My first society event at USyd was the 2022 Queer Beers, the twice-annual “welcome to semester” social night headlined by SHADES and the other queer societies. It was at Hermann’s Bar, bustling with a cacophony of jittery first-years, often exploring their own sense of queerness for the first time, and a whirlwind of students with a complex web of relations. Messy kisses, hearty but short friendships, intertwined friends/lovers/flings, through it all we shared this collective, joyous sense that our love and lives are so deeply, immensely limitless.
I met a few very important people in my life that night, including my first ever uni friend (love you Justine!). But more importantly, it opened my eyes to a world I had never seen before, and a world I had never felt so at home in. My story is well-trodden: barely anyone was “out” at my high school, and existing at an all-boys school as a visibly queer person meant that it became a small segment of my personhood that I kept in my back pocket. I was so focused on survival I couldn’t find bliss.
On campus, there are five main queer societies/collectives that students can throw themselves into. There’s QUEST, Queers in STEM, followed by QOCO, Queers of Colour, who run both open and autonomous events. QUAC, the Queer Action Collective, focuses on off-campus and on-campus activism. Queer Revue is the annual sketch comedy show by, and for, queer students. And then there was SHADES, the largest queer social society on campus, which has been vaguely unregistered since the end of last year.
I joined the Queer Revue in 2022 and thrived as a cast member surrounded by wacky, exuberant, and incredibly gay sketch performers who were all some degree of amateur but all so funny and talented. I then piggybacked one of my best friends (and eventual co-director Ewan) and followed him from that cast to join SHADES as a general executive. From there I jumped to Vice-President and welfare officer in 2023, before assuming Presidency of Queer Revue in the same year.
Society time is compressed, and queer time is quick. I have evolved from hapless second-year exploring on-campus culture after a year of intermittent lockdowns – thank you 2021 – to becoming a pseudo-queer elder on campus. In the space of three years I’ve watched a whole new generation of students emerge, with their hopes and joys and TikTok dances (do the kids still do that these days?)
Yet it makes me sad that this new generation exists in a queer campus vacuum. As much as the other societies are still running, there is a sense that they have actively and passively become separated, and that there is no glue anymore. SHADES was the glue. We organised inter-society events, we held end-of-sem parties, an abundant amount of low-key social events like afternoon teas and arcade nights, and I’d say we did it well.
SHADES running these broadly queer events gave the other societies a chance to run events autonomously without the pressure of serving every student. As a white gay majoring in Gender Studies, the other societies are incredibly important spaces, but ones I do not feel comfortable primarily existing within.
SHADES collapsed because of complex and sensitive issues which I don’t even fully grasp to this day. For some of the execs I spoke to before writing this, the eventual crumbling of the executive team started with a certain Vice President who was unofficially exiled by a unanimous vote. For others, it was a personal reckoning with the serious and awful alleged actions of another executive member. Or perhaps it was the final straw of a barebones Executive and a President who spontaneously ghosted everyone. This is not a gossip piece, and these stories are not mine to tell, but what I can say is that SHADES faced an extensive interpersonal reckoning, and no one was willing to put in the work to patch up the damage.
Inherently, a social society will have problems. They face the possibility of becoming insular, bogged down in arguably incestuous personal relations and histories. There’s a fine line between bringing in fresh blood and having a sufficient handover to pass on necessary knowledge and attitudes to run an executive. Without a confident and consistent welfare arm, a social society, especially one inhabited by queer students, also risks massive internal haemorrhaging which can easily be mismanaged. And yet, I still believe these spaces must persist.
The existence of a space on campus where queer students can just be, without the baggage of explanation to the outside world, without the looming expectation that our existence in this life has to be meaningful, actively political, or even inspirational, where we can just party and dance and support student DJ’s, drag performers, and just forget about exams for a night is so important.
Queer societies have taught me trust and responsibility. They’ve shown me every side of every spectrum you could possibly imagine. They’ve hand-delivered some of my favourite people in the world to me. They’ve shown me what it means to be confident, to be passionate, how important it is to love and to laugh. They’ve let me get a little messy, and they breathed life into the husk of a body I call my own.
There are certain voices on campus who believe that a society like SHADES should be politicised and intertwined with activism. Our existence as queers, it is said, means an existence which is inherently political, and our spaces should reflect that. It may be a privilege, but I believe it is for the benefit of the community to have spaces, especially broadly autonomous ones, where we just can just exist, enjoy, and breathe.
SHADES can’t die. We need fresh blood, we need passion, and we need to pass down the economic and social resources that have been built for more than a decade.
At the beginning of the year, Queer Revue held a social night at a local pub. We advertised it for a few weeks, got publicity from some other societies, we had a free room and a DJ and a bar tab, and only ten people showed up. Eight of them were part of my beloved cast and crew. Two of them were first years. They had heard about the event on Instagram, and were hoping to discover the thriving queer campus culture here at USyd. Instead they walked into a small little room where we tried to make magic anyway.
I write this for them.
And I call on you, dear reader, to take these words and run with them. A few of us are looking to keep the society alive in a caretaker capacity, to make sure that all loose ends are tied before SHADES is hopefully handed over to a fresh group of students. We hope that will happen anyway. So if you’re here, reading this, thinking alongside me that these spaces should exist for our queer communities on campus, then do something about it.
Societies do not exist without student passion. They don’t exist without that hope and that want. They are joyous, social, memory-making places, where you learn invaluable life lessons and skills. We can’t let that die. It is our responsibility to keep that hope alive.
