Glitter bombs, joy and politics: The history of Auckland's Big Gay Out

Thursday, 9 March 2023

Then-Prime Minister Bill English at the Big Gay Out held at Coyle Park, Point Chevalier, Auckland. (First published in February 2017)

Beginning as a “niche” picnic, Big Gay Out has morphed into one of the biggest pride events on Auckland’s calendar. Melanie Earley reports on how it all began.

Twenty-two years ago a couple of hundred members of Auckland’s rainbow community gathered in Point Chevalier’s Coyle Park for a family-friendly picnic.

At the first-ever Big Gay Out, a small stage was set up for performances from local bands and drag queens, and while the smell of a sausage sizzle wafted through the air attendees played games like “toss the handbag” and tug of war, along with running races in stilettos.

Kevin Dunseath, better known by his drag persona The Outrageous Miss Ribena, was emceeing that event and said he had “no idea” so many years later it would be going strong and attracting crowds in the thousands.

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Big Gay Out is held at Auckland’s Coyle Park each year.

“It’s a lot different now,” Dunseath says. “There’s much bigger acts and lots of stalls. It’s amazing to see what it has turned into, but I did enjoy the ‘set up your deck chair’, picnic vibe it used to have.”

Big Gay Out was founded by the Hero Festival which ran throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as a way to give Auckland’s rainbow community a voice and reason to celebrate.

Les Mills, pictured in the 1990s, when he was Auckland’s mayor.

Lexie Matheson, who was part of the Hero Incorporated Society in those early years, says the name Big Gay Out had been a play on the name Big Day Out, a popular music festival at the time.

“It was a way to get the community together in the backyard of our former mayor Les Mills,” Matheson says, referencing how Coyle Park is right beside where Mills lives.

Drag Queen Daphne bush relaxing at a previous Big Gay Out event.

The organisers of the Hero Festival had a “contentious” relationship with Mills, who had been mayor of the city until 1998.

“He wasn’t supportive of the festival or the parade held each year, he was a conservative Christian man,” Matheson says.

“The 1998 parade almost didn’t go ahead after Auckland Council declined the request for funding.”

By 2003, the organisation of Big Gay Out had been passed on to the NZ Aids Foundation, which is now known as Burnett Foundation Aotearoa.

Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pictured at the 2020 event.

Joe Rich, the foundation’s chief executive, says while he wasn’t around in the early days of the event, it had been and still was a great way to help promote health messaging around HIV and regular STI testing.

Those early years helped the foundation collect good sets of data on HIV and other sexual health needs within the queer community, says Michael Stevens, former chairman of the AIDS Foundation.

A ‘politically powerful’ event

Protesters react as John Key speaks at the Big Gay Out in 2016.

Within a few years of its conception, Big Gay Out became an event frequented by local politicians and the occasional protester.

The 2004 event hosted a mass commitment ceremony which saw six gay couples exchange rings. The ceremony was in support of proposed civil union legislation at the time, which sought to give partners rights and recognise them as family in the event of their partners’ deaths.

The following year, then Auckland mayor Dick Hubbard came along to the event and apologised to the queer community for earlier signing a letter that criticised the civil union legislation.

A few fundamentalist Christian protesters also attended the event that year holding placards with phrases such as “God hates homosexuality”, while attempting to preach at attendees.

David Shearer, Labour leader at the time, and MP Grant Robertson speak to the crowd in 2013.

Archived news articles from GayNZ at the time, say in “reverse protest” the Labour Party had a tent with a fundraising game called “drown the bigot”, which featured a caricature of Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.

Helen Clark, prime minister when Big Gay Out started, regularly attended, and it’s now an unmissable event for the sitting PM.

In one noticeable incident in 2016, then prime minister John Key was booed off the stage and “glitter-bombed” by protesters who opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Joe Rich remembers the incident well and says it was “disappointing”.

Michael Stevens and Campbell Parker were married last October.

“I think there’s a time and place for protests of that nature and doing it at Big Gay Out felt as though the celebration was being hijacked for a political cause.”

Lexie Matheson says any successful event has the potential to become politicised.

“A key moment for me was when then prime minister John Key came along and I had to show him around.

“It was an uncomfortable experience for both of us since we’re not politically aligned in any way, but we made it work. It’s a politically powerful event.”

Mobile QR scan and sanitation patrol at Big Gay Out in 2021.

Rich says having political leaders at the event gives the queer community a chance to ask them about their commitments to the community.

A key year for Rich, which highlighted how politicians being at Big Gay Out could be helpful, was in 2017, when the foundation was able to ask then prime minister Bill English about government funding for p re -exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an HIV prevention method.

“By the end of the year the Government had announced it would be funded for people at risk of contracting HIV, which was an amazing outcome.”

Love at the beer tent

Joe Rich is the chief executive of Burnett Foundation Aotearoa.

Michael Stevens, former chairman of the Aids Foundation, has attended Big Gay Out every year and found his soulmate along the way.

At the 2017 event while standing in line at the beer tent he locked eyes with his future husband Campbell Parker.

“We were looking at each other when he said my full name and I thought ‘who is this?’ It turned out Campbell had spent a bit of time working at the Aids Foundation and remembered me from there.

“We started talking and ended up exchanging numbers before he went back home to Napier.”

The pair stayed in touch and began a long-distance relationship before Parker eventually moved up to Auckland.

“It was just a complete coincidence we both happened to be standing in that line for the beer tent at the same time.

“If I’d decided to go a few minutes later we wouldn’t be married today.”

Covid, cyclones and cancellations

Big gay Out was able to run every year uninterrupted until 2018 – that year, Rich says, they had to do their first cancellation due to sudden bad weather.

“We had to cancel the event the day of probably about five minutes before it was due to start because the rain was just torrential.

Performers on the stage at Big Gay Out in 2021.

“Since then we’ve planned a back-up rain date each year, but when Covid-19 hit we had to make more tough decisions.”

Despite the pandemic, the 2021 event was able to go ahead, in between lockdowns, with Covid contact-tracing protocols in place, but in 2022 the event was cancelled due to the Omicron variant outbreak.

At the time the foundation noted there was a “significant public health risk” associated with proceeding due to the size of the event.

Rich says planning for this year’s event had been “interesting” due to the ongoing pressures of inflation that were being felt across the event sector.

“As the event got closer we also found out about Cyclone Gabrielle and realised it was due to hit the same day as Big Gay Out.

“It’s hard to move a giant event like this to another day and we had to make the call at least a couple of days prior before stalls are set up.”

Due to the cyclone, Big Gay Out was postponed by a month bringing it to March 12.

‘It’s not Rhythm and Vines’

While Big Gay Out had grown exponentially since that first event in Coyle Park, Rich says the idea behind it still remains – giving people a chance to have fun and be themselves at a family-friendly event.

“For a lot of young queer people Big Gay Out is often the first event of its kind they’ve ever been to, and it’s pretty special to see.”

Stevens says for him, Big Gay Out was a way of socialising and seeing old friends he may not have seen in a while.

“It’s important too for young people to have a place where they can hang out in an ordinary but inclusive social experience without having to go to a bar or a club.

“It has more of a huge family picnic feel.”

Parker agrees it’s nice to have an event where there isn’t any pressure to “get slammed” or take drugs.

“I mean this is no Rhythm and Vines or anything. There’s no pressure to get drunk, and you can enjoy live performances during the day.”

When Matheson reflects on those early days of the event compared to now, she says the way the queer community in Auckland is viewed has “evolved”.

“Back in those early days we were vilified by the public but now, these events and our people are widely accepted.

“Our son grew up going to Big Gay Out and still attends to this day, but it’s not just my son who has grown up at Big Gay Out – I think all of us have.”