The Monthly
Steve Dow
Should Sydney’s Qtopia centre, which memorialises prejudice and violence against queer and trans people, accept philanthropy from the Murdochs?
On a chilly September evening at the new Loading Dock Theatre, beside the infamous former Darlinghurst police station, the singer and comedian Shalom Kaa, an “Asian-looking Maori with a Jewish name”, dressed in a T-shirt and chinos, is telling his story of gay self-discovery, having arrived here on inner-Sydney’s Oxford Street in the late 1990s from rural New Zealand.
In this converted space at the Qtopia Sydney Centre for Queer History & Culture, where police cars would once pull up with queer arrestees, Kaa sings Kylie and Whitney hits and a religious hymn from his Jehovah’s Witnesses upbringing before guiding the audience to participate in a ceremonial haka. “I have so much diversity in me,” he quips, “if I was up for adoption Angelina Jolie would think she was getting a group discount.”
Historically, diversity was poorly received here, infamously so on the night of June 24, 1978, when 53 people were arrested beside the El Alamein Memorial Fountain in Kings Cross at the violent, chaotic ending of the first Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, as it was then called, and crammed into Darlo’s hard, cold, claustrophobic cells. There was no running water for those in custody, just a bucket for a toilet.
Police beat up and bloodied some of those arrested: a vigil staged directly outside until dawn heard screams and cries from inside. Today, visitors can walk into these cells at Qtopia, a living museum of remembrance and art opened by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns and Lord Mayor Clover Moore on this site in February. In one cell, a recording of a belated 2018 apology from then NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller to the LGBTQIA+ community plays on a loop.
Here, on this Tuesday night, I had also been hoping to see Los Angeles–based trans performer and writer Laser Webber perform his cabaret show A Shark Ate My Penis: A History of Boys Like Me, in which Webber duets with another trans performer, Rebecca McGlynn (as the voice of transphobic author J.K. Rowling), on the surprisingly tender song “Edinburgh”. (“I’m hoping Scotland will mend my heart,” the pair harmonise, grappling for common ground.) Alas, Webber has Covid, so has had to cancel his short season here.
Among the assortment of Qtopia’s donors – federal, state and local government, as well as private – was one that came as a huge surprise when announced on a hot February day in 2023, at the museum’s temporary headquarters at the bandstand in nearby Green Park. Sarah Murdoch, wife of media baron Rupert’s chosen heir Lachlan, announced the couple was donating $1 million as “founding partners” in the project through their philanthropic foundation, to help realise the vision of the late immunologist Professor David Cooper, who worked at the adjacent St Vincent’s Hospital, to remember those killed by HIV/AIDS. Qtopia would be “a place that will tell the long history of battles fought for equality”, she enthused, facing the morning sun. “No, no,” she clarified, “for basic rights for the queer community, a place to educate and break down barriers of discrimination and ignorance, a safe place for people grappling with their identity, a place that will celebrate a rich history that has not yet been fully told or appreciated.”
As a queer man, I was gobsmacked that Lachlan, reportedly more right-wing than his father, should proffer money for queer history and art. The generous part of me, as I stood by the bandstand that day, wondered if it was simply a case that problematic funding is everywhere in the arts, channelled variously through casino, fossil fuel and reactionary media fortunes. My more cynical journalist self, however, alighted on pink-washing – the rinsing of consciences through a queer cycle – when the Murdoch empire otherwise monetises hate and division against minorities.
The conduit for the largesse soon became clear, as gay retired rugby league player Ian Roberts stepped forward. “To Sarah and Lachlan,” he said, “ha – we’ve been friends since the mid-to-late ’90s. I was lucky enough to go to their wedding, and they have never, ever made me feel anything but welcome.” But not everyone present welcomed the Murdochs, as an early entry into the Qtopia visitor book attested: “Murdoch money is BLOOD money. They have vilified our community for decades.”
Despite the presence of Murdoch money, amid rooms honouring queer and trans pioneers and a bed that poignantly recalls St Vincent’s Ward 17 South, the first dedicated HIV/AIDS unit in Australia, Qtopia takes a dig at “Prejudice in print”, with a row of white plastic placards featuring a selection of historical newsprint articles that, in the curators’ estimation, “demonised, vilified and stereotyped” LGBTQIA+ people.
Sarah Murdoch stated she and Lachlan hope Qtopia will “save the lives of many young Australians”, but alas the global Murdoch media empire appears to have missed the memo about suicide risk from vilification. In 2022, Fox News staffers condemned the network’s “hateful” anti-LGBTQIA+ coverage and bolstering of Republican attacks on queer communities, although the network’s Donald Trump boosterism continued. Trump offered this hateful spray against his Democrat opponent Kamala Harris this September: “She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” The Trump campaign followed up with an attack ad over Harris’s support for gender-affirming healthcare: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Right-wing demagogue broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who in 2020 declared it was “grotesque” for children to identify as trans, may have departed the Murdoch empire, but his spirit of holding people up for ridicule based on gender continues at Fox. This year, the network spread false claims that two female Olympic boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, are biologically male, stoking the confected panic over gender.
Within the original antipodean Murdoch empire, Australia’s Sky News continues to produce Tucker wannabes. Consider the shouty broadcaster Danica De Giorgio, who in July railed against the “perverse ideology” of trans identities that had “infiltrated multiple institutions”, while “questioning why biological men with male genitals are allowed to whip their kits off in female change rooms under the guise of being trans”.
In another of her many rank, toxic bulletins on trans and non-binary people this year, De Giorgio mocked the activists Queers for Palestine as a group “really for the people who are just tragically sad and confused”, pointing out that it’s “a crime to be queer over there” (same-sex sexual activity between men has long been decriminalised in the West Bank, but not so in Gaza, and persecution is rife). She then played a phone video of an individual joyously dancing, holding them up to ridicule: “Have a look at this transgender man, dressed as an Indian woman, dancing while waving a Palestinian flag. Wouldn’t you love to see him belly dance his way on to the Gaza Strip, shimmying his way through the enclave? That will give him a real freedom-of-expression experience.”
Demonisation and vilification is a living beast at News Corp, persuading the former Mardi Gras president Richard Cobden to post about Qtopia on Instagram: “Would you go to the Joseph Goebbels Holocaust Museum? No. And you should not go to the Lachlan Murdoch Pride Museum.” Qtopia’s chief executive, Greg Fisher, responded beneath Cobden’s post: “Your constant mention of the Murdochs is just opinion that is shared by some but not the majority … give the place and the hundreds of people now involved in making this happen a go – rather than focussing on a donor that represents 15% of what we have raised.”
I’ve given Qtopia a go and found it brilliantly realised – essential as well. But if the Murdoch money represents only 15 per cent of funds raised, one might ask why it was necessary to take the media empire’s money at all.
I finish up my Tuesday night at Qtopia with the stand-up comedy show “Fags ‘R’ Us”, featuring an array of queer stand-ups landing some good jokes about dildos, Catholic miracles during the passage of marriage equality law, and gay dads being stopped and asked which of them will explain menstrual bleeding to their daughter.
I ponder the repurposing of old slurs – fag, queer – and conclude that language is perhaps more amenable to evolution than right-wing media mouthpieces.
A previous version of this article included reference to journalist Bernard Lane in the section on “Prejudice in print”. The Monthly retracts any suggestion that either Mr Lane’s journalism or his concern about the capacity of teenagers to consent to puberty blockers is disingenuous. The Monthly also withdraws its claim that Mr Lane criticised the Australian Press Council in retaliation for a ruling against him; our article incorrectly backdated that ruling from 2021 to 2019. The Monthly apologises for the error.
Steve Dow is the 2020 Walkley arts journalism award recipient.
