Abstract
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Little is known about how sexual diversity shapes lives outside
metropolitan Australia. Places beyond the metropolis are conventionally
seen as fashioned by narrow strictures of heterosexuality (Gottschalk &
Newton, 2003). A host of (post)colonial national mythologies encourage
people to imagine rural Australians as white, heterosexual men and
women. Such ideas are encapsulated in the bushman mythology and the
legend of Ned Kelly, and replayed through characters such as Crocodile
Dundee (Turner, 1994), as well as the fi gure of the ‘farm woman’ and longstanding
organisations such as the Country Women’s Association (Alston,
1995). Where sexual diversity enters this imaginary, visions are often overlain
with narratives of lesbian and gay suicide, homophobic violence and
‘escape’ migration to ‘gay’ urban centres. This chapter presents a counternarrative,
offering stories about the enjoyment of ChillOut, a lesbian and
gay festival held annually in Daylesford-Hepburn Springs, twin country
towns in Hepburn Shire, Victoria. This is partly an exploration of how
ChillOut complicates and challenges the ‘closeting’ of lesbians and gay
men in rural Australia, utilising camp humour to unsettle stereotypical
assumptions about (people of ) diverse sexualities. But at the same time,
ChillOut is infl uenced by economic discourses that frame lesbian and gay
tourists as ‘affl uent’, and is embedded in political structures that continue
to favour heterosexuality as ‘normal’. In this light, the festival must also be
considered through the construction of the ‘gay tourist’ or ‘lesbian tourist’
as subjects of both privilege and opposition. Drawing on these perspectives,
we address the different experiences and meanings of ChillOut for
organisers, participants and residents.
To explain how Hepburn Shire has become a festival ‘capital’, this
chapter fi rst outlines its shifting demography, economics and politics.
We pay particular attention to the origins and development of ChillOut.
We then explore how the playfulness of camp unsettles the assumptions
of rural places devoid of sexual difference. Next, we argue that while
ChillOut challenges the absence of diverse sexualities in many rural
Australian narratives, it normalises non-threatening expressions –
certain confi gurations of gayness as affl uent lesbian and gay tourists
rather than an overarching acceptance of sexual difference in all aspects
of everyday life. This may be helpfully thought about in terms of a hierarchy
of homosexualities, highlighting ongoing oppression for anyone
whose sexuality does not conform to idealised notions of the lesbian or
gay tourist. In the conclusion, we refl ect upon how ChillOut tests, adapts
and recreates narratives about what it means to live in Daylesford–
Hepburn Springs.