On Glyn Cryer’s fridge in Fitzroy there is a magnet stating: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” The Same Same 25 member may not be a Zen master but his kitchen philosophy does give insight into how he’s helped shaped Melbourne’s Midsumma organisation into a bonafide business which hosts one of the most exciting GLBTI festivals in the world.
 
Cryer joined Melbourne’s Midsumma half a decade ago and spent two years as Marketing Director and two years as Chair. Having decided that it’s time to move on this year to pursue a business of his own, Cryer will be happy to play volunteer at the upcoming festival in January and February and is excited at the promotion of former Deputy Chair Lisa Watts to the organisation’s helm. Watts has already had to make the tough call to kill off Midsumma’s Opening Night at Federation Square and bring the popular Carnival event forward in the program - which is not yet finalised, and Cryer says the festival will only continue to change. “The thing with community organisations is they can go in totally different directions – and they should go in different directions, according to what people want to get out of them.”

He describes working in Midsumma as “an intense environment” with a huge task representing all of gay Melbourne. “You talk to ten people and there are 12 opinions about what Midsumma should do differently,” he says. “The challenge for Midsumma is to hear all of those opinions and go in those directions that people want to go in.”

Responding to the million dollar question - How Melbourne’s Midsumma differentiates from Sydney’s Mardi Gras festival - Cryer describes the cultural program here as edgier because it’s given precedence over the parties. “The range of expressions of gay life in Melbourne is huge,” he says. “There’s obviously a party scene, but there’s also very strong family and kids scene. There’s a thriving indie arts scene and a huge dinner party circuit. There are a lot of informal but very strong queer networks in Melbourne. If you want to serve a queer community like that, you have to have a very diverse program with a whole lot of smaller events so that you can touch people’s different buttons.”

Cryer’s legacy to Midsumma will be the transformation from having an “onerous” volunteer based board to a business with real jobs and real salaries. And one that gets more support and funding from councils, the state government and corporations than ever before. “It’s a scrappy community organisation that has transformed itself into a fairly professional and normalised organisation – that’s a hard thing to do,” he admits. “I didn’t initiate it, but I’ve been a part of that over the last five or six years.”

By Danny Corvini