Nightlife
How Heaps Gay brought a new type of queer party to Sydney
In the final episode of If These Walls Could Talk, Red Bull’s new five part podcast, we speak to Kat Dopper about why wanted to shake up Sydney's nightlife.
If These Walls Could Talk is Red Bull’s new five part podcast about the venues, parties and people that shaped Sydney’s nightlife. This season we focus on the city’s LGBTQI party scene, and everything that came together to make it the nocturnal destination it is today. This article is adapted from episode five of If These Walls Could Talk. To hear the full story, listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Some parties begin because they need to – Heaps Gay is one of them.
Today, a Heaps Gay party could be a decadent, debaucherous ball in the heart of the city, or an industrial street full of colourful queers, dancing naked under the stars. But in 2013, when Kat Dopper first started the event, it was to fill an empty space.
In 2012, Kat had moved back to Sydney after a stint in London. It was in the UK that she’d realised she was gay and found her scene at The George and Dragon, a pub in East London.
“It's a shitty old man pub, but full of young creative people expressing themselves on the dance floor, dressed up, colourful,” she recalls. “You never really knew what you were going to get with the music as well, it really felt like a house party. I was down there trying to meet hot babes as a young lesbian girl.”
Back in the Harbour City, Kat began to explore its queer scene. But Oxford Street left her “overwhelmed”, and the lesbian parties around at that time were very different to what she’d found in London.
“One of the things that I felt ... that I wanted to experience, was that it didn't feel super inclusive of my heterosexual friends,” she says. “Because I didn't have any LGBT pals at the time and was going out with my pals who were really supportive of me kind of finding out who I was. And so it was actually my [straight] pals that helped me kind of come up with the idea of throwing my own event.”
In the back of a street mag, Kat saw an ad promising grants of $1000 to initiatives serving the lesbian community. She applied, got one and set about trying to create the sort of party she wanted to go to.
Heaps Gay founder Kat Dopper
© Ken Leanfore
Kat landed on Heaps Gay as the name because in a city shared by events like Poof Doof and Gay Bash it felt like “the [more crass], the better”. It also played on an expression she’d heard a lot growing up in the small country town of Condobolin.
“One of the terms that was used quite often back in the day, in the 80s and 90s in Australia, is ‘that's so gay’. It's like, ‘you're so gay’. ‘That's gay’. Heaps Gay was about essentially reclaiming of that term for the community and for the parties that I do today, so it made sense. And it stuck.”
With a name and a thousand bucks, Kat organised the first ever Heaps Gay party at the Lord Gladstone Hotel in Chippendale, in the days before the pub was bought by new owners and given a facelift. The party was so packed that punters were flowing out into the back lanes and sitting in the gutter.
It was on that night, during one moment, that Kat fell in love with throwing parties.
“Kato was playing on this sweaty dance floor at the Gladstone and then he dropped ‘Like a Prayer’ by Madonna. And the entire room was like screaming and singing. Hands in the air … it was that moment of literally everybody letting go of their inhibitions.
“I remember just being so, so happy and being like, this is incredible.”
With the first party a success, Kat started to throw Heaps Gay parties once a month.
“Back then the scene was really, really different and I think it really was Heaps Gay at the forefront of creating that inclusive space from the get go,” Kat reflects. “It's really been a part of the make-up of Heaps Gay from the very beginning -- anyone is welcome. It was really a 50-50 mix in terms of gender. It was like male, female, non binary, it was inclusive of everybody.”
Just like the nights she used to spend at The George and Dragon back in London, her first event felt like a house party. “And that's what I've tried to keep doing with every event that I do,” she says.
Kat’s mission has been to keep surprising people and push the boundaries of what a Heaps Gay party can be, seeking out spaces where you wouldn’t normally expect to find a queer party. That’s meant holding events everywhere from car parks to a barbershop and Centrepoint Tower in Sydney. She’s even thrown a party inside the State Library of Victoria.
“I was like, are you sure you want to let us to a party in here?” she says. “We had these incredible underground DJs playing and we're all dancing around. It was so great.”
One of Kat’s biggest feats is undoubtedly the Queen’s Ball -- an annual event thrown as part of Sydney’s Vivid Festival, where Heaps Gay lays claim to Sydney Town Hall. Every year the Queen’s Ball delivers a new experience, but Kat says the foundations remain the same: “It's confetti cannons and glitter and mess but yes, it's wonderful.”
One time, they had 90s pop icon Vanessa Amorosi perform in drag.
“We had a bunch of different performance artists and drag queens and 20 backup dancers and confetti,” Kat recalls. “We had four bear boys dressed up with white angel wings and bare chests to carry her in on a pedestal, and then they flew around her as angel boys while she sang ‘Shine’ on stage. Then it turned into the dancers who did like split jumps and like to ‘Absolutely Everybody’.”
“It's confetti cannons and glitter and mess but yes, it's wonderful.”
It was a perfectly Heaps Gay moment.
“I want to be really passionate about what I create,” Kat says. “I always want to push that boundary for people's ideas of what they're going to get. I think that having a space that hasn't been done before, it's a blank canvas. It's like, what can you do and how are you going to surprise and delight every single person that walks in the door?”
She thinks those boundary-pushing ideas are what makes Sydney great.
“I want to be really passionate about what I create"
“If you look at Sydney, from a bigger picture perspective, it does look like this bright, shiny city. But if you [dive deeper], the incredible subcultures that come out of this city are insane. And that's where the best art comes from: creative people and passionate people that just start things with the crew and focus on what they love and care about. That's what creates community and arts, and especially in our queer scene.”
The need for secret, hidden spaces might not be as relevant as it was in the past, but the need for queer community spaces is still as important as ever.
“I think there will always be a need for queer spaces,” Kat says. “Those spaces exist for people to work out who they are. It's about self-expression and it's about finding [your chosen family] on the dance floor without judgement.”
A vibrant nightlife makes a city -- but for queer people it’s more than that.
“And it's a protest. It's a protest against the injustices that happen that currently exist within this world.”
Right now, Kat’s excited about getting dance floors going again, so Sydney’s queer community can come together under the lights again.
“It's been a long time since the lights went out, so I’m really keen to turn that mirror ball back on again.”
If These Walls Could Talk is Red Bull’s new five part podcast about the venues, parties and people that shaped Sydney’s nightlife. This season we focus on the city’s LGBTQI party scene, and everything that came together to make it the nocturnal destination it is today. This article is adapted from episode five of If These Walls Could Talk. To hear the full story, listen wherever you get your podcasts.
