QUEER AND ALTERNATIVE

Photo credit: Pete Kung

 

This area has changed a lot since the 90s. Smith Street, for example, used to be very, very, uh, smack heavy. So, when Hares and Hyenas opened up a shop on Smith Street, in fact, uh, they closed a relatively short time later, I'm told, because visitors said they felt unsafe coming to the shop. Uh, and even when I moved into the area in 2000, I felt nervous walking home down Gertrude Street alone at night because it was still a bit rough. Yeah, when we opened Q&A at the Builders Arms, there were vacant blocks in Gertrude Street. There was literally a vacant block a couple of doors up from the pub where people would sneak up the laneway and go up there to smoke their joints out of sight or something like that, or probably do other things out of sight as well. Um, so the area's changed a lot. Uh, and to go back even further, when Q&A started, it was initially at what is now Max Watts in the city. So it started as a fortnightly club alternating with a goth industrial club that I also helped run with a different group of friends who kind of began to overlap. And after a while we just went, “Oh, the other club wants to go weekly on Saturday nights, our club isn't quite working in this environment.” So, Pete Kuhn – who was one of the co-founders and one of the DJs with me – and I said, “Oh, look, I already DJ at The Builders on, uh, Fridays and Saturdays. They've got a Thursday night free. Let's see if we can take it there.” We took Q&A – Queer and Alternative – to The Builders Arms, and it just went off. I think it was, it was the right place, the right time. There were still plenty of students living in Fitzroy because they could afford to – they can't anymore. Uh, and I think there's a documentary film called something like 1996, The Year of Punk Broke, which was about the waves of bands like Sonic Youth, Nirvana and so forth, and that was just the time that Q&A started. And so we rode this wave of wild alternative music. Well, wild to some people, to me going to be very, very familiar. 

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A good way to describe it was, uh, share house grunge. So lots of, uh, op shop couches and very much an old school Fitzroy pub. In retrospect, we were part of the gentrification of Fitzroy, which we didn't realise at the time because, uh, The Builders used to be – like a lot of pubs in Fitzroy in the 60s, 70s, 80s – rough as guts. A friend of mine moved on to Gore Street in 1985, and a sex worker was stabbed and killed at the front of The Builders arms within a week or two of him moving into the area, and he's like, “Oh God, what have I done?” By the 90s that gentrification had started, but it was an old school pub, it hadn't been done up. Beautiful old tiled bar, with a floor that I presume was originally designed to be just hosed down after the 6 o'clock  swill. Uh, and I remember sitting at the bar one night and a taxi pulled up and three guys got in – they've obviously already been in a bit of a pub crawl –they came in, they ordered their pots, they sat down and they looked around and slowly started to realise that the pub had changed a bit. Turns out they'd all just got out of Pentridge earlier that day and they'd come straight to The Builders after going through a couple of other pubs as well, because it was one of their locals and they looked around and went, “it's full of people with blue hair and Goth boys kissing each other.” They finished up their pots and left. They were what The Builders used to be like. And as I said, it was a grungy Fitzroy pub, the equivalent of a punters club. I think one of the reasons Q&A worked so well at The Builders was because it was at a time when the gay and lesbian scenes were quite separate, and we were in an inclusive venue that was for both men and women, guys and girls, and everyone in between. I think our original flyers, for example, said, “dress up, down, or sideways.” So, it was the kind of place where straight people could bring their queer friends, queer friends could bring their straight people. Everybody mixed together, everybody mingled together. As long as you weren't an arsehole, uh, and you weren't up yourself. You would be absolutely fine. ​

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And I think that's why it worked. And as I said, musically, it happened at just the right time. Because the reason we started it was like I was listening to punk and grunge, Pete was listening to Britpop. We would go to somewhere like The Laird, or the Peel, or God forbid occasionally go to the Southside to Commercial Road. Um, and the music, not just the music was not our thing, but the style was not our thing. The whole ‘Cult of the Body Beautiful’, uh, the fashion, everything that went with a so-called ‘gay identity’, which to me at the time felt like a commercialized identity, something that had been co-opted, something that had gone from being rebellious and dangerous in the 60s and 70s to being completely co-opted and mainstream in a way. Uh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's why we called it ‘queer’. It wasn't a gay club; it was a queer club. Um, and it turned out there were a hell of a lot more people than we realised outside of our immediate group of friends who were queer and also liked punk, and grunge, and Britpop, and indie, and old rock, and wanted to throw themselves around the dancefloor with gay abandon. 

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Yeah, I think AIDs – the pandemic – started to bring people back together. And then, uh, in the 90s, definitely, I think maybe it was more of a us against the world sense again, um, which helps unite people. Let's face it, if you have a common foe, i.e. an oppressive and a heterosexual world, then that does tend to bring people together a little bit more, to fight a common foe. And also, uh, at the time Q&A was formed. We're talking not long after groups like Act Up had come together as well. So, uh, coalitions were very much of the time. One of the reasons Q&A worked was because it was at a pub; it wasn't a nightclub. People didn't get dressed up the way you do, get dressed up to go to a nightclub. It was just a social night at the pub. And yeah, some people always got dressed up. But they got dressed up in their own unique way. Once we moved to a bar called Barry, it became a club and it meant we were open later, there was a larger crowd, and the demographics started to change. And part of that is because it was now a nightclub, not a pub night. And it was because, as I said, people had moved out of Fitzroy, And so we started getting more – we started getting the occasional group of bitchy drag queens dropping in or uh, the Southside gay boys, um, who were coming because they were told it was a cool place to come to, not because they were into the music. Uh, and that's one of the reasons we killed it off. It had changed enough that it stopped feeling fun, and it felt more like a job. And myself and Pete and Helen – who by that stage was the third regular DJ and promoter – we just collectively went, “let's kill it while the going's good. We could keep milking this and keep it running for several more years, we’re getting full houses every night, big queues.” But things should stop when they stop being fun, and that's why Q&A ended when it did.