Universal Sydney: Gay Sydney Nightlife
Universal Sydney is one of our stable queer venues in gay Sydney nightlife. Owned by Universal Hotels, the venue has been a huge success story for the city’s LGBTQIA+ community, as a venue with a deep history that earns its spot as an icon of Sydney. Gay Sydney Australia sat down with Johnny, one of the managers of the venue, to talk all things Universal. Take a look.
Can you give us a brief snapshot of what someone can expect walking into the venue, who has never been before?
Universal is a two-level venue, so it’s split up into two sections- at the moment. One is the Universal bar, which is downstairs. It’s heavily a drag-focused venue, with seven nights of drag entertainment downstairs, ranging from shows, competitions, and queer open nights. We always have something going on downstairs in the bar.
We’ve also got the Priscilla Corner, our kind of cloakroom that offers drag essentials paired with House of Priscilla down the road.
When you move upstairs to the Universal Superclub, we do have two nights minimum of superclub-style shows. Currently, we’ve got Sanctuary on Fridays and Déjà Vu on Saturdays (see details HERE).
We have a lot of drag and we kind of shuffle through all different types of performers and styles. At the forefront, drag is our main focus and what we love to do.
What makes the venue unique to gay Sydney nightlife?
Not a lot of places have drag every night of the week in gay Sydney nightlife. And our style of drag is very eclectic. So the style of drag you’re getting on a Thursday night with Space Horse and Eli and Jackie is different to what you’re getting with Vibe on a Friday and Carmen or with Sia, Eli and Champagne on a Saturday.
We’re also very community-focused- a lot of the work that we do is collaborating with different charities and events. Sanctuary often will partner with different charities and put a $5 door cover that all goes to various charities. It’s rooted in our history. Both ACON and the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation were founded at Universal Midnight Shift.
Tell us about the history of the venue.
So it was the Midnight Shift originally- which opened in 1981. But before that, this venue opened on the streets as Club 85 in the 1970s, before that it was just a fruit shop on the side of the road (some would argue it still is).
Club 85 was a discreet little bar that hosted queer people and was just getting raided, and raided, and raided by police- and eventually, it was quite literally burnt out. And that was when the Midnight Shift started.
At the start of the HIV epidemic, this is where ACON was coming together and meeting to discuss the response to the crisis. This is where Bobby Goldsmith started. So for as long as people have known, it’s been a venue for the community.
Over that time, attitudes to drag were changing. Priscilla Queen of the Desert came out and people’s fascination with drag was changing and what happened here was there was a big push with really putting these extravagant drag shows on in gay Sydney nightlife.
How did the Midnight Shift Change to Universal?
So for years, the Midnight Shift was really at the top of the game. And as more venues were opening and it was becoming more queer people finding more places to go, it was really at its height. And then through the lockouts, a lot of Sydney started to struggle. The Shift (as it was called then), saw a downturn in audiences.
There was an air of people feeling unsafe on the streets, people struggling to get home because of the lockouts and there were a lot of issues that came with that. So The Shift closed down at the beginning of 2018, and was acquired by Universal Hotels around September 2018.
Universal Hotels at that time owned the Oxford Hotel and had a long history with the queer community. One of their flagship venues, the Civic Hotel, was somewhere that used to host the Diva Awards. They used to work with queens like Trevor Ashley, with Kitty Glitter…
The company’s relationship with the LGBTQIA+ community has been solid from day one. It was almost a perfect fit when this became an option. Nowhere was investing in queer venues, in fact a lot of them were going downhill.
So the company took on Universal and said, let’s give it a go. Dillon Shaw, who’s the licensee, has been with the venue for 15 years. Dillon started as a go-go boy, as a dancer, and has worked his way up to licensing. He’s been instrumental in the direction of the venue.
This venue has almost a 30-year history, so we do want to be respectful and carry those messages that have been there for the last 3 decades.
In what ways is the venue actively maintaining being a “safe space” for queer people?
All the venues on Oxford Street in Sydney that cater to queer people, at the end of the day still are profiting from queer people.
It’s part of our beliefs that if we’re going to profit off this community we have a responsibility to protect the community and to keep our community safe.
An example of that is the street wide initiative with PrideViz. You’ll find a lot of the security guards on Oxford Street will wear the inclusive Pride flag and PrideViz along the back.
It means the guards are asking questions about the right ways to respond to our community and interact with our community. It also sends a message to our patronage that we are a queer space. Our messaging and our performance booking and everything has been queer from day one.
We have messaging on the doors, we have drag artists that stand out the front, and Champagne and Jenna Fluid are out the front every night. People must come across and know that this is a queer community, they’re not going to stumble in here and be confused. We don’t mumble that fact: we want to scream and yell it.
Does Universal Sydney have any exciting future plans you can share with us ?
We’ve got some really exciting things:
We’re upgrading ALL of our bathrooms in the downstairs bar to have 15 cubicles per bathroom which are all easily accessible.
We’ve got a brand new cocktail space opening next door and constant upgrades to our club and production and tech.
We never want to feel stagnant, we never want to feel like we’re stopping, we’re always adapting and growing with the community and seeing what more we can do and how we can invest back into our patrons and our entertainers and our venues
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