Historian Gareth Watkins highlights notable September dates for New Zealand’s rainbow communities
6 September 1957
A large headline in Christchurch’s The Press read “British Controversy On Vice Report”. The article highlighted the newly released Wolfenden Committee’s recommendation that homosexual acts in private between consenting men aged 21 or over should no longer be criminal offences. The Committee argued that it was not the law’s role to intervene in people’s private lives, except where necessary to preserve public order and decency or protect others from harm. In New Zealand, we were still 29 years from reform, so publicly supporting change could carry considerable social risk. Nevertheless, some people responded to the news. Two letters signed “End Legalised Persecution” appeared in response to the story in The Press. One challenged readers to consider whether New Zealand really needed to wait for Britain before reconsidering its own laws. The other argued that the harm caused by private homosexual behaviour was far less than the harm caused when the state imposed cultural conformity.
3 September 1995
Celebrated pianist Michael Houstoun performed a benefit concert for the New Zealand AIDS Foundation (now Burnett Foundation Aotearoa) at the University of Auckland School of Music. After several years performing overseas, Houstoun returned home in the early 1980s and became a familiar presence in concert halls nationwide. The concert was part of a broader community response to the HIV epidemic. While deaths from AIDS-related conditions had begun to decline from their 1992 peak, illness and uncertainty remained, with highly effective combination antiretroviral treatments not yet widely available. The Foundation, which had been at the forefront of the response since the mid-1980s, regularly drew on performers and other artists to support fundraising and public awareness. A couple of weeks before Houstoun’s performance, the fifth annual AIDS Benefit Concert was held in Hamilton. And at the Foundation’s AIDS Media Awards in December, Michael Parmenter performed a dance from A Long Undressing, his autobiographical solo work about living with HIV.
22 September 2019
The Counting Ourselves report was launched at an event in Auckland. It presented results from the first comprehensive national survey into the health and wellbeing of trans and non-binary people. The community-led survey received over 1,000 responses from people aged 14 to 83. Some findings were confronting, with seventy-one per cent of participants aged 15 and over reporting high or very high psychological distress, nine times the rate in the general population, and almost one in five reporting they wanted hormone treatment but had been unable to access it. However, the survey also recorded resilience and community, with fifty-eight per cent of respondents saying they provided support to other trans and non-binary people. At a later launch event in Wellington, researcher Jack Byrne urged people to use the findings as “an activist tool”. The survey results strengthened calls for accessible gender-affirming healthcare, inclusive schools and stronger legal recognition.
Heritage Spotlight
A useful tool for finding more information about queer (and general) ancestors is the NZ Ancestor Search Helper website. Developed by Luke Howison, this free site brings together historical search results from across New Zealand. Enter a person’s name or upload an image of a grave marker, and the website will search multiple historical collections. Information comes from the Department of Internal Affairs, Archives NZ, Te Papa, the Alexander Turnbull Library, dozens of council and local cemetery databases, and military records. A search for Amy Bock, for example, returns photographs and records relating to court cases, marriage and divorce, along with catalogue entries for some draft film scripts originally held by the New Zealand Film Commission. Visit ash.howison.co.nz
