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[00:00:00] So, kia ora everyone. My name is Rebekah Galbraith and I am the convener of the Rainbow Research Network here at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University. Um, to all our speakers and guests today, welcome to Rainbow Studies Now, Legacies of Community. Um, to get things started, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Welby Ames to deliver today's keynote, Building the Family Home, Growing Queer Research Inside Our Institutions. Welby is professor in design at Auckland University of Technology. He is a gay man [00:00:30] and a consultant to many international organisations on issues of creativity and learning. In the 1980s he was arrested numerous times. in Aotearoa. During the struggle for homosexual law reform. So, a well worth cause. Welby is also an internationally acclaimed director, author, designer, illustrator and filmmaker. His book, Disobedient Teaching, has become an influential reference in rethinking pedagogy and the culture of [00:01:00] schooling. In 2001, Welby was awarded the Prime Minister's inaugural Supreme Award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence. And in 2014 and 2022, he was awarded university medals for his contributions to research, pedagogy, and creativity. So I'm sure you'll join me in welcoming Welby. I feel very proud to see this. Kia [00:01:30] ora mai tātou. Ngā mihi nui ngā kupi a kupu katoa. In the mana, in the reo, in the mate, in the whānau o takotāpui, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Um, that's my mum and dad. And, um, Our manga is the one up in the corner, it's called ua. Um, [00:02:00] and, uh, our, our, our, our, our river was, is kind of the back waters of the Waikato. Um, and, uh, what you probably, what you can't work out from that photo is there's no electricity in that house. So my dad was a shearing contractor and my mom was a flee. So in the king country, and, uh. We had power when there was money. They, the three kids sitting on the, on the swings, were [00:02:30] three eldest and they're all queer. So, God knows what was in the water at Pukkiatua, but something was in the water. On the swing, you see my twin sister. She's passed now. Um, and we, she was a darling of the education system. She learned to read and write before she could go to school. She, um, She, she was always in the top classes. I couldn't read or write until I was 15. And, uh, my next sister, Suzanne, who's sitting on my mum's lap. [00:03:00] You can tell we're farm care people because look at the bare feet. I mean, it's only, it's only taken in New Zealand a photo like that. But, uh, she became a teacher. And, um, and my parents had to make a journey. Because they'd grown up... They didn't know what, well, they did, they had a vague idea that queer was something really dangerous and you ended up in prison because at the time that that photo was taken, we were put into prison. And we were fired from our jobs, and we weren't, you could refuse to serve us in shops, [00:03:30] and um, and it was really hard keeping accommodation if a landlord decided, for theological reasons, that you didn't belong anywhere near the accommodation. So... What I'm going to share with you is, uh, is, uh, is biased because of those things. So, I went to Taomutu College and I got expelled for feeling, I won't say his name because it's going to be recorded, but feeling him up in the back of the German class and got caught. It was [00:04:00] not a good thing. It was not a good thing to be caught in the back of the German class doing that. It's quite hard to disengage your hands from... Anyway, we won't go... But I tell you what, there were some kids in the front row who blanched, you know. And, uh, and the difference between us was this. Within, uh, three months he had got a girl pregnant at school and got married. And I refused to say sorry. I refused to say that it was all a mistake. [00:04:30] So, uh, school became pretty hellish. And, um... In the end, we both told each other to fuck off, and that was the end of the, uh, schooling. You know, many of us, we would like a life where we could just be left alone to get on with our lives. That's probably the deepest thing we want, just to be able to populate the same space and rights as everybody else. But [00:05:00] that's... Not always the same. And the territory doesn't always get better and better and better. So, I, um, Once I left school, I became heavily involved in protest. But part of that was because of anger. And I didn't know how to constructively change things. So I thought if I threw myself at walls and, um, And, and marched and shouted, Oh, it was a good way of dissipating anger. And it did something in the time. [00:05:30] Over time I, I, I started to think more about, when I became an old, like I'm 67 now, so you know, I should have grown up, so, but what I, what I thought was maybe if I use my abilities, my talent, to try and change things, so all of us have something in common here, we've all made some commitment of our intellect to humanity, some way, we've all decided to do that. [00:06:00] And, and that has got, that can be hugely constructive. So, on one level I, I do the academic thing, but the other thing I do is I, I, I believe our stories are very, very important. And that's why I have such respect for all of our systems that archive or gather stories. Not the stories mediated by the press. Not the stories mediated through the filter of the time, but the stories from the raw ground, from our people telling our stories in our ways, that are [00:06:30] recorded. It's hugely, hugely important. It's our major defense against invisibility. And so, um, I, and amongst other things, I make, um, films. So, it's just a teaser.[00:07:00] So we, we live across the spectrum of worlds in this country, including sports. We, we often face, um, I, I believe a compartment a a, a, an easy compartmentalizing, you're going, oh, if you're that, therefore you must be this. And oftentimes our fight back is to go, no, no. We, we possess the ordinary and the extraordinary. We are in all of those worlds. And, um, you know, it's [00:07:30] interesting the, the critic, so I'm gonna sound like a winker for just a minute. Okay. So just bugger it. It's got the New York Times Critics pick. It just got a great review in the Guardian last week. But it did, it did crap in New Zealand. The film did crap in New Zealand. And the most criticism from here was, the world's not like that anymore. And you go... You try being trans in Putaruru and you tell me that it's not like that anymore. You [00:08:00] try to question something on a deeper level and tell me that it's alright. And one of the things I, I always think there's an extension of the concept of hermene that says that at it's most pernicious what happens is the victims begin policing them. We begin doing the policing. So we go, well, it's alright for us, I live in Central City, wherever, and, you know, it's not like that anymore. And then we marginalise our own people, so as the victims, we marginalise our own people. [00:08:30] And that's why this, and things like this, are so important. Because they bring us and all of our diversity together. So... Enough about that, because what I'm really going to talk about is this. Last year we did something at our, at our university, and it's, it's, this is why I'm so respectful of what Victoria has done with this. So important. Because in wherever we [00:09:00] are, as scholars, whether that be public scholars or scholars inside institutions, the responsibility falls on us to strengthen the world. And to push back against invisibility. To make sure that we cannot be mythologized or erased by false stories because we are present with the true stories. And so... We set up, I'm going to base this around five strange ideas, but they were five ideas that [00:09:30] sat behind a design, a project that was done at the university I come from, at AUT University. So it's invisibility. Refugees, families, mistrust and exoticization. Those are the ideas. They're going to be, they may seem a little strangely out of context, but that's what, those are the coat hangers we're going to hang this on. Okay, so the first one is if we have a look at invisibility. You know, one of the major agents for, for prejudice and [00:10:00] human cruelty to exist. is that you make invisible the humanity of the thing you oppose. And so oftentimes we, uh, that agency has to stay in place for it to do it. So every time we, back, every time you step forward and came out in whatever form, you eroded the invisibility. And I was over in Germany a few years ago, and I was standing at the place where this happened. We, a lot of us know this image, [00:10:30] or we might know this footage that played in the cinemas, including in New Zealand in 1933. This was the Nazis burning the books. I can't stand his voice, so let's just ignore him. What we're not told is we all think that that's, um, the communist text. No, that's our library. That was, that was Magnus Hirschfeld's library, [00:11:00] the sexologist. That was the building that the top floor was made for trans people who couldn't find a home anymore while they were trying to get help. Those are the books that are burning on that pile there. History rewrites that piece out of it. We have faced a history of erasure through burning, through destroying our archives, through destroying our libraries, through erasing the diaries when we die, our families have thrown them on bonfires to [00:11:30] make sure that the letters never get into the public domain. This is a long, long, long history. And it's also institutionalized. But here's the thing that we face, I think, as academics. In 2020, the Education Act, well this was the beginning of COVID, so we weren't taking much notice, but the Education Act got updated. And it's, it described universities as having four features. And while the top one, you know, they develop independent thought, there's two I think are really important to us. The fourth one says [00:12:00] that they have to be, in the society, they have to be the repository of knowledge and expertise. They have to be the place where knowledge Can be kept safe. Where knowledge can find its voice, where knowledge can take its form, and where knowledge can be kept safe. But I also argue it also where knowledge can be distributed. And the second thing, and this is something that I'm very proud of in this country, sorry, the fifth, the last provision is that it is our job to function as the critic [00:12:30] and conscience of society. Now that sounds cool, but it's actually very deep. We're very uncomfortable and very deep because sometimes we have to oppose even our institutions to do that. We have to face what is enshrined and secure because it falls to us to do this. So if we're sort of in the smell of the smoke and ashes, we have this history in New [00:13:00] Zealand. 1986 Now it's interesting that people attack our archives of knowledge, and they burn, so burning, you can smell the smoke through generations of our people going back hundreds of years, the association with destroying by burning. So and whether it's last year, you told on me, this goes on, [00:13:30] this goes on and on, I'm not going to take every issue, but I'm going to, let me show you this. There's some interesting stuff about our contemporary, you know, very cool world. In our libraries, our knowledge is under threat, you know. So that when, in 2015, when Michelle Teer in San Francisco brought in the first idea of bringing drag queens into libraries to read stories full of life and, and, and color and, and, and joy and thought. [00:14:00] We saw what happened here. We see what happens in America. In New Zealand, this is the Avondale Library, and in Christchurch, there were pickets. There were people protesting that drag queens were allowed to be into libraries. Look at this. 2021. So the efforts to ban books in the US are actually escalating at the moment. Okay, so it's fourfold since 2021. So this [00:14:30] is organized targeted groups, removing our literature from the available, so where ordinary people can get it. So, the ALA report. Um, these are challenges to, to libraries, to schools and university materials. So the three most banned books in America all belong to our people. The three most banned books. They're not the ones that tell you how to torture someone. [00:15:00] They're not some fetid novel full of hate about somebody because their, their ethnicity is different to you. They're our books about identity. We're not saying before about how in a hegemonic construction sometimes we, we regulate. As the victims, we police. We actually have this, we have smoke on our hands here. [00:15:30] So we used to have a language. Our people had a language. And if you went back to the 1950s, you could have heard it. Today, it's almost lost. So, let me give you an example. Here it is. I'm going to tell you about something that happened in Ponsonby. This was in the 1950s. Um, Aunt Nell Dears, it's all cackle, all chatter. You know that, um, those dolly aunties in tits while they've been nabbed in the latty? Mm hmm. Seems the manky old fish, Ajax apparently, screeched to [00:16:00] Hilda and the demons descended in a noshy raid. Poor dears. Still in the DOS they were. Everyone knows it's Tootsie Trade, but they're going to be going in for half stretch at least. What's that about? Well, it's about two guys who are in a relationship. Two elderly men. Who their neighbor reported on them to the police and in a dawn raid their house was broken into and they were arrested [00:16:30] and they are going to be sent to prison. That was our language. So that didn't get stopped by the Destiny Church. It got stopped by us. Because the culture that, that's a very vicious language, it's a very, it's a language born out of pain and, and injury, and it's angry. And so, if you run down, whereas a few words still [00:17:00] exist to Scarpa, we still know is to run away. Some of us still know the word family, meaning us. This is actually family, but it comes from Thieves Cant, which is where thieves, uh, you talk about. If you're in a, a, a, a group and you go, they're family, it means they're another thief. Don't pinch stuff from them. So, um, but here's this rich strain of our culture that we quietened down because we have got quietened down's, not the right, not a fair word [00:17:30] for it. We, we at our worst regulate our own society in a pursuit of a sanitized idea of diversity that is increasingly small and we have to. As scholars do the opposite. Diversity is a beautiful but hugely challenging problem. It's a problem. It's not a glitter. It's something that bears huge responsibility. If we are the critics and conscience of society, we have to look after the [00:18:00] spectrum of who we are, including those in our world who disagree with us. Because otherwise, we take part in the process of rendering invisible. So, I tried something that we thought might be helpful. Now, 2006, our university decided to digitise Uh, all the theses. Because they were sitting, you know, people did a thesis and it [00:18:30] sat on a back shelf somewhere and they hoped nobody was ever going to read it again and nobody did. You know, um, and uh, and I remember the big fight because the university decided to become open access and it was a lot of academics, you know, were going, well, well, you know, it'll be a drop of academic integrity, you know. And the push on the other side was going, but if taxpayers pay for us to be here and our people struggle to be here, should our knowledge not be available? You [00:19:00] know, my mum and dad, sharing contractors, they're never going to get into a university library, but they, well they don't actually have a computer, but if they did, they should be able to get there. If we're in Ngongotaha and we're 14 years old and doing a project, we should be able to get that. If I'm in a retirement home and I want to know about men who come out after the age of 50, I should be able to get that. That's what being a critic and conscience of society is. So we went to the university and we said, [00:19:30] we would like to have a portal designed that just focuses on the queer research out of our university. First sweep through over a hundred theses we found by our people. I felt very proud. Here, so we worked with Dr. Robert Porfiry to find a name for this. Cause, let me do it this way. I don't [00:20:00] think pride is exotic, I think pride has dignity. An academic pride has dignity, but it's absolutely certain of who it is. So, ear is an amazing thing because it's a pronoun, it's genderless. But what it means is to flow, to move out. And so, we worked with um, we worked with the library and then we worked with Catalyst, who is a designer, to put this portal together. The idea was it had to be really easy for [00:20:30] anyone to use. So, all you do is you type in, uh, uh, whatever you're looking for, um, Adolescents, um, whatever you like. Press, press search and it will bring up any thesis, but now any published article done by a member of staff. By our people, for our people. It just does this. It tries to do this. But, it has, the journey to [00:21:00] it was really interesting because it brought up some stuff. So, one of the things on the site also is that it shows some of the staff. So the, the staff profiles. And so if you click on these people, it tells 'em to tell you what they do. It tells you what the connection is to our communities. You know, these people have supervised these, or these people have written these articles or these people have, uh, work on the pride, um, you know, on, on a trust board, on a, so there's a, a link. It's not just going well, I think I'd like to virtue signal here, so I'll see if [00:21:30] I can get on that site. You have to do something. So people sitting in this room, you can find their theses in this site. So, if you put in something like, hello, if you, if you put in um, law reform, it will bring up every thesis that has got some discussion of law reform in it. It will actually bring up not only that but also supervisors who've supervised stuff like that, [00:22:00] other stuff that will be interesting. So, when you click on it, you can download, it'll give you the abstract, and you can download, but then you'll see similar items that locate similar items in the site. It's not trying to be a big Skype, it's just saying, we all do the necessary things to make the world better in our world. Whether it's Pride NZ gathering oral histories. Whether it's our archive gathering ephemera that [00:22:30] people would have thrown away. That actually tells more than what it appears to be. Whether it's our Charlotte Museum, whether it's, whatever it is, we, we gather things together to build the robustness of an identity. So, because our job is to be a critic and conscience of society, and because it is our job to be a repository of knowledge, we went, let's, make that accessible just like today has happened because people went, this is [00:23:00] our job to be scholars in the world like this. It's our job to do this. And every person who's come here with the backpack full of stuff that no one else can see has made a decision to make a commitment to that. And that's why I feel so proud to be able to stand inside a family like this. But one of the issues it brought up was the concept of refugees, and it's something that a lot of non queer people don't [00:23:30] really realise, especially in the realm of academia. Many people come to this country to study because it's not safe for them to study in their own country. We actually have a long history of our people of being exiles. We exiled from our homelands, we exiled from our small communities, we exiled... Back in the day, lots of us went and worked and lived overseas. But in academia, that's a really big thing. So people come here because it's safer. But [00:24:00] actually, it's not entirely safe. Because once you put research online, and it has a search word in it, and I'll give you a concrete example... One of the candidates I worked with some years ago had done a thesis, he had an unusual name. He was coming through immigration in Russia. They thought his name was odd, they looked it up, and the first word that came underneath it was pedophile, because he'd studied, but Erich von Gloden, the photographer, and homosexuality. Detained for two days. [00:24:30] Let's put that in context. There are 65 countries in the world at the moment. where we remain criminalised. Fourteen of them, if we present in public, in other than the gender that we were born with, or other than what it is, the pressure for us to adopt a binary, we get arrested. Twelve countries kill us. [00:25:00] For most of us, when someone says international conference, they're countries we can't go to. It's not safe for us to go to anymore because they can just click on our name and research and we're suddenly visible. We can't hide in this world anymore. And so we have to look after those who have to hide. Like, many of our universities now, our people are pushed really hard for, to allow people to be protected if they're wanting to do [00:25:30] a piece of research, so that that's not, there are caveats put on it, so that this piece of stuff is not actually available online. You can't get it. Because those people have to return to families. So it's a complex issue, so when, and universities often go, oh well, you go to conferences, you go to conferences, and you go, yeah, in about two thirds of the world I can. But my world is smaller than yours, in terms of safety. And when you go, let's team up with people in this country, and this country, and this country, [00:26:00] I can't go to China. I can't go to Russia. It's not safe. And China and Russia are interesting examples. Of the countries that don't necessarily legislate in an obvious way, but they have policies of no, no approval, no promotion. So my film, you saw the trailer, was banned in both of those countries. If I go up and speak on them, I can't show anything in the film that would give some sense of promotion [00:26:30] or approval. And you go, it's not, it's neither, it's just a life. But that's the way it's framed. So many of you sitting in this room, We face a smaller world that's not as safe. Because of things like this, this is tough. So right now in Russia, Safari is the game. People go on to online dating sites, set up dates, beat the people up, [00:27:00] disfigure them. beat out of them the names of their families and their employers and put it all online. That's the world today. This is not some obscure thing. This is a game. Please don't stop it. And so we had to think about the people who would put into something like here both their courage, support their courage and also [00:27:30] to provide safety. Sure. These people seeking refuge, the exiles and the international conferences are the two key ideas here. But, then we jump to another side of it, which is a lovely side. You know, I was talking before about our lost language, which is called Pali or Pallari, or there's a range of names for it. Um, the word family referred to us, and that's why there was a thing called the family bar in Auckland. It wasn't because you were going to take your nieces and nephews and, [00:28:00] and, and, it wasn't. It was because it was referring to an older word. And inside our language, we had names like an auntie, a sister, a mother, the uncles, the houses. So the houses, if you have a look at Fafsweg, but you go back to Jenny Livingston's, um, Paris is Burning. You see, so we made homes. We made homes for our people. When we had to go into exile. And, so there's this rich, rich language that doesn't mean, those words don't mean the same in a heteronormative [00:28:30] society as what they mean in our world. But this idea of family is how we have hung together through storms. You know, and when, even if I go back to like the early 80s, very early 80s, some of our conferences had just moved out of Gay Liberation Conferences. They were three days long. I'm glad this one's one day, I'll tell you why. The first day, everyone was lovely to each other. Second day, everyone tore each other apart. And the third day, we were all running around with band aids trying to fix up the relationships. [00:29:00] You know, so, we, there wasn't a golden age for our family. We have a problem that we fight with each other and don't show respect for the things that are different that are difficult for us. Kind of a way to understand it, when you've been hurt, when you've been pushed to the side, of course you fight for things, but we also have to co exist. So, you know, [00:29:30] this is something I printed as a t shirt and gave to somebody who wasn't a friend. Who was saying everything's alright and I said I want you to come down to Tikawiti with me and we'll go, we'll do some shopping on the main street. The shirt was never worn. Another thing when we were setting this up that happened because of Gareth. We're trying to work out, [00:30:00] if we do things like what's happening today, and we do things like EAR, and we do things like Pride NZ, we do these things, how do we form a stronger network at our country? And I thought, oh, maybe you have, sorry, boring old academic, um, MOUs. And Gareth said something that was, that hit me really hard, because I recognised it as the truth straight away. [00:30:30] Many of our repositories of knowledge grew up on the street because they weren't safe to grow up in institutions. So if you have a look at many of the things we have, that's where they've come from. They haven't been inside churches, museums, libraries, universities. They've been inside, paid for by our salaries, in manky flats, putting things together out of necessity. And so if we're going to join some kind of [00:31:00] support, perhaps rather than buying into one big global thing, we have an affiliation. We work with and respect the mana of each of those things, and we look after each other. We allow this country to have its diversity of needs and histories. The whakapapa of all these things is not taken away as it's subsumed into one, but becomes a network. of goodwill, and scholarship, and care. But that we [00:31:30] think about how we can step further forward into looking out for each other. Things like, if there's some funding comes in, if there's a possibility of doing a joint project where someone gets some money to digitise some stuff, if there's some, a speaker's coming to the country for one thing, we let other people know. We look, if there's a collection, something's just been found in a museum somewhere, we get the word out across. across our people, so that we have a richer, more networked substrate from which to [00:32:00] work. And one of the things, I can understand this, is that, I think it's a quality of our family, is that because of injury, we have quite high levels of mistrust. We're a bit cautious about trusting things. So, you know, if you ever look back in the day, if you were arrested, Um, They were basically given, this is if you [00:32:30] were trans, if you were a gay man, if you were a lesbian woman and you fell foul of the, you were given two choices. You were either arrested and sent to prison or you could go and get treatment medically. The treatment looked like this. So, I was talking to a friend of mine a few days ago who's still got, this is her. He's still got the burn marks under his genitals from where the wires were put [00:33:00] there from the electric shocks when he was put into hospital in the early 60s. We have never received a public apology from the medical fraternity for using us as experimental animals. We have never received an apology. Medicine has a long history of abuse. And so, many of our older people. And people who live through that are very cautious about [00:33:30] organizations that suddenly open their arms, whether that's a church or whether it's a medical fraternity, goes, come on in. We welcome you. We welcome you. Here's a rainbow flag on our door. We go, yeah, nah. So so many of our people have suffered spiritual abuse. Often in quite profound ways and are on quests to find [00:34:00] meaning, the correlation between the spiritual dimension of themselves and the physical dimension and the mental, all the dimensions of the self. We don't even use this word, but it's the only way I can think to describe it. We know, we know whether it's documented like this. This is the men of the pink triangle in the concentration camps. There's very few images of this [00:34:30] survive. We've taken out of universities. Like, when they, when they, Humboldt University, when those fires went, a lot of people don't realise that over a third of the doctorates were revoked. Our people fled into exile. Those who could. Others ended up here. And this not trusting, let me give you, you know, I was watching the COVID thing just recently and, um, you know, and I kept thinking, [00:35:00] shit, this is country, this is country that I love very deeply, not learn. Suddenly that we had vulnerable communities in our nation who were saying, let us manage this. Let us talk with our people. And we were going, we weren't. An organization was going, well, we'll work out how to do it. We'll work out how to do it. And you go, it's not reaching our people. Well, go back to the 1980s when AIDS was [00:35:30] ravaging our people. We had a similar problem. The health department managed our budget and they spent their money on this campaign. Would you jump out of a, out of a airplane without a parachute? And our people went, what the fuck? Sorry, but we did. And so we went to them and said, give us the money, because we know how to talk to our people. Let us, let us be, this is the AIDS Foundation. We said, if [00:36:00] you're going to work with us, don't, don't tell us, consult with us and then go and do it. Give us the resources to do this ourselves, because we can do it. Look, in desperation, I was carrying jumbo pens around and writing no come up the bum in public toilets, you know, because people were dying. Because our people were dying and it was tearing families apart and we were getting a fucking ad on jumping out of an aeroplane. And then on the opposite side of [00:36:30] it, in the, in Australia, so we were managing the escalating queer bashing at this stage. In Australia, they decided to do it, so this, this did play here, but in documentaries. They decided to, how they were going to deal with it was just terrify the living daylights out of everyone. What the hell? In Oxford Street we had t shirts going, don't do tin pin bowling. And, [00:37:00] we were dying. Because we were not changing our behaviour. Because the campaign... It's not given to us to talk to our people and slowly, slowly, too late for many of our lives, too late for my partner, too, too late for many people's friends, colleagues, sons, daughters, too late.[00:37:30] These are not bad policy decisions. This is the agency of death. That occurs when you don't let people who know how to communicate with themselves do it. So, you know, so what did we do? We went quilting, and don't, don't knock it, because it was actually very powerful. Yeah, I know, I'm sorry, I know this hurts.[00:38:00] I know this hurts. Our partners... And our friends died, and we sewed quilts that are the size of a burial plot. With their name, so they could not be invisible. In America, it was the only way they managed to make the government finally acknowledge that there was an age pandemic. The only way they could do it. We laid out, we laid out our people. And people walked round and round and round and went, [00:38:30] this is here. The quilt I made for my mate Ian. Um, he died near the beginning. It's hard because it's at, it's in Te Papa now. But there was a time when schools wouldn't let us bring them in. To talk. You know. And, um, and then we had to, because we were having to do it, we had no protection, so our hearts had to be right out there, in the open, [00:39:00] because it was the only way that we could help people see what was really happening. These were the ordinary, beautiful people of our nation. It was the only way. And I think that's why many of our people have empathy for other people in our nation. Who have to struggle so hard. To get a voice that in a fair world would be a fair representation and an important thing. [00:39:30] So, you know, universities have also got smoke on their hands with this. So when Wren, you know, in 2010, a very interesting article looking at the history of how universities have excluded us. How they've done it is they've just advised us away from doing the research. Going, yeah, yeah, you really want a thesis? I'm not so sure. So this is changing. This is changing because of you. It's changing because of us. Because we go in and we don't allow that to [00:40:00] happen. But it did for years. You couldn't get funding for the stuff. I saw some heads nodding, going, yeah, it's still really hard to get funding for the stuff. So when, and when we were trying to have our conferences in Auckland. I remember the first two, the only two places we could get a conference though was the Auckland Medical School gave us a little, access to a little room, and Carrington Polytech. The thing with Carrington Polytech was it was five buildings over where they'd done the electric shock treatments on our people. [00:40:30] So The geography, the historical geography of our country is very distinctive. That's why I love it when I hear things like the archives, uh, or taking people on walks through the city, going, there is another geography here. There is a cultural geography that has been erased, either purposely or through neglect. And the last one I want to touch on is exoticization. Um, I always thought this was very [00:41:00] interesting. It's distinctive about it. I'm not going to read it out. It's nothing worse than someone reading slower than what you read. Have a read of it. So, this is quite a distinctive thing for us. We often grew up in families where we were ontologically different from our parents. And sometimes we had amazing families that, that went, that folded in around us and gave us extraordinary [00:41:30] But we also have friends who didn't. And some of us didn't have those things. So it's a very, so from the time that we become aware of our difference, we can't guarantee that we have parents who understand that difference. Because ontologically they're not the same. And, I was, oh, I just love this graphic. So one of the things which, you know, there are many stories that circulate that we're trying to run into [00:42:00] toilets to steal people or get ourselves arrested so we can go into prisons to, to rape people or that we, uh, we prey on children. Whatever the stories, they cycle over and over and over and over again through every generation. The same faces with a new person behind them saying the same stuff. Relying on there not being robust, rigorous, informed debate coming back. That has space in the world to be heard. And I saw this graphic, this um, this was a few years ago when it was, you [00:42:30] know, anxiety about the, the, the naughty lesbians were taking over parliament. And the gay men were forming enclaves and were, were, you know, trying to corrupt the world and sway people. And I saw this graphic and I just thought it was so beautiful. Yeah, like if it was a banner, we'd just go fuck off and leave us alone, really, really? So, so one of the agencies that we, we are up [00:43:00] against is that we get accommodated as the exoticised other, not as just our ordinary selves, we're all about complexity, we get narrowed down into something exotic, so. We live with myths like, if you're a gay man, you're promiscuous. And you have a thing called a lifestyle. Fuck, I don't know what that is. A lot of religious groups know what it is, but I have no idea what it is. That somehow, we have this thing called, we have a whole lot of wealthy, white, old gay [00:43:30] men who have got a whole lot of money that they don't know what to do with, and they're going to resource everybody. Look at statistics, look at the latest statistics. We're not, that's not true. That's a little myth that even takes root in our own society. People are managing mental health issues, they're managing medications, they're managing, um, um, huge family responsibilities. So many of us become the kind of, like, parent of the next [00:44:00] generation in our families. They may not be our biological, our children by, if you like, direct issue, but they are when the shit hits the fan. They all show up on the back step. And we become... The adored uncle, the adored aunt, the adored safe place somewhere in the wider extended family where there will be an ear and a compassionate heart. We are hugely responsible in families. We often are caring for the elders in our [00:44:30] families. That we are, we are about fluff and glitter. Well, I don't mind about fluff and glitter, that's fine. But there's a Christmas tree underneath it. And that's the bigger part. And that's the bit that claims dignity, and claims something other than the performance of the self, and claims the lived self. The self. You. [00:45:00] That lesbians are aggressive and hate men. That gay men are all urbane, witty, and style junkies. And unfortunately, the media, and that we're all beautiful in this kind of heteronormative idea of what beauty is, and we're all anxious about our beauty, so we spend a lot of time at gyms or on diets or whatever. You know, if I could put a mirror up here, what I see is a room of beautifully ordinary and extraordinary people. [00:45:30] Not an exoticized myth. You know, as part, so little pieces of our culture are taken and hyper exoticised for the consumption of heterosexual communities. The drag queens, I remember in the 1960s in the pubs in England, it was, men and women were, family, you know, husbands and wives, workmates, would all show up and clap, and then preserve the law that sent them to prison, to those people, after the drag show. Beat them up on the streets after the [00:46:00] show. So long as they stayed inside the exotic. They were in a little box and they were allowed to perform but only inside that box. And when we claimed more than that box, the kaka hit the fan. So, um, Okay, I'm going to stop before five minutes. So, uh, so, uh, this is a project we're working on at the moment. This is, uh, just, uh, one of the things that we face in our, among many things is we realize that we have a generation of our [00:46:30] people who are, are dying now, who have lived through stuff. And we don't have all their records. And none of us can do this. I think any one of us. We just make one small contribution to a greater whole. None of us is a divine being who can do the whole thing. But we act on our responsibility to do that. So, um, I'm just going to play a couple of seconds of it, so. Oh, shit.[00:47:00] So what I tried to do was talk about a few ideas that, I would argue that invisibility is the agency that's used to keep us, it's a primary agency of oppression. That we have to look after our refugees, the people who seek sanctuary with us, and be able to extend our worldview so we understand what it is to stand in their shoes, but also to understand that as academics the world, the geography of the world is not the same. It's not the same. That we come from families, and perhaps we have a [00:47:30] deep responsibility to our families, but they are genuinely diverse, and they are made more beautiful for the fact that values within them aren't fixed, they're constantly in a state of movement. That keeps us thinking. That we have a history of damage that causes us to mistrust things, and that we sometimes have to be aware of the fact that it is easy to opt for the exoticized state [00:48:00] and harder to argue for the state that everybody else has. So I'm going to finish with this. You know, during COVID, I, I didn't get enough books out of the library and I was left having to reread books in my library. And while I fell in love with a couple of authors again. I fell out of love with Oscar Wilde. And I know that's such a bad thing for a gay guy to say. And I thought he was a bit of a pretentious git on the second reading through. But he did say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know you're not allowed to say that, but, [00:48:30] damn. But I will, he did say one thing that I thought, one of the things he said, I thought was really beautiful. And I think he talked about you. You. Us. He said, A dreamer. There's someone who can only find their way by moonlight. But their punishment? They see the dawn before the rest of the world. That's a fine thing. It's a difficult thing, [00:49:00] but a very fine thing. For all that I can't see and that we can't see, thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for what you've done, and thank you for what you'll shape into the future. And thank you for listening. Thank you.
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