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LOVING THE NIGHTLIFE
I was looking for a little nightlife, so I caught the tram to The Butterfly Club on Bank Street.
It’s a dollhouse-size Victorian home, and onetime butcher shop, that has been transformed into a cabaret lounge, decked out in 70s décor – yeah, it’s pure kitsch (600 shows per year). Christine O’Donnell (the Aussie Vicki Lawrence) was the entertainment during my visit. She gave it her all to a packed house of less than 30 seats – but that’s part of the shtick.There’s a little bar – for before and after drinks – and a parlor where you can chat in comfort with other guests.
After the show, I took the tram to the epicenter of gay nightlife concentrated along Commercial Road in South Yarra, on the south side of the river. What’s cool is that once you arrive at one bar, the rest are just a few steps away, sometimes via the alley.
Diva Bar (153 Commercial Road) is where you can get down to the sounds of the ’70s and ’80s. The bar area is so small, at peak hour it felt a bit like trying to cram a bunch of college kids into a phone booth (but the crowd is cute, so you might like that).
The Market (143 Commercial Road) serves up everything from ’70s disco to current tunes, as well as drag shows. It’s only open on Friday (House music night) and Saturday nights (top international DJs).
The XChange (119 Commercial Road) is a multi-media showcase of music, videos, and Dolby Digital sound. It’s the venue for the hit Priscilla: The Drag Show and there’s a roof top garden when you need a breather, or a smoke (no smoking in the clubs).
The country’s second-largest pride event – behind Sydney, of course – Midsumma Melbourne is a month- long celebration featuring cabaret (at venues such as Butterfly Club), live bands, film, fashion and family events.
The 2009 event takes place mid-January through Feb. 8 (remember, when it’s winter in the States, it’s summer Down Under). Book your reservations now.
Next page: Why a small town is on the gay map
great articles guys, I’m from melbourne and living in London & Amsterdam now and really miss Melbourne… (btw for foriegn readers “friendly” rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney explains some of these comments) come and enjoy our great cities!
Why is Mark of Australia calling New Zealand a “colossal hole of colossal proportions?”
As an Aussie, I’m all for you guys coming over and checking out stuff beyond Sydney. Melbourne is wonderful – one of my favs – and Tassie is beautiful. But don’t forget that Sydney itself is more than Oxford St and the Mardi Gras. I live in Sydney. The fabulous hub of cosmopolitan and queer-friendly life is Newtown-Enmore-Erskineville in the inner western suburbs. It has the highest concentration of shopping (on actual streets, not malls!), live music venues, bars and clubs outside of the CBD, including gay, queer, drag queen and drag king venues. Check it out!
Echoing Tony F, Tassie decriminalised sodomy in 1997, and quickly enacted a suit of other progressive laws and policies, including a same-sex relationship register. It is also the only state in which anti-homophobia kits are required in all high schools.
But also, picking up rainbow16, the author is pretty uninformed on a range of issues. I’m a professional geographer, and I can tell you that the official population projections from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in no way indicate Melbourne surpassing Sydney anytime in the next century! Check out the stats at http://www.abs.gov.au. And, yeah, all major Australian cities have rivers (or several rivers) running through them. Sydney has the Parramatta, Georges and Lane Cove Rivers, along with others. Hmmm…
Thanks for the great article on Melbourne. Come here if you like real Aussie men without the Sydney attitude (see Mark’s comment above for a taste of that.) Don’t forget to check out the scene North of the river-Collingwood in particular–for a good type. Cheers guys. Jack.
Tasmania was the last State to decriminalize homosexuality, but when it did,the legislation was and is the most progressive in Australia. Tasmania was the first state to set up registration of civil unions before the recent legislation in the Australian Capital territory.
The Federal government of Australia has a law that restricts marriage to one man with one woman. Tasmanians are now debating a possible State same-sex marriage law.
If you like hiking, Tasmania is a wilderness paradise, with many famous national park tracks like Cradle Mountain in the centre of the island and the track to Frenchman’s Cap in the unique cool temperate rainforest of the southwest.
Gay Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Greens in the federal parliament, was a leader of the successful struggle to stop the damming and flooding of the wild Franklin River and much of the southwestern rainforest. He continues to lead campaigns to stop the woodchipping of other old-growth forests in Tasmania.
nice article, i used to live in Hobart but never did the interesting stuff and now i live in Sydney, so am required to inform that Melbourne is in fact a hole of colossal proportions. At least you didn’t think we all rode kangaroos or had pet koalas. You did however make a few geographical errors, crossing the Tasman will in fact take you east to New Zealand which is, you guessed it, a colossal hole of colossal proportions. Also there isn’t a Tasmanian sea. And for those of you who think Tasmania is still gay hell, one of the bigger figures in Tasmanian politics is Bob Brown who is, funnily enough, Gay.
I agree that Melbourne is a nice place – less brash and vacuous than Sydney, with lovely public spaces and a buzzing cafe culture (if you like that kind of thing, but I don’t drink coffee or tea so I find cafes a bit pointless…).
Tassie is a great place per se and I thoroughly recommend it for tourists seeking something different providing you can “blend”. As a gay-friendly destination, I’m not so sure – at least not yet. In Hobart you may find some gay people (we didn’t, though my gaydar is all screwy of late) but we found homophobia is still rife when we went outside of central Hobart. We noticed that Tasmania was generally not very switched on to two blokes travelling together. This was in March 2008.
Travellers from the US & Canada may want to note that Australia’s voltage is 240W not 110W so make sure your chargers can cope with different voltages.
Cheers from Nick in Sydney
PS – Michael, please check your spelling – Qantas does not have a “u” (it’s an acronym; see the website or Wikipedia for an explanation) and it’s “wombat” not “wambat”.
Um, almost all the capital cities in Australia (except for maybe 2-3) have rivers running through it. Tasmania is a bit of a backwater, as Rain says… the person who wrote this article seems to be a bit misinformed.
Tasmania?
Not when I lived there. How far they have come, if it is truly as this article states. When I lived there, it carried a possible custodial sentence to be a gay man, and gay women were rumoured to be raped on sight even by police… gay bashing of both genders and trans people was common, and so was deeply hateful vitriol.
This was not in the 1940’s either, this was in the 1990’s.
Good for them. I wish it had been different when I lived there, I was only able to blossom when I moved to the USA. Hardly a bastion of gay acceptance, but at least not so archaic and demonising in the big cities especially.