Pride: A Celebration in Pink

Saturday, June 29, 1991
The Concert Hall

“The GCDC had challenges with the volunteer base shrinking because HIV was causing ill health. People didn’t have the energy to be able to donate their time to be able to staff the events, and that was a large part to the winding down of the GCDC. We just didn’t have the volunteer base any longer to be able to continue offering the event.”

– Ron Merko, GCDC Organiser

By the early 1990s, GCDC’s volunteer base had shrunk considerably. As the quotations below indicate, this was partly due to HIV/AIDS decimating the LGBTQ2+ community. Many people who were previously active in community organising were falling ill and dying; many of those who weren’t falling ill from HIV/AIDS were spending their time and energy caring for friends and lovers who were ill. The exhaustion from caregiving and burying friends left little energy for volunteering.

“The demise, I think, was the combination of AIDS and people getting worn out of doing it. It’s hard to imagine those times but everyone was dying. People would get sick and then they’d be dead three weeks later."

– Chris Lea, GCDC Organiser

Participating group membership would lapse after groups failed to provide a representative for multiple meetings in a row, or by failing to provide a sufficient number of volunteers for dances. Many groups–from The ArQuives to Zami–lost their member status at GCDC for brief periods of time. Groups could reapply for membership and were often welcomed back into the fold. 

“AIDS just created an exhaustion and the people, maybe the first generation of organisers coming out of that initial '70s mindset of working together to do these things, people went on to do other stuff, they didn't want to do this anymore, [it] just became repetitious and it was harder to get volunteers so it just kind of fell apart."

– Ed Jackson, GCDC Attendee