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Hi. I'm Doctor Alison Laurie. I was the Gender and Women's Studies programme director at Victoria University of Wellington here in New Zealand. Uh, for many years, I'm a writer or a historian and Lisbon and gay activist. Today I'm going to be looking at meeting places for people interested in relationships with their own sex and how these developed in New Zealand. Uh, though first, I'll look a bit at how some of these meeting places developed. Uh, overseas. [00:00:30] Uh, we know that by the late 18th century, there were what we know. What became known as Molly Houses in London, where, uh, in the late 18th century, relatively upper class men would wear women's clothes and sit about in particular coffee houses, uh, various societies for the improvement of morals uh, were concerned about these and to try to get them closed down. So there is some [00:01:00] evidence about that. And, uh, historians like Jeffrey Weeks have written about that. Uh, we also know that there appear to have been for men, uh, public areas where they could meet. And there are reports of this through the 19th century and, of course, through the 20th century in cities like Paris, where there'd be particular parks, open air places and ultimately, men's toilets where men would meet to [00:01:30] make connections. What's interesting about that is there's been some research done in Newcastle in New South Wales that, uh certainly in the mid 20th century, moving toward the later 20th century. Uh, those kinds of meeting places. The beats were not so much only for men to meet and have sex. But really, they were social scenes that quite often married men would meet there. They'd go out at night for a walk with the dog. They'd meet there, they'd have a cigarette [00:02:00] together, they'd exchange gossip. And, of course, some sexual contact did go on, but that they were just as much social scenes as they were anything else. This kind of possibility has never been open really to women, because women have not had the same access to public spaces as men, uh, women in public spaces on their own, or even in even with a couple of women. There's always been a suspicion that they were there to do sex work, and certainly we have some suggestions of [00:02:30] a connection between sex work and same sexual practises. among women from reports from Paris from the early part of the 19th century that there appeared to have been restaurants attached to brothels where women who may well have been in same sexual relationships congregated and met There. Now, of course, for the upper classes, there's always been other kinds of possibilities. And we have reports again from Paris of salons like that of Natalie Barney of other [00:03:00] kinds of, uh, high, uh, highly ranking nightclubs and things like that, with reports of, uh, that women met one another there and obviously men did as well. And the research that's been done on meeting places in New York, uh, has focused, especially that of Joe Nestle focused on, uh, the kinds of lesbian bars that emerged there in the 19 fifties, uh, and similarly in places like California and so on. [00:03:30] So what was the situation in New Zealand? Unfortunately, we lack, uh, a a lot of information, uh, because much of the research is still to be done. What we can say is that the situation here was always very different to many other parts of the world. For a start, we had six o'clock closing in the pubs and that came in after 1918. We were very lucky not to get Prohibition. Uh, but we did get very restrictive licencing practises and pubs [00:04:00] were, uh they had to shut at six o'clock. They were not open on Sundays. They, uh, were not allowed to serve any food or have any entertainment because that would encourage drinking. The public bars did not allow women to be in them at all. Women were only allowed in hotels in the ladies and escorts bars, and that was supposedly to prevent prostitution and drinks. Cost a higher price in the ladies and escorts bars, which were sometimes known as the cats bar. And a lot [00:04:30] of hotels didn't even have a cat's bar. And, um, people of a certain age can often remember sitting in the car park of in the car with their mothers and siblings when their father might bring a A shandy out to their mother and soft drinks for the Children while he went in and had a beer in the public bar. So this is a different situation very, very different social situation to that that you would have even had in England at the time or other parts of the world. And clearly, in such a situation, [00:05:00] there are not, uh, any kinds of dedicated lesbian or gay bars. There were, however, for men, bars, public bars, Uh, in Wellington, the the tavern, uh, in Littleton, the British hotel where men could gather. Uh, but it was much more difficult for women to find a A bar where they could, where they could meet. And even when you did, you had to be out at six o'clock. So meeting places in New Zealand as they emerged [00:05:30] in the, uh in the post war period, uh, were quite often coffee bars in Wellington. The Tate Tate, uh, was very popular. That was in Herbert Street. Uh, and in Auckland, the and, uh, these were places where everybody knew that the camp card would go. And the term that was used at that time is camp. Uh, the terms gay and gay comes in later. Uh, the term lesbian wasn't, although it was understood [00:06:00] it was pejorative, and people would not have used that of themselves. People knew the term homosexual, But once again, that was a worrying term. So among the communities themselves, terms used was the term camp, so people would meet in the coffee bars. They they would. They were also, and and other so social. Historians, writing on other topics have said New Zealand, in fact, didn't stop at six o'clock. That's when it opened up because in fact, there were lots and lots of private parties, and there were many camp parties. There were people whose houses [00:06:30] really were often used as the party house and where everybody would would go for the Friday and Saturday night party. Sometimes those parties would go on all weekend. Um, so there was a good deal of socialising in that kind of way. Um, and people who would go to those parties, uh can we say, Were they all camp? Well, in those times, uh, in the 19 fifties and also as we moved through the 19 sixties, uh, before the community has become [00:07:00] more politicised, a lot of people would go to the parties who certainly didn't identify themselves as camp. So far as the men were concerned, these men were trained. They were men who who might do it or might not. Nobody was. Nobody was asked about their sexual identity and you'd also have among the women. Uh, I remember several female couples where who would Who would explain that one of them was camp and the other was not. And if their relationship ended, she'd [00:07:30] be going back to men, and then the relationship would end and she'd have another woman girlfriend. But she still would never identify herself as camp, and that was not uncommon. So in a way, it's a kind of model that there's one camp and then the other one isn't camp. Uh, and then you have people who who constantly go to camp parties, but they're not camp. So the question of identity isn't as important as the as the fact that people participate in in a community. Uh, and there they are at these parties. Now, I've [00:08:00] been asked, uh, by people living elsewhere. How come these people could have parties? How come they had backyards? How come they had houses? And that's an interesting New Zealand question, too, because because in the in the aftermath of World War Two, we had a very good state housing policy so that we have, uh, we have houses, uh, for rent because, uh, heterosexual families have quite often managed to acquire a state house, so there are houses for rent that [00:08:30] groups of camp people could rent. There's also more flats becoming available in the city areas because families are wanting to move to the suburbs. So in that sense we were lucky to have houses with backyards and a higher standard of living than would have been the case in some other countries, and certainly in in some other cities. Anyway. Our ways of socialising are uniquely New Zealand, and they are also informed tremendously [00:09:00] by those palaces of queer culture that sail into our harbours every well, every certainly every week and sometimes more than, uh, once a week. And these are the boats that went between New Zealand and Europe, in particular British boats, um, and but also ships from Holland, uh, and other countries and a lot of the people working on those boats. The men working on those boats, especially the stewards, were queer, and they brought into New Zealand, [00:09:30] uh, all kinds of information. They brought books, magazines, which were you couldn't have imported legally, uh, they brought gossip about what was going on in the rest of the world. they brought for the straight community. There's reports about how they brought old spice, which was, you know, after shave. Unknown here. Really? Until then, um, they brought the latest fashions like teddy boy fashions. They brought records, that kind of thing. And during the war, we'd had impulses from America. [00:10:00] So in this period, say, from 1940 from then on you get very strong impulses coming in, uh, giving people a different impression. Different ideas about how you might be queer, how your communities might be formed. Uh, and that sort of thing, as I say the for women, it's harder because you don't have access to a public life on the streets in quite that way. Uh, for men, there's always that possibility of the of the beats and, uh, something which [00:10:30] is more anonymous. In, uh, 1967 we get 10 o'clock closing and the, uh, opening up of the pubs, uh, to provide entertainment food to make them make them more welcoming. For women, that's thought to be very important. So within a short space of time, you get huge social changes. Certainly, by the time you get to the 19 eighties, you have a scene of nightclubs and night places serving alcohol with entertainment, which, uh, which is just [00:11:00] the same as you'd find in many other parts of the world. The first formal club is the Dorian Club, which starts here in 1962. Now, this is not licenced, so these kinds of clubs had to operate under the law. The first Lesbian club, uh, is the KG Club in Auckland that was started by a group of Maori women, and KG stood for Kanga Happy road, which is where it was situated, the first premises, and also for camp girls spelled with a K Camp Girls Club, Um, [00:11:30] and that also operated under the law. And the first, uh, club for in Wellington is Club 41 which was started by lesbians from she the Sisters for Homophobic Equality, started by four lesbians from, uh from that organisation. And the premises were purchased from Carmen, who ran many venues in Wellington, including Carmen's balcony with drag shows, and Carmen's Coffee Lounge, where people could meet and pick up those of the same sex. Um, [00:12:00] the way in which these clubs operated illegally was that you could people bought tickets That was one way to do it, to sell alcohol because people hadn't actually bought alcohol, they bought a ticket, and then they could exchange the ticket for a drink. But it's still under the radar. And there were raids because of selling alcohol without a licence and and problems. All of this changes once we move into a different kind of regulatory environment, and we start getting other kinds of lesbian and gay [00:12:30] clubs far too numerous to talk about here. But we had things like the Victoria Club here in Wellington. Then we had various lesbian clubs, uh, situated here and there. And that's true also in cities like Christchurch and Auckland, not so much in smaller areas. So it's interesting that both Palmerston North and Nate have always had a fair share of venues where people could meet as we move now into speeding through the 19 nineties and through into the 21st century. We [00:13:00] can see now as we move into the second decade of the 21st century that a good deal of the ways in which people meet are through the Internet, and it interests me that talking to young people, especially young gay men expressed some, uh, shock and horror about an earlier time when people men would have been meeting each other on the beat and how scary that must have been and a frightening thing to do. But in many respects, meeting unknown people on the Internet, uh, for [00:13:30] people of my generation can also seem quite frightening because you don't know who those people are necessarily. Or, uh and you certainly need to be careful about meeting them in person because, uh, without finding out more about them and certainly, uh, organisations like Pink sofa would recommend that that's what people do, that they find out more. Take a friend along if you're actually going to meet someone so clearly, the ways of meeting people as we move further into the 21st century become more and more linked to, [00:14:00] uh, the electronic means that we have at hand. And the other thing that one might say about that is that is in a way, we return to perhaps some of those more broadly defined, uh uh, ways of meeting. As in those early camp parties that people don't necessarily need to consistently define themselves as homosexual or as gay or or or as lesbian in order to set up a same sex acquaintance on the Internet. That it's there's much more opportunity for people to explore different [00:14:30] ideas or desires that might occur to them from time to time, and that we may be moving into something which is much more broadly defined than our communities of the, uh, late, uh, 20th century. It may have been, and we really can't predict what the meeting places of the future will be like or how people might define themselves if they use those meeting places.
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