the SSO A-Z guide to queer Sydney

F IS FOR

Fair Day Few things say Sydney and summer like Mardi Gras Fair Day, the annual extravaganza of community festivity in Victoria Park each February.

Like the Oxford Street parade, Fair Day has grown from small-scale origins to become a mass celebration of community, family and friends.

Victoria Park on Fair Day must be the only place in Sydney where you can see bears and babies, dogs and drag queens, and families and fetishists all at once, all having a ball.

Regular Fair Day favourites like Doggywood -“ the ultimate dog competition -“ and drag pageant Miss Fair Day add to the atmosphere and are due to return for this year’s event on 18 February.

There’ll also be a Mr Fair Day contest for drag kings and entertainment by the likes of R&B icon Jade MacRae and Hedwig And The Angry Inch star iOTA.

Add a family-friendly striptease by gay rugby team Sydney Convicts, community stalls and much more, and Fair Day 2007 is set to continue its crowd-pleasing tradition.

Farmers Big Brother runner-up David Graham did a great job of showing middle Australia that gays are not all simpering city types.

As a rugged, semi-blokey country-boy who put the gay in goofy, Graham brought a little bit of Brokeback Mountain to the Big Brother house.

In the most famous coming-out on Australian television, he cried, and the nation cried along with him.

But doubts remained: Was the hillbilly bit an act? Would he really return to the land after enjoying the spoils of being a famous gay on the Sydney scene?

The jury’s still out, although since his release he’s moved back to his Queensland farm, publicly broken up with his scene-loving boyfriend (on his blog, www.farmerdave.com.au), and run a campaign to save his sheep.

But he’s also signed up for the next season of Dancing With The Stars, in which he may prove -“ as Molly Meldrum did last year -“ that, for all of its wonders, homosexuality does not make you a better dancer.