The Peel To Parliament: Meet VIC’s New Equality Minister, Steve Dimopoulos

MP Steve Dimopoulos, affectionately known as ‘Dimo’, tells me he met his husband on the packed, sticky floors of The Peel in 2010, We Found Love playing over the speakers.

I ask Dimo what his #1 gay anthem is, but the answer’s obvious – the Rihanna hit that soundtracked their first meet-cute, and also played at their wedding. A truly Melburnian gay love story.

It is a refreshingly down-to-earth anecdote from the state’s new Minister for Equality, whose life now revolves more on the floors of parliament than gay bars.

Star Observer sat down with him in his CBD office, staring out over Parliament House while chatting about his life, his values, and his new responsibility of being our community’s ministerial voice.

Appointed to the portfolio by Premier Ben Carroll last month, Dimopoulos has represented Oakleigh since 2014. He is proudly gay, Greek-Australian, extremely close to his family and these days, he is happiest when hosting loved ones for dinner or watching Netflix with his husband.

I tell him the terminology for an LGBTQIA+ person who prefers nights at home to partying is a ’quiet queer’, and he lets out a big, genuine chuckle. “Quiet queer! I love that.”

That authentic and accessible warmth also runs through the way Dimopoulos speaks about public life; he shares he’s conscious that taking on this portfolio means his personal and professional life become inextricably linked.

One of Victoria’s first openly gay frontbench ministers, Dimopoulos says he can’t help but think about those who had served in government before him, but were unable to live openly.

“How many… had to suffer the indignity of not being themselves?” he said. “Context matters, visibility matters, being safe matters. [This is] not about ‘Steve Dimopoulos’. It’s about what we provide for the next person.”

His new role, he says, means ensuring LGBTQIA+ needs are thought about in every portfolio. “The most impactful thing you can do in this job is influence the rest of government. The services that our community [needs]” – like the Royal Children’s Hospital’s “incredible work” providing healthcare for trans youth – “need a reference point at the executive arm of government.”

Dimopoulos is emphatic about the soft infrastructure our community urgently needs right now, for social cohesion: Pride events, regional festivals, LGBTQIA+ venues, drag storytime and more. Hard infrastructure matters obviously – he gives the Victorian Pride Centre as an example, but says “the magic happens in the social connections inside”.

Asked about the perception that Labor can sometimes take the LGBTQIA+ vote for granted, he was absolute in his response: “Fundamentally, we don’t take any community for granted – particularly not one that [has] stood with us on so many battlefronts for so bloody long.”

“I feel that what is incumbent on us to do, and in my job… is to remind people what we’ve achieved together.”

But he says, with November’s election approaching, LGBTQIA+ Victorians must consider that our community’s progress is not infallible: “All those things we’ve achieved together, they’re all on the ballot paper.”

He encourages us to take a look at Hansard, and see which politicians have “shown an enormous lack of ignorance about the queer community on the parliamentary record”.

Dimo’s job now is to make that daily terrain safer, less isolated, more recognisably ours.

Being a proud ‘quiet queer’ who also knows the enormous importance of LGBTQIA+ community spaces, and the life-changing things they can provide us with — queer joy, self acceptance, and occasionally even a husband — it feels like he’s the perfect gay for the job.