PRIDE Festival director John Richards joins The Takeaway podcast to talk about the evolution of Bendigo's queer experience

The Bendigo PRIDE Festival director - who is the first guest on the new Bendigo Advertiser podcast, The Takeaway with Chris Pedler - spoke about the goals the three-week event has for both the queer and broader Bendigo community.

After moving to Bendigo to escape the hipster sprawl of Melbourne, Richards inherited the festival.

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"[My husband and I] used to come for the gallery and we know people who grew up here and had a fairly grim youth," he said.

"It was quite poor, quite rough in some areas. We've come in going it's got an amazing gallery, cafes and restaurants. So we have come in to the good stuff."

Before the PRIDE Festival, the Queer Film Festival had been around for nearly two decades, and there was the Queer Art Exhibition in Dudley House.

"PRIDE came out of some money from the state government for mental health and Bendigo ended up running a festival on short notice and I sort of took it over after the first year," Richards said.

And as it's evolved the festival has turned its focus to arts and culture, to better reflect the Bendigo town - funnily enough, it's is also one of the reasons Richards and his husband moved here.

"[The gallery] has reshaped the town," he said. "Things like ChillOut Festival - in Daylesford - are massive and we thought no point doing that because they do it so well.

"We want to make sure there are as many quintessentially Bendigo things in it as possible. So we always try do something with the gallery, there's a mine tour, a drinks tram and we tie all those things in.

"The goal is if you come to Bendigo PRIDE Festival, you leave having experienced an idea of Bendigo."

Two of the headline attractions at this year's PRIDE Festival have been the Pride Flag mural in front of the Bendigo Town Hall and an artwork featuring Bendigo trans man Edward De Lacy Evans.

"[The Pride flag] had worldwide coverage, especially one particular drone shot everyone has seen," Richards said.

"All of us painting it didn't get the scale of what we were doing until we were done.

"[And the de Lacy Evan mural], the whole thing is about encompassing and connecting rather than dividing and hiding away."

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Richards believes the success of the festival and its murals this year, coupled with the city's positive attitude to the LGBTQIA+ community, has helped people reclaim their home town years after leaving.

"People are saying 'I grew up in this town and felt uncomfortable and now all this is happening'," he said.

"Deborah Triangle, our official drag queen played by Matt Finish, grew up here and left because he had such a terrible time in high school. He's since moved back.

"It's about helping to reclaim some of these spaces for people who had a terrible time.

"People in the queer community who grew here and stayed the entire time, they have a slight self-closeting about them because it was a harsh thing to be out in the 1980s."

Since the marriage equality postal survey - where 68.73 per cent of people voted yes - Richards said the experience would have felt positive for the younger generations of LGBTQIA+ communities.

"It was less positive for people my age who saw us going back to what we remembered [from years gone by]," he said.

"But if you were young and thought you were the only gay in the village, and you walked up View Street and saw every shop had a pro-marriage equality poster in their window, that would let you know you weren't alone."

In more recent times, Richards has seen a familiar hatred he experienced in the 1980s being directed to the trans community.

"I see the stuff they're facing and it reminds me of what gays and lesbians faced in 1970s and 1980s," he said.

"It feels like the same hate and arguments.

"Australia always seems to have the same hatreds, just shifted to different people. It's weird seeing that argument [I remember] now [used] against trans people."

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Richards said he also sees the positives in how people talk about queer communities.

"One of the things I disliked growing up was people saying 'men want this and women want this' and I would think 'well heterosexual men want that'," he said.

"Now I am seeing more people say 'heterosexual men want this', and that's a nice acknowledgment."

Going forward, Richards would like to see a continued growth of acceptance in communities.

"I would just like people to not make so many assumptions. Be a bit more open in who you're meeting or what you think that person's story is," he said.

"It's exhausting the amount of time queer people have to spend working out their safety on a moment by moment basis.

"It's way better than when I was younger. Just ask yourself 'does it matter to me? Will it cause me concern?' You don't need to understand all of it, just hear what people are telling you."

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