The faggots are burning. The fire alarm rings in gay couple Warren and Kim’s angular Sydney home as the Mardi Gras parade plays out from the bathroom window.

Warren, in his late 40s, played by Simon Burke, waves away the panic of his husband Kim (Simon Corfield), and offers to fix them martinis. As the lithe, 30-something Kim drops to the ground and crawls on all fours, Warren considers buying him a dog as therapy.

The Homosexuals, or Faggots is in its fourth week of rehearsal when I visit the crew in a wharf loft at Walsh Bay. The title references a meal of mixed pork liver rolled into meatballs – a meal which has just burst into flame in the couple’s oven, and one that doubles as a side dish of gay slur.

The play, by the Melbourne playwright Declan Greene and directed by Lee Lewis, has a rainbow of characters: elegant Baebae (Mama Alto), a non-binary transfeminine person of colour, for instance; and Diana (Genevieve Lemon), a foul-mouthed white trans woman.

But Warren, Kim and their model friend Lucacz (Lincoln Younes) are gay white middle-class cisgender males, like me. This appellation sounds exotic, but “cis” really just means I identify my gender as being in line with the sex I was assigned at birth. Sorry for that gaysplaining, but as a gay white middle-class cis male, it appears I have the floor again.

Men such as me, the play contends, have made same-sex marriage their number one activism priority, overshadowing other lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer concerns. This – plus a fondness for cocktails and cash – make a certain sort of Sydney gay ripe for satire, given to marginalising his oppressed cohorts. How else to explain Kim’s possibly transphobic and racist micro-aggression of a costume, when he dresses up in a “sexy” Hitler/Caitlyn Jenner hybrid? Likewise, Lucacz complains that decoupling “Muslim” from “terrorist” is simply “political correctness”.

But as a Sydney gay of Warren’s vintage, hear me out: we would have dropped the constant bleating about marriage equality long ago if the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull governments had pulled their heads out of their neoliberal backsides and done what the high court said parliament has authority to do: allow us to get married, should we want to.

My partner of 18 years and I wrote our wills a decade ago in the event we would need to legally prove our relationship exists, and perhaps I should just settle for that. But there are now some 20 western countries in which same-sex marriage is legally recognised, while still more have civil unions. Nationally, Australia – reactionary, complacent, conservative continent that it is – has neither.



A number of my queer fellow travellers argue that we shouldn’t go near the conservative, patriarchal institution of marriage. For one thing, as Baebae notes in the play, the marriage equality campaign has been cheaply co-opted by commerce: “ANZ supports gay marriage!” Baebae says, of a Mardi Gras float sign. Warren gasps that he has fought for a decade for gay marriage, a “sanctity” he “refuses to pervert” by marrying a woman. The play’s draft text also quotes the US author Bruce Benderson, who has argued that marriage is meaningless and “wanting it is almost as repulsive as gays fighting to join the military, as opposed to gays fighting to end the military”.

All fair enough, but those are different arguments; the argument I’m making is one of equality of opportunity. Much as Lady Gaga’s song Born This Way can be used to celebrate diversity, self-love or genetic determinism, we can have more than one view of marriage.

The gender theorist Kate Bornstein is prominently quoted in the play too, from her book Gender Outlaw: “Male privilege is, in a word, violence.” But surely opening up marriage to same-sex couples challenges existing privilege.

Activists march during a rally in Sydney in support of marriage equality. Photograph: Carol Cho/EPA

In his play, Greene does hold before me a mirror reflecting uncomfortable truths. I recognised such a moment when a neighbour disses Warren’s loud dance music and Warren calls him a “homophobe”. It’s a word we’re too quick to throw around, undermining the moments when it really needs to be used: step forward Cory Bernardi, who has likened homosexuality to bestiality; George Christensen, who linked the Safe Schools program to paedophilia; and cartoonist in decline Larry Pickering, who last week, at a far-right Q Society meeting in Sydney, said of Muslims: “They’re not all bad, they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings.”

Does my support of marriage equality blind me to other oppression? Well, I did nervously attended an Invasion Day ceremony on 26 January, wondering if I’d feel welcome (I did); and a dozen years ago I was a Mardi Gras volunteer for a season, writing an eight-page guide to the parade and festival and contacting every float maker. Boy was there some socioeconomic, cultural and faith diversity there, beyond the urban, middle-class white gay male.

But I must admit I have little other rainbow involvement with which to signal my virtue, beyond what I take an interest in reading. For most of us living in this absurdly overpriced city, we’re generally too busy to foster rainbow coalitions, instead working to pay Sydney rent and mortgages.

I know my share of conservative gays like Warren and Kim, for whom a facial and a cocktail fix everything. I personally can’t abide the creeping commercialisation of Mardi Gras any more than gays who negatively gear, keeping others consigned to the rental treadmill. Stilettos and floats up Oxford Street are lovely modes of transport but they don’t house or (otherwise) clothe us.

No need for white, middle-class gays to picket Declan Greene’s play, then. If you see it, I predict you will laugh – especially if you recognise your absorbed self. What a way to reclaim a word like “faggot”, too.

• The Homosexuals, or Faggots is at the Malthouse in Melbourne from 17 February, and at Griffin theatre in Sydney from 17 March