A hit new musical has found itself in a delicate balancing act of being a stunning contemporary voice for Maltese theatre and reigniting interest in the stories of a lost generation of gay people in Malta. Luke Saydon’s tells the story of Maltese queer communities as they navigated the social prejudices in the 1980s and had the dark spectre of the global pandemic of AIDS as it was known at the time. For those who didn’t live through it, the mental image of what the queer community in Malta looked like in the past can be clouded by the pink and purple tinge of popular culture, with shows like or exploding in popularity.
This is why, for writer and composer Saydon, telling the stories that emerged from Malta during that time is critical to preserving them. “The queer story is a recent one, I think we’ve only had the word ‘queer’ in the tabloids for less than 100 years. We’ve always been around but we’ve only been documented for a relatively recent amount of time,” Saydon said.
“Having the opportunity to explore and study what the queer Maltese story is, I feel it’s something that all of us as queer people thrive to have. We are blessed to be in a world where we now have access to so much literature and art about our story. Where is the Maltese one?” But what burns in Saydon even brighter is a very acute sense of urgency of the time to preserve these stories.
“We can’t wait anymore. We are losing people every single day, every single year. The more ti.
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