Historian Gareth Watkins highlights August dates that are significant for Aotearoa’s LGBTQ+ communities.
24 August 1976
The NZ Truth tabloid newspaper began a 6-week campaign to publicly out National MP Marilyn Waring. Its first front-page headline read, “MP’s Odd Love Affair.” The story reported that Waring’s lover was a “mother of three who left her husband and children about three months ago to share a Wellington love nest.” Later in a media interview, Waring reflected, “They made a really poor choice. They really thought they were on to a winner, but in fact, they got buried in an avalanche of mail that told them that they were disgusting and filthy.” Waring recalled how there was “huge support right across the board” and how she was only uninvited from one official engagement – an event for the women’s section of the National Party in Remuera. Asked whether her sexuality was subsequently used as a political weapon, Waring recounted several incidents, including Labour MP Peter Tapsell, who “got front-page headlines by saying that the government’s policy on women was being run by a barren lesbian.”
8 August 2001
Veteran broadcaster Peter Sinclair died in Auckland. Paying tribute to Sinclair, Prime Minister Helen Clark said, “Peter was the consummate professional, able to switch effortlessly between radio and television, between commercial and public service broadcasting.” In later years, Sinclair also wrote a newspaper column. He talked openly about his health issues and many aspects of his life – except his homosexuality. After his death, author David Herkt noted, “He could die in the public gaze, but it seems he could not live openly.” Herkt’s article on GayNZ.com in 2001 was one of the few that talked about Sinclair as a gay man. While recognising Sinclair’s great talent and significance, Herkt also observed how Sinclair remained publicly silent and still in the closet (not uncommon at the time). “I see a man crippled by the anti-homosexual bias of his times, but I also see a man unable to free himself, even at the end. His gayness was him, and his silence on the subject is significant in NZ at the beginning of the Third Millennium.”
18 August 2009
The first reading of legislation to remove the “gay panic” defence took place in Parliament. The legislation sought to remove a partial defence in homicide cases, whereby defendants could claim their violent actions were the result of being provoked into a temporary loss of self-control, thereby reducing a murder charge to manslaughter. For defence lawyers, it offered the strategy of pushing the blame firmly onto the deceased victim. The defence had been available in New Zealand since 1893 but was made more liberal under the Crimes Act 1961. By the 2000s, concerns were growing about its use. The Law Commission noted in a 2007 report that the majority of Crown Solicitors supported repealing the law. The Commission wrote, “When we reviewed a sample of homicide cases over a five-year period, we found that fifty per cent of the cases in which provocation was successful were so-called ‘homosexual advance’ or ‘homosexual panic’ cases.” During the bill’s first reading, MP Lianne Dalziel told the House, “The evidence as to what allegedly incited this homicidal loss of self-control is entirely in the hands of the person who has silenced for ever the only other witness to the events. The existence of the partial defence has been described as a blot on the criminal law, and it is time that it is removed.”
Photo: Dame Marilyn Waring (right), after her investiture as DNZM, for services to women and economics, by the governor-general, Dame Cindy Kiro, at Government House, Auckland, on 24 May 2022.
