After Visibility, What Comes Next?
We fought to be seen. But being seen can still feel lonely, kesepian.
Queer people are quite good at throwing parties. IQC knows this because we have thrown a few ourselves.
We have marched at Sydney Mardi Gras, organised Indonesian queer parties, put drag performers on stage, screened films and served Indonesian food. There is almost always something happening at the last minute, but somehow we make it work. Very rempong: our Indonesian queer slang for when things get a little complicated, chaotic and unnecessarily dramatic.
We love all of it.
Visibility matters. There is something powerful about seeing Indonesian queer people taking up space in Sydney, especially when culture and queerness are sometimes treated as if they belong in separate rooms. A lot of IQC's early work came from that idea. Before becoming a registered charity in 2025, IQC grew from a grassroots community around Sydney Mardi Gras marches and Indonesian queer parties. Today, our work includes performing arts, film, storytelling, music, food and other forms of cultural expression.
But after doing this for a while, we started noticing something:
Being in the same room does not necessarily mean people know each other.
You can have 300 people at a party and still only talk to the three friends you arrived with. You can attend Pride, take a photo, watch a performance and go home. You can follow someone on Instagram for two years and still have absolutely no idea what they do for a living.
We are not saying there is anything wrong with that. Sometimes you just want to dance.
But loneliness does not necessarily disappear because we have more places to be visible.
You can be surrounded by people who share part of your identity and still not feel particularly connected to anyone in the room. Research from The Rainbow Resources report, on Australia's LGBTQIA+ community sector reflects this too: organisations working on community development and peer networks are also addressing social isolation and loneliness.
It made us think about what happens after visibility.
Community is not an audience.
This has changed how we think about the word community. It is an easy word to use. Put 50 queer people in a room and we can call it a community event. Put 500 people in a venue and we can say we engaged 500 members of the community. Technically, perhaps.
But IQC is interested in something harder to measure:
Did anyone meet someone new? Did they come back? Did somebody who first attended as a guest eventually become a volunteer? Did an Indonesian artist meet an Australian organisation they later worked with? Did someone feel comfortable enough to bring a friend next time?
Maybe there is something quite Indonesian about this. We have an old expression, “makan gak makan, asal kumpul”: whether there is food or not, what matters is being together. It even became a song by Indonesian rock band Slank in the late 1990s. For us, kumpul is the important word. To gather. To spend time together. Although, being IQC, there will probably still be food.
That spirit sits naturally in some of our smaller events. Our Stronger Together gatherings are simple: food, conversation and spending time together. At our IQC Open House, community members, artists and organisations gathered around Indonesian food, performances and a Tumpeng. During Pride Fest 2026, we tried different formats: film, variety, food, coffee, dance, drag and conversation.
Different formats, different crowds, but the interesting part was often what happened around the program. Someone arrived alone and talked to someone new. An artist met another artist. A volunteer met someone from another organisation. Someone tried an Indonesian dessert they had never heard of and asked the person next to them what exactly they were eating.
Small things, perhaps. But we are starting to think they are the important things.
Culture gives us a very good excuse to meet. Food helps. Film helps. Music helps. Drag definitely helps.
Then people have to do the rest.
We are smaller than we look
Recently, some of our volunteers joked that people seem to think IQC is a grande organisation.
We take that as a compliment. The reality is much less grande. IQC is run entirely by volunteers, balancing this work with full-time jobs, life and everything else.
But perhaps being small is part of our power. There is an Indonesian principle that feels very familiar to how IQC works: gotong royong. Simply put, it means working together and helping each other to get something done. Someone brings the food, someone performs, someone takes photos, someone knows a venue, someone stays behind to clean up. Nobody does everything, but together, somehow, things happen.
That is very much IQC. We may not have the resources of a large institution, but we have people who contribute what they can. Being small also means we can stay close to the people we work with, experiment, notice who keeps coming back and introduce people to each other. Relationships are not something that happens around our work. Relationships are how much of the work happens.
That is why GiveOUT Day matters to organisations like ours. Held on every 15 October, GiveOUT Day is Australia's national fundraising campaign supporting LGBTQIA+ charities and community organisations, with eligible donations doubled through matched funding. Despite a strong tradition of volunteering and grassroots community organising, Australia's LGBTQIA+ sector remains chronically under-resourced. Research by Aurora and GiveOUT also highlights the importance of lived experience in driving meaningful, community-led work..
In 2025, we joined GiveOUT Day for the first time and raised $3,130. Nobody at IQC resigned from their day job, but for a small volunteer-led organisation, that money could do something very real.
It helped us create Tumpeng for Tomorrow, our official launch at Qtopia Sydney, supporting an Indonesian queer artist, food and desserts, photography and event costs. More importantly, it brought volunteers, creatives, supporters and community organisations around the same table. GiveOUT’s 2025 Impact Report later noted that IQC connected with new organisations and built meaningful relationships through the campaign.
That part stayed with us:
The money helped make the event possible.
Gotong royong made it ours.
And the event helped make new relationships possible.
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Maybe fundraising can feel more like hospitality
As Indonesians, we have a very convenient solution for bringing people together: food.
Our official launch centred around a Tumpeng, the cone-shaped rice dish traditionally shared during Indonesian celebrations. There is something about sharing food that removes some of the awkwardness from meeting new people. You do not necessarily need a networking activity or an elaborate icebreaker. Sometimes you can simply start with, “Have you tried this?”
That can be enough.
It has also influenced how we think about fundraising. We do need money. There is no sophisticated way around that. Venues cost money. Artists should be paid. Food costs money. Insurance, administration and all the boring things nobody puts on Instagram also cost money. The wider LGBTQIA+ sector faces the same challenge, with research by Aurora and GiveOUT describing a community sector that remains chronically under-resourced.
But we do not want our relationship with supporters to end when someone clicks Donate. We would rather say: thank you, now come and meet us.
That is the spirit behind this year's Pass the Tumpeng, our GiveOUT Day 2026 fundraising campaign, which raised $3,140 from our generous donors. Their support is helping us bring our Open House to life, connecting volunteers, donors, Indonesian creatives, community partners and people from Australia's diverse LGBTQIA+ communities through food, arts and cultural exchange.
Last year, the Tumpeng helped us celebrate the beginning of IQC. This year, we want to pass it around. We want supporters to meet the volunteers doing the work, creatives to meet community organisations, and someone who has only followed IQC online to finally walk into the room.
Not everyone will become best friends. Some might stay for an hour, eat the food and leave. That is fine too. One gathering will not solve loneliness, and community cannot manufacture friendship. What we can do is create more chances for connection to happen.
IQC will still perform, march, make noise, wear ridiculous costumes and take up space. Visibility still matters. But sometimes community happens after the performance, when the room gets quieter and someone asks, “So, how did you find IQC?”
And then the conversation starts.
Visibility helps us find each other. Connection is what happens next.
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