Features

A History of the Queer Community in New Zealand
When Chris Brickell began to research New Zealand’s gay history for his book Mates and Lovers, people told him “I don’t know if you’ll find much prior to the 1970s”. In fact his research led him to unearth a world that had before been invisible to the public. “I started discovering there was a huge underground gay male world in the Thirties and Forties which no one had ever recorded publicly…there were references in newspapers that made it look like there were a few not particularly happy people in corners leading quite isolated lives, but actually when I looked at it I realised that there was some of that, but there was also quite a vibrant gay sub-culture taking place.”

 
Since the homosexual law reform campaign of the 1980s, the collective closet door has now been opened, sometimes forcibly, by New Zealand’s queer community. “Queer” is a term encompassing gay, lesbian, bisexual, takatapui, transgender people as well as any other sexual or gender identities that don’t fit the traditional mould.
 

Of course, queer people existed before our supposedly enlightened times but the identity of being queer, at least publicly, has changed. Brickell explains the history: “I think in terms of the term ‘gay’, that’s something which really emerged hugely in the early 1970s with gay liberation. It was there in the 1960s but it was used only in terms of things, not gay people, so you might go to a gay party but you wouldn’t talk about the people there as being ‘gay’….You might think more about those people who are ‘that way’ or ‘like me’ or ‘one of us’, almost allusions rather than direct identities. You also had the idea of someone being ‘trade’, which meant they were men who were mostly sexually involved with women but if you paid them or found them in the right circumstances or there were no women around, then they might be sexually involved with men.” 
 

New Zealand’s position as a colony may also have had significance. “I can’t prove it all and I don’t know if it could ever be proved, but I have a suspicion that there were men who came here or were sent here by their families because they were sexually transgressive in some way and it was a way of starting a new life in a new place…Parts of New Zealand were very much a male society at that period, particularly the goldfields, the gumfields, and the rural station farms, so they perhaps provided opportunities and possibilities for those who did want to live a life among men.”

 
The history of queer women sits even further out of sight. “There were a lot of women who didn’t even know that sexuality with other women was a thing, was a possibility. There was a certain discussion of male sexuality because men were subject to the law and were arrested and tried. The most famous case [involving women] was Thelma Mareo and Freda Stark in the 1930s. Thelma died after being poisoned by her husband when he found out about their affair and the newspapers reported it as something about ‘The Gentlest Art of Lesbos in a Modern Setting’. For women, the term ‘lesbian’ has been used since the 1850s, unlike the term ‘gay’ for men which has changed a lot.”
 

Terms such as “lesbian”, and even the more diverse expression “queer”, can raise problems in themselves. Labels, even self-applied labels, can assume a departure from a norm and create a boundary around what fits within that label. In the complex world of human sexuality and gender, it may be dangerous to draw up too many partitions. One “gay” student I spoke to felt “every time I say it [that I’m gay], I feel slightly uneasy. In effect, I’m making my sexual preference my defining feature” (turn to this week’s Diatribe for a more extensive discussion of this).
 

Brickell sees it this way; “There’s a sense in which when we talk about identities in certain ways, we are not just describing them, but re-making the limits of what’s possible. So we are actively constructing a kind of a box which people go into. But on the flipside, you’ve got the sense that these identities do create a place for community to happen.”
 

Ros agrees that “labels can be really constricting but they’re affirming as well. It helped me. It took me so long to claim the word ‘lesbian’ but now that I’ve claimed it I feel like I can move on, because it was really important to acknowledge that part of me. But I think if someone doesn’t want to use a label, that’s fine as well. People can say “I have a girlfriend, I’m a girl. I don’t actually call myself lesbian, I’m just in love with this person.” I think people in the queer community forget that as well…that we all have our own journeys.”

 
With these journeys becoming more and more public, the terms used to define them are becoming public property. Brickell observes that “as the homosexual identity became a social phenomenon and became public…it created a public scare figure that wasn’t there before, so ironically if [these] things weren’t talked about, you wouldn’t call someone a ‘fag’ in the playground because that wasn’t part of your cultural reference.”
 

Looking back to a time before that cultural reference existed can be just as helpful as considering the present. “We tend to believe that our society is so much more enlightened in every single aspect than any society that has gone before, and that’s a particular view of progress that is very simplistic. There’s an assumption that if someone’s closeted that is in and of itself always bad, and if someone is open that is in and of itself always good for them and for everyone else. The fact that I met guys who lived such interesting gay lives in the 1930s and 40s really caused me to stop and think about my own view of progress that we so often adhere to.”
 

Coming back to today, I asked Ros the extent to which homophobia still exists. “I think it’s still there. In this role you get people coming in who have been harassed on campus or around campus.” But the greatest frustration of the people I spoke to was more the latent side of the problem. “I feel like it’s okay to be gay these days,” says Ros, “but you’re not allowed to complain too much and it’s still quite hidden from the public eye. For me and my partner that’s always an issue. We have to be like ‘okay where are we? Okay can I show you some public affection?’ It’s a constant thing and it can wear you down a bit sometimes.”

 
If there was one thing she would like people, straight people in particular, to know, what would it be? “There is a heterosexual privilege in society, just like there is a white privilege and a male privilege and that it’s really, really subtle, but it’s there. It’s easy to take for granted how easy it is to be heterosexual even if you’re not homophobic at all, because most of the people I know aren’t homophobic. It’s hard to know how much privilege you have because you live that world. And it’s not until it’s taken away that you realise what it’s like to have to constantly come out, to not constantly see stereotypes.”
 

As well as restricting individuals, such stereotypes fail to reflect the different cultural and racial experiences of queerness that exist in New Zealand. Ros is half-Thai and “it was so much harder coming out to my mum because it’s just harder in general, and in Asian culture, I think there’s a lot of [situations] where they know their child is gay but it’s just ignored…I think a lot of my European friends think ‘when you’re gay you come out to your parents’, that’s the journey for them.”
 

For Maori, the reclaiming of the phrase ‘takatapui’ can be reflective of a journey that combines both culture and sexual identity. The term can be loosely translated as “gay” or used widely to include anyone who is non-heterosexual. Its deeper meaning is as fluid as the people who choose to identify with it. To Elizabeth Kerekere, who is of Ng?ti Oneone, Te Aitanga a M?haki and Rongowhakaata descent and a board member of the Lesbian and Gay Archive of New Zealand, takatapui “is about being out as a lesbian and as a Maori at the same time. It means not selling one out for the other.”
 

Georgina Beyer - who as the world’s first transsexual MP, knows better than anyone the challenges of a journey that combines sexual and gender identity, Maori and New Zealand culture, homophobia and social politics - sums up the goal of takatapui in an affirmation that could just as easily encompass anyone who is queer or those who choose not to be labeled at all. “Takatapui should define the line between what we accept and what we tolerate. We should never accept being tolerated. We should only tolerate being accepted for who and what we are.”