Lockout Generation

After yesterday’s @sydneymorningherald article about the generation lost to lockouts, I had a look through the archives at some of the first photos I took at @club77sydney for @starfvckersclub in 2009.
I remember pitching the idea to @djhookie and @mrdisorder to be resident photographer for this weekly night that took over a period of my life, beginning a journey that has never ended.
What lured in to Starfuckers was that it was weird – on reflection because I was weird. And really fucking confused. Through school I was too wog to be skip, too skip to be wog, too nerdy to be a jock, too horny to be a nerd, too arty to be normal, and too poor to be an artist.
Club 77 at this time was too gay to be straight, too straight to be gay, too westy to be trendy, too trendy to be boring, too ethnic to be Greenwood. We were a bunch of people that waited all week to find ourselves amongst contradictions, expectations, rejection, and confusion. What was found by many of us was this unique blend of self expression where identity, gender, and sexuality blurred. Identity and confidence was hard fought for and respected. We were one weird, really beautifully fucked up family (also known as ‘community’). In each of us there was a piece of each other (maybe sometimes quite literally) and documenting this became something personal, affirming and hopeful. In today’s language ‘we were seen’.
I don’t know what would have happened if we didn’t have this place. Maybe in today’s day and age some of us may have defaulted to binaries and the identities at our immediate disposal… perhaps even concerningly, online where echo chambers and algorithms hide the existence of the beautiful, the strange, the weird… the ‘other’… from plain view.
We need spaces like Club 77 to provide the opportunity to be unashamedly weird, to be challenged, to find ourselves… and most importantly to be loved and to be seen.