News / Community
Podcast recalls Brunswick’s ‘hidden’ LGBTQIA+ past
Queer history as told by the people who were there and shaped it
Mark Phillips
BRUNSWICK’S “hidden” gay and lesbian history is the subject of a new podcast that records a culture of pride, protest and partying extending back decades.
Queer Histories Queer Futures is a 14-part series which was launched at Michelle Guglielmo Park in Sydney Road during this year’s Midsumma Festival and is also currently airing on community radio station 3CR.
It is accompanied by a walking tour of the sites referenced in the podcast.
The series encompasses the entire City of Merri-bek but leans heavily on Brunswick as it covers numerous strands of the area’s queer history from the 1980s until the present day.
Conceived in late-2023 by the Lee Ellis Working Group, a group of LGBTQIA+ identifying staff from within Merri-bek Libraries, the project was funded by the council and researched and produced by James McKenzie and Nici Stott in association with the librarians.
Their brief was to produce a Queer history of the area as told by the people who were there and shaped it.
McKenzie, a long-time Brunswick resident who has presented the LGBTIQA+ show In Ya Face on 3CR since 1997, said the series was one of the most satisfying projects he had worked on in his career.
He said when he moved to the area in the mid-1990s, it was “edgier” and the Queer scene was much more hidden than in places like Prahran where the “pink dollar” was openly celebrated.
“It was great for me, because … I’ve lived here for 30 years,” he said.
“I walk past these places every day, especially on Sydney Road. And so it’s a wonderful thing to be able to do a podcast series about the community that you live in, and a community where you’ve seen so much change … changes in attitudes, physical changes.”
A close relationship between the Queer community and activist politics was a strong characteristic of this period in Brunswick, McKenzie said.
McKenzie drew on his background as a journalist for Melbourne Community Voice, Melbourne Star Observer and Brother Sister to conduct research and interviews for the podcast.
Episodes vary in length and include deep dives into working class drag performances in Brunswick by Barry Solomon aka Barb Wire, HIV-AIDS education at Pentridge Prison, the Orlando Queer disco at the Victoria and Edinburgh Castle hotels, Out Cast Theatre company which was based in the Brunswick Mechanic’s Institute, and the fabled Sydney Road bookstore Barricade Books.
Echoing present day experience, there are also episodes about how the Queer community was part of the opposition to hard right groups in Brunswick, Coburg and Fawkner in the late-1990s and early-2000s.
The program also explores the fight against prejudice, violence and homophobia, with one episode dedicated to the murder of a gay man in Clifton Park beat in 1991. Outrage at the murder led to the formation of a Melbourne chapter of the Queer Nation radical activist group.
McKenzie said Brunswick and Merri-bek had a strong Queer history even if it was less public in the 1980s and 1990s than in suburbs like St Kilda, Fitzroy and Prahran. In the most recent Census, about a quarter of Merri-bek’s population identified as LGBTIQA+.
“[The Queer scene in Brunswick] was much more underground, much more edgy, it was much less fashionable. A lot of the Queer stuff kind of happened side-by-side with straight stuff.
“They weren’t necessarily, you know, flying rainbow flags out front like that. They may not necessarily have even identified as gay … so I think it’s really surprising that these places that are so identifiable as straight places actually have a Queer history. And I think we’ve uncovered that.”
McKenzie said many listeners to the podcast may be surprised at the number of locations that are mentioned that they pass every day but did not realise had a Queer back story.
“It’s always been a Queer area, but it’s always been pretty underground.”
— James McKenzie
“Now people talk about Merri-bek being one of the Queerest areas in Melbourne, and that wasn’t the case until recently, you know.
“So there’s all of this stuff that used to happen at certain venues, and it was all underground. … It was before the internet, before social media. And so unless you were in the know, you didn’t necessarily know about it. And there’s a whole new generation now that has no idea about it because they weren’t born then, or they were very young.”
One of the most compelling episodes of the podcast concerns the stabbing murder of a 60-year-old gay man, Francis Barry Arnoldt, at a well-known beat in Clifton Park in October 1991.
The gay and lesbian community around Melbourne was so outraged at the crime that several weeks later Queer Nation organised a vigil and rally at the murder site to demand better protection from police from homophobic attacks.
In 1999, a man was eventually convicted for the crime and spent 18 years in jail. He maintained his innocence and a campaign to overturn his conviction was launched while he was in prison.
McKenzie said there were numerous beats in Brunswick during the 1980s and 1990s where gay men could meet up for sex, but they were very much underground and considered illicit at the time. Beat users were also often harrassed or arrested by police.
“It was hard to get people to talk about beats, and I would have loved to have done a more kind of detailed documentary about beats in Brunswick.
“[They were] everywhere. Gentrification and the internet killed it all. The world’s changed.”
Tensions between the Queer community and police are also discussed in an episode about the Orlando disco night which began at the Victoria and Edinburgh Castle hotels in the late-2000s.
The series will continue airing on 3CR until the middle of March and is also available on Apple podcasts. McKenzie hopes it will inspire similar Queer history projects in other parts of Melbourne.
“I think the Brunswick one is really a great example of relatability for certain areas,” he said.
“Yeah, [it’s] inner city of Melbourne, but it’s an area that wasn’t associated with being a Queer area, but it’s got a Queer history. So I think there’s lots of areas around the country that could go, hang on a second, we must have a Queer history too that’s underground and was hard to document.”
McKenzie said it would also be fascinating to delve into earlier Queer history in Brunswick from the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.
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