It is just gone midnight on Thursday night and like a number of gay men and lesbian women in New Zealand, I’ve had a long work day, knocking off three or four day’s work in advance, one task after another, because, like them, I’m flying to the 30th Annual Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras tomorrow on the Air New Zealand Pink Flight.

But my weekend isn’t going to be quite like the other passengers on the flight, because I’ll be working for the duration.

I’m part of a team from Redflame Media that will be recording the event for a future TV broadcast.

It has been an interesting project. I have learned lots about Mardi Gras as an event. I know more about its history - from its riotous beginning through the still politicised and hedonistic middle years to it’s more organised recent times as Sydney’s greatest annual event - than I ever did. And during the last few weeks I have begun to discover just exactly what Mardi Gras means at this moment in time - to New Zealanders in particular.

Like many of us, I have some great memories of Mardi Gras. I think my first Mardi Gras was around 1986. It was an experience of highs - literally. I watched the Parade from above Taylor Square, sitting on the edge of a shop awning, my legs dangling over it, drinking beer while the Parade wheeled and turned off from Oxford Street below me. And later that night I was halfway up a lighting rig in the Horden Pavilion, around 10 meters above the dancefloor, watching around 10,000 shirtless gay men below me dancing to an extended length remix of the Pointer Sisters doing ‘Jump’ - and 10,000 shirtless dancing gay men jumping at the track’s chorus line was, I have to say spectacular, a great human ripple in the Pavilion’s vast spaces - and the experience was also made even more interesting because a man below me on the rig spent around 10 minutes licking my boots.

And I’ve had lots of other experiences of the event. I have seen the Parade from the VIP area. I have watched it from a crowded street with a can of Fosters in my hand. I’ve seen it in fine weather and in rain. I’ve stumbled out of the party at dawn. I have had a very early dip in a hotel pool where the blue waters have refreshed and woken me. I have been amazed at the spectacle of the Party shows. I’ve got drunk in overcrowded Oxford Street gay bars. I’ve had really nice encounters with people I will never see again.

For New Zealanders the Sydney gay world is different. It is an escape from New Zealand’s sometimes too small gay world. It is a chance to experience gay events with thousands and thousands of other gay people. It is a chance to be someone different from your New Zealand personality. For some people it is a chance for sexual contact. For others it is an important experience of community that links them to a greater gay universe. For most of us it is a holiday away from a heterosexual world for a minute.

And it is going to be interesting trying to record this event in its many meanings - personal, political, social, artistic, and cultural.

Mardi Gras has its fixed stations for New Zealanders. There is a gay flight put on by Air New Zealand where, for a moment, the national airline puts on a pink sash and its gay customers get a special check-in that moves faster than everyone else’s. There is the arrival and hotel rooms, serviced apartments, or friends’ spare-rooms or sofas. There is the first gentle night in crowded Oxford Street or Newtown pubs , bars and clubs amid a relaxed crowd that isn’t going to be going hard-out because they are pacing themselves for Saturday. There is Saturday morning shopping, and then the parade watched by three or four hundred thousand people. There is the dressing for the Party, the cab trip and the arrival at Fox Studios and the party entrance near Moore Park - and it is like an Oscar red carpet arrival. And then there is the Party itself - huge, packed with people to look at, music to dance to, and one show after another.

It is almost a ritual build-up to an ecstatic moment when finally you are at one with a huge dancing crowd that is bigger and gayer than any dream you’ve ever had.

And then there is the return.

I’ve done flights back to New Zealand afterwards where you can tell the gay and lesbian passengers because they are the one’s who are sound asleep for the duration.

It is a brief few days when we are freed from New Zealand. I’ve said before and I’ll probably say it again that just being born in this country at the end of the world should entitle people to have a government-funded return flight to a destination of your choice every couple of years. I think we need it culturally. I think we need personally. And I think it is possibly more important for the gay and lesbian members of the nation.

For us, Mardi Gras is a chance to join our greater tribe, even if it only for three or four days. We get to experience a New World where suddenly, in some of Sydney’s areas, we are in the majority. And there is a sense of freedom implicit in this experience that every gay and lesbian needs to find at least once in their lives.

It is an interesting thing to try and record. I hope we achieve it.

It will also be interesting to be working during the crucial 36 hours, attempting to capture them in sound and images while all about us people revel in their own experiences of the event. But even we’ve been bright enough to schedule a few moments where we too can join that experience without the burden of work. We need to go there too. We also need a taste of that airy feeling of release and celebration where somehow we are all weightless with all the odd burdens of being gay and lesbian falling away for a brief but wonderful instant…