Gay liberation, 50 years on
Exactly 50 years ago, in 1972, many Aucklanders were faced with something they had never knowingly confronted. For some it would be their worst fear. For others it would come as a great release.
“It was a turning point,” explains historian Brent Coutts, “and New Zealand as a whole would benefit from it.”
A group, Auckland Gay Liberation, had just been formed. They promptly embarked on a series of events calculated to bring a group of people who had been erased from public light to visibility. Male homosexuality was then illegal in New Zealand and punishable by up to two years of imprisonment. Couples could not marry. Any social interaction was “underground”.
For a landmark publication, 1972: A Year in Focus, Coutts has conducted interviews, written an extended essay, collected photographs and located many primary documents in order to outline 12 months that changed the sexual outlook of New Zealand life.
“I realised that there may be very little commemoration of this historical occasion and felt it important to mark it,” he says. “I had been frustrated by the very simplistic understanding of the events of 1972 and wanted to help correct that.”
To recover the past involves not only revealing the things that happened, but also the thoughts behind events. The 60s were the era of the counterculture and there was a new belief that fundamental change could happen. The 70s saw those ideas travel globally.
“I came across the now almost forgotten idea of holding a ‘consciousness-raising happening’ to encourage visibility and a change in opinion,” Coutts explains, “and the protest tactic of a ‘zap’, where you turn up unannounced to make your demands. These terms from the 1970s have fallen by the wayside and perhaps should be revived.”
The Gay Liberation “zap” at the at the Auckland Registry of Birth, Deaths, and Marriages in April 1972, for example, involved a male couple arriving at the main desk in an attempt to marry. A “Gay Day Happening” in Albert Park had the Gay Liberation street-theatre cell re-enacting incidents of police harassment of gay men.
Coutts also reconfigures many stories — and reveals many people whose significant achievements have been overlooked. The accepted version says the Auckland Gay Liberation was the result of Ngahuia Volkerling (now Te Awekotuku) being refused a visa to travel to the United States to study because one component of her academic visit was to investigate “gay power”.
While Te Awekotuku certainly provided a catalyst, Coutts reveals that after a bare three months of involvement, she decided to pull back from Gay Liberation and focus instead on Maori activism and her academic studies.
“While she was a force of energy,” Coutts writes, “it was the group of individuals that joined her who initiated and drove the movement for change.”
People like Malcolm Mcallister, Dick Morrison, Janet Roth, Caterina De Nave and Sharon Alston have been all but erased from the historic record, yet they were the people who would continue as the mainstay of the group for the next few years. In 1972, they would join anti-vietnam War protests, hold regular monthly meetings, publish the Gay Lib News, and hold a Christmas Party, amid other actions.
Eventually the group would petition Parliament, face up to many television and radio interviews, and even speak at more liberal schools. Other Gay Liberation chapters were formed in Wellington and Christchurch.
It was the thought that counted, not an individual voice, no matter how strident.
There were many defining debates in that first year. Some feel very familiar in an era where the concepts of “cisgender” and an ever-lengthening string of acronyms have become part of social discussion.
“One of the things I found interesting was a heated debate over what name to call the community,” Coutts comments. “Should they stick with the name ‘homosexual’, which many rejected as a term that medicalised their sexuality and identity as an illness. Many advocated for the term ‘homophile’. Eventually, the term ‘gay’ won out as a name used in 1972 for both men and women.”
The idea was, Coutts suggests, that Gay Liberation would achieve liberation for individuals and then work to make wider social changes. It was a sexual revolution from the singular to the social.
“It was the inauguration of a new era of political visibility and assertiveness — and the beginning of an assertion of legitimacy and inclusion. In this respect, it’s a turning point in our history,” he says. “The wider New Zealand community eventually began to accept the new Gay Liberation ideology as a normal way of thinking.”
1972: A Year in Focus is designed by artist George Hajian and bound in a multi-sectional format, with each of the five parts on differentsized and different-coloured paper. There are photographs and graphics from the era. To read and use the publication is like plunging into the archive, with its various strands.
“The idea was to try to visually represent the different voices in the community in 1972. There is very little visual record of events and the photographs by John Miller and Max Oettli are a taonga that we felt were important to include in the book.”
While being very readable, fascinatingly explorable, and a work of publishing art, Coutts has also provided the ultimate resource in a year when the teaching of New Zealand history enters a new phase of the refreshed school curriculum.
1972: A Year in Focus, by Brent Coutts (Queer Art Narratives, $30), has already sold out its first printing. Copies were donated to 40 public libraries throughout New Zealand. Another edition is planned.
A longer version of this review will appear on anzliterature.com.
David Herkt talks to Brent Coutts about a new era
1. Just as the season tips over into winter, prodigiously talented Kiwi writer Laurence Fearnley is back with a new novel, Winter Time (Penguin, $36). Set in the Mackenzie Basin, it centres on a man who has returned home to work through his brother’s sudden death.
2. Escape the drizzly cold by dipping into Sarah Mccoy’s escapist novel Mustique Island (Harpercollins, $33). Imagine: It’s the 1970s and divorced mum Willy May has just built a house across the island from Princess Margaret.
3. Already in production as a movie, The Guncle (Simon and Schuster, $38) is a comedic novel about a oncefamous sitcom star who takes care of his niece and nephew following their mother’s death. Think modern Auntie Mame set in Palm Springs.