Today, all the world loves a gay Today, all the world loves a gay

Today, while thousands of Sydneysiders frantically pick out glad rags for the hottest event on the city's social calendar, Australia's most glamorous entertainer, Pencil Vania, will be painting and preening.

With her face and hair perfectly set, she will totter down Oxford Street to greet fans in a vampish yet virginal tutu embossed with pink roses and offset by knee-high boots with 20-centimetre heels. Around 11pm, she will step in to something even more alluring. And a third outfit is on standby - in case of surprises.

For while Ms Vania has spent more than a month getting ready for the big night, she must also be prepared for the unexpected. Because, as everyone knows, at the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, anything goes.

Australia's largest event of the year - which attracts more people than even an Aussie Rules football final - caps a month-long festival of gay film, dance, literary events and theatre. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the mardi gras parade promises to be a spectacle of skin, sin and silliness.

Oxford Street - Sydney's gay strip and main parade thoroughfare - is expected to attract crowds of 750,000, not including the 7,500 participants strutting their stuff for all the world to see. As a sign of the carnality and comedy to come, the shops in the King's Cross area have, as usual, tarted themselves up with Glomesh and chintz, as well as Spandex and fur. For parade entrants like Ms Vania, it matters little that most spectators attend for cheap thrills. Their very presence, she says, indicates growing acceptance of the homosexual community.

'It's much more open now,' declares Ms Vania, who owns Drag Bag, the only specialist drag-queen store in Australia. 'I was a bit scared to take part in the parade at the start. I thought the police were going to come and bust us.' Her fears were justified. When the first Sydney gay mardi gras took place in June 1978, a riot ensued, culminating in 53 arrests. A '78er' who will be marching today at the head of the parade remembers the episode well.