Those who were there look back at the queer pride party that defined the 90s.

The Hero Parade was Auckland’s largest and most prominent event celebrating queer pride and, during its 1992-2001 run, the centrepiece of the now defunct Hero Festival. It was part of an international tradition of gay pride parades, beginning with events in New York and Chicago following the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Since the Hero Parade, both Auckland Pride Festival’s Pride Walk and Rainbow Auckland’s Pride Parade have followed in its footsteps.

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of Aotearoa’s Gay Liberation Front, we’re publishing four oral histories of core Pride events, including the founding of the GLF, the re-launch of the Pride Parade, and the creation of the Pride Walk. The Hero Parade sits squarely in the centre of these events – a celebration of community, a commemoration of history, and a loud and proud expression of queer defiance.

The late 80s and early 90s was a period of upheaval for the queer community in Aotearoa, as it was for queer people across the world. The Hero Parade wasn’t just marching under the spectre of Aids, but into a country less than a decade out from the Homosexual Law Reform Bill of 1986.

Paul Rose, activist and journalist: If you look at what happened in the mid 80s and into the mid 90s with Aids, it’s horrifying. Kids these days, they always brush it off. It’s like, “Thank you, but it’s not really that important.” In fact, an entire generation of mainly creative people were wiped out. If you look at places like America, like New York and California, the people who were dying of Aids there were graphic designers, musicians, authors, florists. They worked in creative industries. 

Nicola Legat, journalist at Metro magazine in the ’90s: Hero landed in the middle of a kind of political moment where it looked as though Auckland was going to become run by people with a very strict moral code that they were going to impose on everybody else. And so in a way… it’s the kind of thing that’s happening right at the moment in the United States. We had that moment in Auckland in the mid- to late-1990s.

Rex Halliday, organiser of the first Hero Parade: We had run quite a hard-hitting Aids prevention programme in 1990, saying, “This is dangerous. It can kill you, it’s a really nasty way to go.” Because it was, then. “It’s killing lots of people and you need to stay safe and you’ve got to wear condoms.” 

People needed a strong sense of self-esteem and a strong sense of community. We thought: What can we do to build up in the Auckland gay community a real strong sense of community, and a sense of being proud of who we are? 

I had a group of volunteers. We sat talking about it and we came up with the idea of having a celebratory party. We definitely didn’t want to do a sleazy party. We wanted to do something that actually celebrated and praised who we were as gay people. 

Michael Stevens, participant and former Aids Foundation employee: I think what made the Hero Parade was that it was our gift back to the straights, and we were having fun. There were politics involved in it, but there was an awful lot of just celebration and that over the top camp, “let’s send up the world” attitude going on with it, too. 

RH: Someone suggested the idea of a hero, and we all thought of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a person with big guns, killing people. That was the idea that had been sold to us as a hero. 

But I said, “No, that’s not what a hero is. No, a hero is a person who actually is able to stand up with their own truth no matter what is against that.”

The first thing we did was a big party in 1991. It was targeted at gay men, but some lesbians came and helped us in the whole development, which was just a fantastic show of community as well. That was a huge success, but there was a lot of opposition to our doing that. A lot of people with me thought, “No, you’re wasting a whole lot of money.” 

I said, “No, we’ll make money on this,” and we did. 

Every volunteer who did anything gave their services and their time and their effort… they gave it all for free. And that was just extraordinary. The community came together so much.

The Hero Parade was a procession of floats – walking and vehicular, from both community and corporate groups – held in February, a few weeks before the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Around the world, Pride is traditionally celebrated in the month of June to coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Auckland’s inaugural Hero Parade took place in 1992.

RH: The Hero thing, Hero Parades and parties, was a huge celebration of, “We are here, we’re queer, and we’re not going to go away. Nothing is going to stop us now. We are here.” That’s what it felt like. It was empowering. Hero parades were empowering.

I remember on the night of that party – it was in an old railway shed down on the railway yards – I remember standing up above it and watching this group of people dancing and having this wonderful time, and just having tears of pride at these people who were my community. I just felt so proud of them. 

The idea was: a hero is someone who can stand up for your own truths. To not let other people’s negativity affect you badly. To care for others, and to live safely, to deal with the difficult exigencies of existence well, like Aids at that time.

The parade became an annual event, and because this was New Zealand in the 90s, not everybody was on board.

RH: Les Mills was the mayor of Auckland at the time, and he was a good, conservative Christian. He had issues with it. He tried to pretend that he didn’t because his gym, of course, had so many gay people. He didn’t want to get anyone’s back up. But it was a fight.

MS: Metro magazine funded a float that was a caricature of Les Mills’ face to go down the street, so you had that kind of political content going in as well. You had Metro magazine going, “Fuck the mayor. Let’s do something. Let’s pay to build a big paper mache model of him that makes him look like an idiot.” And they did. 

In 1996, the Hero Parade moved from its traditional Queen Street home to Ponsonby Road, where the relaunched Pride Parade would later be held.

MS: In terms of visibility and place, having us in the middle of the city is a good thing, and it shows where we should be. Hero was different from the Pride marches in that it was more anarchic, I would say. Hero had lots of different little community pieces happening within that parade. So, different groups would say, “I want to do this in the Hero parade,” and you’d get some absolutely bizarre and wonderful creations happening. It was an incredible time.

I think that we did deserve to be [on Queen St] smack bang in the middle of the city, like so many other parades have been, so I made that view quite clear. I did find out later there are practical things to consider, and that taking a parade along a flat stretch of road, like Ponsonby Road, is much easier than having trucks having to brake all the time, going down Queen Street, which I’d never ever thought of.

Nicola Legat: Ponsonby Road turned out to be its natural home. A lot of the fire had gone out of it. Everyone just accepted that Hero’s here. If you don’t like it, don’t go on Ponsonby Road, but it’s here.

MS: Some of the floats were quite amateur, and you’d cheer and clap politely, and some of them, you would just go, “Fuck me. How did they think up that?” 

Wayne Otter, who was at the Aids Foundation for a long time, did an absolutely stunning, but quite small, entry into one of the Hero Parades where she was dressed like some sort of fantasy Roman warrior goddess in a chariot being pulled by these semi-naked Legionnaires, and it was absolutely stunning. It had nothing to do with anything else except going, “Wow, that looks fabulous.”

The 1998 parade almost didn’t go ahead after the council’s City Promotions Committee declined a request for funding. Then an unlikely saviour emerged.

Bill Ralston, editor of Metro 1997-2000: It’s very simple. Metro was a magazine focused on Auckland, and I thought the council withdrawal of the [parade] cleanup money was outrageous. When you’ve got a media outlet that focuses on the wellbeing of the city, the health of the city, the enjoyment of the city, it’s important to actually put your money where your mouth is.

We only had $15K in our whole marketing budget. When you consider the number of people who come out, not only to take part in Hero, but just to watch along Ponsonby Road – a lot of them would be our readers and probably would think it was a good idea, so we gave the money to Hero so they could stage the parade.  Metro took what we called a “corporate box” at a restaurant on Ponsonby Road, which we could invite our advertisers to, and they came in droves.

The most embarrassing thing was, at the front of the march, there were a lot of scantly-clad men wearing masks of my face leading the march. And that was almost as embarrassing as being declared “gay man of the year” at the Hero Awards afterwards. [Bill Ralston is straight.]

The 1998 event remains the best-known Hero Parade, in large part for that image of participants wearing Bill Ralston masks. The parade in its entirety is available to watch on NZ on Screen.

Colin Mathura-Jeffree, television presenter and Hero legend: The Hero Parade in 1998 was called Gods and Monsters. They had this wild idea of planets, deities, devils and every wild pagan legend in between. They’d created a huge blue lotus flower that would rise, float over the crowds, 20 feet in the air, and they needed a Hindu goddess in the centre of it. So someone in Auckland Council working with Hero threw my name in the ring.

They called my mother, Rosalie – not my NZ agency at the time – and my mum loved the idea. She knew I was going to have lunch with the Maharani of Udaipur – the Rajput queen – and phoned to tell me. I was apprehensive about the idea but she said, “This is a moment for people who need to see someone like you, so open and carefree about who you are. It will change their life.” Her words excited me. I asked the Maharani, would being a goddess offend? And she smiled and said such honour comes only from Shri Lakshmi.  Two days later I was in Auckland.

After the heyday of the late 90s, Hero fell on hard times. The Auckland City Promotions Committee voted against funding the parade, and while a complaint to the Human Rights Commission was made, the commission said there was “no evidence of discrimination” in the decision. The 2000 parade was cancelled due to lack of financial backing, and the 2001 parade was to be the last.

New Zealand Herald, 27 August 2002: “The showpiece of Auckland’s gay and lesbian community in February all but died last night when the Hero Incorporated Society was wound up. The society, which was debt-free, owned the intellectual property rights to the Hero Parade which would now revert to the Hero Charitable Trust, said society chairwoman Ann Speir. The trust debt is believed to be more than $140,000, and Ms Speir, who is also a trust member, said the trustees were still debating its future.”

Paul Rose:  There were six of us who came together to rescue Hero. The Hero brand managers, we were called, and we managed to produce an offer that actually wound the trust up. I think we ended up paying nine cents in the dollar to the Hero creditors, and there were lots of them.

NL: The kind of clashes that there were between what people thought Hero should be, the clashes over funding, that kind of stuff. It became more sort of granular and event-focused in a way.

MS:  The Hero Parades were festive. From my memory, they had very little corporate influence anywhere or visibility.

CMJ: Hero meant a lot to me. My mum was right – people said seeing me on television did have a wonderful positive effect. But for me I did it especially for those career game changers I met at the beginning of my model life who died of Aids. I stood up in that beautiful lotus flower with their names in my heart and their faces on my mind, while the intense rain and wind blasted me, laughing joyously as I attempted to throw rose petals into the roaring cheering masses of people, while my sari totally unraveled and fell off. 

I celebrated the heroes that were game changers to me.

RH: There was opposition, but there was much more enthusiasm, not only from the gay community, but from the public as a whole, people just loved it. They loved the joy, the unity, the expressions of it. Over those few years, I had so many young gay men and women come up to me and say, “This has been the thing that made my coming out possible. Hero inspired me to accept who I was.”