The Spark
It started at the beginning of 2012, when an article in Rolling Stone stopped me in my tracks.
Suzi Taylor interviews queer couple Erin and Em, from Wodonga, Victoria. Photograph: Waqar Ali.
The story was about a school in Minnesota where there had been four suicides of students who were queer (or perceived to be) over a short period of time.
The school district 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 proactive, inclusive messaging or curriculum.
The situation for LGBTIQA+ students back home
This resonated with my own experience at school. LGBTIQA+ issues, health, stories and histories were non-existent. 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. A few years on, and not much had changed when I became a high school teacher. During my first ever teaching job, in a non-religious school, a colleague of mine outed me in a school council meeting and proposed I be sacked because I was obviously not a good influence on the students.
But back to the Rolling Stone article. What struck me most was that I knew that statistically in Australia, young LGBTIQA+ people had much greater rates of suicidality than the general population. I wanted to understand why. I wanted to provide a way for them to tell their stories, on their terms. And I wanted to find out how much had changed for queer kids since I was at school.
Our very own home-grown Coming Out Ball
Fortuitously, I came across a newspaper clipping about an event called the Queer Formal in Melbourne. Organised by Minus18, it was basically a giant prom night, complete with photo booth, lolly buffet, sit-down dinner, live performances and dancing. The night belonged to 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 on the NSW/Victorian border and made contact with two young women, Steph and Erin, whom I had met whilst producing a radio story about the Border’s first marriage equality rally.
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. The last time I saw him, Adis told me we should make a follow-up film one day. He had been profoundly moved by the experiences and beautiful personalities of our participants.
“These stories are important and precious,” Adis said in his rich, expressive Bosnian accent. “You should keep following!”
And so here we are, over a decade on from my initial call-out via the Minus18 newsletter. The participants who stole our hearts as teenagers are now in their 20s. You should see them now.
