Mardi Gras is back on Oxford Street, and we're back in Mardi Gras! At least we're about to put in our application...

This year will also be World Pride, the overall theme is Dream Gather Amplify, and we're contemplating the challenge of resisting normativity as our movements grow. While there are many minorities inhabiting both the queer and nonbelief umbrellas, and probably always will be, we're moving into a world where both heterosexuality and religion - at least any specific religion - are losing their claim on majority status. Lots of people are joining us, but 'the fight' is by no means won. How do we proceed in this new situation? For a start, beware of falling into normativity. Remember the past and keep asking questions. What else??

We're building the big old union banners that we hoped to after the centenary of the Great Strike of 1917. There's plenty of room to say all of this... but how? We're going to need more ideas and slogan suggestions, some construction, plenty of design and lots of painting... not to mention participants on the day! If you're interested in any or all, get in touch!

2021 is up in the air, in more ways than one - even if the parade still goes ahead, we will have to decide whether we run a float. There are reasons to be cautious, but also many reasons to be keen, as have carried us through so many floats already! If you are interested in us running another float, whether you have ideas or are interested in participating, do get in touch. It might be the prod that the rest of us need!

In 2019, Writing our Future was sixty people and six pushables - a giant book and separate pages, with a different message on each page. Here are the costumes, simple lengths of fabric to be worn as aprons. The printing on the chest was digitally designed and a stencil of baking paper and tape was cut on a laser cutter, then screen printed by hand. We had two photographers on the night, and we'll eventually get hold of the photos. Without them, few details are accessible, but some of the slogans were:
Writing Our Future: What will we choose?
Climate Action OR Climate Crisis
Thoughts and Prayers OR Action and Change
Freedom From Discrimination OR Freedom To Discriminate (It's possible the wording was improved since the notes I have)
Proportional Tax Payment OR Continuing Religious Exemptions (no wonder I can't remember the exact wording!)
(and one more, about listening to lobbyists or experts, which I hope will come to me soon!)

Unfortunately there was a mutiny - one friendship group booked out 39 of the tickets, then showed up but operated like they were their own separate float. From the start, they wore the pictured costume, but not in the specified manner. The printed logo was carefully turned in. One of them had choreographed a routine, which we encouraged as we hadn't managed to do one, but they refused to teach it outside their group. They were overheard saying that two pages were enough and five were unnecessary. They 'helped' assemble the pushables as many of them were far bigger and stronger than the rest of us, but insisted that they knew better than us about the float we'd spent months building. They stood over us, belittling us and eventually slashing our painstakingly painted panels with knives, cutting the pages down from 3.6m to 2.4m tall, with the bottom panel flopped out horizontally over the base and the remains tied back to the frame with bits of rope.. When the last base was found, they refused to assemble it, so we had to work around them and try to reproduce their vandalism to make it fit the others. Then, when it was time to move, they took off without us - two thirds of the people with one third of the pushables, leaving maybe a dozen of us behind with four pushables, including the big heavy book.
A couple of strangers volunteered to help, and it was just enough for us to get everything moving once we got permission to join in a gap. Just before we cleared Start Area, however, it turned out our permission was not duly authorised and we had parade officials I'd never met demanding we stop, shouting threats in my face, refusing to listen or to talk to the people pushing at the back of the float and trying to physically push over the book. Eventually an official I did know came over, explained the situation and helped get our float across the starting point to wait at the top of the other leg of Start Area. We were now to be the very last float before the volunteers, so that the media would have time to be alerted to the change. Two more of our people were overwhelmed and had to leave while we waited, and I don't even remember if our helpful strangers stayed or left, but just enough volunteers eventually got on board so that we did, finally, get to march.

And when we did, our messages were chanted!

We never found out why this happened, the best we can figure is that they weren't being deliberately destructive but just wanted to have some fun and didn't appreciate how much work went into making the float happen, how much we would care about the thing they knew we'd slaved over for months, or that we were humans at all; the more persuasive of the group saw our float and our good faith invitation as an open playground, and the others, who we'd never met and who never even said hi on the day, were caught up in the atmosphere and didn't know what was happening. It's hard to maintain that level of optimism given the careful misuse of costume and the apparent planning regarding the number of pushables they ended up pushing, but it somehow feels like a less devastating explanation than one that involves the mutiny being deliberate. yeah, positing that the people we provided a float for forgot we were human is the upside. great.

This is why we didn't produce a float in 2020, despite a perfect parade theme for us, "What Matters". Producing a float with few people and little funding is always difficult and there is always drama, but it is worth it to have atheism represented within our queer community and also get our specific messages out there. We get to exist as part of an intentional grassroots community working somewhat together towards something worthwhile, there are a number of high points throughout the process, and we get to see all our people love being there on the day. In fact, thanks to the Community Workshop, this year the process was a joy as well as the usual hard slog, surrounded and supported by fantastic staff and other groups of float builders.

Cruel bullying and having our hard work callously taken advantage of, however, is beyond the pale and is taking some time to recover from. Eventually we should pull all the threads together enough to remember the final slogans and recover our photos to put up here, and hopefully we will be back one day, with something positive to say and a good crew of people who are honest when they sign up to do something. Frankly they don't even have to do the thing, there's a difference between sabotage and the many perfectly good reasons for things not happening that we pull together and make it through, so honest intentions and maybe a touch of communication feel like kinda baseline requirements!

So if you are a generally decent human being and you have an idea or would just like to see us back on the road, give us a prod and let's talk!

We have costumes!
Sign up at stickytickets.com.au/81092

This Mardi Gras, on March 2, 2019, Sydney Queer Atheists' float is Writing Our Future. We will push a giant book and several pages, each illustrating a different quandary our society faces, as we brandish giant pencils in an extremely simple choreography. Costumes will be simple aprons in blues, greens and teals - the fabric will be available to pick up beforehand if you want to make them fancy, or can be assembled with safety pins on the day. What you do to them, and what you wear underneath, is up to you!

Our society is currently in the process of making several big decisions that will deeply affect the future for us, our communities and our world. Sydney Queer Atheists wants to remind us that these choices belong not just to our representatives, but to all of us. We don't have to follow the same old script that favours the interests of the rich and powerful through injustice, inequality and abuse for the rest of us. Together we can write a brighter future. What will we choose?
Concession tickets are available on request.

In 2018 our union banners of atheist history didn't get it together, so Kate & co ran Sydney Queer Tango's float instead. For 2019, though, we have a plan and our application is in - a whole week early!

>This year, we're planning early. Get in touch if you're interested or have any ideas!

The application form is in! There is still scope for change, so we'd love to hear ideas, thoughts, reactions or feelings about it, but this is now our starting point:

WRITING OUR FUTURE

We are building a large, pushable book in the process of being bound, with pushable pages floating ahead of the book. The cover of the book will bear our name and title, with each of the the pages will be illustrated offering a choice on a different issue - one: 'Religious exemptions from the Anti-Discrimination act OR Freedom from Discrimination'; another: 'Thoughts and Prayers OR Action and Change'. The full list of topics will be reviewed for topicality closer to the date, since everything is changing so quickly! We may use LED strip along the edges.
Costuming to be finalised - we're looking at bookbinding aprons with a fallback of printed tshirts, with people holding placards done up as smaller pages for smaller issues, writing and bookbinding tools.

...and here is my very quick sketch of what we may (or may not) look like!

Mardi Gras is less than a month away!

We're currently busy building six giant glowing Ionic columns for this year's float. We have decided that our 'Pillars of Society' will be Secular Education, Community; Diversity; Social & Environmental Justice; Democratic Decisionmaking; Scientific Method.

You don't want to miss this! Register at stickytickets.com.au/33823

It's not yet 2016, but we're working on our float!
This year we'll be portraying the secular Pillars of Society, with grand Ionian columns dancing down the street, representing Secular education, Social & environmental justice, Diversity, Reason...
What do you think are the top six pillars of society? Let us know!