The Spark
It started at the beginning of 2012, when an article in Rolling Stone
stopped me in my tracks.
It was about a school in Minnesota where there had been four suicides of students who were queer (or perceived to be). The school district found itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides, but because it was accused of ‘having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an extreme anti-gay climate’. The article explored a culture of teachers and school leaders turning a blind eye to homophobic and transphobic bullying, and of the schools lacking any kind of inclusive messaging or curriculum. This resonated with my own experience at school. LGBTIQA+ issues, health, stories and histories were invisible from the curriculum. Prejudice was normalised. If I’d asked my school principal to take a girl to the formal I would have been sent to the school counsellor. Not much had changed when I became a teacher. In one school, a colleague told the principal I was queer and suggested I be sacked because that was clearly not good for the students.
The article struck me because I knew that statistically in Australia, young LGBTIQA+ people had much greater rates of suicidality than the general population. I wanted to document these stories. I wanted to know how much had changed for queer kids since I was at school.
Fortuitously, I came across a newspaper clipping about an event called the Same Sex Formal (subsequently renamed Queer Formal) in Melbourne. Organised by Minus18, it was a giant formal, complete with professional photo booth, sit-down dinner, live performances and dancing. And it was created for all the queer teens who couldn’t attend their own school formals or debutante balls, either because they were overtly forbidden from bringing a same-sex partner or because they just knew they wouldn’t feel welcome.
I knew immediately that the Queer Formal could be a positive, life-affirming event - and it could be an empowering way to explore some tough subject matter.
I put a call-out through Minus18 networks inviting attendees to get in touch about taking part in a documentary film. Within a week, I’d already been contacted by 10 young people. They were from public schools and private schools, and lived everywhere from Dandenong to South Yarra to Torquay. Some came from religious families, some from culturally diverse backgrounds. They spanned the spectrum of sexuality and gender identity; and I knew that if I could find a way to weave their stories together, we’d have a unique window into the lives and perspectives of queer teenagers in Melbourne, 2012.
I knew that I also needed to capture some experiences of growing up queer in the country. At the time, I was working for ABC radio on the NSW/Victorian border and made contact with two young women, Steph and Erin, whom I had met whilst covering the Border’s first marriage equality rally for ABC’s AM and Triple J’s Hack.
Fast forward three years and we were at the icing end of ‘Love in Full Colour’, taking care of the sound mix and the colour grade. We were almost there. Our original DOP, and my good friend Adis Hondo, was fighting for his life in hospital, and the last time I saw him, he told me we should make a follow-up film one day. Adis had been profoundly moved by the experiences and beautiful personalities of our participants.
‘Their stories are important, and they’re precious,’ he said in his lovely Bosnian accent. ‘Also - they’re not over!’
And so here we are, ten years after the initial call went out through the Minus18 email list. The participants who stole our hearts as teenagers are now in their 20s. And do they have some stories to tell.
