Queer Places:
Sir Charles Hotham Hotel, 574-580 Flinders St,
Melbourne VIC 3000
Tommy McDermott (1926–1992) lived in Melbourne. The four-storey Sir Charles Hotham Hotel is located at the west end of Melbourne’s central business district, on the corner of Flinders and Spencer streets. Built in 1912 in the Art Nouveau style, the building has more recently been a backpacker hostel but was once a favoured watering hole of sailors and waterside workers. It has important meaning to LGBTIQ+ communities as an upstairs bar provided a venue for drag shows and singalongs on Saturday nights in the 1950s and 1960s.
Photographs of queer life in Australia before 1970 are rare. In 2005, two photograph albums from the estate of gay man Tommy McDermott were donated to the Australian Queer Archives. The photographs depict McDermott’s social life from the late 1940s to the 1980s, including private parties, hotels, arts balls, and other functions. Although drag shows were an important part of their lives, the albums reveal that in addition, McDermott and his friends practiced a form of gender nonconformity closer to what may have been understood at the time as female impersonation or transvestism. When these men dressed in women’s clothes and wore wigs and make-up, they did so with the intention of passing convincingly as women. An interview with a contemporary of McDermott’s, about the photographs in his albums, reveals the story of drag shows at the Hotham Hotel. The shows were performed on a stage made of two dining room tables pushed together in front of a bay window. There was an upright piano on each side, and costumes were improvised from whatever was at hand. The crowd was mixed. Kamp men and their friends would queue to get in, and the downstairs working-class male clientele would sometimes come upstairs and join in. The drag shows and gender nonconforming community at the Hotham Hotel are a significant part of the history of today’s trans and gender diverse communities. The hotel is also an important reminder of the proximity of kamp and ‘square’ (a word used to refer to heterosexual people, in the language of the time) people’s lives and recreational activities in this part of the city in the mid-twentieth century. The stories around the Sir Charles Hotham Hotel reflect a queer world that flourished just outside of respectable middle-class society’s field of vision.
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