A subversive take on Sleaze
Sleaze organisers have unveiled a suitably dark, decadent poster to publicise this year’s ‘Decadence’-themed October 2 event.
The widescreen poster, featuring an array of queer Sydney identities, is the work of photographer Mat Hornby and stylist Matthew Stegh, two founding members of performance and production troupe Glitter Militia.
“Glitter Militia mainly puts on cabaret shows, so we were really keen to have a performative element to the shoot,” Stegh told Sydney Star Observer.
“We ended up using a lot of performers we’d worked with on other projects in the past.
“For a shoot like this, you couldn’t just get a model from a modelling agency. And we had all these ideas for what we wanted, but we wanted the performers to come to the party with suggestions as well so it could be a real collaboration.”
Rather than adhering to a strict brief, the pair were given this year’s theme and wrote their own synopsis for the shoot around it.
Stegh said they looked at posters from previous years to determine what had and hadn’t worked.
“The ones from the late ’80s and early ’90s were important for me, because that was my coming of age. My first Sleaze Ball was in ’92, and back in those days, it really was a costume ball, and I was quite excited and frightened by the extreme costumes.
“It was that costume, performative element that we wanted to capture, to hark back to those days.”
With that in mind, Stegh and Hornby made sure they included a few frightening touches to their own image, not least of which is the sight of drag queen Maxi Shield done up in full Penguin face-paint as a studly Stu Fenton nuzzles her crotch.
“I love monstrous drag; that’s what [drag’s] supposed to be. Anyone can copy a woman, but when they gather up all the fears that men have of women and throw them back out there in a grotesque way, it really pushes the envelope. We love grotesque elements like that.”
info: Sleaze Ball is on at the Entertainment Quarter on Saturday, October 2. Visit www.mardigras.org.au/sleaze
