lives and identities and the political contests that follow have become a regular part of our national debate. It is common to tell this 50-year story as a history of incremental change and occasional “backlash”. Yet this pleasing arc of liberalising progress conceals more than it reveals.
This story makes our current settlements concerning gender, sexuality and the state seem inevitable, rather than the product of continual and ongoing struggle. And a simple story of progress hides the ways in which those who have sought to reinforce a “traditional” gender and sexual order have been players in this landscape from the start. Distressed fathers and “stay at home” housewives have proved just as adept at telling stories about intimate suffering to power their activist campaigns.
Often, they have used these techniques to secure reforms and funding that work against feminist and LGBTQIA+ ambitions. Children�.