FROM THE EDITOR

My 21-year-old nephew is gay. In Dublin, where he’s living, he’s been refused entry into many bars, by the door staff - hired professionals - for dressing “like a girl”. He’s been spat at, stared at, shouted at, stalked. He likes to wear whatever he likes, you see, which includes dresses, jewellery, heels, and such traditionally “feminine” attire. But in a country like Ireland, despite the gay marriage vote receiving a resounding ‘‘yes’’ in 2015, a dark underbelly of conservative and narrowminded opinion lingers. It tends to rear its ugly head late on a dark Friday night on Grafton St, fuelled by alcohol, homophobia and hate. My nephew deals with it extremely well - much better than I would or could have at that age - standing up for himself, speaking up, posting on social media whenever he is subjected to any kind of discrimination, shaming the place/perpetrator/posse in question. But that doesn’t lessen the disappointment and sadness that follows, that this sort of anti-gay rhetoric persists into 2018. As it does in Australia, never more obvious than during the same-sex marriage referendum late last year, when “Vote No” campaigners grasped the opportunity to campaign to a national electorate, even writing those words in the sky over Sydney’s CBD. Vote No. As Kiwi reporter Hannah Spyksma tells us this week, her experience of the plebiscite after moving to Brisbane with her partner Chloe Fill last year came as a real shock. As a woman in a same-sex relationship in New Zealand, she took her “right to marry as a given”. She tells her story on Page 8.