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Welcome to Dangerous Desires. The gala event. Same same. My Name's Verity George. I'm an actor writer and co-owner of Garnett Station, Cafe, restaurant and Tiny theatre. Every day, the rainbow flag flutters in West mere in the breeze and people gather to exchange their stories. Tonight we hear for an evening of storytelling with a diverse group of authors and community notables who are going to talk about how they found out about the love that dare not speak its name. [00:00:30] Unfortunately, tonight, Emma Lyon and Rebecca Swan are unable to attend this evening. Things that change the status quo were the homosexual law. Reform was signed in New Zealand in 1986 and the Marriage Equality Bill was passed in 2013. Still, it's not always straightforward finding out about same sex love. Catalas wrote poetry at the end of the Roman Republic, and I translated it in my Latin class at my much loved private [00:01:00] girls school. Halfway through my nine years at Saint, my mother asked if I'd like to go to a college school. Well, I considered it briefly, but then I declined. By the time I was in high school, there was only three of us in the Latin class. The exclusivity made it so much more exciting. My biggest secret as a teenager was my middle name. It's Leslie, It's Lesley. And after being [00:01:30] teased with Lizzie, Lizzie Leslie, I sensed that it was best to keep my mouth shut, which is not something that I find very easy to do. But when I discovered Catalas poetry to Lesia, I could pretend that I had written it. Let us love my lesbian. Let us love and all the words of the old and so moral May they be worth less than nothing to us. Sons may sit and suns may rise again. But when our brief [00:02:00] light has set, night is one long everlasting sleep. Give me 1000 kisses, 100 more, another 1000 another 100 when we've counted up, the many thousands confuses them so as not to know them all so that no enemy may cast an evil eye by knowing that there were so many kisses. Then there was Collette in the 19 hundreds, writing about married life, sexuality and the problems of a woman's struggle for independence [00:02:30] and and an erotica writing in 1992 Unhappy with Workmates Calling Me a wannabe dyke, I was still toying with getting off the bisexual fence, you see, when the movie version of Orlando came out. Tilda Swinton, the hero, played both sexes over three centuries. This was Virginia Woolf's 1928 fantastical biography presented to her lover, Lita Sack for West. Oh, I did love the [00:03:00] naughty twenties. That's why I wore my lovely beaded top for you tonight. But that's enough about me. Suffice to say that I'm pleased I finally had the courage to come out at 30 years of age after much literary input. The first of the seven that we have talking tonight is Thomas Sainsbury. He grew up in. He got a B a at Auckland Uni. He majored in English lit and theatre, and on graduating, he formed fingerprints and Teeth productions. [00:03:30] He is prolific. He's a powerhouse of creativity. He's won play markets young playwright of the year four times and has been a finalist for the Bruce Mason Award and the play market New Play award. Several plays have had seasons in London and Australia, and he was a cow writer on Madeleine Sami's fabulous Super City Series. I've had the pleasure of working with him at Garnett Station's tiny theatre, and I can say from experience. He's the sort of actor that pulls focus [00:04:00] your your turn. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the introduction. Verity. Um, so I'm Tom, um, one of and here I am talking about sexuality and discovering it. I first there's never a moment when I kind of kind of didn't know about sex. And one of my first memories involved sex. Not me having sex. But I remember getting hold of my sister's Barbie [00:04:30] doll, which was about this big and my brother's, which was about that big and hiding under my bed and making them go for it. Um, I like this was before school, and I'm like, In hindsight, I'm like, Was I just in acting? Did I see my parents having sex? And was I And was I just enacting what I saw? Which I hope it's not the case, but what I think happened was I grew up on a farm, so like sex was around me all the time. They're always like cows having sex and chickens having sex, [00:05:00] and I remember distinctly remember my father and his brother having a discussion about rugby while watching two pigs having sex. So it was quite it was quite commonplace. And also, I was known in my family because flies always chose to mate on me for some reason. So sex was always around me. And when people taught me when people taught me about sex, I kind of already knew everything. Anyway, Um, and it was also a great source of entertainment for me, and at school, me and my friends, both [00:05:30] male and female, would have great discussions. And we we we we would write this little story that we'd share with each other about the sex lives of our teachers. And, like, who was who was having sex with who. And, um, all the female teachers had, um, tampons and and stuff like that. It was just all very crass and smutty. Um, but it was never called sex, and it was never called getting it off or anything like that. We didn't really understand that term, So everyone was mating. So Mr Priest was mating. Mr. [00:06:00] Vick, I mean, it was all very ums. And when we discovered what oral sex was, we were like, This is great. So we included in our story. But instead of ORAL, it was a URAL. I wonder what oral sex is like. Um, I didn't really I wasn't really, like a little closeted homosexual boy growing up. I like I was never I never felt other or anything like that. But like in hindsight, the way that I kind of became obsessed with, [00:06:30] uh, the main character from, um, strictly ballroom or the singer who sang the They made this telly and I was kind of obsessed with these men, but I never kind of dealt with it at the time. So it wasn't like I was this, um, little kid who knew I was different, But, um, the first time I kind of came across a homosexual and literature was when we started. Uh, when we started a subject at school, we were about eight or nine. It was called keep keeping yourself safe, and it was taught throughout [00:07:00] school, and it was like they really hammered home about, I don't know, there must have been a meme quite a few molestation cases or something because they were adamant on, um, getting these little kids to kind of deal with it. And there was this one book that we had and the main villain of the piece was this uncle who, uh, who would like there would be this. He had blonde hair and he had a moustache. They always kind of had moustaches. And there was this, like, there's always a picture of him silhouetted in the bedroom door and then he would come in, come [00:07:30] in and he would touch both boys and girls. He had to be careful. You had to be on, um, watching out for this kind of behaviour. And we learned if you got any inappropriate touch and you had to go to a safe person and usually in these books it was always, um, grandmothers. So you can kind of imagine my total confusion, and it kind of didn't really sit with me. But one time I went to my grandmother's place and I just swam in a pole and we were sitting on the couch watching days of our lives, and we were eating a plate of, um, pizza flavoured shapes and we were sitting together [00:08:00] and she for, like, maybe 30 seconds, she stroked my neck and my upper back and she said, You're so smooth and that was it. And I just sat there going, Oh my God, is this And I was walking home going, Oh, my God, have I been molested? What's kind of going on? And then I was like, Who's my safe person? My grandmothers should be my safe person, but she's the one doing the molestation. So I decided to tell my sister, who was six years older than me and I explained everything, and I was kind of teary at this [00:08:30] point, and she just said, Stop in a dick. So that was the end of that, Um, my first kind of dabbling in pornography I or my first kind of erotic book that I read was this one here. I got it from home. It's called Where Did I Come From? And it's an illustrated guide, and so this is the most erotic picture that I kind of grow up with. I'll just find [00:09:00] it for you. It's this one here, so it's a mother and father. By this time, the man wants to get as close to a woman as he can because he's feeling very loving to her and to get really close. The best thing he can do is lie on top of her and put his Penis inside her into her vagina. And so I kind of look at that and I'll kind of take it all in. But it didn't really. After a while, it didn't really do anything for me. And then I got what's happening to me, which is the next in the illustrated [00:09:30] series. And I would spend like I'd flick through and I'd spend ages looking at this picture here. No, it's not that one. It's the next one, and it's It's this pictogram of of males developing from the age of 8 to 18 and like, I'd be fascinated with it and I'll look at I'll read about all the details about maturing and then so that was quite erotic, I guess when I was quite young, But then when I got a bit older, it was it filled me with anxiety [00:10:00] and I'd stand in front of the mirror going. I don't look anything like this, And he started, like my excessive exercise exercising around that time, Um and then after that, I kind of dabbled in real pornography. And I remember there was the at the corner store. I was about 11 at the time. And at our corner store there was the magazine rack and then at the very top, quite quite a reach was one porn magazine that had a red bag on it with an R 18 sign. And twice [00:10:30] I would come there and just stare at it for a minute and, like, I wonder what the shopkeeper thought. And then I'd leave. And then on the third one, when she was scooping someone some ice cream, I grabbed it, put it in my bag and then just kind of walked out. I never got in trouble for it. And I raced home and I ripped it open. And it was all just, um, a woman, just single woman by themselves, posing. I remember a lot of pearls, and, um, there was one article called, Uh, Well, there was one model, and she had an article called My Name's [00:11:00] Vanya. But don't confuse me with Uncle Vanya. And I remember that the article basically describes her turn ons and things like that. And then, um then it said, Don't confuse her with the tragic hero of, uh, Chekov's play Uncle Vanya. And I remember even as an 11 year old reading that and going, Honey, no one's going to confuse you with Uncle After that, a miracle happened. Um, I was going for one of my many runs at that time to lose weight and look like the kid in the look like the boy in the Pictogram [00:11:30] and I was running down. And then, um, just on the side of the road was a whole lot of scattered, um, pages of a porn magazine. And I've actually since found out that this is quite a common occurrence with people I don't know, some patron saying that pornography is going around leaving pages of pornography around. And this one was different from my first one and that had men and women together, which I found very fascinating. And there's also, like, little stories that they wrote about, [00:12:00] um, about erotic adventures. And I guess what happened then was the, uh, the beginning of the identification with the female rather than the male. And I remember this one story about this red head called Vicky V IC K. I and she, uh, took was taking a taxi home in Essex, and she could. She arrived at her home, but she couldn't pay for it because she didn't bring her wallet, so she had to pay for it with sexual services. And I just remember reading this, but identifying more with Vicky than the taxi [00:12:30] driver. Um, later, A. After that, Like I started reading a few books with female protagonists, they were a little bit saucy. Um, I found like Milton Boon. Not very satisfying. I thought the euphemisms of manhood and Mount of Venus just didn't cut it. And then I read Lady Chatterley's Lover. When I was 15, I got my hands on that, and I just It was a real revelation for me. I remember reading it and just identifying so much with her. It's a It's a brilliant book, and it would be one of my favourites. But I remember the descriptions of sex. [00:13:00] It was just so kind of erotic, but it was also so kind of powerful and visceral, and I just remember reading it and just thinking, yes, I can. So I'm so there. I can totally feel it. And then when I turned 16, we got the Internet. Um, so if you were and it was dial up. So if you were prepared to wait for one hour, you could watch whatever porn you wanted, so I became very educated that way. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, [00:13:30] Thomas. Wonderful. You reminded me of one of the things in In My family bookshelf. Which was the little Red Book. Yes, the little red book of all sorts of things. It was very instructive on how to masturbate. I remember. All right. Our next guest is Jen. She She has a strange combo of talents that run from school and university teaching to running a fly fishing lodge. [00:14:00] It seems entirely logical. She's now launching herself in a new direction as a crime writer with her darkly mad The Gentleman's Club, published in November last year. Jim. Thank you. Thank you, Verity. Um, the fishing lodge I ran with my partner, Heather McDonald. We had our civil union the first civil union in the central North Island 10 years ago. But I have to say, Tom, I think I'm probably old enough to be your grandmother, [00:14:30] and and I didn't come out until I was 45 and I spent the first at least 20 years of my adult life, Um, living as a straight married woman. Um, I told myself not very convincingly that I didn't need a clear gender, gender identity. It wasn't important to me. And yet I felt these terrible tingles whenever I heard that song. I looked it up this morning. [00:15:00] Apparently it was one of the most successful recordings in New Zealand ever. That was Alison Durbin singing I have loved me. A man like my Mama loved and so the The tingles came. And there I was in my wrong pond, living my heterosexual life, teaching at Auckland Girls Grammar with Julie for some of that time, and Carol and, um then probably because various lesbian friends were popping up on the hillside around my [00:15:30] pond and sort of waving at me. I knew there was another life out there. I knew that people were leading a life that was not actually denied to me, but it was something that was out there, and I thought it was really pressures. So I found myself getting involved in homosexual law reform activities. I was the middle class housewife. I was going to get a petition drawn up of people like me not not gay people, but I was going to support homosexual law reform. Um, and I did this. It was published [00:16:00] in the In the Herald. I got some people around me and we got this huge list of people not nearly as big as Jeff Bray Books list. But anyway, we did it. And then the the light came on for me. One night I went across to a ITS North Shore campus where Jeff Bray book was speaking, and I had a lot of gay friends with me and I. I came along tonight to talk about pitfalls and Prat Falls, and I thought windfalls as well. My, my, I don't know if it's a prat fall that you spend 20 years of your adult life being straight when [00:16:30] you're not really. But anyway, it's happened. Um, Jeff Bray was my first windfall, a huge fat lump of windfall because during that night the light really came on for me. I realised that the people that I was there supposedly talking about writing petitions for I should be with them, so I didn't come out immediately. I just knew that I was going to, I spent the next four years or so getting into false starts, hopeless relations, sort of things that [00:17:00] I I knew were hopeless. The married next door neighbour, the person 25 years younger than me, the, um, seriously clinically depressed, suicidal people that I knew were never going to be for me. So but But there I was having these relationships. Finally, in about 1990 I left the marriage and I was off. I was out. I was I just did it just like that in the end. But in those previous 20 years, lesbians and gays, as I said, [00:17:30] keep kept appearing and intrigued me. I thought they held that key to something precious. I wasn't homophobic at all. I just wasn't one of them. The other fascinated me, but I'd externalised it. Except that at my nice private girls school, I used to in my fourth form year kiss Maxine Taylor every Friday afternoon before we went home for our weekends. And no, it was just kiss. It was it was in public. I mean, the other saw. Nobody said Les that we just Maxine and and Jean kissed. So that was a That was just [00:18:00] my part of my life. When I was growing up in the sixties, I smuggled books into wherever I was living. I read them with a torch under the sheets. If I was sharing a room, probably lots of people did that and do that. But do they do it with books about prostitution? This is my big the biggest, for I actually believe prostitutes to be the most liberated of women. I read everything I could about Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler. When Jemaine Grier's female unit was published, I came to admire hookers, the sophisticated ones driving [00:18:30] the flash cars even more they'd done it. They'd broken away from the traditional suburban, repressed devitalized life that Greer was talking about and up One of the earliest books that I took under the covers with the torch were Twilight Women Around the World, an international picture of other love by somebody called Art Leighton Hassel, who I think wrote one book and then disappeared without trace. He they were prostitutes. They were one of the of the underworld. They used to identify each other, apparently [00:19:00] by shaving a patch off their hairy thighs so that they would know who each other was. That was that. The next thing that happened was, um and under the covers with two more books. The second sex by Simone, which was a bit too fat and too for a 13 year old. Um, but the world of Suzie Wong and these two books, this is another windfall. My fa my obstetrician father, this is interesting. I don't know why he had expressed to his gardener and interest in books like that, but the garden actually gave me these two books the [00:19:30] second and the the um, the world of Suzie Wong said, Please give these to your father, so of course they came straight to me first. And the world of Suzie Wong was a fascinating book set in this Namco Hotel and there's prostitution again, and I just thought it was just fantastic. Next, I was probably about 20 I suppose, and I got hold of the happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander. Um and I don't know whether in my mind [00:20:00] and my heart, I was one of the men watching the girls or I was one of the one of the girls, but there's a very vivid scene in there of two girls getting it on and I I was transfixed by this. Dangerous desires were looming, but the lesbian writing I got my hands on back then included Radcliffe's Hall's world of loneliness, which described another kind of repression. But there was no guilty thrill there For me. There was no hiding the book of the I just Thought It was sad and weird, and I knew she was right. People like her viewed [00:20:30] themselves as congenital inverts. They couldn't possibly be happy. They individually, all together they were always going to be a cast, so that was a sort of a It was all a way somewhere out there for me and gradually the book hiding stopped altogether. Who would think that the yearnings and enchantments of Suffolk poetry, or Frank Sarge's home erotic The hole that Jack dug with the sweaty bodies and the low life depravity of Charles Bukovsky were ringing my personal bells? Even I could barely hear them. [00:21:00] The bells rang louder when I read the Pretenders, Gwen Davis' unsubtle erotic novel about all kinds of imaginable kinds of deviant sexual behaviour, hypersexual hyperactivity everywhere, thrills on every page, I didn't hide that, and I even recommended it to a few bored housewives. And that was followed by Jane Rules unsent letter to a lesbian lover who was never quite a lover, vividly depicting New York and London and a group of friends as they searched in vain for a sustaining love was called, This Is Not [00:21:30] for You and that affirm for me that a lesbian life was all too difficult. I could relax. I was excused. I could stay in what I thought of as my side, ignoring sexually active but unfulfilled yearning on my calm leg. I have no regrets, but I would like to say I can't help being a bit curious about what would have happened, how different things might have been for me if I had found one of those clandestine American newsletters written by lesbians calling themselves The Daughters of Bullet, [00:22:00] for example, the latter, edited by Phyllis Lyon, also known as Anne Ferguson. Vice versa. Created and edited by Edith E, also known as Lisa Ben. Nice anagram there. What if I had found the price of salt? Patricia Highsmith was known as Claire Morgan. All those aliases, so many guises I can't help being curious about what would have happened if I had my wake up call much sooner than 1986. Got rid of my own guys, Perhaps the biggest of all for me in my twenties [00:22:30] instead of my forties. Thank you very much, Jim. Perhaps there's another book. Our next guest, Dangerous Desires was the title of his groundbreaking 1991 book that won the New Zealand Book Award. Among other prizes. He's been a filmmaker. Think desperate remedies. Jane Austen on acid. [00:23:00] He's looked back at the cracked plate of our Colonial past, and now he's taken some time out and brought us the same same but different festival. I believe it's Peter Wells. Thanks very much. I subtitled this or I titled This My Dirty Talk. Yeah, [00:23:30] because I'm a writer. I will read from what I've written at different times in your life. You're a different person. In 1975 I was in Paris for the first time in my life, and I was with a friend from Auckland. Or rather I wasn't with a friend from Auckland. We had got on the train together from Charing Cross, but on a stoned daffy moment. I decided that I need to get off the train and go and get something to eat. [00:24:00] It took longer than I thought. English queues and I had to run to catch the train. Perhaps I didn't explain to the guard where I was going. Or perhaps the guard was just homophobic. I found myself on the Hitchcockian nightmare of a train going in the wrong direction. Tim, that was the name of my friend was on the train to Folston. Whereas I was fatally on the train to Dover. We had no way of getting in touch with each other. We hadn't planned [00:24:30] what hotel we were staying in in Paris. The following day I crossed the channel and settled into the sad business of being in Paris City of love. But with not with my friend, then remarkably like something out of a dream and something you would expect in a city the size of Auckland. But not in Paris. I saw Tim walking towards me, looking just as lonely and miserable as I was. He spotted me just as I spotted him. We shrieked [00:25:00] like two bars, as was our want 1000 tasteful Parisian eyebrows were raised simultaneously as 1000 pair of eyes consigned us to the oblivion marked as with an added black mark of But we couldn't have cared less. We were two crazy and and in a place we both delighted in calling Paris France as it was always [00:25:30] called in American sitcoms. This was a reflection of the fact so much of our culture at the time in New Zealand was really imported through films or books or television. Maybe that was the reason Tim and I talked to one another and totally phoney accents. One of these accents was American Deep South, as spoken by Vivian Lee and Street Car Named Desire, which has been mentioned several times over the today. The other was Scottish, as spoken by Maggie Smith [00:26:00] in the prime of Miss Jean Brodie. So we just walked around talking to each other, either in deep Southern accents or Scottish accents, wildly hopeless accents. Why the accents? I've often wondered this, maybe because the world around us appeared so phoney. We thought we were best actors in a crazy sitcom we hadn't invented and didn't fit with them. Or maybe our own native voice was too tender, too unused, too naked [00:26:30] to be trusted. Tim wasn't out, so I knew he was gay. I also knew he befriended me because I was out. He probably thought I knew what I was doing. I didn't. I was making it up as I went along, but we shared something really, really important. I knew even then I was going to be a writer, and he was a writer who had done columns and hot licks which preceded Rip It Up magazine. Then he'd been adopted by Brian Fairy when he came to New Zealand, [00:27:00] which Tim parlayed into working for Brian Eno in London. Later, he would become famous as Tim Blanks of Fashion TV, editor at large of style dot com, And I'm sure he'd hate this super unstylish version of his first trip to Paris. But at this stage, it was just my friend Tim Melancholic. His father had died probably five years earlier, and he was in love with a bisexual boy who tormented him. Crawling [00:27:30] Jim was also very funny, and we were, I guess, girlfriends in a way, enjoying our first time together in Paris, France, really without much money between us. But what is this to do with sex? Within an hour or so of us meeting up almost in a spirit of celebration, I expertly shoplifted an American pulp porn novel in one of the pawn shops we went into Yes, shoplifted. I thought I was being out [00:28:00] of a feast journal a phase of my life I have long left behind. I swear, Carol, The moment we got the book, we cracked its spine open and took turns reading out loud and loud, an accent of voices, paragraphs of utterly startling obscenity. I won't do the accent, but this is just an example. I was hypnotised. The bastard was either a witch or a goddamn vampire who lived on fuck juice instead of blood. [00:28:30] This time the tunnel was reversed. The wrong end of the telescope was the right one. He started to look even bigger in real life, and his asshole was starting to feel like it could swallow me whole and one reverse movement. Like a fleshly vacuum cleaner. The book was full of startling images as well as amazing language that's strained to evoke sexual action. IC CCCC you [00:29:00] would run over several lines of print rising into capitals as it got near the point of no return write. A hard cop was dated in 1973 and was just on the threshold of the macho movement that would take over the gay male world immediately. So the book is drenched and, as it says, 200% man to man action. Raunchy and full of set pieces like a full on orgy and a sauna, a rape fantasy with a group of super hung black men. But it also [00:29:30] encompassed little nuggets of real life wisdom We recognised from life in Auckland. Quote. When you achieve official status as a queer in our town, you automatically lose your claim to membership of the human race. It was written by someone called Allegedly Jed Cox. Another author was Peter Peer. This led Jed Cox. This Jed Cox was clearly highly literate. The narrative was actually structured in a complex in a complex and sophisticated [00:30:00] way, with two journals commentating on each other like an 18th century epistolary novel. Much later, I found out Chris Christopher Isherwood often used his downtime to write porn, and I wondered, Write a hard cop was printed on the cheapest S paper by a San Diego publisher. It comes from a time when there was virtually no image based pornography, very little film, no video at all, maybe just Standard eight film, [00:30:30] and the book and the magazine trade covertly carried a cargo of only slightly underground porn. You had to be over 21 and sign a document to get it posted within the US. Why, out of light in reading the book out loud? It was a joke against the super French, really, against those polished Parisians who went out of their way not to understand the barbarian tongue of English. So, of course, they couldn't possibly acknowledge that their ears [00:31:00] were now receiving a tidal wave of gorged genitalia and associated Avia a bit like the dildo being thrown at dildo Bains, a K, a Stephen Joyce, sexual politics and action. The French were caught in the dilemma of having to pretend they simply didn't understand. Just as Tim and I had to pretend we weren't incredibly interested in the sexual logistics and athletics being described, the fact was, neither Tim nor I were actually sexually [00:31:30] experienced at all. And this book, which we took delight in reading aloud and ridiculing was actually quite instructive on a sort of mechanical level, which we knew very little about. As we walked along the streets of the city of love, reading aloud and mock deep Southern or mock Scottish accents braying with laughter, we were silently instructing ourselves on all sorts of stuff we needed to know. [00:32:00] I'm sure it's not the first or the last time. Pornography has been used to learn about sexual techniques. I've always been very grateful for this book, which on one level is just a piece of brazen porn whose whole point is to arouse you and get you off, but which was actually quite complex in the way it was written. Talked of moods and feelings, tried to describe sexual feelings, which God knows as a writer I know are very difficult to translate into words. [00:32:30] And in a way that was absolutely typical for two writers. Neither of us met the flesh and blood man of our dreams in Paris, France, City of love. We were too busy with our noses buried in a book, and I find that so, Thank you, Peter, for carrying on our [00:33:00] themes of shoplifting and pornography. Her real name is her alias is Diesel Dyke poet. She is a performance poet, winner of the title of Riki Poet for 2010 and 2012 and also the winner of poetry. Idol, 2015. Diesel Dike poet has performed at Heroes Out West, which, sadly, does not exist anymore, and [00:33:30] Dykes on Ms at Garnet Station, which does exist. Still, she has a mass collection of over 700 poems. She is a psychologist by profession but prefers to be a spoken word artist and writer fighting. Firstly, I have to say that I've never been at a venue where I've had so many Ex-girlfriends turn up. [00:34:00] This poem is entitled woman or girlfriend. When finally I shake loose this darkness, I'll be brief in your morning. You'll feel me and the air band pull of the moon as you breathe in the sunrise. Vapours from sacred water shall rise in the altar. That is your mind. I'll be the conscience staring back at you from the mirror, dressed in tuxedo, black with tails [00:34:30] or like the sun and the moon, the dimensions between a woman and a girlfriend are obvious. a girlfriend will cause your heart to flutter. A woman will gaze straight through you as she's oozing pheromones, causing your heart to skip beats Every time you even breathe in her direction, a girlfriend will give you butterfly and French kisses. A woman will take your tongue, [00:35:00] slip and slide it, melt it your lips like candy floss as she merely jits her way into hyperactive diesel space. The girlfriend will come into your yeah, that's right, your house and like, well, she'll do things but a woman. A woman will come into your life. Clean up your bad habits along with your bad banking behaviour, too the girlfriend, or help you find pieces to a puzzle. You know, putting some kind of like dangerous [00:35:30] connection together about you and her. But a woman will help you find peace in your soul, putting your relationship back together with you and your goddesses. The girlfriend will take off all of her clothes and tell you that's right. She'll tell you to have sex with her or make love to her or something like that. But a woman a woman will take off all of her fears. Lay her pride along with her scent between the sheets and lingering on your pillow, she'll permit you [00:36:00] to be with her. She's reconsidering or deconstructing new approaches to ending homophobia, racism, sexism and all bigotry you see, because her love me making is an act of revolution. I've been tripping over girls hopelessly like I've been tripping over my untied shoelaces, digging the concrete reality that is girlfriend space blindfolding myself from Cairo to solo to Brighton. But I'm sorry. I'm just gonna say this. Girlfriends are for wannabe 30 [00:36:30] something year olds and or younger. I mean, you know, you take them home and you introduce them to the you say, meet the new misses. But woman yeah, especially my woman was the reason I could sleep night. She was the reason my heartbeat could make fun to sound like symphonies. She was the professional who made me realise the others were just unpaid work without retirement. Satisfaction guaranteed. And I'm not finished yet. OK, girlfriends. [00:37:00] Ah, amazing. But it's kind of like a crutch about to become your cage. But a woman a woman's got the Earth's backbone and the pull of the moon. You know, I think most of us tend to settle for packages a lot less than what we think we have. But I've been dressing myself in front of the mirror long enough to know what looks good on me [00:37:30] and what doesn't. I guess you can tell that my, um kind of, uh, narrative is Butch. And I make no apologies for that. Um, last night I talked about the, uh I guess my first my early experiences with [00:38:00] With Women with With the concept Of Of Loving my own. And I was only four. And it was an electrifying experience, and the television screen got turned off. But, um, that that energy, you know, that energy that you have between someone is is incredible. And I think [00:38:30] that in in the mainstream, in the mainstream narrative, um, it's so controlled. And I think that's something that we don't have. We don't have a narrative about what we should be or how we should behave. I mean, if we look at the constructs that we have now, it's it's incredible, and it's amazing. [00:39:00] And so, um, I come along here to support um, same same, but different because of that. OK, so I wanna give a big, um, out to the trans community. Big out to my own community as lesbian and a big out to the gay community as well and to the LGBT QIAP community. So, uh, [00:39:30] someone asked me, What does the a P mean at the end of the LGBTI LGI a and OK, [00:40:00] all right. Thank you. Thank you. Next. Nick Jones is one of the new voices being introduced this year. He's been studying creative writing at a UT and last year scooped up the prize for best graduate student. He was the finest at the New Zealand writers College short story competition. Tonight, he's going to be reading a short excerpt from his untitled coming of age novel [00:40:30] set in a small town with hallucinatory overtones. Um, so I'm gonna read a, um, shortened down chapter, Um, from a novel that, um, was just introduced. Uh, I am reading from a female perspective, so forgive me if I get it wrong. Um, if I get it wrong, tell me, like, afterwards and then I can fix it. Um, so basically, it just revolves around a character [00:41:00] named Susan, um, as a child, discovering that, um, the boy that she has a crush on isn't like every other boy. Once, Adam was in the centre of things once he was in my dreams. Kids have silly crushes, silly crushes on silly kids. But he was all effeminate and clueless to my attractions, the way little boys tend to be. My memory paints a picture of the child back then. Wispy hair, [00:41:30] fine, dark and straight. Long lashes, pale skin, cute freckles dotting his cheeks and nose. He's stubble on his chin nowadays, but that little boy is still there. The summer of 95. It's vague in the picture. It paints yet still beautiful, still innocent. Mum and dad were from out of town with cardboard boxes carrying our lives. Inside, we moved into the neighbourhood and into a small white wooden place away from [00:42:00] the city. The moving van was in the driveway. Mum and me, we were unpacking boxes in the vacant living room. Dad was helping the driver carry furniture, dropping it all in the front yard. Unpacking boxes. Wasn't my ideal way of spending the morning trying to escape out the front door away to explore, Mum shouted at me, Susan, Lucy fence and you get your little butt back in here. My pace quickened head down. Looking at my feet, she continued. You're nearly six years old now. Girl time. [00:42:30] You carried your weight. Her voice echoed in the empty house behind me as the door closed. The first day at a new school is always hard, especially when you arrive late in the term me up front of the class like a coming of age film teacher's hand on my back. Now everyone, this is Susan. She's new blonde little girls and pigtails titter to each other behind whispering hands. I sat in the back at Interval. This kid came up the first one. Hi, he [00:43:00] said. I'm Adam with him, A curious looking boy, dark skinned and astonishing blue eyes, he smiled nervously at me and nudged his friend. Oh, and this is Tyler. Tyler lived just around the corner from the school in a state-owned home. He was polite and a little shy. The two sort of adopted me. It was a relief to have friends again. Weeks went by, and most mornings a knock on Adam's front door would announce my presence, this little girl blushing when he'd open it up and invite me inside. [00:43:30] Adam was my prince charming. The problem was, he wasn't into it. It wasn't just in the way that he ignored me or how he blushed. Whenever a certain boy spoke to him, there was something else in me, a voice which started to whisper that Adam was different. All the other boys our age were plucking up the courage to ask girls out for the end of year disco. But Adam kept to himself for weeks. Whenever Adam began a sentence with Susan, my ears would prick up, hoping desperately to hear [00:44:00] the full sentence, hoping to hear those words. Susan, will you go with me? I just don't get why he won't ask me, I said. Tyler blushed. He flipped through the pages of his book. Maybe he's just not interested in the disco, but why not? The elderly librarian looked up at this and shushed us. I don't know, he said, My legs curled up until my knees were planted beneath my chin, my face buried into my jeans, groaning, annoyed, a dull thud as Tyler's book slowly closed. [00:44:30] I was gonna go with Julie, he said. Cool, I replied, No, I mean I was gonna go with Julie. But hey, if it means that much to you, I'll say no to her. Tyler. Now listen to me. If it means that much to you, I'll I'll say no to her. And I don't know, I. I could go with you. Oh, no. Go with Julie. I said I don't want your night to be lame because Adam won't ask me. Oh, I'm gonna ask him instead, I decided. Why can't the girl ask the guy? I'm gonna [00:45:00] Yeah, of course. OK. Tyler put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me a little. There's no rule. The next morning, when Adam walked into art, I glared at him. Adam McCormick. I hissed as he sat next to me. You will take me to the disco, whether you want to or not. He looked like I'd slapped him. What? Another glare? Yeah, sure. Uh, OK. And that was that. School discos suck ass, especially when they're full of 10 and [00:45:30] 11 year olds. Everyone's just standing around awkwardly, too afraid to dance with their dates. These geeky kids getting on sugar rushes from the free mini soda bottles on supply. Cool kids are grinding one another, mimicking what they've seen on TV. Adam had arrived on my doorstep in a dress shirt and pants. He looked handsome. I smiled. Wow, he laughed when he saw me. You were wearing a dress. My smile turned into a frown. And we linked arms and walked [00:46:00] down to the school. Halfway through the night, Adam disappeared from the brightly decorated hall. He must have slipped off while my hands busied themselves with paper plates and cakes at the snack table. It had only been a few minutes, but he was gone. Seated on one of the chairs off to the side, Tyler looked glumly up at his date, dancing with all her friends. He saw me watching and shrugged. Hey, there was a chair next to him waiting for me. You look beautiful, Susan. He said [00:46:30] Thanks, Ty. You look cool too. Hey, have you seen Adam anywhere? I've lost him, Adam. Oh, right. Um, nah. Maybe he's outside. The side door exit led out to the basketball court. Some kids were laughing out on the concrete. It sounded wrong. And then there was a shout from behind some trees. Get off me, Faggot! Behind those trees. Jason, this guy who played football, leaped away from the park bench. He'd been sitting on. A second boy stood up. He was [00:47:00] all nervous and confused. It was Adam, Jason, he whimpered. His tone was muffled. He said something else that I couldn't that couldn't be heard. And the older boy suddenly barged forward, his fist twisting Adam's dress shirt up around the collar. He slammed Adam against one of the trees. He responded in a violent whisper, then pulled his other fist back and punched Adam hard in the face. Adam fell to the ground, blood spurning from his nose. Adam, I rushed forward as he crawled to his feet. He saw me standing [00:47:30] there. Among the other kids who had heard all the commotion, his face was cold and empty. The blood dripped down and over his upper lip. Stay the fuck away from me, Jason said before storming off. I bent over and helped Adam up and pulled him back to the bench so he could sit down. Tyler stepped out of the hall to check on the noise. He saw me with Adam, then the rest of the crowd staring. He blanked for a moment, then shouted, Hey, everyone, they're giving away free movie tickets inside. [00:48:00] He nodded at me and then stepped aside As the kids rushed back in the doors. He followed him behind them. What happened? I asked. Adam, wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve and tried to stand up. Let me go, he said. He got to his feet eventually and began walking out of the school gates and onto the footpath. Adam, wait. Why did that kid hit you? I asked. He stopped. Looked at me. There were tears in his eyes. I'm gay, OK? His lower lip trembled. [00:48:30] I like other boys. Devastation erupted in my body. Tears formed in my eyes but were blinked out before he could notice all of my wasted affection set up on my chest. Jason, he said he liked me. He said he wanted to kiss me, but someone saw us. I guess he thought he could hide it if he smashed me. Adam dropped to the curb and buried his head in his hands. Now everybody will know he was right. Everybody did know the next Monday [00:49:00] at school, Jason, he invented this whole story. He told everyone Adam had lured him away to talk about sports, he said. Once they were alone, Adam had tried to force Jason to kiss him out there in the dark, we'd pass by groups of kids at the school cafeteria, me, Adam and Tyler. They'd whisper amongst themselves. Words like queer and faggot bounce through the classrooms in between classes. When we were grabbing our books, kids would play jokes [00:49:30] and stuff. Adam's locker with extra thick anal condoms. Gotta keep safe fags. Someone would shout as the plastic strips fell from his locker to the floor. Thanks, Adam would reply, teasing back. I'll need them for when I fuck your dad. My crush on Adam went dormant, only to be woken up twice during those teenage years. A text message here and there suggested that my heart may have had a chance. He even kissed me one night when we were drunk under the moon, but sobered. [00:50:00] Those events were quickly ignored. Once Adam was in the centre of things. Once he was in my dreams. Thank you. I think so. Certainly the, um, discos I remember weren't quite that juicy. Yeah, Grant. Robin Robertson is the finance spokesperson [00:50:30] for the Labour party and a rainbow MP Wait, wait. There's more for Wellington Central since 2008. He writes his own speeches, people. He contributes to blogs. And he grew up in Dunedin, and he has flown to Auckland to have a thoroughly gay weekend. Uh uh. Thank you for that introduction. [00:51:00] Uh, can I start by? Um, just, um, congratulating Peter and everybody involved in in the festival. I. I think this is a tremendous, uh, tremendous initiative and one that, you know, I really hope grows and grows and grows. Uh, over time. So so, Well done. I really mean that. When I was thinking about what? To what to talk about today. I. I ran through my list of of coming out fiction literature and a little bit like Stevens [00:51:30] in some way. The farmers catalogue, um, was a very big part of of my coming out. That's farmers the, um, the shop rather than anything else. Uh, and that figured large, but I didn't think I could dwell on that very far. As did, um, the famous five books. I felt hugely vindicated in slightly later years when, um, the comic strip troupe in the UK produced the five go Mad Things. And Julian was this very buff, um, older brother [00:52:00] in the family. And that kind of resonated with where I'd got, um, not so much in the five go mad. Where there was Uncle Quentin who was always described as the screaming homosexual Uncle Grendon, which kind of sense to me, So I could have talked about that tonight, and I could have talked about, um, other books, and it would have almost become a bit fan boyish because it would have involved Peter and Steven and, um, and all sorts of people who really meant a lot to me as I grew up. Um, the tales of the city books, which I stole off my mother's bookshelf, [00:52:30] um, to read were were hugely important. And I thought I was Michael and and I. I went through all of that. Um, but I've actually decided to do quite possibly the most preposterous thing that a politician could do as the only non writer on a panel. I've written a short story for tonight, and you all get to be the first people to hear it. So it, um, as they say in the in the stories. It's based on true events. Uh, and, [00:53:00] uh, it does resonate about my growing up in Dunedin, and it's called Operation City Bookshop. Todd's history teacher, Mr Snow, had said that every successful military campaign had three elements planning, preparation and perspiration. Todd certainly had the letter in bucket loads as he ran down Beach Road to get the number seven bus to town. He had done his planning and preparation, but nothing could be taken [00:53:30] for granted. Todd hustled past the suburban shops open for Friday late night. Did they know Mr Lang of Lang's butchery? Stared out the window, his chubby eyes meeting Todd's. He quickly turned to his assistant and then back to Todd, and possibly Todd Thought smiled. Next door at the video shop, Todd could see Mr Lee, the owner of Ross Lee, at his counter. He moved even quicker. Things had got [00:54:00] awkward with Mr Lee since the day Todd had rented boys in the band. He had taken it up to the counter between Ghostbusters and back to the future, but they were new releases and had to be run up at the other till, or something like that. Mr. Lee had said he asked Todd a lot of questions about boys in the band and why it had caught Todd's eye. Todd talked about music and bands, but not about boys. Mr Lee said Boys in the band wasn't taken out very often and that [00:54:30] Todd could keep it an extra week. And he smiled in a way that Todd later learned to describe as knowingly. Mr. Lee was on the PT A with Todd's dad. So when Todd took the video back the next day, he told Mr Lee's son, who was on the counter, that he didn't like it very much. Why should I care? Ross Lee, vid E junior grunted safely across the road, and at the stop, Todd saw the bus lights appear in the distance. He looked into the window of Helen's hair design. [00:55:00] Helen waved out to Todd. He half waved back. He wondered why Helen had become a hairdresser. She always kept her hair as a military crop cat, and she only ever wore jeans and a plaid shirt, which was really different from most of the other people in the neighbourhood. Helen didn't know his plans. No one could know Todd's plans Operation City Bookshop was Todd's. The plan was simple. Take the bus to town, go to City Bookshop, make his purchase and get home all before the last bus and any need [00:55:30] for parental involvement. The first stage of the plan was simple. City Bookshop was just a five minute walk across Queens Gardens from the exchange. Todd had practised all of this the week before. Mr Snow would have called this covert reconnaissance. He'd gone to the shop and confidently walked up to the counter and said in a voice loud enough to ensure most of the shop would hear. Do you have a cricket section? This was an instantly believable alibi. Todd loved cricket. He had a poster of New [00:56:00] Zealand's best bowler on his bedroom wall. The player had a moustache, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a mat of dark. Here. Todd thought he looked like Tom Selleck, another member of the test team, had recently started advertising for jockey underwear. Todd had a copy of that, too, in a drawer beside his bed. In any case, on the reconnaissance mission, the old man behind the counter, who looked like a poet Todd had studied at school motioned him to the back of the shop. Todd already knew where the books [00:56:30] were, but waited and made sure he sought confirmation. He was heading in the right direction. Deception was another word Mr Snow had used talking about war. The sports books were in the corner next to a section called Lifestyles. Todd didn't know what that meant, but he had seen what he needed to three magazines stuffed awkwardly into the end of the shelf. The title wasn't fully visible, but the word man in Capital Letters was, and more to the point, the picture of the naked bodies [00:57:00] of two men, locked and embrace, presented itself boldly planning and preparation. Todd thought, as he got off the bus on Friday night, were his friends. It was dark now. He'd chosen his outfit carefully. The long trench coat he bought from the op shop and the woollen tramping hat made him far less recognisable. He thought that that really is true, too. The old man was at the counter. Todd went by without a word. His plan was simple. [00:57:30] Pick up a crooked almanack to act as cover, pick up the magazines and straight to the counter. The coast was clear. Todd moved confidently. Planning check, preparation check. Perspiration, triple check. He paused at the cricket almanack cricketing. Tom Selleck was on the cover, a pleasant surprise two steps forward, and he reached out to get the magazines. All the military precision in the world goes nowhere without intelligence, Mr Snow [00:58:00] had said. How could 1 50 page magazine cost $20? Todd noticed that the price in US dollars was $3. 50. Todd had always wanted to live in America in battle. Expect the unexpected. Mr Snow had said. Todd folded the magazine under the Almanack and kept walking for the first time in the history of City Bookshop. There was a queue at the counter. Todd studied the cover of the Almanack Cricketing. Tom Selleck was in his delivery [00:58:30] stride, every muscle straining captured a second from Release Todd. Mr Snow Cricket shrieked Todd, thrusting the almanack towards Mr Snow. A game for gentlemen, Mr Snow said, not looking at the almanack, but now fully staring at the magazine with its title exposed in block capitals, man on man present perspiration had now beaten planning and preparation. [00:59:00] What kind of history teacher hangs around in bookshops. On a Friday night, Todd fumed, he reached the front of the queue and held the book and magazine in one hand and 2 $20 notes in the other, defiantly not turning around. The bookshop owner peruse the books as if he had never seen them before, lifting one up and then the next he may as well have shouted out, We've got a gay one here, Todd. And then, just as he had planned, the owner took his money, returned [00:59:30] a handful of coins and the books in a brown paper bag. Todd walked out into the cold winter year. The unexpected import costs of Man on Man meant a long walk home. He considered tapping the public phone in the gardens to get a ride from his mother. But there would have been a major diversion from the plan, and he had had enough of those for this mission. Man on man took pride of place in Todd's bedside draw. He made sure to study the cricket almanack as well over the weekend in case Mr Snow quizzed [01:00:00] him about it on Monday. But he didn't and amazingly, he didn't say anything to Todd, either. The unit on World War Two finished, and Mr Snow started to get very excited about the Kings and queens of Tudor and Stuart, England. After a few days, Todd declared Operation City Bookshop a success and moved on to his next mission, a far less risky affair. He had found a classified ad in the newspaper where you could order man on man by post. He was expecting [01:00:30] the first issue in the mail any time he had planned it out. He knew the Post is times, and he he had prepared to be there, and he had cover. If anyone asked what this was all about, he said, I have no idea how a parcel for Mr Snow could end up being delivered to me. It's the beginning of a new career, [01:01:00] a big thanks to the very entertaining and and illuminating um, speakers tonight. Also, many thanks to the same same festival sponsors a UT pride, gabber, Ga N Simpson, the Wallace Foundation and Creative New Zealand I. I remember attending the very first Auckland Readers and Writers Festival planned by Peter Wells and Stephanie Johnson, and I'm I'm chuffed to have been asked to be involved in this inaugural [01:01:30] literary event. So thank you very much. Peter, um, books are for sale in the foyer and thank you to Carol for from the women's bookshop for always being there for us. So thank you, everybody. Can I just, um, thank you all for coming along to this very beginning of the, uh, festival. It's been tremendous. Um, ride the whole way through. Um, I. I would [01:02:00] like to give a special thanks to Julie Watson, who has really been the person who's held it all together. Um, all the way through. Um, so thank you to you. The audience to thank you so much. Thank you. So.
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