Milo Hartill on tackling ‘gay becoming uncool again’ and dreaming of irrelevance
“The dream is for me to be old, fat and irrelevant and young black, fat queer people to be like, ‘yeah girl, we’ve seen it before’. Performer Milo Hartill talks to CityMag about her Feast Festival debut this weekend.
When Milo wrote her debut solo cabaret Black, Fat and F**gy she hoped one day it would be irrelevant.
“My dream is a world where a show like this isn’t necessary,” she tells CityMag.
“The dream is for me to be old, fat and irrelevant and young black, fat queer people to be like, ‘yeah girl, we’ve seen it before’, but unfortunately, that is not the part of history that we are living in right now.”
The performer and content creator with 41,700 Instagram followers says she’s seen a shift in the landscape, and, two years on from appearing in Sydney’s World Pride 2023 campaign, “being gay became uncool again”.
“Especially in this year 2025, where it feels like heroin chic is coming back into style, and racism feels like it’s at an all-time high and fatphobia the same, people now are emboldened to hate,” she says.
Which is why, she says, festivals like SA’s Feast, Victoria’s Midsumma festival and Perth Pride are so important.
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Much like her own dream of one day becoming irrelevant, she says the goal would be for mainstream festivals to have queer and marginalised shows in their programming, but for now, “we don’t live in a world where that would happen on its own”.
“Audience-specific festivals are so important so that we do have somewhere to go, that we are safe, and we are prioritised and we are considered,” Milo says.
“We’re not getting represented anywhere else, we’re not getting funded anywhere else, we’re not being encouraged to be who we are anywhere else.”
Her solo show – playing in Adelaide for one night only on Saturday, November 8 – is a cabaret that she says “is very ‘yay gay’ in a lens that doesn’t get to be represented a lot”.
It explores the intersections of being black, fat and gay, what those identifiers mean to her and what it can mean in the world.
“I think for me, being gay is the minority that I have had the least push back on, which I know is not the experience of a lot of people,” she says.
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“I don’t want people to think that the whole show is, ‘woe is me, it sucks’.
“Despite the world being a cruel place to black, fat, queer, disabled, minority and or oppressed groups, there are a lot of perks that come with being in those groups, the main one for me is community and feeling like there are other people who understand me in a way that I don’t think straight, cis, white people have access to.”
A self-described “non-practising bisexual”, Milo wouldn’t spoil the show for her Adelaide crowd, except to say: “I’m in a very happy, committed relationship at the moment, and I don’t get to use one of my skill sets very often, and I use it in the show.”
She says after touring the show interstate, the response she received fell into two camps: “I never thought about things that way” or “oh my god, it’s so nice to have the thoughts that I have had in my brain said out loud by somebody else”.
Milo was inspired to write Black, Fat and F**gy after finding herself bored by the musical theatre cabaret offerings that come around each festival season.
“We all know what the existence of a white straight guy in musical theatre is like,” she says, “It’s the only experience that gets depicted on stage, like we’re doing this again?”
“I felt scared and proud to put this work on because I feel like it was something that I had been yearning for growing up and I was like, ‘you know what, if other people aren’t going to do it, I’m going to do it’.”
Though Milo has been an Adelaide Fringe regular, she says she’s excited to be a part of her first Feast Festival, which this year is putting on its largest program in a decade, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of SA decriminalising homosexuality.
“I personally need, love and want festivals like this,” she says.
“For so many people, it’s their first time seeing people like them, it’s their first time knowing that people like them exist.
“I can remember the first Perth Pride I got to go to, it was life-changing, getting to see that many gay people in one space, having a good time.”
Milo’s Adelaide debut of Black, Fat and F**gy headlines Prospect’s Feast Hub, located at Payinthi Prospect Town Hall, on Saturday, November 9.
She is also performing at the Feast Festival Gayla, at Feast Hub on Thursday, November 6 at 7pm.
