A protest is taking place in Sydney this Saturday to reassert Newtown as, “a beautiful community of queers, weirdos, freaks, hippies, goths, punks, ferals, migrants and everyone else who doesn’t fit in elsewhere.”
After a young person was beaten in Newtown in early April, Reclaim the Streets have decided it’s time to “keep Newtown weird, to keep Newtown safe.”
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A spokesperson for Reclaim the Streets, James Loch, says the aim of the protest festival is to remove the toxic culture that has seeped into Newtown over the past year.
“The aim…is to drown out that toxic culture with a highly visible public display of everything that’s out of the ordinary,” he says.
Loch says they need to shed light on the fact that people who don’t conform to a masculine society have become easy targets for violence on the streets.
“We’re up against a toxic masculinity that requires men to use violence to assert themselves,” he says.
Last year Newtown resident and transwoman Steph McCarthy was also viciously attacked at the Town Hall Hotel in Newtown, which many in the community view as a result of the lockout laws in Kings Cross and the CBD changing the traditionally LGBTIQ-friendly demographic of King Street.
The spokesperson for Reclaim the Streets says that Sydney’s lockout laws have pushed much brutality into the Newtown area over the past year.
“We need safe spaces for people to meet and safe streets for them to get home,” he says. “We want people to feel safe when they dress as they choose.”
Loch says the violence sends a strong message to politicians about the need to implement the Safe Schools program into Australian education.
Reclaim the Streets protesting. (Photo credit: Tolmie MacRae via Reclaim The Streets Sydney/Facebook.) Source: Facebook
“We need Safe Schools to be properly funded, so that children learn that it is wrong to discriminate against people based on their gender or sexual identities,” he says.
It says it’s a free mobile protest festival of weirdness, meeting at Victoria Park at 3pm on the 23rd of April and heading down King Street.
“We should be comfortable wearing whatever we want, looking however we feel without fear of violence or intimidation,” the Facebook page reads.
