Surprises all round in Tassie

Surprises all round in Tassie

Last weekend my girlfriend took me on a surprise birthday trip to Tassie. She’s great at keeping secrets, so I didn’t know where we were going until the morning we left.  She’d planned it all out: spa suite with harbour views, MONA, Salamanca market, cycling and even amazing places to brunch. Just when I thought the weekend couldn’t get any more awesome, we discovered in the local paper that we were there for the TasPride closing party, Hobart’s equivalent of Mardi Gras. Great timing.

It’s like my girlfriend’s gaydar subconsciously sensed this was happening when selecting travel dates, because she knows how much I lurve gayness.   The party was held at a venue called the Grand Poobah which, despite its hilarious name, is not gay all the time. It was headlined by “Sydney’s best all-girl band, The Frocks”, playing hits from the ‘70s until today. I’d never heard of them but was chuffed there were chicks on the line up.

We spent the early part of the evening guessing which tunes would be played by a gay cover band, and when the ladies burst on stage with a rock version of George Michael’s Faith, my girfriend whacked my arm and yelled “I told you!”

Hobart’s eclectic mix of LGBT (mostly L) revellers rushed to the dance floor, busting out those hand pumping, foot stamping moves gays are born with. And before I knew it my girlfriend had pulled me up there too.

When she dances the music flows through her body. When I dance it gets clogged up in my torso causing jerky spasms and head banging movements more suited to heavy metal. But we were in Tassie and didn’t care who was watching.

Until song number two kicked in and almost killed the vibe – Shania Twain’s Man I Feel Like A Woman. To clarify, the crowd went nuts for it. Perhaps it was just us mainland wankers who felt Shania was beneath us. But seeing the tie-wearing dyke singer belt out those lyrics with conviction brought us back to the party.

The Grand Poobah even had a cage you could dance in. A hyper-energetic gay boy backflipped off the bars as his posse of pump wearing “fag hags” gyrated alongside. It was such a fun night that I danced, or maybe drank, so hard that I fell asleep on a Poobah couch. Tasmania really took it out of me.

INFO: You can follow Monique Schafter on Twitter @MoniqueSchafter

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