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Queer Fest was a massive festival with a ring of 55+ stalls, food trucks, a stage, and plenty of areas to kick back and chill. It was an explosion of queer creativity and community, with all types of creatives represented behind stalls and on stage.
Artist stalls were loosely grouped by discipline and this grouping had many creators mingling and moving between stalls, saying hello to familiar faces, and meeting new ones! Organisations such as Decrim Queensland, Open Doors, Gay Skate, and Magandjin People’s Pride garnered excellent foot traffic and reported a wealth of valuable conversations with attendees.
Local autistic drag diva Bella Belle emcee’d the event and chatted with attendees throughout the day, bringing some serious glamour to the great court while she wasn’t performing. Belle Bottoms joined Bella Belle for a fantastic and engaging drag show that had a crowd of attendees get on their feet to surround the stage. We also had some strange and peculiar queer representation from Cosmology Drag Creature who performed some interstellar numbers and shared some poetry with the crowd.
The highlight for me had to be the fantastic live music. And I’m not just biased because I booked them! Georgie Taylor, Talia Stewart, Passion Pup, and Faceless engaged everyone who had sat down for a bite to eat or to chill between classes and provided beautiful ambiance for stallholders to enjoy. They mixed moving originals with well-chosen covers that had everyone around singing along.
How did we make it happen?
Volunteers!!! And our Queer Officer Ali working day and night for a while. Queer Fest was a monumental effort that was months in the making. Last year was the first Queer Fest, so we gratefully had a blueprint and idea of how to grease the wheels for an even smoother event this time around. We reached out to hand-picked artists and organisations from last year’s attendees, newer folks on the scene, and those we didn’t have room for last time. This ensured that every single stall was a local queer maker (and not a damn drop-shipper!!) or an organisation that makes a genuine positive impact in our community.
Event support on the day (setting up tables and chairs, labeling stalls, helping stallholders load and unload their wares, covering stallholders’ lunch breaks) and all the decision-making behind the event was done by a team of volunteers from the Queer Collective, led by Ali, with help from the UQ Union’s event support team, Chloe and John. Volunteers from within the collective were coordinated by Daniel, and we saw an incredible turnout from our community to help support the event. Thank you to everyone who helped out, whether you gave your entire day or an hour between classes, Queer Fest wouldn’t have happened without you. And to Ali, thank you for your patience, leadership, and trust in the team you built around you, and for herding us like cats. As with every Queer Collective event, this was done for the community, and by the community, and the time and care from everyone involved cannot be overstated.
Written by Jester Roach
Photography by Jasmine Thorp
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