Birds of a Feather: On Queerness, Performance, The Coming Back Out Ball and The LGBTIQ+ Elders Dance Club

Instigated by All The Queens Men (ATQM) and engaging more than three thousand individuals and hundreds of artists, The Coming Back Out Ball was delivered in Melbourne in 2017, 2018, and 2019 to honour the contributions and diversity of older LGBTIQ+ people. ATQM’s independent performance works were initially developed in response to the isolation, stigmatisation, and culturally specific needs of ageing individuals, but have since created a new community including broader networks and allies. They have also given rise to a suite of related projects – in person and online - that have held space for LGBTIQ+ elders through the pandemic and our re-emergence into social life once again. This co-authored paper playfully mimics the performance aesthetic of The Coming Back Out Ball to consider how meaning and reciprocal value is created between artists, elders and allies. To reflect the multivalent nature of ATQM’s creative outcomes, we deploy queered dialogic, interdisciplinary, and creative methodologies. Core to this theorisation are concepts of ‘communitas’ and ‘the gift’ and through contemporary art and performance theory, alongside queered autoethnography, reportage and rich media, we layer diverse voices of community, artists, and scholars to articulate its significance. These gestures speak to a need for intergenerational, intersectional and intercultural opportunities; to the value of performance as a tool for care through building social connections and addressing loneliness; and to the potential for national and international replication of such life-affirming, ageing-positive projects.