When tasked with writing an opinion piece, the most important thing to do is to have an opinion. Lucky for me, I have plenty of opinions. Opine I do, and opine I do well.

It was Mardi Gras season this year when my most recent opinion came to me. I opened the newspaper and was faced with a full-page ad by quantifiably non-gay job-seek company Indeed.

It read, in rainbow lettering:

A job search without Indeed is like Mardi Gras without a party.

I felt such anger when I saw it. In what possible way are those two things alike? I wanted to rip it out and scrunch it up in my gay hands. But more than that, it made me want commit the greatest act of violence I could imagine:

I wanted to write an opinion piece about it and sell it to the very newspaper that was publishing the ad.

So I wrote. And they published. But, unfortunately, what I learned was, they didn’t really want my opinion, in its full extent. And I was left with a mouthful of things unspoken – as if someone had cut me off in a meeting, just when I was getting to the good stuff.

Lucky for me, these stories are all like meetings where no one speaks but me.

And so this is the opinion piece I never got to write:

It was a rainy night in 2002, I was 16 and I’d carried a milk crate from Central Station to Oxford Street – ready for my first Mardi Gras parade.

I wore denim shorts three sizes too big and a Bonds singlet (this was long before we realised it wasn’t OK to call them ‘wife beaters’).

As we stood on our crates and leaned over the barriers, we got hugged by Drag Queens. We got the knowing nod from Dykes On Bikes. We got a wave from a giant papier-mâché John Howard.

Our friend, Taylor, had just had her nipple pierced. As the parade went by, she routinely lifted up her top and flashed her bare breasts to whoever was floating past. She flashed nurses and lifesavers and someone smoking a cigarette out of their arsehole.

She flashed all of us. She put her tits in our faces and we all gave enthusiastic consent – not that we even knew the term back then.

As the teachers marched proudly by, Taylor flashed them too.

A man carrying a tiny blackboard and wearing a glittery plastic hat approached the barrier.

“Taylor?” he said, “Taylor what are you doing?”

“Oh,” she stammered, scrambling to pull her wife-beater back into place, “sorry Mr Edwards.”

Sure, Taylor had literally exposed herself to him – bare flesh. But, in this moment between them, something of his was laid bare too – his queerness. And there wasn’t a Bonds singlet to cover it back up.

He smirked, knowingly. And in his eyes I recognised a certain something.

A look that said: So now we’ve both seen each other.

As he turned and hurried away, she called after him, “See you Monday, Sir!” and flashed him one last time.

That night, arms kept falling around my shoulders, kisses were magnets to my cheeks. Glitter fell from nowhere and would take weeks to wash off. My first girlfriend, Kirby, linked her fingers through mine.

This is how people must feel on their wedding day, I thought. Or how I feel when I finally get that week-old piece of apple skin out of my teeth – divine elation.

Afterwards, no one stared at me in the line to the women’s bathroom. No one called me Sir. Though, to be fair, no one flinched when Taylor sat on the milk crate and pissed into the street. She turned it up the right way first – as if that somehow made it watertight.

(Piss-tight.)

And 18 years later came that fucking ad:

A job search without Indeed is like Mardi Gras without a party.

Years before that ad, I took my three sisters. Two had an argument over some bottles of champagne. One responded by drinking all the champagne and pashing the only straight man in the crowd. Some queens marched by blasting, “We Are Family.”

I teared up.

“But I really DO have all my sisters with me,” I kept saying, “I really do!”

Meanwhile, Kirby’s beer goggles were seeing in 20/20.

“Your dad is such an attractive man,” she said earnestly. “I mean, I don’t like men, but your dad is just so attractive, don’t you think?”

Over the years, I’ve been to different parties. I’ve marched with various groups. And each year, things seem further and further away from where they started for me 18 Mardi Gras before now. Last year, we had to queue for hours behind corporate floats. There were banks marching. There was Holden, Google, Seek.com. There was a ‘Gay Christmas’ float which consisted of one buff Santa and 100 attention-seeking fag-hags dressed in reindeer costumes.

I wanted to ask, what exactly are you celebrating?

When I march, I’m filled with a rare feeling of safety, of pride, of belonging. What are Holden feeling?

To illustrate these changes, I wrote about the rainbow Indeed ad that had angered me so much. Mardi Gras didn’t begin as ‘a party,’ I wrote. It was a protest. And eventually, it became a safe space for baby dykes like me. It was the one night where, after the parade, all the clubs were ours.

But, when the article was published, the line got cut. The ad stayed. They wanted my trending queer content – but they wanted their faux-rainbow cash-cow even more.

I tried to explain that with the rising popularity of Mardi Gras also comes the re-outnumbering of Queers. And while I love our allies – I also miss the days gone by. The days of an all-queer sanctuary, where we were the majority for just one night. Where people came to watch. To support. Not to take over. But now, that magical night of freedom is gone – replaced by $200 tickets to attend parties filled with rainbow-hash-tagging, virtue-signalling bandwagoners who haven’t even watched the parade. Who’ve missed the chance to thank (or flash) a fire-fighter, a nurse or a lifesaver. Now it’s just another night where I worry about lining up for the toilet.

(Where’s that piss-tight crate when you need it?)

And I wonder, how does all this sit with the 78ers, who started it over 40 years ago? They were fighting long before the pink dollar even existed. Long before marriage equality was even a twinkle in our collective eye. Long before I was first spat at. Screamed at. Questioned. Long before we snuck out of bed at night to watch Queer As Folk. Before the only porn we had was the drawings Kirby did in our birthday cards.

Even so, how can I complain? The night is popular because things are better.

But then – last year, a colleague repeatedly used the word poofter at our staff Christmas party. And no one in a room full of teacher-voices backed me up when I asked him to stop. I bet if he’d failed to draw a margin in his workbook they would’ve had something to say about it.

At times like these, should I just ask Indeed for a cuddle?

Newspapers love statistics. So I wrote that LGBTQIA+ youth are still five times more likely to commit suicide than other young Australians. Despite the millions in seasonal Mardi Gras-themed public-facing ad campaigns – these deaths still happen. And where are all the rainbow re-brands when the tears fall, when blood is drawn, when the rope is tied?

Recently, I saw an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages. We were chugging beers and talking about being adults.

“What are you parents like?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “Dad died. And Mum disowned me for being gay.”

“Right,” I offered, “but at least we have Rainbow ATMs now.”

This year, dejected, pissed off and developing an allergy to my once-loved rainbow – I decided to give Mardi Gras a miss. I decided to write about how much it’s changed. And how hard that is to be mad about – the confusion of being celebrated more but heard less. And of the 800 words I wrote, the paper published less than half. Meanwhile, that weekend, the rainbow Indeed ad got a wrap-around front cover.

In that, my point made itself – game, set and match. And yet, ironically, my point was nowhere to be seen.

After that, as my actual opinions continued to wrestle in my mind, I remembered the 78ers. The hits they took from the police. The families and friends they lost to AIDS and to gay-bashings and to suicide. I remembered when my parents marched with me years ago, Mum with tampons in her ears to block out the loud screams and the deafening music. We held our hands above our heads as a giant rainbow flag fluttered over us, keeping the rain off our hairspray.

Mum’s smile.

They held a sign that said: We Are Proud Parents.

This year, Mum bought the newspaper to read my work. After discarding its rainbow cover, she did that things mums do.

“I read your article – ” she said, “it made me think. And I would really like to march again.”

“I dunno,” I brushed her off, “I’m over it.”

My article was out there. It was a flop – changed beyond recognition. Another Mardi Gras weekend was over, the first I’d missed in 18 years. Fuck Mardi Gras, I said to myself, it’s ruined.

When Monday came, I rocked up to work, determined to move on. In the hallway, a little voice chirped from behind a blue fringe.

“Hi Miss,” it said, “you’re my favourite teacher.”

“Oh, that’s nice of you,” I smiled, “then you’re my favourite student.”

She turned away, embarrassed. And as she did, the light bounced dramatically off the side of her face.

The weekend’s remnants.

“I like your glitter,” I offered, knowingly.

She hid her face in her hands, as if she thought about pretending, just for a second, that she wished I hadn’t noticed.

I recognised a shyness in her smile. And I saw that particular something in her eyes.

That look that says: So now we’ve both seen each other.

Ok Mum, I thought, let’s march again.