Life in Oz: how do gay rights in Australia measure up to those in the States? Right well, thanks, mate. (Gay Games VI Sydney, Australia).

Sydney is about to join the shortlist of aggressively gay-friendly cities that have hosted the Gay Games in its 20-year history. There's little question that the city, which throws the world-famous Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras every February, deserves its place among San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam, and Vancouver, Canada, the previous hosts. It's less clear, however, how the rest of Australia--a huge, rugged country where Great Britain once exiled its criminals--measures up when it comes to acceptance of gay people. Are Americans going to notice a difference in attitude when they go Down Under for the Gay Games?

Yes and no. Not surprisingly, Australia has a lot of similarities to the United States. A strong gay and lesbian presence in the largest cities has resulted in thriving political and cultural scenes, while in the rural areas, it's a little more difficult to find comfortably out gay men and lesbians. Beyond these similarities, however, Australians say their live-and-let-live attitude has resulted in a tangible difference in the way straight and gay people perceive each other and, in turn, spawned more legal recognition for gay people than in the United States.

"On the whole, people are more laidback here, and I think they're less hung up on appearances and external details," says Gillian Kendall, a U.S. expatriate who has lived with her Aussie partner in the Melbourne suburb of Carnegie since December. "Gays and lesbians here are usually much safer to be out and to be clear about, being gays and lesbians, at work or on the street or in teaching or in government."

Kendall's relationship is a good example of the legal protections and recognition afforded to same-sex couples in Australia. Once the 41-year-old has lived with her girlfriend, 36-year-old Nicole Phillips, for 12 months, she is eligible to apply for a resident visa. Binational couples in the United States do not yet have that option.

"In the state of Victoria we have the same property rights and other like rights as married heterosexual couples," explains Leigh Johns, 32, president of Melbourne's popular annual GLBT Midsumma Festival, which takes place in January and February. "That level of acceptance and openness and tolerance is something that makes life here pretty pleasant." Johns, along with his partner of eight years and a lesbian couple, is a proud coparent of a 17-month-old daughter, Mietta.

The bulk of Australian gay society, politics, and culture revolves around the country's two main urban centers: Sydney, a sprawling, gleaming metropolis of more than 4 million people, and Melbourne, an older, more European-style city with just under 3.5 million residents. Both on Australia's southeastern coast, the cities have a dynamic with each other not unlike that between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"Sydney's gay scene tends to be en masse--big, really big--whereas Melbourne does things on a different sort of scale," says Sydney native Dominic O' Grady, editor and publisher of the Web-based Gay Australia Guide. "Mainstream gay life in Sydney is very much about taking your shirt off and partying for as long as you possibly can. They still love to party in Melbourne, but they also like to do their cafes and the restaurants. It's a bit more social, with smaller social groups there."

But size isn't everything, according to Melbournian Johns. "Because the [gay] community is larger in Sydney, it's more disparate," he says. "It lends itself to having more separate organizations catering to different groups within the community. We are a smaller community, but we tend to band together a lot better."

Another difference U.S. visitors may notice is just how little the Australians wear when they go to the beach. While most American men currently favor billowing swim trunks, Australian guys seem to prefer formfitting briefs--much to the delight of Sean Ashby, a gay man whose company, AussieBum, makes many of those briefs.

The fact that two-year-old AussieBum is considered a national corporate Cinderella story speaks to Ashby's confidence in his product and his countrymen's unflappability about sexuality: He uses openly gay men for most of his company's modeling needs. "We don't go out there and say, `Look, we're a gay-owned company, and here's our product, and you should support us,'" Ashby says. "We basically let the product speak for itself. With Australia being a very beach-orientated society, everyone [gay and straight] wears AussieBums."

And when they're not in swimwear, they might be in drag, says O'Grady. "Drag is huge, unbelievably huge," he says. "Drag is really satirical here and really political as well. It ties in with Australians' love of disrespecting authority and questioning social structures. Drag does that really effectively."

Even though Australia's drag scene has launched the mainstream careers of many a lovely "lady" (Sydney drag star Vanessa Wagner was a houseguest this season on the nationally televised Celebrity Big Brother), cross-dressing here isn't just for the boys. Melbourne in particular is home to a burgeoning drag king culture, with weekly performances by such favorites as Maurice Valentino and Jack Shit. "What distinguishes the kings from traditional drag is the distinct lack of lip-synching," says 31-year-old Louise Terry, a product developer for Tourism Victoria. "These girls--sorry, boys--sing and write their own material."

Terry, who lives in Melbourne with partner Grazynka Ziemkiewicz, 26, says that on the whole, lesbian life in Australia "could be likened to lesbian life in many places around the world--generally less visible than the gay male scene and with a limited selection of distinctly dykey nightlife options available."

Not all of Australia's cities are quite so forward-thinking as the big two. Brett Humble, a 30-year-old corporate fitness trainer (and sometime AussieBum model) based in Sydney, says he is much less comfortable being out in his native Perth, 2,000 miles away from Sydney on the country's western coast. With more than 1 million inhabitants, Perth ranks fourth in terms of population, but its isolated location has historically made it a less hospitable place for gay people, he says.

"It's quite hard for a gay man to grow up in Perth," Humble says. "A lot of men from Perth actually leave there and end up either in Melbourne or in Sydney, just because it's more acceptable over this side of the world and, I think, eyes are more opened."

Acceptance of gays and lesbians varies across the vast continent. In northern Queensland, small coastal resort towns are popular gay destinations, while on the island state of Tasmania, gay male sex remained a crime until 1997, and cross-dressing only became legal in 2000.

Still, even in the more remote regions of Australia, there seems to be an increasing amount of acceptance, Johns says. "I was born and bred in [rural] Victoria and escaped to the city to come out and experience a gay life," says the native of Bendigo, population 77,000. "But it's interesting--I can now go back to my country town and there's a gay community there, which, when I left in 1987, would've been unthinkable."

In fact, he says, some towns have undergone complete transformations. "Daylesford [northwest of Melbourne] was once a very small country town that didn't have very much to offer but has now simply been overtaken by gays and lesbians," he says. "It's the spa center of Victoria."

This progress is inherent to the Aussie psyche, O'Grady says. "There's a great tradition among Australians, which is: Each to his own, and let people get on with what they want to get on with," he says. "If you just get on with what you want to do, and you are what you are, people here respect you for that."

Kendall agrees. "People here tend not to be very stuck on themselves," she says. "People here don't care if you're gay or Greek or disabled or English. As long as you're not George W. Bush, you're pretty well accepted."

Allen is the former editor of Los Angeles-based 'zine Planet Homo.

Find Dan Allen's travel diary for his trip across Australia at www.advocate.com