From RuPaul’s Drag Race to Beyoncé’s Renaissance, it’s fair to say that queerness is having a moment.

The queer community has always shaped social and cultural trends (think voguing; think disco; think carabiners), but arguably in a more subversive way (because of, y’know, a history of legislatively and socially policed homophobia).

Now, it’s becoming mainstream, shaping fashion, internet culture, modern relationships, political discourse, and language (slay). But perhaps nowhere is the queer renaissance more pronounced than in the arts.

With WorldPride kicking off this week, ABC Arts has dug into the program and chosen five influential queer Australian artists who are making bold and thoughtful work across the creative spectrum – and (we think) you should know about them.

• Warning: This story contains explicit language.

Emma Maye Gibson aka Betty Grumble (she/her)

Performance artist. Lives and works on Gadigal land (Sydney, NSW).

Emma Maye Gibson has been making radical performance art for the past 15 years.

She is best known as her performance alter ego Betty Grumble, who has variously been described as a “sex clown”, a “war mask” and a “love letter”.

On stage, Gibson is utterly captivating. Her performances are a deeply embodied and genre-defying mix of dance, burlesque, music, poetry, clowning, drag, aerobics, and cabaret.

Whether it’s pressing 1,000 “pussy prints” live on stage or performing a “grief cum”, her work is always subversive and playful, and knits together complex ideas with levity and profundity.

For WorldPride, she is presenting her biggest work yet: 24 Hour Grumble Boogie. It’s part dance party, part purification ritual, and a daunting feat of endurance.

Gibson is interested in the healing and connective power of art — partly because of her parents: Her father is a GP and her mother has a multidisciplinary practice that spans art, bodybuilding and aerobics.

“That’s been really formative for me. I was always encouraged [by them] to be celebrating my body through singing and dancing,” she says.

Gibson has been dancing since she was four. She first discovered performance art while studying art at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, where she forged a friendship and creative partnership with fellow student Charlotte Farrell. Together they began making dynamic feminist performance art as What Makes Men Blush.

Farrell also introduced Gibson to the queer performance community.

“[I] was taken into spaces like the Red Rattler, and I realised that there was a community of people very interested in liberation and the avant-garde.

Through her friendship and creative collaboration with Farrell, Gibson began to connect with her queer identity, purpose and creativity, which were underpinned by a sense of defiance.

“My art practice [became] a very important way for me to express my sexuality, to share my body and also to protest the ways in which normative society had created situations and systems where I’d experienced violence, which I think is a cultural issue that a lot of bodies, and especially queer bodies, can relate to.”

So Betty Grumble was born.

“For the things that I wanted to do and say [on stage], I needed her as a carapace, as a cocoon to help me have the strength to be witnessed by audiences to then be able to discover, to feel, and to create a sense of myself,” says Gibson.

How Gibson performs with and through Betty has shifted over the past five years, in what feels like a gradual unmasking process.

“In a lot of my first acts, I was shitting or bleeding or vomiting – it was always about my body spilling out of itself because I had so much rage around the idea that my body didn’t belong to me,” she explains.

“[But] water has been a really important element in my shows in the last few years; to literally bathe, to cleanse, to let her [Betty] be spilling out of the container.

“[Through] water and sweat and performance, I’ve allowed my ‘Emma Maye’ face to come through the make-up.”

This is not the end of Grumble: “She’s not going to stop … It’s more that I’m integrating her into me [through performance], live in front of everyone,” says Gibson.

She has also increasingly drawn on the work of other artists, friends and mentors in her own practice, and invokes them as her artistic ancestors in a way that gives her performances a ceremonial quality.

24 Hour Grumble Boogie is being staged at Carriageworks this weekend and brings together a bevy of Gibson’s artistic collaborators and influences, including friend, DJ, and fellow performance artist HipHopHoe.

“I’m really excited to do it as a purification ritual and as a way to bow in a gentle retrospective to my grumblings, and to punctuate the day with guests that are meaning-makers for my life and my career as a performance artist.”

Raghav Handa (he/him)

Choreographer and dancer. Lives on Gayemagal land (Manly, NSW) and works mostly on Gadigal land (Sydney, NSW).

Raghav Handa has been “obsessed” with dance since he was a child.

Growing up between India, the UK and Australia, he found refuge in it.

Handa was born in Amritsar in the north Indian state of Punjab. He first discovered dance when his mother bought a 10-class dance pass for his sister in a classical style called Kathak, which means “storytelling” in Hindi.

Handa describes Kathak as “dynamic, fast-paced and very rhythmic”. Aged seven and watching his sister from the wings, he was captivated.

“There’s a pinnacle in Kathak called Chakkar, which is 32 turns. It’s a bit like fouette in ballet, and it culminates in this frenzy of spins. I was enamoured by it.”

Fortunately, Handa’s sister wasn’t all that interested and he eagerly jumped in to take her place.

While Kathak ignited his love of dance, it wasn’t until he migrated to Australia some 10 years later that he started dancing in earnest.

“This is where my artistry began – in Australia,” says Handa.

At 19, Handa met Kukuyalanji and Waanyi dancer Marilyn Miller, who introduced him to traditional Aboriginal dance forms. Miller invited him to take classes at the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA) Dance College, where Handa met and learned from other prominent Indigenous dancers, including Raymond Blanco and Vicki Van Hout, with whom he danced for 12 years.

“I learned a lot of traditional movement with them. They helped me to understand process; how works are made; what abstraction is; how to create form and language around a scene; how to make someone feel something,” he says.

Handa’s work is a fusion of traditional and contemporary styles that draws on his foundation in both Kathak and Indigenous dance techniques.

He is particularly interested in using dance to examine traditional concepts and symbology that in other contexts might be considered offensive.

His 2020 work Cult of the Titans explored cultural understandings of the swastika, which carries a very different meaning in Hinduism to the one defined by Nazism.

“[In Hinduism], it is how the stars and the galaxies align. It’s a symbol of eternity … but it also recognises new beginnings. In Diwali, the festival of lights, it’s drawn everywhere,” Handa explains.

“I was trying to make people understand that it’s a holy symbol for billions of people. But it’s been appropriated and, in a [Western] context, it’s offensive.

As a queer person of colour, Handa is compelled to explore ideas that challenge mainstream narratives, saying: “As artists, we have a responsibility to bring the truth out and propel our nation forward.

“Through art, the change comes — and for me, that’s queer.”

Handa says his queerness is “implicit” in his work.

“It is no different to my heritage, [in that] it informs my work and underlies it, and it makes me strive harder in some ways.

“But for me, [queerness] is more about, ‘How do you feel and how do you see yourself? How do you make sense of things in the political arena that we hold and the social structures we are in?’

For WorldPride, Handa has created choreography for Nicholas Brown’s queer comedy Sex Magick at Griffin Theatre Company. It’s his first time choreographing for a play.

“I was really excited about it, but also shit-scared,” he says, laughing.

“I’m always thinking about, ‘How can I link the audience through the bodies of the performers on stage to the narrative? How can the movement drive the narrative?’

“Dance is our human language. It’s very dynamic … and very beautiful.”

Jazz Money (she/her)

Poet and multidisciplinary artist. Lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung land (Castlemaine, VIC).

There wasn’t a single moment when Jazz Money knew she wanted to be a poet — but she has always been drawn to storytelling.

The Wiradjuri poet and multidisciplinary artist grew up primarily in Red Hill, a small town on Boonwurrung Country in rural Victoria.

When she was a kid, a creative career seemed “impossible”, she says.

“I couldn’t see them [creative pathways], and they weren’t encouraged. Survival was more the mode, rather than creativity, which I think I always understood as an indulgence, and something that was for people in the city,” says Money.

Notwithstanding, she was drawn to books, particularly fantasy.

“I was a bit of a weird kid and books were a really safe, welcoming and lovely place … and an escape,” she says.

In her early 20s, Money studied filmmaking at Swinburne University. After graduating, she moved to Sydney and worked for several years at the Museum of Contemporary Art as an in-house filmmaker. She describes it as “an apprenticeship in how the arts works”.

In tandem, she began writing poetry.

“Poetry was my way of making sense of the world, a way of feeling comfortable. I think I wanted to journal but I didn’t know how to do it. Everything I wrote ended up reading really weird, so I called it poetry,” she laughs.

Money is self-effacing. Far from “weird”, her poetry is deeply moving, full of heart, and has a universality to it that is tethered to the personal.

In 2020, she quit her job to pursue poetry full-time.

“It was a really weird time to make that call, peak pandemic. My wife was like, ‘Oh! All right. Let’s see how that goes!”

Money had her reasons. She had that year written her first collection How to Make a Basket and was increasingly being commissioned to write poems.

The same week she quit her job, she won the David Unaipon Award for How to Make a Basket. It felt like a sign.

“It kind of launched my career as a professional writer, which was crazy and serendipitous. It felt like a big hint that things were happening in a way that made sense,” she says.

After publishing that first collection, Money began to think more deeply about and engage with her queer and Indigenous lineages through poetry.

“Those are lineages with a lot of beauty and strength and power behind them, but also ones whose voice has been actively attacked.

“I started thinking about, ‘What is the value in having a platform? And how are you going to use it responsibly?’

She sees engaging with and continuing First Nations languages as part of that responsibility.

“There’s so much story … [in] this continent, and so many layers of deep time,” she says.

“Especially with First Nations words and languages, they operate not just as language but also as philosophy and as history lessons, and as [a] linkage to Country that is deeply held.

For WorldPride, Money was invited to write a festival anthem for the Out & Loud & Proud choral festival. She worked with composer Joseph Twist to create a song about queer communities and networks of care.

“I was thinking about what it is to celebrate being queer. It’s about how we lift one another up, and make space for people to feel safe in their identity; to come with their trueness of being into this large family that is waiting there to embrace them,” she says.

“And it actually slaps.”

• WorldPride event: Out & Loud & Proud runs from February 19-23 at Wesley Conference Centre.
• You can find Jazz Money’s poetry in Nangamay Mana Djurali, a collection of First Nations queer poetry that has been published as part of WorldPride.

Dino Dimitriadis (they/them)

Theatre maker and director. Lives and works on Gadigal land (Sydney, NSW).

Dino Dimitriadis has been making theatre for 15 years. They are one of the few trans directors working on mainstage productions in Australia.

It’s a situation that Dimitriadis is actively trying to change.

“I don’t want to be one of the only trans directors in Sydney who gets [their] emails answered and gets to have conversations about what kind of work we should be making,” Dimitriadis says.

Over the past decade, Dimitriadis has forged a name for themselves in the independent theatre scene making and platforming distinctly queer stories.

“The landscape was very conservative at the time, and there wasn’t really much queer theatre in Sydney, at least.

“When I first started my company, I wasn’t even really making particularly queer theatre … [but] as I became more serious about making art, the parallel journey that I was going through in my life was one that really informed the work. I really discovered community and what it meant to have queer family,” they say.

Dimitriadis was born towards the end of apartheid in Johannesburg, South Africa, and lived there for the first nine years of their life.

“It was, and still is, a very complex country. The idea of violence is something that was in my consciousness from a very young age; [the sense of] being unsafe.”

They had a sense of their queerness early on in life.

“I didn’t know what to call it or have many references for what it was. I felt there was something different and I felt there was something I had to keep hidden,” they say.

Dimitriadis comes from a Greek Orthodox family and says that even after their family relocated to Sydney’s north shore, they couldn’t envision coming out.

That feeling began to shift after they left school and started studying commerce and arts at the University of Sydney.

“For me, art was a big thing that took me to that point. I was meeting so many different people and having really interesting experiences making theatre, and that world really was the kind of parallel world that was running in my life that actually allowed me to find my queerness.”