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.

Adelaide Rief, Marnie Badham, Tristan Meecham, Bec Reid and Lenine Bourke and myself co-authored the paper ‘Birds of a Feather: On Queerness, Performance, The Coming Back Out Ball’, published in Special Issue of Australasian Drama Studies on Queer Performance, Issue 81, October 2022.

The 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.