Historian Gareth Watkins highlights November dates that are significant for New Zealand’s rainbow communities.
1 November 1944
Activist Ralph Knowles was born in Dunedin. From an early age, he was captivated by religion: “If I saw an article in the paper about the church overseas or some theologian, I was fascinated by it.” When he was 20, a priest encouraged him to seek treatment for his homosexuality. Knowles remembers, “As far as medicine was concerned, it was sick. As far as the law was concerned, it was a crime. As far as the church was concerned, it was a sin.” He went to see psychiatrist Dr Basil James, who was a promoter of aversion therapy. Knowles underwent a drug treatment that would make him vomit while a recorded voice told him, “You are sickened by this disgusting behaviour.” The drugs were administered every two hours, day and night, for nine days straight. Afterwards, he found that “it hadn’t worked, and it was time to get on with life.” Knowles would go on to co-author the first prevention pamphlet on AIDS in NZ in 1983, as well as become a key figure in the fight for homosexual law reform in Christchurch. Activist Bill Logan recalls, “Ralph [was] the one who actually kept the Christchurch Gay Task Force together with its weekly meetings through 1985-86. Ralph was a key community-builder, and it was community and community-builders who were crucial to our victory.”
1-9 November 1961
The annual Conference of the Methodist Church of New Zealand took place in Auckland. Following on from a resolution passed the previous year, the Public Questions Committee reported on “the moral and sociological factors which would be involved in the legal toleration of homosexual practices.” This was significant, given that homosexual law reform was still 25 years away. The Public Questions Committee reported, “It is clearly inequitable and contrary to the common good that homosexual acts should be severely punished while the adulterer and the adulteress and those responsible for bringing unwanted children into the world stand outside the sanctions of the law.” The Committee concluded that a legal toleration of homosexual acts between consenting adults would open the way to “a more constructive treatment of a hidden problem. Because much study needs to be given to the causes and nature of the homosexual condition and to the means whereby the homosexual can be cured or helped to accept his abnormality.” In 1967, the Conference reaffirmed its 1961 recommendations on homosexual practices.
27 November 1999
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Georgina Beyer becoming the world’s first openly transgender Member of Parliament, following her earlier achievement of becoming the world’s first openly transgender Mayor. Beyer won the Wairarapa electorate for Labour by a margin of 3,033 votes – comfortably beating the National Party candidate and eventual television personality, Paul Henry. Beyer’s win cemented her place on the world stage. In 2019, author Andrew Reynolds reflected on Beyer’s achievements: “Being the first in the world again is a remarkable achievement, and her courage, her tenacity, her authenticity transforms hearts and minds. I don’t want to be melodramatic, but we know that queer kids around the world, in places that are less affirming than in New Zealand, struggle every day with anxiety, with depression, with suicidal thoughts. But we know that when they see somebody in legitimate positions of power around them, they are reassured. They feel validated. They feel worthy. They feel they can aspire to something in the future. So, every queer, out, elected politician in the newspaper or on television is life-affirming.”
