Historian Gareth Watkins unearths February dates from the past that have had a significant impact on today’s queer community.
6 February 1840
Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi was signed on this day. With it came New Zealand’s adoption of English law, including the Offences Against the Person Act, which made sodomy punishable by death. Then in 1893 any sexual activity between males in this country became illegal. Penalties included imprisonment, hard labour and flogging. The criminalisation of same-sex love was in stark contrast to earlier times when, according to academic Elizabeth Kerekere, Maori society “accepted diverse sexuality and gender in this country before colonisation.” Speaking to the New Zealand Herald, she said “Colonisation changed everything – our expression of sexuality, women having control of their own body, female leadership. We lost all of that, having fluidity, being polyamorous… our sexuality was stolen.”
9 February 1903
Writer James Courage was born on this day in Christchurch. He is credited with writing the first ever published gay novel by a New Zealander (A Way of Love in 1959). Courage grew up on the family farm near Amberley before attending boarding school – first at Mr Wiggins’s preparatory school and then Christ’s College. It was here that he began writing an intimate diary – a journal that would span the rest of his life. After his death in 1963, the diaries were deposited with the Hocken Collections at the University of Otago and placed under an embargo. Access restrictions ended in 2005 and, historian Chris Brickell, “rushed into Dunedin’s Hocken Library to prise open the small leather notebooks and the loose-leaf pages tied up with ribbon.” The diaries are full of entries on sexuality, relationships, literature, travel and the psychotherapeutic treatment that Courage received later in life. Brickell subsequently published parts of the diaries and wrote about this significant New Zealander, “He was fearlessly brave, and paved the way for people like me to write about gay things.”
19 February 1968
The Sunday Times newspaper reported on an ongoing study by two prison chaplains into the treatment of homosexuals in prison. The newspaper quoted the late Rev. Ernest Hoddinott, a Methodist minister and Senior Chaplain to the Justice Department: “Homosexuality is a tragedy. It is no respecter of persons – it’s found in all sections of the community.” He believed that there were at least 25,000 homosexuals in New Zealand. Since 1960, the Methodist church had been considering the implications to a “legal toleration of homosexual practices.” In 1961, a church committee reported that reforming the law would remove injustices and open the way for a “more constructive treatment of a hidden problem.” However, “The Church has always distinguished between sin and crime… to say that in certain circumstances homosexual behaviour should not be a criminal offence is not to condone or encourage private immorality.”
21 February 2015
A protest by three people dramatically interrupted Auckland’s Pride Parade. While the protest only lasted a short time, it ignited years of nationwide debate about the participation in and continued purpose of, Pride events. The protest was in direct response to the participation of the Police and the Department of Corrections in the parade. In an interview with the Counterfutures journal, one of the protestors, Emilie Rakete said “At this point, we had not yet solidified as a group known as No Pride in Prisons. In a sense, No Pride in Prisons came about as a result of our reaction to what we saw as a queer collaboration with the prison system.” Collective member Sophie Morgan told the journal, “Pride started as a commemoration of a riot against Police, against the Police brutality at Stonewall Inn. It’s crucial for us to be speaking back to that history.”
Photo | Dan Lui.
