Sydney a few years ago and discovered this community, I had never felt such a sense of near-ecstatic queer belonging.That weekend remains a bit of a blur, but seven months on it comes back to me in euphoric glimpses: bumping into old friends on the dancefloor; a chat with a stranger in line for the bathroom leading to a furtive pash.One friend described that weekend to me as the Last Party – we knew Covid was coming, but couldn’t really have understood that within a matter of weeks we would be watching as social restrictions swept across Australia.
Around the same time, I was in the process of ending a six-year relationship – as the two of us were disentangling our lives, we anxiously checked the news every morning in case we would wake up.