Minus18’s Queer Formal Is Growing Up, In The Best Way

This past Saturday night, five hundred teenagers entered Melbourne’s St. Kilda Town Hall to the gentle notes of a harp cover of Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’. When the song finished, there was the loudest round of applause I’ve ever heard a harpist receive.

The event was the Minus18 Queer Formal, a dance organised for LGBTIQ+ young people for whom regular school formals can be a tense, stressful experience. Those applauding were the LGBTIQ+ teens of Melbourne and Victoria, who came decked out in a decidedly queer take on their formal best. Some were in suits and gowns, others in punk ensembles complete with a mohawk or spiked collar. A few came in drag looks that honestly could have been professional; others just rocked up in something rainbow, with brightly coloured hair and pride flags repurposed as capes.

The queer formal has grown a lot in the past few years — as recently as 2015, Minus18 volunteers were cramming tablecloths, booklets and other gear into two cars to make the trek from Melbourne to Adelaide for the event. This year, there’s no way two cars would have cut it.

In large part, that’s due to Instagram, which sponsored the event for the first time this year. As a result, the formal was decked out with rainbow photo backdrops, selfie stations complete with makeup stands and ring lights, a dessert buffet and more. Outside the doors, teens posed for pictures in front of a limo covered in rainbow stickers and the words “you are now entering a discrimination free zone”. Most importantly, the event was free for the 500+ young people who attended.

The result was nothing short of resplendent. For some of the attendees, this was their second or third formal, for others it was their first time. At the start of the night, the difference showed — by the end, almost all of the teens were on the dancefloor, enthusiastically doing the nutbush to any song the DJ happened to play. At one point, a conga line swept up nearly every attendee, snaking around the entire room for the length of several songs.

For five glorious hours, St. Kilda Town Hall was full of what has long felt like a rare thing: queer teens in their masses, happy, unguarded and unafraid. It was the kind of space, and the kind of celebration, that felt entirely impossible back when I was a queer teen myself, not all that long ago. More than once on Saturday, I stood at the edge of the dancefloor and cried.

“It’s So Great That Everyone Can Just Be Themselves”: The Queer Formal Is For Everyone

“I saw the wig and thought, ‘that’s so Cruella de Vil’, and then like, I started an outfit that kind of had the same colours,” sixteen-year-old Britt, who performs as drag queen Theresa Problem (“get it? There’s a problem?”) explained when I complimented her look early in the night. She was in a black and white wig with matching ensemble and towering platform boots. She’s been doing drag “officially since November”, though she’s been practising the makeup side of things for around a year.

This was not her first Queer Formal. “I’ve been to plenty,” she laughed, estimating that she was probably in year eight for her first one. The event just keeps her coming back. “I’ve made so many friends through it,” she told me, pausing to scream “yasss!” as the harpist finished another song. “I can also come out in drag, and it’s just like a really fun time, so it’s kind of become tradition that we all go out together”. In the tradition of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, a lip-sync competition was planned for later in the night, which Theresa was planning on entering. She won it.

There were more than a few teens like Britt/Theresa there on Saturday: veterans of the Queer Formal, ready to dress loud and start conga lines, or welcome a shy new kid onto their table. Almost all the veterans I spoke to told me this latest formal was the best one so far, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect.

For Jake, who finished school last year, the dessert buffet, limousine and makeup stations simply couldn’t compete with the fact that this year, for the first time, he had a boyfriend to attend the event with. He clarified that this was the guy next to him, though I already had an inkling — the pair had been holding hands for the entire conversation.

There were also plenty of new faces, kids who were ecstatic to experience the formal for the first time. Some had parents waiting to pick them up in the parking lot outside — “oh yeah, I’m out to everyone,” one fourteen-year-old told me. “Our school’s a very accepting school, because we go to an art school. We’re even allowed to dye our hair!”.

Others had yet to come out, and had told their parents they were simply “at a party”. “I was trying on fancy dresses and my parents were like, ‘have you got something on?’,” one teen laughed. “I was like, ‘oh, nothing special'”.

Not every kid had had an easy journey. One young trans guy told me he’d had to move schools just recently, shortly after coming out. “I mean, the teachers probably would have been accepting, but you can’t really change thirteen-year-old boys’ opinions on that stuff,” he said with a shrug.

Others were at various points in their coming out journeys. At one of the photo booths, two best friends approached me and asked if I could take a few photos of them — as they happily posed with almost every prop Instagram had on offer, we traded coming out stories. One of the two explained that they had managed to come out to their parents as queer, but not as nonbinary, and revelled in the excitement of being at an event where people asked about their preferred pronouns as soon as they met them.

Later in the night, I sat down to speak to a young guy who was alone at a table taking a break from the dancefloor. He had a sharp haircut and was wearing what he later told me was his first suit — he came out as trans a year ago, when he was just thirteen.

His family, he says, was immediately accepting. “My mum’s queer, so that helped,” he told me. Even coming from a supportive home, though, the significance of being at an event like this wasn’t lost on him. “It’s just so great that everyone can be themselves here,” he told me. “It’s so nice.”

Generation Z Is Generation LGBTIQ+

It’s remarkable what a difference it makes when you have permission to be yourself. As the night wore on, any guardedness or nervousness in the room just melted away. The room was lined with Minus18 volunteers wearing angel wings, who were ready to step in if anyone needed help. There was a separate breakout space specifically for young people of colour at the event, and another separate space that provided a break from the noise, with beanbags and craft supplies. Every toilet was gender neutral, and a table full of pride flag badges made it easy to signal your identity without even having to speak.

Everything had been thought of, and all that was left was for teens to be teens. When a Billie Eilish song came on, the entire room stampeded to the dancefloor; when Panic! At The Disco’s ‘Girls/Girls/Boys’ started playing, teens flooded the stage. Conga lines started for no reason. The triangle dance abounded. One kid I was interviewing promptly vanished when their friends skidded into the room bellowing “the dessert line is open!”. Teens cheered for absolutely everything: the AUSLAN translator making sure speeches were interpreted in sign language, the ‘All Star’ harpist (the talented Sarah Lambourne), the arrival of more glitter.

In fact, despite Instagram starting the night with a powerpoint on Instagram’s safety and privacy features, and the protections in place for queer youth, by the end of the event the mood was not one of vulnerability, but of confidence. A photo backdrop had been provided with UV markers to write affirmations; by the end of the night, it was covered in Instagram handles and messages ranging from “if your parents are mean I’ll adopt you” to “find Emily a wife!!” to “#boob”. As the dancefloor started to amp up, one savvy teen discovered that the laptop playing a slideshow of images from the night had AirDrop turned on — for the rest of the event, the powerpoint was regularly interrupted by AirDrop notifications sent by kids trying to gain followers on Instagram.

This might seem like an unremarkable list, just a bunch of silly things teens do. The remarkable thing is that for so long, for queer teens, just being a silly, carefree teen required sacrifice. For so many queer teens, it still does.

This year’s Queer Formal was a vision of what it might look like to grow up without that need for sacrifice. For at least some of Generation Z, a queer teenage experience defined by pride, not fear, is in reach. It’s hard to fathom what that kind of opportunity might have meant for me, and for so many others. It’s hard to express how glad I am for the five hundred teens who got to experience it firsthand on Saturday night.

The final act of the night was a set by DJ Gay Dad, who nailed Gen Z music taste so well a teen presented them with a paper cup mid-set. On the cup were the words “I love you DJ Gay Dad”, scrawled in UV pen. At the end of the night, all these kids still had love to spare.

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The author of this story travelled to Melbourne courtesy of Instagram Australia, who also provided the images for this story.

To find out more about Minus18 and the events they run for LGBTIQ young people, visit the Minus18 website.