HEADER IMAGE Luke Dyson
Once a small-scale start-up with just 9,000 attendees, in just under a decade, Mighty Hoopla has secured a reputation as one of the world’s most adored LGBTQIA+ music festivals, welcoming 30,000 partygoers to South London’s beloved Brockwell Park every summer. As a group of queer pop-enthusiasts in the BRICKS office, Mighty Hoopla is undoubtedly one of the highlights of our annual editorial calendar; it’s our gay Glastonbury. But behind the eco-glitter, cabaret collectives and drag dance parties lies something much deeper. What makes Mighty Hoopla so special is that the festival pushes nostalgic pop with genuine advocacy – it’s a powerful celebration of inclusivity, authenticity, and unapologetic self-expression. Perhaps now more than ever, that’s exactly what our community needs: a place that protects queer joy.
From the U.S. rolling back its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, to the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling that transgender people are not included in sex-protected spaces under the Equality Act, “I think that we’re being forced into a global togetherness,” says Mighty Hoopla co-founder Glyn Fussell. “Mighty Hoopla is soaked in joy, colour and creativity; there’s a childlike quality to it, where we can return to an innocent time when we all just were together and we weren’t being attacked around every fucking corner, because that’s what it feels like at the moment.” It’s for these exact reasons that the festival came to exist in the first place. “Mighty Hoopla is the utopian universe that I want to exist in,” Glyn adds, and we couldn’t agree more.
To learn more about how Mighty Hoopla’s utopian universe comes to life, I sat down with Glyn to discuss the festival’s cultural impact, the behind-the-scenes considerations to preserve its sense of euphoria and of course, our favourite Real Housewives.
Mighty Hoopla has become the premiere queer music festival in the UK and has gained a new level of international recognition in the last year. How has it felt to see Hoopla recognised on a global stage?
It feels amazing, but it’s unsurprising with everything happening in the world. Our community will travel far and wide to come together. The beautiful thing about people buying tickets in advance is you can see where people are coming from. People will travel the amount of distance; they love us in Australia and America. We’ve had people that came from the Middle East. What’s wonderful about that is – in the same way, what’s wonderful about queer people – is that we travel en masse and we travel together, and big groups will come, groups of six to 10 will come to the festival. It becomes their holiday, their vacation, their gaycation. We’ve always had the ambition to take the festival global, but it’s been more interesting for us to let the global community come to us first, and then we can see.
Was that the main decision to bring Mighty Hoopla to Malta?
It would be easy for us just to do one big thing a year, but as queer people, we need more experiences. I don’t want to be heavy, but we are in a particularly heavy time, and it’s impossible not to address the fact that the walls are closing in. That’s how it feels, right? But I’ve always been someone who’s not just an optimist, my cup is eternally bubbling over. I feel like that is my responsibility for this community, to lead when everything’s getting heavy, down the yellow brick road, so to speak, to a place that can feel how the world should be. That was part of Mighty Hoopla from the beginning; we wanted to create this fantasy experience of the best bits of our community coming together.
That was part of Mighty Hoopla from the beginning; we wanted to create this fantasy experience of the best bits of our community coming together.
I say it all the time, and especially during Pride Month, we’re always asked the same questions. We get asked questions about our struggles. But I think one of the brilliant things about being queer is the community and the intersectional joy that we all share as one, and that’s rarely platformed or asked about. There is this sense of heaviness, but we have such a joyful time together.
We are joy, and that is why we are attacked from every angle. We have a sense of joy that these people cannot feel themselves, it is dangerous and scary to them. Rather than understand it and understand all the nuances and the differences within it, they shoot it down. I feel that not just right now, at this moment in history, but we have always been made to be victims. We’ve been pushed to be weak, or we’re supposed to be miserable and dangerous human beings. With that, they want us to be angry. And, if time and time again, when we’ve been repressed so publicly, it forces us closer together. These wrongful narratives don’t separate us. It pushes us together, and where we always come together is the dance floor. It’s with combined joy. That is what we share, and we come together in our differences. The dumb thing about this moment is that we will come out the other side, fight, and look fabulous, right? We will come out looking fabulous, understanding each other way more, and all the while, we will have danced to Cher.
It’s been a particularly difficult time for the queer community, especially our trans siblings, given the recent Supreme Court ruling. This year marks the 5th birthday of your incredible charity partner, Not a Phase that uplifts trans lives, who I know you work closely with and who you’re on the board of – I’d love to hear more about your relationship with them.
I’ve worked closely with Not a Phase, Danielle St James is one of my closest friends, and I’ve always supported the good work the charity does. My role over there has been to help wherever I can help, and part of that has been connecting them with brands for further financial support. What’s been scary to me is that since Trump’s administration came back into power, DEI budgets have fallen away one by one, and all of the big brand deals that Not a Phase had lined up just fell away. It just makes you realise that us queers have always been expendable to these brands. Maybe 10 to 20 years ago, that would have been the end of Not a Phase. But now there’s social media, and there are people like Nicola Coughlan, who helped raise over £70,000 for the charity earlier in April. That is what I mean about our community. I put allies in that because allyship is the only way this community will continue to flourish.
Our aim is that every single person who comes to Mighty Hoopla feels joy, so we must understand everyone’s experiences to ensure that people have a great time.
You’ve previously spoken about the importance of working with queer people behind the scenes across the festival to maintain an authentically inclusive environment, which is a sentiment we also strongly believe at BRICKS. Can you share with us the ways you’re engaging with diverse communities in the lead-up to this year’s festival and ensuring that all festival staff are equipped to engage safely with queer crowds?
The key to all of this is to want to do it right and put safety first and foremost. It takes a lot for an organisation to facilitate joy on a mass scale, but a lot of boring stuff goes on behind the scenes before you can get the joy, right? The key is to not think that you are the authority on everything; that’s the biggest lesson that myself and Jamie have learned. As we’ve expanded the festival, engaging with key leaders within our community is important. Examples are our arts and cabaret producers – Cassie Leon from the Cocoa Butter Club came on board to ensure we diversity-check everything we do. The beautiful thing is that she doesn’t have to do that as much anymore because we’ve got a wider education on ensuring that there are diverse people everywhere on the site. That’s important because we can only have a crowd that reflects that if we’re putting it on the stage and behind the scenes. We’ve always tried to make a point of it being fully inclusive, so we brought in the amazing Danny from Safe Only, which is a queer security company, and Danny is now employed by us part-time and does an insane amount of work behind the scenes around access and making sure that people feel safe pre-and-post festival. The events security industry is still catching up to the modern day of working, and we’re making sure that not only happens, but we leapfrog past the wait. We are also working with Levelling the Field to ensure an opportunity for disabled people, deaf people, and blind people to work at the festival. We’re always trying to do more.
People don’t release inclusivity; it’s an ongoing issue. They don’t see events as a 360-degree issue. They prioritise the ‘during’. But pre-production and the aftercare are also really, really important.
For me, it’s always education. As I’ve gotten older and as you begin to better understand yourself, you realise the importance of educating yourself about the diverse needs of others. And the deeper you go, the more you see how, much like within our queer community, these experiences are deeply interconnected. It’s so nuanced, and the key is communication; to talk to people and understand and not be scared to ask questions, like what do you need? Our aim is that every single person who comes to Mighty Hoopla feels joy, so we must understand everyone’s experiences to ensure that people have a great time.
As Mighty Hoopla stans in the BRICKS office, we believe that “hating pop doesn’t make you deep” and that pop artistry has been the platform for many queer artists to share political messages. There’s been some discussion in the zeitgeist recently around superficial politics and authentic advocacy in pop, and I’m keen to hear from you, as pioneers of a platform that spotlights many rising queer artists, about the importance of authentic advocacy and allyship in pop music right now?
Well, let me start by saying that the hatred towards pop is deeper than people think because a lot of it is steeped in homophobia and misogyny. When you look at what is deemed “cool”, it usually has a white angry boy vibe. Pop music gets a bad name – it’s chastised as shit or weak, fake or not credible – and I truly believe it’s because it soundtracks the stories and the lives of women and queer people, full stop. I think that pop cuts so deep, it’s so important. It’s what I know for me; it was genuinely an outlet for my creativity and queerness.
Pop music gets a bad name – it’s chastised as shit or weak, fake or not credible – and I truly believe it’s because it soundtracks the stories and the lives of women and queer people, full stop. I think that pop cuts so deep, it’s so important. It’s what I know for me; it was genuinely an outlet for my creativity and queerness.
When I was pretending to be straight, it gave me a lifeline to something hopeful; it gave me hope. And back then, there weren’t actually that many gay pop stars, so the fact there are now is just magic. I feel that I’ve always tried to platform queer entertainers; it’s one of the biggest privileges of my life. Even pre-Hoopla, I did it with Sink The Pink. I did it because I think that women and queer people are brilliant, and this world would not be in the mess that it is in if we were running it. It’s my responsibility to give a platform to those amazing queer pop artists. You know, I feel like this year, we’re doing that more than ever. There are so many amazing newer queer artists out there that are making incredible music. They’ve got stuff to say that is important, and these artists are not given a platform. We don’t just give them a platform, we chuck them at midday in front of 15,000 people, because in my world, that’s where they should be.
I know you have big names like Ciara, Jade and Kesha this year, but Mighty Hoopla’s line-up is infamous for its mix of rising queer talent, who is your not-to-be-missed act at this year’s festival?
You know who I really, really, really, really, really love? And I’ve heard the new album. There’s an amazing queer pop star called Tom Aspaul. He actually used to be a DJ at Sink The Pink back in the day, but he’s a really established songwriter who’s written for Girls Aloud and Kylie. I truly believe that the music that he makes is the most perfect pop you have ever heard and this new album is absolutely amazing. He describes himself as “Poundland George Michael”.
Ok, I’m sold, I’ll be there! My last question, I know you’re a Real Housewives mega-fan like me, so I have to ask you this; if you had to pick six Real Housewives to come to a Dinner party at your house, who would you pick?
I can tell you right off the bat, Brandy Glanville. Also Phaedra Parks, and Countess Luanne as we’re already friends. Obviously Sonja Morgan, Heather Gay, Dolores Catania from Jersey. Gosh this is so hard, I want to invite everyone. Genuinely, this is the best interview question I’ve ever been asked, thank you. We could have just spoken about this, instead of Hoopla, but I reckon we’d be still here on the call tomorrow if we did.
Mighty Hoopla takes place at Brockwell Park in Brixton, South London between 31 May to 1 June, 2025.
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