My first few hours in Sydney simply couldn’t have been gayer. It was 2002, and Australia’s biggest city was about to host the sixth Gay Games, so I’d arrived with a gaggle of LGBTQ+ American journalists for a very pink tour. Still dazed from the long flight, we were shuttled right from the airport to Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach, where a dozen barely-clad and oiled-up Aussie hunks were leaping across the sand for a photo shoot for the then-new Aussie Bum swimwear line. Subtle, this wasn’t.
As I learned quickly on that first trip, few cities in the world know how to get their gay on as unabashedly as Sydney, Australia’s Emerald City. And though I’ve been back to Sydney since, nothing could have prepared me for the full onslaught of gayness that washed over me during my recent visit this year for Sydney World Pride, the first time the global event has ever taken place in the Southern Hemisphere. During this trip, the gay started even before landing in Sydney, with distinctively campy shenanigans like drag bingo at 35,000 feet above the Pacific aboard the Qantas Pride Flight.
