AN ODE: The Bearded Tit Is Dead. Long Live The Tit

The Bearded Tit is soon to be no more, with its last party happening on November 1. After nourishing the artistic and queer scenes for 11 years, the milk of the Bearded Tit will linger on Sydney’s lips forevermore, and its legacy will – hopefully – live on.

On October 18, a few dozen eccentrically dressed people gathered in a reserve in the centre of Redfern. They’re turning heads with their outfits: someone is wearing a gold, sequinned blazer with tassels, another with a keffiyeh around their shoulders and a white robe with Tom of Finland featured on the back, in all his chapped glory. Another person is completely covered head to toe in black lace, absolutely swimming in it, layers of veils obscuring their face entirely. 

A clarinet player in a black, plumed marching band hat and a pair of fake breasts begins to play a mournful tune, and leads a procession down the road to 183 Regent Street. The flock hover outside the venue, blocking the street as the choir, eulogists, and DJs enter the venue first. 

There’s a quiet reverence in the air, people unsure how to act on such an auspicious occasion, but then, a disturbance —  an old man pushing a shopping bag-laden pram splits the crowd, shouting, “move out the way, you cunts! You’re cocksuckers, the lot of you! All cocksuckers!” 

The congregation erupt in cackles and applause, absolutely delighted to be perceived so accurately by a random stranger. 

It’s the perfect start to the Bearded Tit’s funeral.

The beauty & vitality of the Bearded Tit, and why queers adored it

The inner-city bar hosts its final party on November 1, after 11 successful years as one of Sydney’s most sacred queer and artistic venues. 

Joy Ng started the bar with two friends, needing to create a space for their communities to meet outside of a club environment. A “lounge room for our communities”, as she describes it. 

“A lot of us met on the dance floor when we were younger, and we wanted a kind of lounge room for our community,” she said.

The trio lovingly pieced the Tit together from treasures they had lying around or foraged found objects: the timber for the bar and booths was repurposed from old fencing from a friend’s dad’s farm, the tiling all vintage, slotted together painstakingly from Joy’s own collection. 

There’s a crocheted penis in a jar, embroidery framed in gold on the walls, and taxidermied birds displayed in a glass case, watching over the patrons from behind the bar. 

Much of it has been gifted to the venue by artists who’ve performed at the space, thousands of creatives taking to the stage with shows designed to delight, energise, titillate, confuse — some of which would make even the most progressive Inner West boomer a little uncomfortable.

“I’ve always valued artists being able to have alternative spaces to experiment, and I’m really glad that this has been able to be that for other people,” Joy says. “A lot of my friends, the way they started their artistic career, performers or dancers, they started out in unconventional spaces, and a lot of time it was in nightlife, you know, clubs, bars, warehouses, and they hone their craft that way.”

With the way the Tit delights in the unconventional, it’s no surprise that the bar has a hefty queer patronage. The lesbian community especially has taken a fondness to the Tit, so much so that the bar launched Sad Dyke Sundays in 2022, setting aside Sunday afternoons for lesbians and the similarly sapphically inclined queers to come together weekly, one of the most regular dyke events in Sydney. 

A neon sign spelling the words “dyke bar” in pink and red is erected at the front of the bar every Sunday, finding its way to the Tit after being created as part of Macon Reed’s pop up installation Eulogy for the Dyke Bar at the National Art School for World Pride two years ago. On the mantlepiece over the fireplace, a copy of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book and a DVD box set of the L Word stand guard. 

“We’re not a lesbian bar, yeah, but we are an unofficial lesbian space,” Joy says. “We’ve always been run and owned by lesbians, so it has unofficially become that space, but a lot of our friends come in here. People feel comfortable here… but it’s not a single gendered space.” 

One of the eulogists at the funeral describes Joy as the “sharehouse mum of Sydney’s entire queer community”, and it’s a heartwarmingly apt description. With the Tit, Ng curated a space that feels so comfortable, and so safe for so many people, letting people be, as another speaker at the funeral puts it, “positively and negatively ourselves”. 

It’s a sentiment that resonates deeply with me; the Tit has held me through my early adulthood, kept watch over me as I tried poorly to flirt with women twice my age, seen me through speed dates and second dates, friendships and break ups, and the spark of so many different kinds of connection.

Although this feeling of safety comes off as effortless, it’s something that Joy has had to learn to construct. 

“In order to keep a space as safe as possible, you need to be very hardline about certain things,” she says. “It took quite a few years for me to learn about how to actively care for people, and how that care sometimes means that you might say something that they don’t like.”

The Tit is welcoming, but it is exclusive. 

The Bearded Tit and the politics of sharing space

When Joy announced the Tit’s closure six months ago, she said she wasn’t looking for anyone to “save” the bar. Instead, the Bearded Tit will forever be encapsulated as a moment in time, a collection of bodies that came together to dance and laugh and cry for a little over a decade.

“I think it’s important for me that there isn’t another hospitality business,” Joy said of the building’s future. “Hopefully I’ll find a tenant that’s in, like, the medical health field… you’ll come in to get your X-rays here.”

The Bearded Tit is a testament not only to the vitality of alternative, creative, queer spaces, but to the ability of a community to make something unique together, night after night. There’s no reason why more places like this shouldn’t exist, and it might just take a Tit-shaped hole in Sydney’s heart to kick them into gear. 

“I hope that the Tit is like a fire, and then the wind blows and there’s spot fires everywhere,” Joy says. “We need a variety of places, so that everyone can find a place for themselves. And so I’m hoping from this, different people with their own backgrounds, their own histories, can open a place for their particular community, that multiple people do the same, and that they know that it is possible to do that.”

At 12am on November 2, the lights will come on and the Bearded Tit will cease operations forever. The building will be gutted, the timber bar returned to the farm from whence it came, its collection of treasures auctioned off to those wanting a piece of memorabilia to commemorate the space they curated with strangers and lovers alike. 

Writing this story now, tucked away in a booth up the back of the bar on a Sunday afternoon, dykes trickling in, I’m struck with the notion that no matter how hard I try, I won’t ever be able to adequately memoralise the Bearded Tit on paper, but I’m comforted by the fact that to do so exists in opposition with its foundational values.

The phrase “in memory of now” is scattered throughout the bar — it greets you in paint at the front door, emblazoned on wine glasses, on the backs of paper coasters. 

One night, when Joy and her former business partners had been working long days putting the bar together, they trudged, exhausted, to a hotel up the road to eat chicken schnitties before passing out at home and beginning the cycle all over again. A television was playing a boxing match, and they noticed one of the boxers was wearing a belt that read “in memory of now”. 

They were struck by the depth of the sentiment. How incredible, they thought, to be cognisant that the moments you’re living in this exact space in time, are the ones that will shape your history, to wholeheartedly embrace the present in spite of what your past or future hold or may hold. 

The knackered group later realised: the boxer’s belt didn’t say “in memory of now”. It said “in memory of mom”. In their exhaustion, they had misread it entirely, and constructed their own philosophy out of something that only existed between themselves. But, it was perfect. 

The legacy of the Tit will be spoken about for years to come, Tit-framed stories shared at weddings and in club bathrooms and at show openings. But only those there in those moments in time will truly know what it felt like to be held, safely and lovingly, in its walls.

The hearth of the Tit may have to be extinguished, but with any luck, those who love it will leave with embers in their hands, ready to scatter them someplace new. So when you see smoke, go and help stoke the flames — because Sydney needs places like the Bearded Tit.