Candy Royalle – A Legacy Of Love 

By Guy James Whitworth

Five years ago this week Sydney’s Queer community lost one of its brightest and most inspiring stars.   

For those unfamiliar with Candy Royalle, she was a spoken-word poet but was also so much more: she was an activist, a performer, educator, and mentor and was very much someone who used her platform to highlight and raise the voices of others, specifically women of colour.   

Obviously, none of us are immortal, but there is a really sweet meme that either one of Candy’s family, friends or many fans has posted on her Facebook profile that says:

 “If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach at immortality”. 

And if that is to be believed then Candy can never truly leave us because her influence is as prevailing as her incredible body of work.   

Candy Was Fierce And Formidable

She was born in 1981 and was mostly Sydney based in her adult life, however, she’d lived and travelled a lot overseas before her passing in 2018 after a defiant battle with ovarian cancer.   

I first met Candy a decade before that. She was a close friend of my partner and she and her partner, Nicola Bailey (the photographer responsible for all the photos used in this article) were returning from a few years of travelling around the world; meeting the two of them was, in some ways, a lot more nerve-wracking than meeting my partner’s parents. 

To say that Candy could be fierce is an understatement, and although I later grew to know her as a warm, compassionate, kind and gentle encourager of others’ talents, I always carried the knowledge of how formidable she could be.   

An Unstoppable Force

In 2016, there was a documentary made that Candy and I were in called A Queer Aesthetic, and it played at the Seymour Centre as part of the Mardi Gras Festival. Mardi Gras hadn’t allocated us an MC, so there was no one to host or guide the Q and A at the end of the film. 

When Candy arrived on that day I was in a bit of a panic and Candy said she would sort it, and oooh let me tell you, she bloody did. There was a straight male house manager and after he unwisely talked down to Candy she literally ripped him seventeen new arseholes! It was kind of fun to watch (he totally deserved it) and we were quickly allocated an MC for the event.   

The reason I mention this is because, yes, I saw Candy direct formidable anger and fierceness when she chose to wield it, however, just as impressively, I also witnessed her direct, with the same unstoppable force, an incredible generosity when it came to sharing her creative knowledge.   

A Raw, Relatable Energy

From our very first meeting, I had a lot of respect for Candy. She was brave, she was passionate, and she was utterly inspiring. I sketched her portrait a few times in her life, onstage and off.   

She was one of those people it was always a good idea to listen to; she taught me so much about the integrity and duty of being an artist. I didn’t always agree with her views, but I certainly knew that her views were always informed and carefully considered. 

My political views usually ran alongside hers but didn’t always run as deep. I naively liked the idea my work might change the world, but she based her writing and performances on the knowledge that it should and could.   

Candy’s poetry, which was often sublime in its raw yet relatable energy, showed me something I’d never witnessed before – an incredible passion and a power to connect.   

And that’s the bigger part of what she taught me: creativity can be a force, it can carry momentum, and it can be focused or unfocused. When properly focused it can carry emotion, it can carry a message and it can change the world through its authenticity.   

Candy’s Legacy

By watching Candy perform, and listening to what she had to say, I understood that for my work to have any true worth, it has to contain ethics, awareness and compassion.   

Add into that the Queer element of what we do and you have a Queer message that must be listened to by the world.

However, and this is the beauty of Candy’s legacy, she keenly and kindly shared her skills with so many other people around her, that those same teachings are alive in a host of Sydney’s Queer artists, poets, performers and writers that now make work worthy of Candy’s legacy.   

Rest in power and strength my friend, and hopefully, you know, whether it’s five years or one hundred, your light and influence will always shine as bright.   

A Trillion Tiny Awakenings by Candy Royalle, published by UWA Publishing. Available from major book retailers.