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…

Aidan thought adultery was where a group of adults got together and discussed contemporary issues so he was completely unprepared for the consequences of his Civil Union.

Blair knew he had the best butt in the Bay of Islands and that many tourists admired it.

Chen spent a lot of time on NZdating and thought of himself as take-out Chinese.

Dylan was depressed because although he did Body-For-Life and pilates and he had a Life Coach, men seldom phoned him back after he had sex with them.

Eric often fantasied about being a eunuch because he thought it would be easier.

Felix was obsessed with France and, although he didn’t say it aloud very often in Featherston, he knew that the French rugby team made the All Blacks look like a bunch of oinks.

Gavin tried hard to reconcile his belief in God with his fondness for passive sodomy.

Henare created havoc in the hearts of many homosexual men because he hadn’t quite moved from gay-friendly to available yet.

Ian had the idea that he was idolised by other gay men but really they were only treating him like the slut he was.

Jon also had a yellow T-shirt that said ‘Juicy Root’ in big red letters and he was just good-looking enough to get away with it.

Karl liked wearing kilts even though he had no Scottish ancestors.

Liam loved the idea of being in love with someone else but he seldom was.

Madhu was a male model much in demand for his masculine moodiness but it made him a pain in the butt to live with.

Nils thought that the philosophy of Nietzsche was neat but he’d quickly realised that most gay men were in favour of Hobbes when it came to their sexual behaviours.

Owen was attracted to obese men which meant he had many more opportunities open to him.

Phil couldn’t quite reconcile his prediliction for penises with his phobia of germs.

Quentin was quite sure he’d turned out to be queer because of his name and he blamed his mother.

Ronan felt that rich men were there to be exploited even if occasionally he had to turn up his rear to do so.

Steve took steroids and sucked cock and liked the music of Paul van Dyk which made him very attractive to people he considered stupid.

Talatala was actually timid but knew some men got off on thinking he was threatening.

Ulysses usually experienced an urgent need to urinate whenever he entered a gay venue.

Vaughan liked variety even if he often had to think about someone else when it was happening.

Wayne found a kitten was better for his mental wellbeing than Wellington’s gay nightlife.

Xavier dressed up as Santa every year for the Lateshift Xmas Party.

Yanni had discovered, after a few years in the gay community, that it was still all Greek to him.

Zach was the only gay Zulu in New Zealand but he lived in a completely monogamous relationship.

I’ve just moved house.

And packing was a complete revelation of what I’m inclined to think of as My Gay Life – years of it.

I couldn’t believe how many condoms with HIV/AIDS messages on them I’d managed to get given or pick up over the years – and not use. I now know what a lubricant package ten years old feels like. The oldest expiry date on a condom I discovered in a desk-drawer was 1988.

There was a whole history of gay clubbing in bits and pieces. Fliers for Melbourne and London clubs. Leaflets for Auckland’s Flesh and G.A.Y.. A Wunderbar Handleclub tag. A Surrender Dorothy key-ring.

There were a few old gay porn magazines from the early 1970s  I’d souvenired from three or four boxes of them that had been donated to an Australian Gay and Lesbian Archive once but had been rejected as ‘inappropriate’. I’d always opposed that decision because in many ways gay porn has influenced our sexual stylings in a number of ways from the erotic language we use in bed to the sexual characters we impose on ourselves and our partners. The hairstyles, though, I have to say were a turn-off.

Then there were the Hero programs going back to the early 1990s. Often large, often filled with articles, stories, images, and photographs, and designed by the best gay and lesbian designers Auckland could offer, these were a complete year-by-year chronology of our attitudes to ourselves – from A3 size proclamations of art and confrontation to today’s discreet, pocket-size schedule.

But what fascinated me were the remnants of both Australian and New Zealand HIV/AIDS campaigns that I’d kept for some reason or another.

That’s right, there had been something about these campaigns that had made me want to own them. And keep them.

At a time where the New Zealand AIDS Foundation’s HIV/AIDS campaigns seem only to aspire to some sort of HIV/AIDS ambient hum or background white noise signifying nothing except that things are ticking over, money is spent, and jobs validated, it was extraordinary to see targeted campaigns with impact, and with graphic and photographic power.

Some of them were the strong death-warnings of the early years – “Kissing Doesn’t Kill, HIV/AIDS does”. Others were focused on gay men and injecting drugs with photographs of extraordinary erotic force. There were hot posters that actually eroticized safe-sex and made you want to do it. There were posters with graphic work by artists like Keith Haring and Juan Davila that could easily have been framed works of art.

I’d actually had some of them on my walls at various stages of my life, they had been that interesting.

And they were still potent images and potent words.

Sitting there surrounded by boxes and half unrolled health promotion materials, I couldn’t help but think of the recent NZAF posters for the Posterboys campaign: ill-executed, appallingly-designed, badly-photographed with poster-wordings I challenge anyone to recall.

They were a triumph of the ‘I want to represent my community well and do something about HIV/AIDS’ scenario we get in spades in the victory speeches from the Underwear and Best Bums competitions that pre-occupy our gay and lesbian venues - and they were about as memorable. They even lacked the sense of irony that could have made the campaign work.

The Posterboys followed directly on from last year’s badly-conceived campaign aimed at Asian gay men. The poster-images in that campaign reached a new low. The print-colours were singularly off-putting. The poster tag-line was so meaningless as to be confusing. And the campaign seemed to be targeted at no-one - including gay ‘Asian’ men. Their tastes, their world and their needs certainly didn’t figure in it.

Together, the Asian Gay Men campaign and the Posterboys campaign, both served, in my mind anyway, to illustrate the tired bankruptcy of NZAF’s recent health promotion ideas about this latest stage of the pandemic.

NZAF has seemed to have made HIV/AIDS so boring that no-one is interested. It is actually an achievement in itself to have taken a life-threatening disease transmitted sexually and made it yawn material.

We are in desperate need of a wake-up call to both the community in general and to NZAF in particular. The failed ‘community consultancies’ of last year alone should have convinced NZAF that no-one is interested anymore, and what is required is a refreshed message, new ideas, and new strategies for coordinating the best skills of our community in the service of a health campaign which should concern us all.

And it is interesting that the best HIV/AIDS poster I’ve seen in recent years was made by an 18 year old student in an Auckland Tech for an assignment. It had a very simple tagline – “No condom - no butts” placed over a photograph of a butt – the sort of cheeky butt you’d want to have. The design was great. It was sexy. The message with that obvious meaning and its secondary meaning – as in, ‘no excuses’ was cool. It had wit, flair and mass-appeal. You would have even noticed that poster from a speeding car if it had been on a bus-shelter….

I really wanted that poster. It was simple but the execution of it made it really memorable. I would have stolen it if I could.

When I was packing I discovered I owned no posters from recent HIV/AIDS campaigns by NZAF. Not one. In boxes and boxes of papers and leaflets and fliers in a lifetime of picking up the things that interested me, not one NZAF poster from recent years had made the grade.

And I think that says a lot.