Midsumma Festival

Midsumma Carnival is held during the event's opening weekend and is traditionally held in Alexandra Gardens with stalls, food, and entertainment from 11am to 11pm. The main stage includes entertainment from the upcoming festival program to showcase and promote later events.

Stages: Main Stage and Picnic Stage

Precincts: Sports, Youth, Family, Tea Tent (for older audiences) and a Chill Out Zone

The day is brought to a close with the T Dance, Midsumma's dance party under the stars. Artists who have performed at T Dance include Slinkee Minx, Trevor Ashley, Ricki-Lee, Paul Heron, Inaya Day, and the Divine Knights.

Queer City was a collaboration between City of Melbourne, Arts Victoria, Midsumma, and local galleries and artists from the gay community. In 2012 the Queer City was focused around 1000 Pound Bend Gallery and performance venue in Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne along with City Library and a new exhibition space known as Mailbox 141 on 141 Flinders Lane which has been converted into a small art exhibition space.

There is an exhibition of Vivien St James' work, a celebration of fluid or 'unstable' genders at Platform Space, as well as exhibitions at Guilford Lane Gallery and forty-five more downstairs.

Yarra Arts is the collaboration between the City of Yarra, Arts Victoria, Midsumma, local galleries and artists from the LGBTQIA+ community.

In 2009, this exhibition series featured a premier event from T.J. Bateson, a group show, TransMasculinities, which explored aspects of gender, as well as a range of work at the artist-run gallery initiative 69 Smith Street in Melbourne's Fitzroy. T.J.Bateson's new body of work, Veiled in Plain Sight, was created specifically for Midsumma celebrating the relaunch of Tacit Contemporary Art in Abbotsford. It was off the back of the exhibition series, Transmen Translated in 2008, that artist and curator Jesslyn Moss brought together TransMasculinities, a Midsumma group show featuring photography, painting, drawing and video by eight FTM artists from Australia, the UK and the United States. The exhibition explored new ideas of masculinity and offered an insight into the physical and psychological aspects of transgender butch, gender queer and transmasculine experiences, and was shown at Red Gallery. 69 Smith Street featured work from Benja, Mark Bareald, Gary Campbell, J. Kristensen, Piepke, Mel Simpson and Rat Simpson and explored concepts of identity, relationship and material assumptions through photography, and playful work portraying women's relationships with each other and the open road. The 2009 Yarra Arts Exhibition was launched on Wednesday January 20th at 69 Smith Street Gallery.

In 2012, Ross Watson presented their 25th Anniversary exhibition series entitle Cycles & Sequences which explored cycles of life, notions of time and endurance, change and transition in today's disposable society. Cycles & Sequences included the first ever paintings of the Bel Ami stars, Lukas Ridgeston, Kris Evan and Dolph Lambert. Celebrating positive gay role models in their art has been an important aspect of Watson's work, and this exhibition featured Lance Corporal James Wharton II, who appeared on the front cover of the U.K.'s Armed Forces magazine in 2009, as a soldier who is openly gay.

The majority of Midsumma Festival events are within the umbrella events program, which are created, produced and funded by independent third parties who pay fees for inclusion in the Midsumma Festival. In 2012 there were approximately 160 events.

• List of LGBT events
• Australian Queer Archives holds archival material relating to the Midsumma Festival

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  Carnival
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  T Dance
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  Adam Love
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  Drag