Has the Mother City Queer Party lost its edge? Lost its quasi-underground status and gone mainstream?
That's the question many veterans of the earlier bashes were asking after Saturday night's marathon MCQP jol at Ratanga Junction.
This was the first time, to my knowledge, that the legendary queer party has been held for two years running at the same venue, and it all felt a bit too Canal Walk.
Don't get me wrong - this was a superbly slick and professional operation, choreographed down to the last dash and full stop. And perhaps that is the problem.
The MCQP has become almost too professional - I was fully expecting to see a team sponsored by KPMG or Investec.
Somehow a cutting edge party loses that edge when the music is spun by DJs from 5FM, when a number of teams simply print the same T-shirt and use that as their "uniform", and Hylton Ross tour buses pitch up every half- hour ferrying partygoers from the city.
Part of the reason for the party corporatisation was the semi-disaster of 2004, when a gale-force southeaster trashed the party at the Founder's Garden outside Artscape.
All of which is not meant to detract from the fact that the MCQP is still one of the best parties on earth.
The Babel of foreign languages being spoken attests to the number of tourists who now fly in to be there.
And there were some brilliant costumes echoing the Comic Strip theme.
My favourite was "Comic Sans must die" (you have to be a sub-editor to understand that one).
Uderzo and Goscinny would have been pleased to see the large number of Gauls present, including Ass Tricks and his buddy Ob Licks, while Hergé would have been be-mused by several male couples either painted silver or wearing tin foil (Tintin).
There were a lot of Horny Little Devils, a couple of Peter Pansies, a bunch of X-rated X Men and Betsy Boobses; a German man bore the slogan Komm ik strip 4 U, and one man wore very little other than his tattoos.
Then there was the happy camper who sported a sign that read "Finding Him: Oh!" As for our team, having learnt way back that the thing to do is be simple, warm and comfortable, well, we sort of wimped out. Flowing red capes, fish-net stockings and underwear on the outside is pretty much our uniform, and this generic super hero thingy translated into Super Heroes R Us, aka Working Class Super Heroes.