#the wickham

[qnewsau]

Brisbane Hustlers strip off for Rugger Bugger fundraiser

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/brisbane-hustlers-strip-off-for-rugger-bugger-fundraiser/

Brisbane Hustlers strip off for Rugger Bugger fundraiser

The rugby players from the Brisbane Hustlers stripped off for their annual Rugger Bugger striptease fundraiser on Friday night.

All year, the gay and inclusive rugby union club fundraise to support their sport and their trips overseas.

One of the club’s biggest annual events is the Rugger Bugger. For six weeks, the Hustlers have been hard at work learning and rehearsing their dance moves for the big night on Friday (October 18).

Brisbane drag performer Martoya Jackson accompanied the Hustlers on stage as they took over The Wickham, delivering multiple dance numbers, stripping off and auctioning off Hustlers gear to raise money.

Image: courtesy of Tina Eastley

Crowds packed the Fortitude Valley pub on Friday night to see the rugby players put on a show.

The Hustlers told us that by the end of the night, they’d raised more than $3500 for the club.

The Brisbane Hustlers fundraise for not just their season at home but also the club’s trips overseas to the Bingham Cup.

Image: courtesy of Tina Eastley

In May this year, the Hustlers flew to Italy with Australia’s other gay and inclusive rugby clubs to compete at the biennial World Cup of gay rugby.

This year was a special one. The Hustlers presented their final pitch in their bid to bring Bingham here.

In August, International Gay Rugby confirmed the Hustlers would host the Bingham Cup and the Amanda Mark Cup in Brisbane in late August 2026.

Thousands of players and supporters from countries around the world will come to the city for the tournament.

In 2022, Bingham also introduced the Amanda Mark Cup, an inaugural event at the tournament for women’s rugby.

The Brisbane Hustlers also proudly celebrated their 20th anniversary this year.

Special thanks to Tina Eastley for the photos!

Read more:

Brisbane Hustlers fly to Rome to bring Bingham Cup home

20 years ago, gay rugby club Brisbane Hustlers was founded

Our gay rugby clubs cheer their Bingham Cup results

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[besotted-with-austen]

Jane Austen: so, you go to Mr Collins' house and Elizabeth is there alone. She welcomes you politely, but she looks---troubled.

Colonel Fitzwilliam: and of course she does, after everything I said to her-

Fitzwilliam Darcy: do I sense if she is mad at me specifically or it is just her headache?

Jane Austen: roll an Investigation Check.

Fitzwilliam Darcy: *grimacing* it's a three.

Jane Austen: just her headache.

Caroline Bingley: *derisively* she only looks like she wants to stab you, Darcy.

Fitzwilliam Darcy: *shrugs* I guess I am too nervous to really give her a proper look.

Jane Austen: what do you do next?

Fitzwilliam Darcy: well, I-I tell her, "In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

Jane Austen: Elizabeth blushes. She is absolutely stunned.

Georgiana Darcy: that is good, right? Right?

Fitzwilliam Darcy: I tell her that even if her family is--not ideal-

Charles Bingley: *making a face*

Caroline Bingley: *playfully disgusted frown* and I made my character romance you?

Fitzwilliam Darcy: -and I might be acting impulsively, I just have to let her know that I love her. That's it.

**Silence**

Jane Austen: *smacks her lips* okay-

Charles Bingley: *histerical laughter* I don't like the way you said it-

Colonel Fitzwilliam: it's an immediate natural one, yes? Please tell me it's immediate.

Georgiana Darcy: shhhh!

Jane Austen: give me a Persuasion Check-let me tell you, you have to roll very high.

Fitzwilliam Darcy: figures-very well-

Fitzwilliam Darcy: *beat*

Fitzwilliam Darcy: *flatly* natural one.

Colonel Fitzwilliam: JUSTICE!

Jane Austen: *claps her hands* you make your grand love confession, but Elizabeth stops you and immediately rejects you.

Fitzwilliam Darcy: ouch.

Jane Austen: she tells you that she could never marry the person that hurt her sister and destroyed Wickham's future-

Fitzwilliam Darcy: *dawning horror* I had forgotten they had talked, fuck-

Jane Austen: and, finally-

Charles Bingley: there is more? He is already dead-

Jane Austen: Elizabeth looks at you dead in the eye and says: "From the very beginning—from the first moment, I may almost say—of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

Fitzwilliam Darcy: damn.

Caroline Bingley: *dying of laughter under the table*

Charles Bingley: I do not know if I can resurrect you after that.

Georgiana Darcy: I knew it, I should have given you Bardic Inspiration-

[firawren]

Pride and Prejudice 1995 text posts, part 1 of ? - next set

More: Persuasion 1995 text posts | Sense and Sensibility 1995 text posts | Northanger Abbey 2007 text posts | Emma. 2020 text posts

[probablyday]

millennial nerd bertie wooster for some reason

[aquitainequeen]

I've always liked the establishing character moments in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice; e.g. Bingley is jolly and friendly but tends to be a little too reliant on Darcy's advice and approval; Darcy's rich and snobbish while also a good friend to Bingley; Elizabeth is cheerful and independent; Mr. Bennet is scholarly and clearly isn't that fond of his wife and younger daughters, but obviously loves Elizabeth, etc.

But I've only just now realised that Georgiana Darcy has three such moments.

The first is when Caroline is telling Jane via letter that the Bingleys are going to stay in London for a while, and that she's hoping that her brother will marry Georgiana. We've heard her mentioned before by Darcy, Caroline and Wickham; now we see her in person for the first time, standing arm in arm with her brother before confidently going to meet Bingley:

This is a really interesting moment, because it could be what happened in reality - but that's highly doubtful; Georgiana is far too confident here compared with what we see later in the story and it's very unlikely she'd be interested in a new suitor after what happened so recently with Wickham. Thus it's either Caroline playing up their meeting in her own mind, anticipating their courtship and marriage, or it's Elizabeth picturing what happened, fuelled by her own resentment of how Wickham was supposedly treated by the proud, selfish, unfeeling Darcys. So the first time we see Georgiana is deeply influenced by what two other very biased characters think they see.

The next moment is here:

This time around Georgiana doesn't say a word or take the initiative; it's Wickham who takes her hand to kiss it, flirts excessively with her without saying a word, and strides off while she looks after him longingly, the beginnings of her smile fading as Darcy's handwriting takes over the screen. This is a rather biased moment as well; it's Darcy's flashback and he wasn't here for this bit, so he'd inevitably picture Georgiana as a sweet innocent completely swept off her feet by the charming man he so despises - but Darcy also knows his sister far better than Caroline and Elizabeth do, and she confesses everything to him once he discovers them at Ramsgate, so this is very likely how it went down in real life. And thus we get that much closer to the real Georgiana.

Finally, at the beginning of the fifth episode, we meet Georgiana in the flesh,

waiting nervously to be introduced,

smiling as soon as Darcy steps aside,

so nervous but so very pleased to meet Elizabeth,

hesistant and selfconcious but very interested in learning more about Elizabeth, coming further out of her protective shell, full of love and praise for her brother, earnestly saying that she should have liked to have had a sister. And Elizabeth, like the audience, is charmed by the real Georgiana.

[bethanydelleman]

One text post for each dubious male character in each Austen novel

George Wickham, Pride & Prejudice

Mr. Elliot, Persuasion

John Thorpe, Northanger Abbey

John Willoughby, Sense & Sensibility

Henry Crawford, Mansfield Park

Frank Churchill, Emma

Bonus:

Jane Austen Text Posts

[didanagy]

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (2005)

dir. joe wright

[princesssarisa]

My post about whether or not Lydia should be saved from Wickham in modern Pride and Prejudice retellings has gotten more likes and reblogs than I expected. It's made me think of another possibility of why Austen didn't save her from him.

Presumably, Lydia and Wickham's marriage could have been avoided in only three ways that would have left Lydia's reputation intact. The first is if they had only been planning to elope, but it was prevented, as with Georgiana. The second is if they had been found earlier and separated before Lydia lost her virginity. Or else Lydia could have listened to Darcy and left Wickham, and then Darcy could have used his influence to protect her honor: e.g. by claiming that she was kidnapped, or by arranging a decent marriage for her.

If Austen had wanted to make any of those choices to free Lydia, she could have done it without drastically changing the plot. But if she had, it might have felt a bit too "literary" and unrealistic.

I've just been re-watching some of Dr. Octavia Cox's literary analysis videos on YouTube. They reminded me that Austen always loved to skewer the tropes and clichés of other literature, especially Gothic melodrama, whether in outright parody or in subtler deconstruction.

Dr. Cox's video on the elder Eliza's fate in Sense and Sensibility particularly highlights this trend in Austen. She argues that Eliza's story is a classic, clichéd Gothic melodrama (a beautiful orphan, an abusive uncle, thwarted romance, forced marriage to a cruel man, a "fall" into a life of "sin," and ultimate illness and death, all narrated by Colonel Brandon in heightened, poetic language), and that Austen's point in including it was arguably to highlight that this wouldn't be the fate of her heroines. Marianne comes close to it with Willoughby and with her near-fatal illness, but in the end she's saved. Austen's point was arguably to say "Yes, I know all about this type of melodrama, I know all the clichés, but I'm relegating it to the backstory, because that's not what I want to write."

(I don't know if everyone would interpret the elder Eliza's storyline this way, but it's how Dr. Cox reads it.)

Maybe with Lydia's fate, and with the backstory of how Georgiana was freed from Wickham, Austen was doing something similar.

I'm not enough of an expert on Georgian literature to know if the rescuing of girls from predatory men with their virginity and honor intact was a cliché or not. But it does appear in late 18th century comic opera. For example, Mozart's Don Giovanni: the title character is the ultimate womanizer, but he has no success with any of the women he tries to prey on over the course of the opera. His seductions are stopped by the timely, chance arrivals of his enemies, his victims get away unscathed, and he pays for his crimes with his life in the end. Or The Marriage of Figaro: the Count's designs on Susanna are thwarted, and he's humiliated and forced to beg his wife's forgiveness.

If stories of womanizers being thwarted and punished, and their female victims saved with virtue intact, were as common in the literature of the day as they are in opera from that era, then maybe Austen used Wickham and Lydia to deconstruct them.

We definitely see some skewering of poetic cliche in the fact that despite Mrs. Bennet's fears/hopes, Lydia's honor is saved with a bribe instead of a duel.

Maybe like the Eliza backstory in Sense and Sensibility, the backstory of Georgiana's near-elopement can be read as a more perfect "literary" example of a girl escaping a cad's clutches. The elopement was thwarted partly by pure chance, as Darcy paid a surprise visit just before Wickham and Georgiana meant to run off, and partly because Georgiana was a “good victim,” whose conscience got the better of her and who chose her family and honor over her whirlwind romance.

But similar luck isn't on Lydia's side, nor does she make the right, “virtuous" choices. Darcy doesn't find the lovers until Lydia has already been living with Wickham, and like a typical reckless teenager, she cares nothing for either her reputation or her family compared to her infatuation with him. So Darcy is forced to bribe Wickham to marry her, Wickham goes unpunished except that he loses his hope of marrying rich, and all the characters have to live with the results of the scandal for the rest of their lives.

By having Georgiana's successful escape from Wickham be mere backstory while foregrounding Lydia's lack of escape, maybe once again Austen was saying "I could have freed Lydia this way – I know the tropes other authors might have used to free her – but I'm a more cynically realistic writer than that, so I won't."

I have no idea if this is valid or not, but it's a theory.

[fancy-nancy-all-grown-up]

girls want boys to act how they do in jane austen novels and they do—but it’s mr wickham

[anghraine]

This is unnecessarily long, but: I was just thinking about Wickham's predation on fifteen-year-old Georgiana Darcy and then, almost exactly a year later, Wickham's predation on sixteen-year-old Lydia Bennet.

There are obvious parallels between the two incidents. In fact, they're so obvious that I think the incidents are sometimes treated as equivalent, with the consequences only differing by happenstance. I don't think that's true, personally.

There are some mechanistic sort of differences—Wickham put a lot more effort and planning into the Georgiana situation. He wanted to marry her for her money and to make her brother suffer. She had to be isolated from people who would look out for her interests, he had Mrs Younge in place, he had known Georgiana as a child and was able to exploit his own previous kindness to her as her father's godson, etc.

And Georgiana, despite all of this, and despite being swept away by a teenage infatuation with an extremely attractive man, was still uncomfortable with it. She was worried about disappointing a brother who raised her and whom she deeply loves and admires. When her brother actually showed up by surprise, she decided to tell him everything; Darcy takes pains to give her credit for this. Adaptations generally downplay Georgiana's active decision-making here, but the only element of chance is Darcy deciding to go to Ramsgate at all. He insists that he was only able to act because Georgiana chose to tell him what was going on.

This isn't meant to be an indictment of Lydia, though. Does she admire the parents who raised her? No. But why would she? Especially why would she admire a father who treats her mother and sisters and herself with profound contempt and no sense of responsibility? Why would she ever confide in him?

It's not like Lydia doesn't confide in anyone. In fact, she too confides in an older sibling, her sister Kitty. And in one sense, her trust in Kitty is not undeserved. Kitty does keep the secret. Presumably, she does this because, despite her occasional annoyance with Lydia, she is very much under her influence and goes along with whatever Lydia does. Regardless, she is trustworthy in that sense. Moreover, we see at the end of the book that Kitty is easily improved by being placed in better environments and taught how to behave. She just didn't know better.

How was she going to judge Lydia's situation correctly? Who was teaching her to judge anything correctly? Certainly not their parents.

If Mr Bennet had bothered to interest himself in his younger daughters and try and influence them for the better, impressionable Kitty is probably the one who would have benefited the most. The whole Lydia/Wickham thing would have fallen apart before it went anywhere if all the girls had been been properly raised, even if Lydia did exactly the same things.

And Lydia likely wouldn't do the same things if she'd been brought up properly and, you know, treated with a baseline of respect rather than being openly mocked by her father, the person most able to affect her development. Instead, at barely sixteen, she's been continually rejected by her father, over-indulged by her mother, and flattered by adult men (28-y-o Darcy says he and Wickham are nearly the same age). And she still tells someone what's going on, even though she doesn't care about her parents' opinions or the consequences of her actions. And she was under the protection of a colonel and his wife at the time, who also could have told someone or acted, and didn't.

It's not that nobody could have done anything about the Lydia/Wickham situation. It's that nobody did until Darcy found out and tried to extract her. But it was, in one sense, too late. To Lydia, he's just some unfun acquaintance who says boring things like "go home to your family and I'll do what I can to cover for you." That is, he tries to do what he did for Georgiana.

But Lydia is not Georgiana—she did not choose to tell him about any of this. She did not want to be extracted because she didn't know and couldn't be quickly made to understand what marriage to Wickham would mean in the long term. And she didn't care what her family thought because she had no reason to, pragmatically or psychologically.

Georgiana, otoh, did care about her family's welfare and the good opinion and affection of the head of her family. But despite their radical differences in personality, the most fundamental difference between the girls IMO is that Georgiana had every reason to believe that disappointing Darcy and losing his respect would be a change from the norm.

Normally he is affectionate and attentive towards her. They write each other long letters, he defends her to other family members, and praises her frequently. Georgiana, quiet and intimidated though she may be, talks more when he's around. Disappointing him had actual stakes for her.

Put another way, the potential loss of his good opinion mattered to her because he's gone to the trouble of raising her as well as he can and forming a good relationship with her. She chose to tell Darcy the whole thing because he had earned her affection and trust in a way that Mr Bennet has utterly failed to do. Even Darcy happening to visit Georgiana at Ramsgate comes from his affection and attention to Georgiana's welfare, even if he couldn't have known what would follow from checking on his sister at that particular moment.

Chance is always part of life, and it's part of the novel and these situations. But a lot of how these scenarios wound out was not determined by chance but by long-existing patterns in these girls' educations and relationships.

[the-home]

[qnewsau]

Poof Doof hosts official Big Gay Day after party in Brisbane

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/poof-doof-hosts-official-big-gay-day-after-party-in-brisbane/

Poof Doof hosts official Big Gay Day after party in Brisbane

The Wickham and queer party pros Poof Doof have again joined forces to host the official Big Gay after party at the pub.

Big Gay Day is one of Brisbane’s biggest and best street parties. On Sunday, May 5, 2024, the pride celebration will again take over The Wickham and shut down an inner-city street to drop in a big main stage boasting an all-day lineup of musical acts, DJs, drag extravaganzas and more.

Legendary US drag queen Lady Bunny and Spice Girl Melanie C (returning to the Big Gay Day stage for a DJ set) are headlining on the Big Gay Day main stage. They’re joined by Aussie dance music group Sneaky Sound System and British DJ Tall Paul.

This year’s very camp Big Gay Day theme is The Wickham of Oz.

After the entertainment on Big Gay Day’s main stage wraps up, Poof Doof want all punters to follow the rainbow brick road upstairs at the official after party at The Wickham.

All Big Gay Day ticket holders get free entry to the after party from 9pm that night.

On the DJ decks upstairs will be Jimi The Kween, Argonaut, Richie LeStrange (all pictured above, left to right), Jesse Boyd and Galleon.

Freestyle performers Gogo Bumhole, Pisces, Asphyxia, Charlie, Zelphia Mann and Bizzi Body will also serve up roving go-go shows at the party.

Since it began in 2000, Big Gay Day has become one of Brisbane’s biggest street parties, all to raise money for local LGBTQIA+ charities.

More info and final release Big Gay Day tickets at biggayday.com.au.

  View this post on Instagram

  A post shared by Big Gay Day (@biggaydayofficial)

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[ardentlyinlovedarcy]

George Wickham is supposed to be an incredibly hot character who attracts people at first sight due to his beauty, charm, and charisma. He should be as physically appealing as Darcy. In my personal opinion, so far, Matthew Goode from “Death Comes to Pemberley” (2013) comes closest to this description among all the actors who have played Wickham that I’ve seen.

[firawren]

Pride and Prejudice 1995 text posts, part 4 of ? - prev set, next set

More: Persuasion 1995 text posts | Sense and Sensibility 1995 text posts | Northanger Abbey 2007 text posts | Emma. 2020 text posts

[probablyday]

modern nerd woosterposting and friends

The Posts are going viral again so sure, I'll dig through my drafts. Two of these were written for the same story. Can you guess which ones?

previously: millennial nerd bertie wooster for some reason, millennial nerd woosterposting part 2 act 1 act 1, ukridge buys bitcoin, psmith "meets" elon musk, modern nerd bertie wooster goes viral

[phantomstatistician]

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Sample Size: 3,122 stories

Source: AO3