The True History of the Lesbian Landslide

An infamous 2011 brawl sends Sally Olds searching for answers.

If you haven’t seen the video before, open a new tab and type “lesbian landslide” into your search bar. Click on the “Mick on X” result. Mick is not the original filmer or poster of the video, but he does repost it every year with a variation on the caption: “As we celebrate #Midsumma today let’s never forget the drama and the piece of history that was the Lesbian Landslide of 2011.”

Press play. We are on a lush green hill—a grassy knoll, really. The sky looks white, and then the camera shifts a little, re-focuses, and the white turns to blue. In the background, there are skyscrapers, and, at ground level, some white-capped pavilions, including a tent for queer radio station Joy FM. In the foreground, there is a massive, messy brawl involving dozens of people. Almost all of the participants are wearing baggy singlets, baggy shorts, and have short spiky hair—there are several dead ringers for P!nk. We are among lesbians and gays. There is a tangle of bodies on the ground, rolling over glass bottles and empty plastic cups. A frantic voice asks: “What did you do, Lou?” A lesbian beseeches: “Why do you do this? Why do you do this?” Someone is slapped, someone pushes someone, and everyone seems to end up on the ground at least once, standing unsteadily and plopping down again like toddlers learning to walk. A gay guy pipes up laconically, from somewhere behind the camera, in a nasal drone: “It’s like a lesbian landslide.”

Press play again. A viewing in 0.5 speed allows surprising new details to emerge, as well as some main characters. These are:

Main character 1: Blonde lesbian (the aggressor). Towards the start of the video, a blonde woman with an orange fake tan is at the centre of a knot of lesbians and gay men. She is swinging and lunging forward, held back by another lesbian in a purple singlet.

Main character 2: Tights lesbian (the peacekeeper). As Blondie swings and misses, a lesbian in black tights with cut-outs all the way up the sides of the legs careens towards her, and seems to be mouthing “Stop!” The next moment, Blondie grabs Tights by her asymmetrically-cut hair and pushes her down the hill. She lands a few metres away, her body off-screen but her head gruesomely rolling into frame, as though she’s been beheaded. The next moment, Blondie slaps a tall gay man who falls over. Blondie then reels, or is pushed, backwards.

Main character 3: Snapback lesbian (the avenger). As this is unfolding centre-screen, a lesbian wearing a snapback cap runs to Tights. In the video, you can hear a question ring out—“Who?” Snapback sprints into the fray and pulls the blonde girl out of the pile of bodies on the ground, hooks an arm around her neck, and yanks her backwards. Blondie goes sprawling. A few moments later, Tights has recovered enough to stand up. She staggers back into the frame, hitches up her bra, and staggers out again. The camera focuses on a large cluster of people, still half-heartedly pushing and shoving each other, but in the corner you can just see an orange-tanned arm flailing; Blondie is still wrestling with Snapback. Finally, Blondie, who has ended up on top, extricates herself from Snapback on the ground.

There are many other participants and possible subplots to follow in the video, but these three are the most spectacularly implicated. They also organise the chaos into allegiances, with Blondie as attacker, and Snapback as the protector of Tights. Beyond that, the relationships are ambiguous. Do they all know each other? Are Snapback and Tights friends, lovers, or spontaneous allies? Are Blondie and Tights pre-existing enemies, feuding exes, or did something else happen on the day? And what of the gay men, who spar with the lesbians throughout? Given the title of the video, it’s surprising that this was evidently not just a lesbian fight, but a fight involving the entire rainbow alphabet—an LGBTQIA+ landslide, if you will.

The video has since become lore in the queer community (I know of someone who throws a lesbian landslide party every year as pre-drinks for St Kilda Pride), not least because it raises many unanswered questions. I wasn’t there in 2011. To quote Tegan and Sara, I was nineteen (and living in Brisbane). I first saw the video a few years ago and, since then, have been desperate to know what sparked the brawl. The working theory has always been infidelity. You can imagine how it might have gone: Tights pashed Snapback behind the portaloos, then Snapback’s long-term girlfriend Blondie found out, so Blondie punched on with Tights, then Blondie’s besties got amongst it, and the rest is herstory. But this theory, while elegant, doesn’t account for the active involvement of the gays.

I started to wonder if Midsumma itself had something to do with the fight. Midsumma nowadays is a giant, sprawling, year-round affair that bills itself as the queer arts festival. It culminates in the St Kilda Pride March and the Victoria’s Pride day party. It contributes millions of dollars to the economy, and attracts over 300,000 attendees. Shirtless muscle men pose beneath the blow-up rainbow (with the Philadelphia trans flag edging up its sides) wearing big white grins. Brunswick co-parents in broad brim felt hats walk their kids to the youth-homelessness charity crêpes truck. How could such a hygienic event have fostered avalanche conditions? The landslide happened on January 16th, 2011. This is only fourteen years ago, but the video feels like a relic from a long-dead civilisation. I found myself wanting to understand the habits of my near yet somehow distant forebears more deeply. I felt that to find out who they were and what they fought about might reveal something crucial about lesbian culture today.

*

Another reason to look now: as time goes by, the landslide’s digital presence is slowly vanishing. The person who hosted it on YouTube for years deleted their account, and the video along with it. A post from 2013 on a tumblr page belonging to “Tammy Tingles” shows a photograph of the area being excavated by yellow diggers. Tingles has captioned it: “REBUILD AND EXCAVATION AFTER THE GREAT MIDSUMMA LESBIAN LANDSLIDE OF 2010 [sic].” It features in a few posts on X, as well as some years-old Facebook threads by Thursgay, the heaving dyke night where many people have their first gay pashes. Earlier this year, the Instagram account innernorth.ai, which uses AI to generate warped, satirical images of queer and cosmopolitan Melbourne life, mocked up the landslide. The images depict scores of identical lesbians—white skin, white shirts, jean shorts, crisp undercuts—slipping and sliding in muddy grass. It’s their most popular post to date.

From what I can tell, the incident has never been acknowledged in any official Midsumma reports, programs, or communications, though I hear it comes up every year in festival planning meetings. I also fancy you can read it between the lines of the annual report released after Midsumma 2011:

“The Carnival for 2011 was in a new location for the first time, and I am confident that next year, with the experience gained…[italics my own]”

“…approximately 100,000 [attended] in comparison to 30,000 in 2010...”

“The weather reached a high of over 30 degrees, at which point the lack of trees and shade became noticeable at the new venue of Birrarung Marr…”

A new location, a massive crowd, and a hot day. The perfect conditions for carnage. Crucially, there was also a steep slope. Bordered by the city and a wire-strung bridge, Birrarung Marr is a grassy wedge of land that descends sharply towards the river. In the program for that year, released just before the festival, Lisa Watts, the Chair wrote: “Carnival has moved to Birrarung Marr! Will the drag queens roll down the hill in impossibly high shoes?” Soon after Midsumma, Watts was interviewed in the Sydney-based magazine Lesbians on the Loose. “The event was marred by a ‘lesbian landslide’ brawl involving several lesbians,” the copy reads, “which has so far clocked up over 13,000 views on YouTube.” Watts is quoted as saying: “It is annoying, and ridiculous. The Midsumma crowd is well-regarded by police and is not aggressive. But if you drink too much and act stupidly, you will get on the internet.”

With little else to go off but the video itself, I began asking around. I messaged every single person tagged in the comments sections of the Thursgay threads. In the intervening years, many of those connected to the slide had seemingly grown up, moved to a forest or a farm, and swapped their studded leather belts for…newer versions of the same studded leather belt. They weren’t checking their Facebook message requests, anyway. From those who were still online, I’ve never received swifter replies—the community rallied around me and my quest. In response to cold DMs requesting information from strangers, I was sent strings of emojis. I was hugged by interviewees. After each minor breakthrough, my sources spurred me on.