Queer groups at USYD are remarkably small at the moment, and this presents an unusual problem when people start finishing their degrees. Usually, institutional knowledge (meetings and minutes, protest building, multi-year campaigns, cornerstone events, etc.) ends up in the arms of generationally resilient political factions or well-funded student execs. When their members leave university, the group’s direction remains anchored by the sheer weight of organisation. Queer campus groups, on the other hand, often change hands wildly from faction to faction or remain wholly independent because queer struggle beyond “visibility” remains a fringe fight to take up. All the while, queer student causes are woefully underfunded and are often one of the first on the block for “cost-cutting measures.”
As such, when queer oral tradition fails, strategies often just get lost. Many political directions that were obvious a decade ago have become obtuse and surprising today. Meanwhile, USYD management gets to normalise the erosion of student autonomy over the course of decades. It’s normalised for the USU to own all the O-week (“Welcome Fest”) infrastructure. It’s normalised for a queer society to have corporate sponsors. It’s normalised for campus security to tear down posters each morning. Looking back at student history makes it strikingly clear how much the university micromanages the way queer people group themselves, how we organise, how we make change happen. This pinkwashed bureaucratisation must be interrogated at every turn. Instead of a stifling and sterile corporation, we need a campus culture that nurtures the creativity to resist bureaucratic inertia, to get stuff done on our own terms.
Sydney University’s track record on queer rights is abysmal, and this is a reflection of the fact that it is an institution that has funded and participated in genocide from its founding to the current day, from Gadi to Gaza. It is a colonial machine that swallows up marginalised groups into its bureaucratic folds, as long as it can make money from them. If there is a risk to the university’s brand or profit — most recently seen with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment — then it will spit these groups out with full violence.
A prime example: from January 1993 to July 1996, the University of Sydney attempted to prevent ALL Health Sciences, Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing students with HIV, Hepatitis B, or Hepatitis C from graduating. They claimed that these students could not legally perform Exposure Prone Procedures — procedures with a risk of cutting the student’s skin — and therefore could not meet their course requirements. Rather than offering exemptions on EPPs, management eagerly mailed this no-graduation threat twice to all enrolling health students, most of whom had no compulsory EPPs in their courses at all. It took a three and a half year legal battle with the SRC at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for Sydney Uni to capitulate.
The reason Sydney Uni did this was, of course, money. The letters were sent to weaken prospective liability claims just to get insurers off their backs. Where there’s potential fines involved, Sydney Uni has thrown entire student faculties under the bus and bought into the racist, queerphobic fear mongering around HIV and hepatitis. To quote the SRC’s campaign, “HIV doesn’t discriminate, the University does”. In short, the university isn’t and never has been on the side of students.
To pretend that Sydney Uni is built on anything other than violence would require a long term project of historical revisionism. In the case of their queer rights record, the Pride Network does that revisionism. Established as the Ally Network in early 2015, it was at the time an index of LGBTQIA+ friendly staff and an advisory group to university management. The Pride Network does two things:
- It normalises university management being the sole representatives of tertiary education at Pride events, and
- It lets the university stay quietly apolitical on queer issues while pinkwashing their brand of ‘diversity and inclusivity.’
Case in point, Sydney Uni (on request of the Ally Network) entered its first float in the Mardi Gras parade in 2016, less than 12 months after the Ally Network was founded. Before this, university students in the Sydney region used to band together in a cross-campus activist float that echoed the radicalism of the first Mardi Gras. By sticking its corporate foot in the door, Sydney Uni cut in on a space that has always radically belonged to students, and normalised their brand image in the parade.
Sydney Uni pinkwashes their brand through their ad campaigns (see: “Unlearn love”), scholarships, sponsorships, and the Pride Network. However, whenever students demand the university to act on queer rights, they quietly palm off taking a public position to the Pride Network while delaying any material changes for as long as possible. On marriage equality, former Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence refused to set the university’s position despite on-campus protests, months-long campaigns, and several faculty Yes endorsements. Instead, the Ally Network snuck in their support for marriage equality with a statement on their webpage just days before the postal vote began in September 2017. That year, and for four years after until 2021, Sydney Uni paraded in Mardi Gras while uni staff still could not access any gender affirmation leave, let alone annualised leave. No matter how many rainbow flags they raise at the Quad, Sydney Uni will never act on the struggles that queer people face.
When the university tries to claim that inclusion is the highest goal for queer students, we must be able to turn back and say that we will not have the purpose of our education decided for us. Campus communities and student unions are where the queer movement first thrived because students decided that police violence was not welcome there. Mardi Gras is not just important because it was a protest planned by USYD students; it’s important because it started a months-long campaign that won the right to protest for everyone in NSW and took away legislation that NSW Police used to attack sex workers, Indigenous people, and queer people. After three massive Drop The Charges rallies and 125 arrests, the NSW Summary Offences Act 1970 was repealed, and most charges against the 78ers were dropped. The second Mardi Gras had no arrests because queer students and activists won against the NSW government and police.
The start of queer revolutionary creativity starts with the realisation that queerness is a political class whose struggle is bound up with everyone else’s. During the many attempts before 2007 by the Howard Liberal government to introduce voluntary student unionism and crush student union power, queer students joined the fight at USYD — they had some of the most to lose, including the Queer Space. An attack on student activism is an attack on all students, and this stands as equally true today. The new Campus Access Policy exists to let Sydney Uni continue profiteering on the genocide against Palestinians while minimising damage to their brand. The point of Queers for Palestine is that the pinkwashing of genocide is unacceptable whether it is done by the Zionist regime or by Sydney Uni. We must not let our queerness be used as a brand shield in capitalist interests; it must be in our own hands, and we must know what to do with it.
