History of Midsumma

Since 1988, the Midsumma Festival has been Victoria's premier gay and lesbian arts and cultural festival, presenting an annual community celebration and encouraging the development of innovative artistic content and a unique cultural experience.  We believe that maintaining a history of Midsumma is just one of the ways that we can recognise the efforts of those people and organisations which have been, and continue to be, an integral part of Midsumma's history.

The online History Book has been compiled from contributions solicited from past and present Board members and volunteers of Midsumma throughout its history. Midsumma has made no attempt to verify the accuracy of the information provided by the contributors - each account is an independent story. Any views or opinions expressed are those of the authors and are not endorsed by Midsumma. Because of Midsumma's rich history, it is inevitable that, at different times and in different places, people have different recollections of events. There is no one official history of Midsumma - each and every story is, in part, our history. If you disagree with any account of events in the History Book, we invite you to submit your own.

About mid-December, when the cicadas start singing, the boys in shorts reappear in Brunswick Street and you have to stop wearing leather in the afternoon. That's when you know it's Summer in  Melbourne. During most of the 1980s, this meant it was time to start saving up for Mardi Gras, But in 1988 some of our local community leaders decided they were sick of Sydney taking all our  money and talent - it was time we had a festival of our own. And the rest is history - the history of the Midsumma Festival.

Early 80's - GayDay

Midsumma's history is actually a little more complicated than that. There had been earlier attempts to stage a gay community festival in Melbourne. In the early '80s there was GayDay, originally organised as a celebration of homosexual law reform in Victoria (four years before NSW, let it be noted), and later run by the ALSO  Foundation. GayDay was held in the concrete bunker under Olympic Park - not the gayest of venues. After venturing outdoors in 1985, it was rained out, and thereafter lost its ambitions to be a major festival, though it lingered on as an annual picnic.

1986 - VAC proposed a Melbourne Festival

Resentment of Sydney's all-singing, all-dancing, all-exhibiting, and very expensive, Mardi Gras monster continued to seethe in the breasts of Melbourne's gay elite. In 1986 a proposal for a new Melbourne festival was floated, mainly by the Victorian AIDS Council, which saw that the gay community needed a morale-booster during the worst years of AIDS. A street parade and festival in Acland Street, St Kilda, was proposed. The idea sank, partly through ALSO's attachment to GayDay, but mainly because several local gay businesspeople, led by an Acland Street cakeshop proprietor, thought it would be bad for their oh-so-respectable image.