There’s nothing queerer than inviting an audacious and creative homosexual to a stage and saying “you, yes, you, you can speak on anything you want to for about fifteen-to-twenty minutes or so, and it can be funny or heartwarming or devastating or all three of those things, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be about queerness but we are called Queerstories so probably keep that in mind.”
This is how I imagine the invites went out to all the speakers at the 2025 Queerstories, curated by Maeve Marsden and performed at Parramatta Riverside Theatres.
This was my first proper brush with Queerstories, but whispers from the audience told me I was surrounded by people who’ve been to these shows consistently over the last decade. Weaved into the oral history of every speaker who has graced this stage is the memories from the audience, which string these stories into a coherent history for a community who so often lack one.
Six speakers, sitting at little tables with their glasses of water and wine at the foot of the stalls, rotated at a pedestal for the night, sharing their stories of heart, discovery, loss, and queerness.
Winnie Dunn kicked off the night with a story about a relative’s egregiously penile bachelorette party, complete with strippers in police uniforms. Sneaking away from the festivities, young Winnie encounters her aunt, also named Winnie, who has snuck away with her soon-to-be wife. A wife, in fact, that would make her aunt’s marriage the first legal queer Tongan wedding to occur in Australia.
Recounting her time at lesbian surf camp, Joanna Lamb’s recount was a masterful explainer of the messy social and romantic dynamics that occur in queer-only spaces, and also a testament to how many times one can say “lesbian” in a single story. Nico Bruni’s graphic exploration of the lengths one will go to to be one of “da boys” was enthrallingly funny, if not lightly traumatising. I sure hope I never stumble into a bathroom with unexplained kitchen scissors and the desire to trim my pubes, because it clearly can’t lead to anything good.
Nancy Denis performed a sensational monologue exploring her first experiences with intimacy and queerness, and how her journey towards spirituality recentred the voices she’d heard and denied her entire life. Andrew Wiltshire’s entire story was told in ASL, and his journey from incredibly religious husband and father to free and boundless out gay man — dotted with social exclusion and awful medical diagnoses — was incredibly heartwarming and heart wrenching at the same time.
The capstone of the show was Dylin Hardcastle. Their story was of an uncle that truly saw Hardstone from a young age, in all their idiosyncrasies and truth and queerness. It was a beautiful encapsulation of why Queerstories exist.. Hardcastle would visit the uncle spontaneously, be greeted with an overly dramatic hello, and spend hours feeding off this indescribable bond. That’s exactly how it felt watching the show, feeling deep down that there was this indescribable bond which brought all of us strangers in that room together. I didn’t speak, but I felt heard.
After the show, my mum and I bought two of the books on sale outside the theatre, and we approached Hardcastle and Dunn to sign them, and for hugs. It felt like a kind of home.
Nothing epitomises this safe space more than Denis hopping up on stage after the final speaker and quickly asking if anyone in the audience could give her a lift to her home in [suburb redacted for privacy reasons since this is the Internet and not a theatre]. We weren’t strangers in that moment, we were old friends, new friends, and guests at this dinner party we call life. There’s always someone who needs a lift home from a dinner party, and thankfully, the host’s mother was on standby in the audience, conveniently going exactly where she needed to be.
