GAY SYDNEY: A MEMOIR
Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre.
February 19
Until February 23
★★★★
Dozens of half-naked male bodies glisten with sweat and desire.
“I liked the sauna,” says photographer/performer William Yang. His voice is deadpan and understated.
Ken’s Karate Klub in Kensington was Yang’s favourite place when he arrived from Queensland as a young student and found a gay tribe beyond his wildest dreams.
For more than 50 years, Yang has chronicled Sydney’s subcultures and especially its queer culture, to become one of the most astute observers of his milieu and times.
His story and that of queer Sydney have long been intertwined. Hence, the show’s subtitle. It is a memoir, but it is also a short insightful queer history lesson about how far the city has travelled.
WIliam Yang has transformed the slideshow/monologue into an art form.Credit:
The show spans half a century, beginning when Yang landed in Sydney in 1969, the same year as the Stonewall riots.
Soon he was a habitué of Oxford Street’s Capriccios and Patches – mention of which resonated with older audience members – gay venues that existed when homosexuality was a crime. And Yang was photographing all he saw.
His World Pride show uses his trademark form – the slideshow/monologue. Yang has over the years transformed a format once synonymous with a daggy dad’s camping holiday shots into an art form – think Sadness, Friends of Dorothy, Shadows. That he makes it look simple is a testament to his storytelling craft.
In the vast Everest Theatre Yang holds the stage, although the large venue leaches some of the confessional tone. He is aided by musician/composer Timothy Fairless on guitar/keyboards whose compositions evoke the times.
The show presents us with the paradox of William Yang. He combines a quiet, unobtrusive presence with an unflinching eye.
He has captured the excess and abandon of the seventies and eighties. But so, too, the devastation of the nineties, as AIDS destroyed so many lives. His 1990 photographs of his young friend Allan, as AIDS ravages him, remain heartbreaking. They reduced me to tears when I first saw them years ago, and they retain their power.
The strength of this show is that it combines a young man’s visual diary with the reflections of a mature observer.
Yang is an artist and activist whose personal stories have political resonance. He has documented the evolution of the most visible expression of Sydney’s queer culture Mardi Gras, from its roots in political protest to a glorious celebration.
These are tales of our city that demonstrate that social change can happen.
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