John Richards sees Bendigo side-by-side with other "great gay metropolises ... places like New York or London, San Francisco".
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Not based on its scale, or population, but because "LGBT people are everywhere ... we are everywhere," he says.
"I want to look at Bendigo and say, 'what are the stories? What has not been recorded? What is the hidden history?" Richards said.
The answers to those questions are the subject the Big Book of Queer Bendigo, a new book Richards hoped would contradict the tendency for "queer people to be written out of history, or not written into history at all".
"Traditionally, our stories were not considered important enough," Richards said.
"But [queer people] need to find their people and their history. And that is a big thing. It is important to have role models ... these are all lives that intersect and they are all important."
'Rescuing' past figures to help future queer people
People like Edward de Lacy Evans, Richards said, a transgender man from Bendigo who was outed in the 1880s and became the subject of international controversy and humiliation.
"We revive him for Pride with an artwork that mural triggers the Bendigo Advertiser to write an apology for how they had reported on his life 143 years earlier ... which in some ways gives him a happy ending," Richards said. "I feel like we rescued him in a way."
Richards said it was important for future trans men living in Bendigo to know "they are not an outlier".
"There are local trans men in town who that mural of Edward de Lacy Evans has given them a through line to 200 years," he said. He hoped his book might do the same.
There was also the story of Agnes Goodsir, the pioneer painter who studied at Bendigo School of Mines in the late 1800s before she raffled artworks to fund a trip to Paris.
"She lived in this fantastic expat lesbian Australian enclave in Paris in the 1920s," Richards said.
'Bendigo tries to be a 'normal' town ... but it really is not'
Common knowledge about Goodsir and de Lacy Evans, as well as others that filled the book's pages, might have helped the experiences of queer people who came after them, Richards said.
"Many people who grew up here have such tragic stories about how homophobic it was," he said.
"Bendigo tries to be a 'normal' town ... but it really is not.
"Normal towns don't have the biggest Stupa in the western world in them ... or have the world's longest imperial Chinese dragon."
It was someone who felt that element of "different" that Richards his book might serve as a beacon of hope for.
"I think a book that says, 'you are part of this ... you have always been part of this town, you are connected and you are welcome here', is a really valid thing," he said.
