Jessie Lewthwaite celebrates our queerest capital.
By a happy coincidence, I ended up having back-to-back party weekends away in the capital. Coming down from Auckland, I was concerned my soft Australian skin would be cold, and I was especially worried about how the gale-force winds would affect my hair, which I sculpt to make it look messy and like I don’t care, but it takes me 20 minutes to get it right. However, this little capital city had a heart that pulsed rainbow after dark—right there between the government buildings and the vape smoke.
There’s something beautifully scrappy about queerness in Wellington. Cuba Street is somehow an aspirational mix of Melbourne and San Francisco, with the way it is trying to look so rooted in the soul of the real people and their stories, but will still charge you $8 for an oat flat white. They love a stylishly mismatched outfit that looks like it came from both a costume box and a climate protest. You’ll find drag artists running fundraisers for trans youth one night and performing ABBA covers the next. You’ll see dykes in flannel slow dancing with poets who’ve just come out as non-binary, and no one bats an eye. Everyone’s a little bit earnest, a little bit awkward, and entirely unbothered by the forecast.
A Saturday at Ivy feels like the full queer life cycle condensed into a few hours: teenagers testing out their first lipstick names, long-time lovers slow dancing to a remix of Florence + The Machine, someone’s mum buying everyone tequila in a show of allyship. If you loiter by the smoking area long enough, you’ll inevitably end up in a conversation about whether the alphabet acronym should expand again or collapse gracefully. It’s queer academia, but in crop tops and harnesses.
Wellington is also relentlessly queer, which I absolutely love for a capital city. As an Australian, the idea of going to Canberra and expecting it to be a beacon of queer culture is hilarious. How do you expect the suits of public service to also serve drag realness after dark? But Wellington goes from corporate button-down bars overcharging during happy hour to a bookshop hosting a sapphic book club within about 100m of each other. The queerness is so powerful that when I saw the Beehive, and remembered who is our current Queen Bee, it felt so out of place in a city like this. The capital truly has everything—whether you are searching for coffee that’s ethical, a government that’s corrupt, or a nightlife where you can actually find a femme on a weeknight.
Wellington queer culture is like your eccentric artsy aunt who wears hand-knitted rainbow scarves and drags you to queer book launches, while Auckland is more your posh cousin who brunches in Ponsonby and only remembers Pride if it comes with a sponsored cocktail. In Wellington, 11% of people openly ticked the rainbow box on the census—possibly because nobody here cares if you show up to yoga in drag, or argue about Judith Butler over craft beer. Auckland, meanwhile, is still figuring out if it’s the next Sydney or just really into beige apartments with “bi-curious” lighting. Both cities host legendary queer nights, but in Wellington, you’ll stumble into Ivy Bar midweek and find half the crowd debating pronouns over poetry slams, while in Auckland, you’ll need a group chat, a cover charge, and a backup plan for when the Uber cancels.
Wellington is a tiny act of resistance, a love letter written in thick eyeliner and loud laughter. It’s not perfect—but perfection never looked this good in flannel anyway.
