In the last three decades gays have become increasingly mainstream. Gay representations are now commonplace in the popular media. Money Up Front and No Kissing asks how an interpretation of this legitimacy might be enhanced by creative practice. This study blends critical theory dialectics, practice led research methods and the elastic gay idiom of camp to situate the tacitly felt sensations that attend the phenomenon into a cognitively understood, coherent contextual framework. The study begins with Australian queer culture theorist, Dennis Altman’s 1982 observation of a ‘new homosexual’ emerging in the decade after the birth of the gay rights movement. It traces a relationship between gays and the market developing at the same time as the rise of neoliberalism’s cultural logic in which the marketplace was increasingly seen as the most effective arena to enact social decision making. Gay legitimacy is popularly framed in terms of teleological social progress but this study implicates the market in the redistribution of prejudice away from gays to provide access to resources for market expansion. A new millennial formation of gay consciousness has meant the subsidence of the generation that preceded it. This study aims to use performance and photography to shed light on the lived dimensions of that displacement as the values of the socially liberal generation that experienced the trauma of the AIDS years are supplanted by those of a new generation in tune with, and unconflicted by the ideologies and imperatives of neoliberal culture.