Sydney gay club forced to change name after community backlash

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A gay club about to open on Sydney’s Oxford Street has been forced to change its name after community outrage about its marketing towards young gay men despite being named after a song by lesbian singer Chappell Roan.

Michael Lewis, who runs gay club Palms on Oxford Street, plans to open another club in December with owner Kevin Du-Val on the site of the former venue Two 3 One, which he had intended to call Pink Pony.

Formerly club Two 3 One, the venue was set to be the home of Pink Pony – which is undergoing a name change.

However, members of Sydney’s lesbian community told the Herald the club’s pandering towards men while using the name Pink Pony, taken from a lesbian anthem, felt “hurtful” and “distasteful”.

“It’s pretty distasteful to take the term Pink Pony Club … from probably the most well-recognised lesbian pop star in the world right now and apply it to a venue that, from the get-go, has been explicitly described as ideally 90 per cent men,” lesbian drag queen Jasmine Noud said.

Jedda Riley, an Aboriginal transgender woman and drag queen, said the name felt hurtful and was a symptom of a broader gender issue in Sydney’s queer nightlife community.

Jedda Riley performing at Yabun festival in 2024.

“When I saw the name of the club … I was personally hurt by it because the song – that really doesn’t represent who [Chappell Roan] is as an artist. A lot of her fans and a lot of people who love her saw straight through that,” Riley said.

“It’s just really solidified the fact that there is this undertone, this cultural problem, of you are not welcome … the queer scene in Sydney reeks of misogyny. They don’t create safe spaces for women, and particularly trans women.

“If we look at Oxford Street as a whole, where are the female spaces? Where are the female events?”

Noud agreed.

Lewis acknowledged the anger and confirmed the name change on social media after the club’s Instagram handle was changed to “new.name.coming”.

“We acknowledge and respect the very passionate feedback provided, and it is clear that it’s best we move forward with a different name,” he said in a statement.

Before the backlash, Lewis said he wanted the venue to be 90 per cent male.

Lewis also runs Palms on Oxford, which is 200 metres from the site which has drawn controversy.

“[Pink Pony will] unashamedly be targeted at the boys, pretty much 18 to 35, and of course there’ll be overlapping above that, just as there is underlap at Palms [with] under 35s”, Lewis told Gay Sydney News before the name change.

“Of course the girls will be welcome, but it would certainly be our desire that it is predominantly gay boys, and when I say predominantly, I’m sort of talking 90 per cent plus.”

Pink Pony Club by queer advocate Roan has racked up close to a billion streams on Spotify and is her second most popular song.

Roan is famous for singing about queer and lesbian-related themes. Pink Pony Club references the inner battle of leaving a small town and going to a gay club where she’d be accepted for her sexuality. It was inspired by Roan’s time at The Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood.