Maxi Shield teeters the 200 metres from her old back lane townhouse up to Oxford Street, her wig a big bouffant and her prodigious breast plates affixed. She sashays on heels near the fortress-like sandstone cells of the former Darlinghurst police station, where inaugural Sydney Gay Mardi Gras revellers were held and beaten by police in 1978, back when being queer was a criminal offence.
Gingerly negotiating the pavement gradient up to Taylor Square on a sultry February Saturday night, Shield is ready to perform at the Oxford Hotel alongside fellow drag queens Jacqui St Hyde and Coco Jumbo as the body-positive Triple Ds. She recalls drunkenly agreeing to her first proper gig here, on this street, more than 25 years ago: she debuted on the back of a ute outside the Midnight Shift nightclub, lip-syncing to the tinny output of a handheld CD player.
Once billed as Sydney’s golden queer mile, showcasing LGBTQ+ culture and the community’s fight for equality, Oxford Street has borne the brunt of lockouts, lockdowns and surrounding gentrification, its shine tarnished by a slew of empty retail spaces. Booze still flows from its venues, though punters are hard-pressed to find a cafe.
The City of Sydney is forging ahead with plans to revitalise the strip, as hundreds of thousands of local and international revellers prepare to march or cheer along its six traffic lanes for this year’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras on Saturday. But is Oxford Street ready for its closeup?
‘It was a nightclub district, it was a destination’
It’s been a quite a build-up to the 2023 Mardi Gras. For the past two years the parade has been forced by Covid into the confines of the Sydney Cricket Ground, and this time around it comes fused with Sydney’s hosting of WorldPride – hundreds of events intended to make the city the queer capital of the world, at least for three weeks. Some say the revelry masks the sin of intolerance: in an article last week for the queer newspaper Star Observer, the activist Rodney Croome dubbed Sydney the nation’s most homophobic and transphobic city for having the “worst attitudes and laws” on equality.
On Oxford Street, queer venues such as the Oxford, Arq, Stonewall and the Colombian have survived, augmented from Friday by the activation of “Pride villages” in nearby Crown and Riley streets celebrating “the gaybourhood”, with Oxford Street set to host a street party on 4 and 5 March.
But a large portion of the strip is dominated by hastily erected hoardings, featuring paintings of Oxford Street’s queer history by the artist Amy Blue. The City of Sydney has leased three huge blocks of three-storey federation buildings to the developer AsheMorgan for 99 years – hence nearly all the shop fronts on the northern side of the street, between men’s tailor Zink at 56 Oxford and the basement club Palms at 124 Oxford, are shuttered. The buildings will be allowed to rise up to two more storeys.
Lawrence Gibbons, publisher of the Star Observer, is unhappy that a redevelopment condition – that 10% of floor space go to a “creative and cultural purpose” – doesn’t specify LGBTQIA+ community use. Gibbons came to live in Sydney in 1995 when the queer strip was “pumping”, he says. “It was a nightclub district, it was a destination: Sydney had the reputation of being on par with San Francisco, Berlin or Amsterdam, it was a party town.”
In granting a 99-year lease to AsheMorgan and Toga Group to create a retail, office and 75-room hotel development collectively called Oxford & Foley, the City of Sydney moved out a hub of LGBTQIA+ community groups and businesses from the federation buildings, including the Star Observer under its previous publisher, as well as Mardi Gras, which has moved its administration across Oxford Street to an upstairs office that previously housed a sex shop.
Gibbons is a native of San Francisco, where definable neighbourhoods have been forged by “empowered” queer communities. That could have been Oxford Street, he says – but these days, the strip is a “basket case”, lacking a focal point compared with Melbourne, where the Victorian Pride Centre has opened in St Kilda.
In a statement to Guardian Australia, the AsheMorgan principal Alton Abrahams says the “LGBTQIA+ community has been front of mind for us throughout the project”, with the developer offering space for a WorldPride volunteer hub.
The City of Sydney’s 2022 Oxford Street cultural and creative precinct planning documents have beefed up references to the “preservation and strengthening [of] Oxford Street … as a focal point for LGTBQIA+ community life and culture”, with an aim to “celebrate and acknowledge Oxford Street as a sacred walking track of the Gadigal people”.
A Sydney councillor, Jess Scully, tells Guardian Australia that the City of Sydney wanted “theatres, venues, creative spaces” along the strip. “If you reinvest in your properties and add basement space … that’s one of the ways that we’re encouraging the continuing entertainment, creative and cultural use of the area.”
While planning law cannot specify that a space be leased to an LGBTQIA+ tenant, they can be encouraged through incentives and support, Scully says. City of Sydney has worked with Mardi Gras and WorldPride to get pop-up tenants in six empty shop fronts, with negotiations under way to fill five more, including a First Nations community space.
Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore, tells Guardian Australia the council wants Oxford Street to be a “celebration of LGBTQIA+ culture and community, a destination and workplace for culture and creatives”. The new planning controls are the “kickstart” the strip needs, Moore says, although some retail landlords are “squatting on vacant shop fronts”. AsheMorgan, she says, is on schedule to complete the work by February 2024.
The fight for a queer hub
Further up Oxford Street, Gibbons fondly remembers the queer pub the Albury, replaced by a shoe store and later a medical centre. “There was drinking on the footpath – could you imagine that in Sydney now? They’d get the tasers out and take everyone down.”
Gibbons emphasises his greatest annoyance: police taking sniffer dogs on to Oxford Street and its venues for drug searches. Should police force members be allowed to march at Mardi Gras? “I would say they should march, but not in uniform out of respect for history,” Gibbons says.
It’s out of respect for history and the desire to give Oxford Street a queer focal point again that the queer museum Qtopia is lobbying to move into the infamous former Darlinghurst police station, between Taylor Square and the National Art School, which now houses NSW Health administration offices.
“Not only is it the epicentre of Oxford Street, it was a place where gay men and lesbians were taken and brutally bashed and mistreated – not just on the night of the ’78 march, but decades before and decades after,” Qtopia’s founder David Polson tells Guardian Australia. “Once we get the police station, it’ll be the start of the healing process between the police department and the queer community … [and] it will help start the revitalisation of Oxford Street,” he says.
A gay Gadigal man, Graham Simms, who also has Bidjigal, Yuin, and Darug lineage, and whose drag alter ego is Nana Miss Koori, says Oxford Street needs more Indigenous culture, including a permanent drop-in cultural centre and employment of Indigenous people. He emphasises an ongoing need, too, to consult with Indigenous people on the strip’s future, including himself and Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor: “Come to us. Invite us to the table.”
‘Oxford Street will never be what it once was’
A historian, Garry Wotherspoon, who lives in a high-rise apartment above Oxford Street, says the “real golden age” of the modern strip was the 70s to the early 90s. Kings Cross “used to be where camp life existed” until the 1960s, when US servicemen based nearby would mete out violence against gay men, who migrated along with venues to Oxford Street in search of safety and cheaper rents. “It really created a wonderful history, a sanctuary.”
But Oxford Street had its “queer moments” earlier, he says, including “Mr Wigzell’s baths”, near Taylor Square in the 19th century, where on Tuesday and Wednesday nights “working-class lads were let in for six pence”.
And the future? “You can’t recreate the past,” Wotherspoon says. “Oxford Street will never be what it once was. But queers, we aren’t born into our community … we only discover our sense of difference coming into puberty. So there really is a need for a place for young queers to come and feel, ‘Yes, there’s plenty like me, and I’m not isolated.’
“[But young people] don’t necessarily want to come here. King Street, Newtown is what I would call the new Oxford Street.”
Maxi Shield, still joyfully performing, thinks everyone who has spent time on Oxford Street has their own golden age. Hers was the late 90s and early 2000s, when she found her feet not only as a drag queen but as a gay person as well, with red ribbon drives and World Aids Day.
She remembers performing in St Vincent hospital’s ward 17, for patients who were dying from Aids, which is now being “recreated” by Qtopia as a temporary art exhibition at the National Art School.
“I get really frustrated when people, especially older generations, say, ‘Oxford Street’s dead’ and, ‘It will never be like it was.’ When an 18-year-old is going to Stonewall and having that same experience that we did in the 90s or the 80s or 70s, but with the influences of today.”
The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade will be held on Saturday 25 February. Qtopia’s exhibition Ward 17 South is at Building 11 of the National Art School until 5 March
