Nightlife
The oral history of The Imperial, Australia’s most famous gay bar
Erskineville's Imperial Hotel has been part of Sydney's DNA for 35 rollercoaster years. Here, we trace the history of the legendary gay venue.
Ever since Hugo Weaving donned a dress and lip-synced across its main-stage for The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, The Imperial has been a must-see destination for LGBTIQ+ tourists.
The corner pub in Sydney’s Inner West only features in the 1994 cult film’s first and final scenes. Still, that was more than enough to transform the rough, no-frills venue into an essential stop on what Jonny Seymour, who is one half of DJ duo Stereogamous and co-runs Sydney’s 25-year-strong queer event Club Kooky, equates to a gay pilgrimage tour. “[People] would come see ‘the Priscilla bar’ as if they are going to see the Opera House,” he says.
Artist Gareth Ernst was a bartender at the Imperial in the mid ‘90s, where he’d serve backpackers eager to catch a show as lively as the film. More often than not, he said, they’d leave a little confused.
“It wasn’t quite as glamorous as Priscilla,” he laughs. “Oxford Street was all gay and fabulous, but The Imperial was a bit more feral, a bit grungier -- it was kind of like the ‘queer centre’. Everything was rundown, and because nicotine goes into everything, the ceilings and everything else were this brown, murky tan colour.”
“Anything that had been bright and colourful was tatty. And the drag shows were dodgier -- the queens would fall off the stage, there was no budget. They’d just make stuff out of, like, cardboard.”
[People] would come see ‘the Priscilla bar’ as if they are going to see the Opera House
While Ernst recalls more than a few lost tourists, Priscilla didn’t exactly make out The Imperial to be more than it was. As Hugo Weaving’s character Mitsi (based off The Imperial’s legendary Cindy Pastel) lip-syncs in a dingy, dark room to a slow ballad, the crowd could not care less. Men have their backs turned, playing pool -- one of the few watching throws a beer can at her back.
If anything, The Imperial’s current iteration -- the result of a six million dollar renovation by new owners -- is closer to the glamour tourists remember from Priscilla’s desert drag performances.
A page from Capital Q Weekly, 1999. Via Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
© Capital Q Weekly / Archives of Sexuality and Gender / Australian Gay And Lesbian Archives
While the current Impy is a comfortable, stylish pub with a Priscilla-themed bistro, a same-sex wedding steeple on the rooftop, and, vitally, air-con for the downstairs club, its early days looked a little different -- for one, it began serving the LGBTIQ+ community at a time when homosexuality was illegal.
Oxford St was all gay and fabulous, but The Imperial was a bit more feral, a bit grungier
Despite being world famous, The Imperial has always literally and figuratively been on the fringes of Sydney’s mainstream gay culture, centred on Darlinghurst’s Oxford Street.
Surviving as a queer venue for 35+ years in Sydney doesn’t come without its challenges and controversies. Here’s the history of the Imperial, featuring several police shutdowns and a lot of sex.
Less Than Legal Beginnings
When Dawn O’Donnell bought The Imperial in 1983, it was a working class pub. Keenly aware of the burgeoning shift of LGBTIQ+ people into the Inner West, she extended her empire from the city’s eastern suburbs, where she owned multiple gay bars, nightclubs and saunas, beginning with Cappriccio’s in 1969.
O’Donnell, a figure skater turned publican, was herself lesbian, and opened Sydney’s first lesbian bar, Ruby’s Red -- she’s largely credited with making gay Sydney what it is today. Ernst recalls being terrified of her, as a fresh faced 20-something whose bar job at The Imperial marked his proper introduction to gay nightlife.
“Dawn would turn up sometimes in this big Mercedes with her Dutch girlfriend [and later life-long wife, Aniek Baten] and it was like the queen had arrived,” he said. “She was super scary. It was kind of gangster -- like guys being taken away in carpets, just disappearing.”
O’Donnell was a powerful woman with connections to police, and other more nefarious figures. She did, after all, own a set of gay bars and bathhouses during a period where homosexuality was illegal in NSW -- though it’d be decriminalised in 1984, just a year after she bought The Imperial.
A 1987 ad for The Imperial in Sydney's Village Voice.
© Sydney's Village Voice / Archives of Sexuality and Gender / Australian Gay And Lesbian Archives
“Everything about us was illegal,” says Lloyd Grosse, who began DJing as Buck Naked across S&M and leather events in the ‘80s, and has lived a street away from The Imperial for decades. “So anything else illegal wasn't necessarily a bridge too far.”
“She had a really good relationship with the authorities,” says Seymour. “The venue would never come under a real scrutiny as far as noise and so on -- and she ended up buying surrounding properties around the Imperial, [so if people] would make complaints, she’d just sort of turf them out.”
Still, The Imperial -- as well as O’Donnell’s nearby pub, The Newtown -- was a rare safe-space for queer people, even if Seymour remembers rumours that she maintained the LGBTIQ+ monopoly in the area by exerting her influence on liquor licensing boards.
“It was a different kind of community there too to the Oxford Street community,” says Ernst. “It was just more diverse, and a bit filthier.”
“And upstairs was derelict, I think there’d been a fire or something like that. I remember going up there one night -- all the lights didn't work, and rain was coming through the ceiling.”
A page from Capital Q Weekly in 1999, advertising The Imperial.
© Capital Q Weekly / Archives of Sexuality and Gender / Australian Gay And Lesbian Archives
Seymour says his friends called The Imperial ‘The Drain’ -- “everybody just ended up there at the end”.
“Because it was the only place open late at night, everyone sort of mixed.” says Ernst. “There were trans women with fluoro green hair, baby lesbians, men in suits. They’d play pool together -- all the weirdos came together, and didn’t look how you expected. The biggest weirdos were the ones in suits. They’re always the weirdest.”
But with that came violence. Ernst recalls when three neo-Nazis arrived one recovery session on a Monday morning and were soon pushed out by the patrons -- “It was real community action”. There was a lot of in-fighting, too.
“Some of the fights between the girls were pretty hardcore,” he said. “And there was one night, there were these two guys fighting, just going for it. I’d never done it before or since, but I jumped over the bar -- I’d just had it. It’d been a really long night. I grabbed the instigator and threw him out. It was so awful to do that. It was devastating.”
“The violence was normal -- I’m just thinking about that now. People tend to like, 'oh, the community!', but there was a lot of pain that would come out. Everybody in that place experienced some kind of violence and every night, there was violence in some way.”
Signal, The Illegal Sex Club
Downstairs was Signal, a sex-on premises club.
“The police fully knew about it,” says Seymour. “They just got a little payment every Saturday night. They'd come in and pick up an envelope.”
Seymour, who moved to Sydney from Tasmania in the early ‘90s, says The Imperial was the first bar he “felt at home” in, thanks to Signal.
“Downstairs, back then, wasn't connected to the main part of the building -- the only way to get there was outside and around the back of the building,” he recalls.
It was a different kind of community to Oxford street. It was more diverse, and a bit filthier
“There wasn't even a door. Just this knocked out hole that you stepped through, where there was a gimp in full regalia who just shouted "five dollars!", snatched and pushed you into this room.”
“It was a specific gay men's cruising sex on-premise venue. And there's a couple of tell-tale signs about that -- one being the floor being covered in sawdust, to a full bath set up in the middle of the bar, which I thought was interesting, not knowing about golden showers or anything like that. [There was] no internet, [I was] fresh off the boat from Tasmania. And there was a motorbike welded to the ground, for play.”
Flyer for Woof Sydney at Imperial, courtesy Lloyd Grosse
© courtesy Lloyd Grosse
“In the back, there was this large horse-shoe dark room that they called the Helen Keller room -- because you couldn’t hear or see anything in there. And the music that was playing was Tangerine Dream all this sort of ‘70s ambiance psychedelica -- and I just was like, ‘this is amazing!’”
“I’ll always remember the smell,” says Ernst, who occasionally bartended at Signal. “Rancid beer, cigarette smoke, sweat, of course -- and whatever was dripping from the pipes.”
“Eventually [Signal] did get shut down by the police, while we were there,” says Seymour. “They were like look, the raid's coming -- they just grabbed bits and pieces, like cash registers, and as much alcohol as they could move out of there. I helped sort of make the place look as though it wasn't a bar, and we were officially shut down after that.”
Signal found a new home in Darlinghurst in 1996, before closing last year after hosting 23 years of cruising.
A Change Of Hands
After Priscilla’s wave of attention, the venue struggled in the ‘00s -- and when O’Donnell passed away in 2007, it was snapped up by Shadd Danesi, who owned Oxford Street mainstay Arq. He sunk millions into renovations, and the venue reopened in 2010 -- but it didn’t have that same connection.
“I remember when the new guys took over, I was walking past, they were freshly opened. They'd hung a gay flag up out front -- and it was upside down,” says Grosse.
A 1987 ad for the Imperial from Sydney's Village Voice
© Sydney's Village Voice / Archives of Sexuality and Gender / Australian Gay And Lesbian Archives
Eventually, The Imperial was taken-over in 2015 by Spice Cellar, a club night fleeing Sydney’s lockdown law-affected CBD. Seymour was approached to be involved as a ‘cultural ambassador’.
“It felt really great, because they came in with a philosophy that it's a community space -- ‘We want to still be queer, but we want to make that downstairs bar work’,” he said.
“But that opened The Imperial up to way more scrutiny. Everybody who used to go to Spice Cellar will end up here at The Imperial and it stopped being a neighbourhood bar.
“It became super problematic. Ravers were coming in and going down side streets, someone took a dump in somebody's front yard and they were caught. And so every week there were people showing up at the venue just to complain about it. The police got hold of that, and then it was just a downward slide for all of that.”
After just three months, Spice Cellar lost their licence. Grosse remembers DJing there during this period -- and while he usually, by his own admission, “makes music people fuck to”, it’s this crowd that stands out.
“They had me in the front bar after Kate Monroe at 5am or some ridiculous hour -- and I’d never seen people so off their face. They were absolutely cross-eyed.”
“It was definitely a honeymoon,” says Seymour. “It was like, wow, this is going to be really wonderful. And the cops coming in, shutting things down, just -- it just reinforced what a nanny state we are in or a school ma’am state, as I like to call it.”
A 1998 ad from Capital Q Weekly, via the Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
© Capital Q Weekly / Archives of Sexuality and Gender / Australian Gay And Lesbian Archives
Dragging Up History
The Imperial’s doors stayed shut for years. Then on Mardi Gras weekend of 2018, it reopened under new ownership, after a lengthy renovation and a period of consultation with the queer community.
The venue had been purchased by publican duo Sydney Collective and given a much-needed makeover: the back bar was converted into a restaurant called Priscilla’s, and upstairs was transformed into an outside courtyard and bar. The community spirit of the Imperial’s early days remained, the venue itself just looked -- and smelled -- a lot nicer than it had back in decades past.
“Stereogamous started playing there again on Saturday nights, and we ended up sort of having fallout with management because 'our music wasn't queer enough',” says Seymour. “Which is fantastic -- a cis, straight middle-aged man, coming in saying what queer music is and isn’t.”
Seymour equates it to ‘The Hard Rock Café’ of gay bars, but acknowledges that the space still holds excellent events and performances.
Depending on the night, the Imperial’s subversive spirit can still be seen in regular events by the likes of House of Mince, Heaps Gay, GiRLTHING and Canned Fruit. John Pants, who runs Melbourne night Honcho Disko, has held monthly Sydney events there since 2018. For him, it’s the dream spot.
Honcho Disko's 2020 Mardi Gras party at The Imperial
© Honcho Disko
“It’s been really harmonious for Honcho -- and being a subversive, alternative party, it fits in well with the history of The Imperial [while] progressing into the future of what drag looks like.”
Pants has a particular love for the way The Imperial’s gentrification pushes queer artists onto occasionally unsuspecting crowds.
“It’s always fun to see the reaction of people that go to those types of spaces like The Imperial -- generally, they love it. It’s something new for them that they haven't seen. Those moments are always great for me.”
In 2020, at the helm of the venue’s day-to-day operations are General Manager/Licensee Zoe Simmons and Marketing Manager Oliver Levi-Malouf, who also doubles as a regular drag performer on the Imperial stage. For Levi-Malouf, the chance to reimagine the Imperial was a dream come true.
“I think the Imperial is an iconic queer venue, not only in Sydney but around the world,” they say. “Last year, I took a trip to America and whenever I’d say I was from Sydney, they’d be like ‘oh, have you worked at the Imperial?’ I think it’s somewhere that people have always had this fascination with.”
More than 25 years on from its cinematic cameo, Levi-Malouf says the venue still has Priscilla tourists come past. Drag remains a key part of the Imperial’s offering: from Wednesday to Sunday it runs events ranging from bingo and trivia to large-scale production shows. The Imperial also runs weekly drag workshops, where new queens can come and get help sewing, making costumes and styling wigs.
Many of the queens still working the Imperial stage today have been at the venue since the 1980s or 1990s. “And we have them performing with fresh 18-year-olds who have just been doing drag for a year. It’s really fantastic that we can have that cultural exchange,” Levi-Malouf says.
While the Imperial of today is a whole lot less grungy than the venue of yesteryear, Levi-Malouf says the venue “couldn’t operate” without honouring its long, storied history.
The stories that have come out of this venue have cemented a lot of Australian queer history
“Every time I walk out and do a show, someone in the audience is like ‘I came here in 1995 and saw Mitzi Mackintosh performing live on this stage’,” they recall. “The stories that have come out of this venue have cemented a lot of Australian queer history. Because a lot of queer history’s oral; it’s stuff that’s spoken down generation to generation. But when you have a venue, those stories are kept alive in the performers that work here, the costumes that are kept here and the shows that are done here.”
“I don’t think there’s any way we could fight the fact that the Imperial will always keep dragging up history and will always keep dragging up stories,” Levi-Malouf says. “It’s just a vibrant cultural place.”
