American actress Lily Tomlin shouts “I want to see glitter and sequins and feathers,” as she pumps up revelers ahead of Sydney’s famous and irreverent Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
“I want to see you basking in your own glory!” she yells as the gay pride parade, an annual event which has enjoyed a growing international profile in recent years, kicked off under rainy skies.
Comedian Tomlin was a celebrity guest at this month’s Mardi Gras and one of thousands of foreigners joining what has become a major cultural event in the Asia-Pacific region.
Photo: AFP
“It’s welcoming, it’s fun and entertaining and slightly irreverent,” says Mardi Gras chief executive Michael Rolick of the raucous parade of some 8,500 people — dressed as everything from bikers to angels — which was watched by tens of thousands more who lined the streets.
The parade is known for its outrageous costumes and scores of participants dressed as brides and grooms in support of gay marriage, while others wore cheerleading outfits, chain mail, hot pants or, in some cases, not much at all.
Rolick believes that for the past 10 or 15 years, the parade has been Australia’s best known cultural event, and a must-see for tourists along with the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge and Bondi Beach.
“There aren’t too many gay pride festivals which happen at night time at summer and stop the middle of the city like this, and have the support that Sydney does and I think that that’s something they want to experience,” he said.
Sydney is best known for its spectacular New Year’s Eve fireworks, but the gay pride march — one of the world’s biggest — also draws crowds. Last year it pulled in 22,000 foreign tourists.
Officials say the pink dollar is also lucrative, with those who come to Sydney for the Mardi Gras spending on average more than other tourists and depositing A$30 million (US$30.4 million) in the state economy each year.
The event held its own during the global financial crisis and indications are that its audience is being increasingly drawn from Asia, although the US and Britain are the largest markets by a big margin, accounting together for about 40 percent of foreign visitors.
Rolick said the two main markets were followed by New Zealand and western Europe, but acknowledged there was “an increasing interest from our own backyard.”
“The tourist numbers from that part of the world [Asia] are starting to increase,” he said, but added that foreigners have long taken part in the march, which has been a feature of Sydney for more than 30 years.
Among the Asian participants this year was the famous transvestite group Tiffany’s Show Pattaya, whose exquisitely adorned models danced on a giant peacock float which ended the parade.
“This was something we’ve talked about for a few years,” the group’s creative director Ken Smith said, adding that Sydney’s Mardi Gras was well-known in Thailand.
The Mardi Gras began as a “fun” human rights protest in 1978 — but police cracked down heavily on marchers and more than 50 were arrested in the brief riot which followed. However, the event helped bring legislative change, including the decriminalization of homosexuality in New South Wales in 1984.
Rolick says it also helped bring the community together during the worst days of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the years that followed, but has lost none of its relevance even today as it highlighted calls for same-sex marriage in Australia, which bans gay marriage.
“The parade is very much an amplifier, like a microphone, for what our community wants to say,” he said. “If you look at the event over the years, that has gone from ‘we’re equal and we’re not criminals’... to not stigmatizing us with HIV, to changing the age of consent and the right to same-sex marriage equality.”
However, the tone is always light, with this year’s march featuring a huge figure of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard — who has said she believes marriage should only be between a man and a woman and who remains unmarried herself — in a bridal gown.
Peter Murphy, who took part in the first Mardi Gras and has been involved in many parades over the years, says the event has always been “a big party.”
“It began as a Mardi Gras, it wasn’t so much an act of defiance as a way to shift from a fairly routine type political protest to something that was more cultural and much more open and disarming,” he said.
From India to China to the US, automakers cannot make vehicles — not that no one wants any, but because a more than US$450 billion industry for semiconductors got blindsided. How did both sides end up here? Over the past two weeks, automakers across the world have bemoaned the shortage of chips. Germany’s Audi, owned by Volkswagen AG, would delay making some of its high-end vehicles because of what chief executive officer Markus Duesmann called a “massive” shortfall in an interview with the Financial Times. The firm has furloughed more than 10,000 workers and reined in production. That is a further blow
MOBILE SMART: The Dimensity 1200 is 22 percent better in terms of performance than its predecessor, and 25 percent more power-efficient, the handset chip designer said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday unveiled its premium 5G processors — the Dimensity 1200 and Dimensity 1100 — as it vies for a larger slice of the world’s rapidly growing 5G smartphone market. Manufactured using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (台積電) 6-nanometer process technology, the Dimensity 1200 processor performs 22 percent better than the previous generation Dimensity 1000+ processor, and is 25 percent more power-efficient, MediaTek said. Chinese smartphone brands Xiaomi Corp (小米) and Realme Mobile Telecommunications (Shenzhen) Co (銳爾覓移動通信) are to be the first adopters of the latest Dimensity chips, the companies said during a virtual media briefing. Xiaomi plans to equip its first
‘BROAD RANGE’: The US Department of Commerce intends to deny a significant number of license requests for exports to Huawei, an industry association said US President Donald Trump’s administration notified Huawei Technologies Co (華為) suppliers, including chipmaker Intel Corp, that it is revoking certain licenses to sell to the Chinese company and intends to reject dozens of other applications to supply the telecommunications firm, people familiar with the matter told reporters. The action — likely the last against Huawei under Trump — is the latest in a long-running effort to weaken the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, which Washington sees as a national security threat. The notices came amid a flurry of US efforts against China in the final days of Trump’s administration. US president-elect Joe
Answering to a reported request by Germany to help address a chip shortage in its auto industry, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) yesterday said that it was in talks with domestic chip suppliers. Foreign media over the weekend reported that German Minister of Economic Affairs Peter Altmaier had sent a request to Taipei to ask Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to cooperate more closely with German automakers to provide microchips and sensors, to bridge a shortage that has emerged over the past few months. The MOEA said that it had not yet received the request and could therefore not elaborate