Will Sergent

It’s hard to imagine now, but Will Sergeant didn’t know a single gay person when he came out in 1972.

Homosexuality was still illegal in South Australia, and it was such a hostile environment that he was saving up for aversion therapy before several events that year irrevocably changed the course of both his life and South Australian society.

On May 10, Dr George Duncan was thrown into the River Torrens and murdered by three assailants, and July saw the formation of the Adelaide Gay Liberation Front.

More than 50 years later, Sergeant can still vividly recall the first meeting he attended.

It was literally a life-changing experience and after a near total lack of visibility, “this explosion of an overt gay culture was marvellous.”

The following year, Adelaide’s first Gay Pride Week included a Pride March down Rundle Street that was held on a Saturday morning to coincide with the busiest shopping period.

When it was finished, a small group of marchers including Sergeant ran into David Jones to hold a same sex love-in.

The following decades saw Sydney and Melbourne usurp Adelaide as bastions of queer culture, and the Mardi Gras and Midsumma celebrations became important “public manifestations” of this vibrant community. But when Adelaide finally got a dedicated LGBTQIA+ arts and cultural festival in 1997, Sergeant was front and centre.

By that time he’d developed the character of Dr Gertrude Glossip PhD (Formal Drapery) Curtain University, a “dowager diva” who he describes as an alter ego rather than a drag queen.

“Gertrude is to me what Dame Edna is to Barry Humphries,” he explains, with an added rainbow focus.

Glossip led a gay history walk at the inaugural Feast Festival, mixing risqué anecdotes with material drawn from oral histories to illuminate Adelaide’s often untold gay history.

“She loves to get her audience to laugh with her,” he says, “but she can also tell some very poignant, moving stories.”

These events are important “not just for the walkers in the group, but the passers-by who observe or perhaps stop and listen to a little bit,” says Sergeant, who knows from personal experience how important it is to have a visibly thriving queer community.

And the walks proved so successful that he has reprised them at South Australia’s History Festival and the Adelaide Fringe.

But none have been as moving as the march of honour before the premiere of Watershed, an opera about Dr Duncan that was co-commissioned by Feast and the Adelaide Festival.

“To be involved in that was an extraordinary experience,” Sergeant recalls, “it was very evocative, and we had a very special performance by the chorus from Watershed.”

For this “proud unreconstructed 1970s gay liberationist,” festivals are by their very nature a celebration of a city’s diversity, and have a vital role to play in fostering visibility for marginalised and underrepresented groups across society.

“That’s especially true in Adelaide, because a smaller city seems to be designed for festivals…where a festival can be a bit lost in a larger city, in a smaller city there’s more opportunity for concentration of events and venues which gives it an intensity and a focus.”

And having a dedicated festival is especially important for the city’s queer community, “because growing up in the fifties, there was nothing…if there were any public coverage [of queer culture], it was negative and pejorative.

So that positive celebratory manifestation is hugely important.”

 
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This article is part of the Festival City Stories series, a collection of reflections about Adelaide made by the people who make this a festival place. The project was funded through the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Arts South Australia, Arts Recovery Fund, and delivered in partnership with the State Library of South Australia. 

Written by: Alexis Buxton-Collins

Photography by: Alex Van de Loo