About

Jump back 50-years and representations of Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow people were often framed by the media in a negative light. Media coverage was often concerned with creating shocking headlines that marginalised individuals. But since homosexual law reform in the mid-1980s, there has been a growth in stories being recorded and published that have shown how Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow people have survived and thrived in the face of marginalisation and oppression.

PrideNZ.com is part of this growing Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow media landscape that is recording and openly sharing events and histories so that Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow people can see themselves reflected.

PrideNZ.com has become the largest online audio repository of local Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow history. There are now over 1,000 audio recordings of events and life histories freely available to a worldwide audience. The earliest audio on the website dates from 1967, and the latest from this year. Recordings document key aspects of Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow history including homosexual law reform, marriage equality and New Zealand’s response to HIV/AIDS.

PrideNZ.com would not exist without the community contributing to the website. Hundreds of interviewees have generously shared their experiences. Numerous interviewers have conducted a diverse range of interviews. Event organisers have kindly allowed their events to be recorded, and funding agencies have backed a unique array of recording projects.

The website has three aims: to capture a sense of rainbow lives in New Zealand through audio interviews and event recordings, to make those recordings easily accessible to the public, and to help save rainbow heritage by making the collection available to archives in the future.

The rich content the community has made available via PrideNZ.com is not only a taonga now, but will become a touchstone for generations to come, creating a pathway for future Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow people to hear who we were, how we spoke and what our dreams and aspirations were.

Some of our guiding principles include creating and maintaining:

• A first-hand/eyewitness community resource that is available to as many people as possible.
• A community resource that is inclusive and promotes the health and betterment of all rainbow people; and in turn, the enrichment of the wider society.
• A community resource that is not-for-profit.

A lot of our content is available as broadcast-quality sound files for not-for-profit educational use or community broadcast. For more information please get in contact.

Since 2009, PrideNZ has been on a journey to document, and make Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow content as accessible to communities now and into the future. Part of that journey is using Artificial Intelligence and Gen AI to make the collections more discoverable and accessible. This may be through the creation of AI transcriptions of the audio, creating summaries and articles, or having conversations with the collection using the PrideNZ AI assistant. Find out more about how we are using AI in positive ways.

Language use: Within the AsiaPacific region there are dozens of words that represent different forms of sexuality and gender. For this website we are using the umbrella term rainbow. Where appropriate we will also try and include culturally specific terminology. We also use tags. Items are tagged from a users perspective to help find content of interest. Tags do not necessarily reflect how participants would describe themselves or what they are saying. We always welcome feedback into how podcasts are described and tagged. Please get in contact if you have a suggestion.

Archives: The PrideNZ.com website is archived in at least three locations - National Digital Heritage Archive, the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress.

Datasets: In October 2021 Digital NZ incorporated the PrideNZ media dataset into its search engine. Digital NZ allows people to search across collections from multiple collecting organisations. Explore the PrideNZ data within DigitalNZ.

URL and hosting changes: In 2021 the PrideNZ website switched to the https protocol (previously http). When searching archives for earlier versions of this site use http. Our audio media hosting also changed in 2021, from media567.com to Amazon S3. Also in 2021, the domain name Pride.NZ was purchased and redirects to PrideNZ.com