A personal reflection on repurposing traumatic sites into spaces of cultural memory. This article explores the complex intersections of queer history, trauma, memory, and the ethical responsibilities of cultural institutions in preserving and presenting difficult histories.
The intersection of queer history and urban sites has never been more relevant than now. Qtopia received the Best Museum Exhibition Peoples Choice Award for The Underground , at the 2024 Time Out Sydney Arts and Culture Awards. This recognition reflects something profound about our communitys desire to reclaim and honour heritage spaces, both positive and negative, that shaped our queer sub-cultures.
The toilet was a site of rebellion in shadows of notoriously violent Darlinghurst police station, where Qtopia is now situated.
Hanky codes, insider secrets, steam rooms, toilet hook-ups and hidden notes such as: Meet me at 5.30. Ill be wearing a blue adidas tracksuit are a memento from a lost world of hook up culture long before Grindr and the Internet itself were even dreamt of.
The Exhibition: notorious and nefarious spaces
The exhibition explores public toilets, back rooms, sleaze spaces, and often abandoned spaces of ruin laden with memory and history. These are places where queer culture thrived during times when the laws or morals of the era considered such actions illegal and deviant.
At one time a popular beat until they were closed to public access in 1988, The Toilet Block home of The Underground is alongside the location known as The Wall where rent boys traded in less than salubrious surroundings on Darlinghurst Road. It was a place for mainly men to find sex and social communion after the gay bars of Oxford Street shut their doors for the night, noting the police and criminal underworld got paid in paper bags for their tolerance at the time.
The space was ahead of its time. George says: Taylor Square toilets so successful in 1920s art nouveau art and flushing urinals a first.
Through re-purposing of the underground toilets from piss venue to art venue an 18+ exhibition using archival creative visual displays of the once nefariously purposed site.
Curatorial vision and challenges
Former Curatorial Director George Savoulis said, Winning the Peoples Choice Award reflects the passion and creativity of a team of Curators and artists that brought The Underground to life. A few curators worked on this project: Liz Bradshaw, Laura Castagnini as well as Savoulis, noting challenges getting approvals given the dilapidated and authentic condition of the building.
The exhibition pays tribute to some of the subcultural icons and creative communities that emerged in Sydney during these times, George continued.
Im Too Beautiful to Be A Lesbian
My work is bent, bisexual, about the beautiful and I am grateful as a vain diva, that Performance Space has preserved this artwork like a wax work of my most glamorous identity to be repurposed in a public toilet, noting previous incarnations in late night R-rated TV and re-imagined at the 40th Anniversary of P Space in 2023.
The original performance was at cLUB bENT in 1996 at The Performance Space, with then director, Angharad Wynne-Jones. Though re-imagined in 2023 at the P Space 40th Anniversary at Carriage Works, it is featured in this exhibition under the staircase in a diva secluded seraglio.
The historical context- police surveillance and community resistance
Savoulis, former curator at Taylor Square, explains: These were infamous locations socially coded queer sites of communion but theyve since been demolished. We often overlook how spaces like the Green Park and Taylor Square toilets were part of an unspoken network for our community. Especially opposite the police station, in the shadow of authority was radical in its defiance. He recounts interviewing Barry Charles, aka Trough Man. He was adamant that the Taylor Square toilets were too exposed, preferring the train station for quicker exit routes. Of significance: We knew we could get into trouble, but desire was so strong.'
The popular myth is that public sex is transactional. For many from another generation, they were places of identity, connection, even friendship. They were crucibles for finding ourselves and each other.
Bars and toilets were places of like-minded community meeting and of social communion. Savoulis adds: Its about finding friends, selves, crucibles sites of connection.
Toilet sex and these interactions were more complex. There is a quote from George Michael at the exhibition, which says: Are you gay? No? Then fuck off! This is my culture from 2007 after his ignominious arrest.
The exhibition features The Vice Squad and Gay Hate police. For the queer community, the NSW police Vice Squad were also known as the Peanut Squad epitomised the harassment of the vulnerable. The toilet police reflected societal and sex phobic and homophobic norms.
The exhibition also features coloured hanky codes, and in The Female Underground my own work is featured, though my ID is now fluid.
Personal reflections: complex feelings about museums on sites of trauma
There are trauma-informed considerations in these sites. Is it ethical to be sipping champagne at sites of unspeakable horrors such as Pentridge jail or police cells at Darlinghurst?
Traditional gallery spaces the white cube sanitise experience. But in this exhibition, you lean into the visceral experience of space. George says: You walk down that double staircase a kind of double helix and immediately youre hit with the coolness, the smell, the damp: a layered sensory experience.
Well, thats the polite version the space well, its wet and dark and still smells of shit. Its damp, it has a stench, the staircase is slippery and when I first went down those spiral steps, albeit in my moonboot, I held on tight.
My own hesitation to involve myself in Qtopia stems from wanting to remember the reality that these are sites of violent acts. I have interviewed former Pentridge prisoners like esteemed author and proud Koori man, Noel Tovey, who was jailed for buggery. Should it be regarded as like a venerated somewhat holy space? Should we pay homage to the ghosts as well as lived experiences of survivors? There are many complex issues.
Its an ongoing dialogue between ethics, memory, aesthetics and politics. Every decision we make is filtered through the lens of lived experience and that includes considering trauma, legacy, and dignity. The space itself is complex: the plumbing, the heritage overlays, the stench that still lingers in places. Weve had delays around safety and infrastructure, but also moments of pure magic where audiences feel the past press against the present.
The windows were vital during its life as a beat. Savoulis remarks: They let you zip up fast and stay alert to the arrival of cops. These arent just remnants. Theyre active elements in the story. So, rather than stripping the space, weve kept its spirit. Weve layered our exhibitions over them not erasing, but conversing. This is what makes the space so unique.
This is crucial. Heritage isnt just bricks and mortar its emotional. Repurposing spaces like Taylor Square means stepping carefully. These sites carry stories of entrapment, policing, shame and also pride, resilience, intimacy. We treat them as sacred, not in a religious sense, but in the sense that they hold something precious and painful. These are spaces where our community found each other.
Historical Figures: John Marsden
Marcus ODonnell in his article Preposterous trickster: myth, news, the law and John Marsden wrote Marcus ODonnell was the editor of the Sydney Star Observer. He writes: As editor of the Star observer I followed the Marsden trial, working closely with the papers reporter David Mills who filed weekly reports for much the trial. Mills and the Star even became bit players in the Marsden drama when Marsden was charged with contempt of court for revealing the name of a protected witness to several journalists including Mills.
In the famous defamation trial of 2001, John Marsden agreed that he had given a false name to police in 1967 when he was arrested over an incident in a railway station cubicle.
The whole underground space in that area contained tunnels that led the prisoners from the police station cells to the court underground.
The challenges of repurposing a space like this involve plumbing and safety delays. There are also ethical considerations about repurposing sites of trauma and the need to consider the lived experience of others.
Featured Works and Artists
Wicked Women
That section of the exhibition was a highlight feminist, punk, defiantly queer. Wicked Women was research by Laura Castagnini with great care, working closely with some of the original artists and photographers. George says: These were women who pushed boundaries and were often left out of mainstream feminist discourse because of their kink, their porn, their politics.
The toilets themselves created a powerful tension a space once heavily gendered and often hostile to women now turned over to voices that subvert that history.
Savoulis adds: Many women, and especially queer women, found these public spaces less accessible for that kind of coded intimacy. The gendered policing of public toilets, along with physical surveillance by staff, made it much more dangerous or simply impossible. Our exhibitions try to explore those nuances.
My own work includes pieces with images of Gigi Legenhausen and others in black vinyl and leather, ever so 90s.
George says of my own exhibit: Barbarella Karpinskis work is always deeply grounded in community. In our exhibition, we expanded it beyond the gallery context and into a responsive installation that breathed with the site. Reimagining it in the toilet block demanded we shift the gaze: the audience becomes part of the tension, navigating intimacy, shame, memory, and desire.
Bridging Generations
I took my 20-something trans-nuanced art student friend and introduced them to the remains and ruins of a world they will never know this was my real pleasure. To bridge connections to a world this generation will never know. A lost world thats what museums are for.
