Nae and Shae tie the knot!
Fighting for the right to marry
Back in 2012, one of the first big radio stories I made for Triple J was about the inaugural marriage equality rally in Albury. Around 200 people came to it, almost all of them young. It was the largest ever queer public gathering the Border town had ever seen - a campaign that mobilised and collectivised our community on a scale like we’d never seen before.
I remember clearly the wonderful Archdeacon Peter Macleod Miller standing on the podium, looking out at the crowd of predominantly higher schoolers and asking: Where are all the adults of our community? Where are our local leaders and representatives? I can’t see any of them here.
He was baffled but he was also angry. He perfectly expressed the collective feeling amongst so many young people, both queer and straight, that they had been utterly abandoned by leaders who were supposed to care about and represent them. I met local high schoolers Steph and Erin in Albury-Wodonga shortly afterwards, and they became an integral part of Love in Full Colour, travelling the four hours to Melbourne together to attend the Minus18 Queer Formal because they weren’t able to attend their own school formals.
The following year, Steph went on to give a speech at the Equal Love rally in Melbourne, to an ocean of thousands of people. The scene of Erin, dressed in a wedding dress running up to give Steph a hug right before she went on stage, is an ephemeral moment in the film, and one of my favourites. In the speech, Steph summed up why the marriage equality campaign wasn’t just about queer people wanting to get married. She joined the dots between the messages that she and her friends were absorbing: No school formal or deb ball for you. No marriage for you. No Safe Schools for you.
In doing so, she captured the constellation of reality for so many young queer people coming of age in 2012.
Many of the participants in Love in Full Colour campaigned for queer rights in their own unique and powerful ways during this time. Some of them took to rally podiums, others shared their story via Minus18 videos. One wrote a book, another went on to lead a major trans rights organisation, others made community radio, did phone banks, painted placards, and braved often hard conversations about the Yes vote with family and friends.
And then we got to do it…
We often don’t get to fully experience the fruits of our activism in our lifetimes. So you can imagine the depth of emotions running throughout a beautiful Spring day last year, when one of our Full Colour family got married to their love, surrounded by family and friends - many of whom they’d marched alongside a decade earlier, for the right to have this day. Our crew felt incredibly honoured to be able to capture the day for them both. Over the next few months I’ll be logging and creating ‘selects’ of the footage from the day in preparation for the work of our wonderful editor Sioux Currie, and I’m sure there will be a few eye leaks along the way.
