Friends of Dorothy holds a mirror to Sydney’s gay and lesbian community over thirty years, remembered and photographed by William Yang.

With intimate stories and sexy, provocative images, William opens the door to his life and heart as a young Queensland-born, Australian-Chinese gay man coming of age in the late sixties. How William fits, and doesn’t fit, into the changing fabric of Sydney’s gay world resonates more broadly with the ever-changing cultural and political face of Australia.

It’s a story of sex and love, of culture and politics, of struggle and loss… from the wild seventies to the safe, and sometimes unsafe, and paranoid, nineties. It’s both a documentary history of gay Sydney, and a moving personal remembrance, as William weaves his own story with that of some of his closest friends.

Meet Peter Tully and David McDiarmid, creative and political artists whose early contributions to the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras inspired the imaginative and festive parade of today; Peter Blazey, the flamboyant journalist with whom William did a gossip column in the eighties; Allan, who had never known the closet.

Yang says: “I left Brisbane in 1969 and came to Sydney to live. Here, without a past history, I found it easy to assume a new identity. It so happened that the time when I arrived coincided with the beginning of the post-Stonewall gay movement in Australia. I have carried my camera to gay events in Sydney for over twenty years. I have gathered together some of these moments in time into a haphazard document of Sydney’s gay sub-culture. It’s a personal view and I make no apologies for that.”

“(Friends of Dorothy) is never sentimental but tenderly exquisite as the storyteller (Yang) and his sound collaborator Simon Hunt entertainingly assemble a liberated ‘Boys Own Adventure’.” The Sydney Morning Herald

William Yang