This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content. You can search the text using Ctrl-F, and you can also play the audio by clicking on a desired timestamp.
Uh, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Peter Wells, and it's my pleasure to be chairing the session called teenage years. Um, the Teenage years. Everyone remembers the passion and angst of this passage from childhood to adulthood. It's peculiar simmering power and insight into the way the world is unjust, unfair and on the whole, pretty ridiculous. As one gets older or less, one gets more used [00:00:30] to these qualities and tries to come to terms with it. But teenage years are usually when a sudden awareness of the gap between pretension and reality opens up vast as a chasm to talk about the strange and unsettling territory. We have four experts with us this afternoon. Two of them were foot soldiers in the teenage years. But those years along behind them, obviously, uh, first of all is Chris Brickle, associate professor, [00:01:00] um of gender Study. Uh, sorry, Associate Professor Chris Brickle, gender studies coordinator, GE Gender and Social Work, University of Otago. And I'll introduce him more fully before he speaks. Um Beside him is Steven Aldred, Grigg, award winning author of spell binding books that are at times, works of fiction at other times wide ranging and insightful glances deep into our past and across across the divide. [00:01:30] We have Chris Jones and her friend Alicia Parkinson, who will give us a sense of the power of teenage years by by opening the session, um, performing a poem. But before this please join with me in welcoming our guests this And now we'll kick off with Chris and Alicia's performance of I am sure [00:02:00] 10:03 p.m. I love you already. I love you again. I love you straight boy. For both our sakes. I hope your love is platonic. There's no way I can return it. You've given it so freely for that I admire But straight boy, we only just met six hours ago and I'm a lesbian. 10:04 p.m. shout at me in Japanese Straight boy, that's twice [00:02:30] 10:33 p.m. You said gorgeous. You're so foreign. I wanna study you. You're so intriguing to me straight boy, the reason why I'm not like the other girls is because you I only like the other girls. You can study me from a distance Look, but don't touch the masterpieces. 10:36 p.m. You missed out the H when you called me. So, uh, I like to think the H wandered off somewhere. It formed other words other sentences like homosexual like Here's to the queers Like hands off 10:55 p.m. I mentioned [00:03:00] that I'm a lady lover. A gentle reminder to a flirtatious straight boy. He said, Heck, then you buy or all hope is destroyed with one word Lesbian 11:05 p.m. For a glorious 10 minutes, lesbian made the flirting stop then all caps GIRLYG winky face. That's four 11:12 p.m. You can decide whether to call me bay or not. You won't get too attached, you said. So be so attractive. Free lesbian Don't distract him. [00:03:30] 11. 14 You said cute girlie 11. 15 You said next Saturday, girlie 11. 16 You said OK, girly Sunday you blew me a kiss. You called me beauty. You called me beautiful. You called me girly. You called me girly again. That's nine. You call me girly one more time and I'll show you what it means to be treated like a woman. Later that night you called me on the phone saying I wanna get to know you better. Well, boy, you don't get to know me like that Because I don't like boys like that. [00:04:00] You said. Are you sure? Are you really sure? Straight. Boy, this is one of the things I'm very sure about. People like to ask. When did you find out? The first time I used the word gay. I didn't know what it meant. I just knew it was bad. The first time I heard the word lesbian, someone had said dirty before it. The the first time I made the connection between how I felt and the word homosexual was in a Bible. I spent the next eight years self inflicting conversion therapy. You don't know the meaning of desperation until [00:04:30] you spend that long trying to change everything about who you are. Because what you are is wrong is unforgivable. Because you're so disgusting that I let him rape me in the hopes it might turn me straight. That when it didn't, I let him do it again and again and again. I stopped counting after 17. I thought I deserved it. My wrist will tell you that. I am sure. I was sure when I tried to kill myself, I was still sure when my friend asked why, and I came out to her. I was sure when I decided to love myself, [00:05:00] I was sure when I got my first girlfriend, I was sure when this time it finally felt right. I was sure when I told everyone else, and I was sure when I told you. Thank you, Chris Alicia, Thank you. [00:05:30] Um, we'll change gear here slightly by introducing our our two main speakers in more detail. Chris will be the first speaker. That's Chris. Brickle is well known as the award winning author of Mates and Lovers, which chronicled the gay male homosexual and homos social past, unearthing a whole hidden world and bringing it to light and contemporary analysis through commentary and photographs. [00:06:00] He has gone on to publish books which examine this rich vein of the past, which leads directly into the present. Some of these books are on sale in the foyer. His current concern, however, is completely spot on with our subject this afternoon. He has spent the last few years researching the history of the teenage world of A in New Zealand, and he'll begin the session by doing a presentation. So thank you, Chris. Cool Well, [00:06:30] thanks, everyone. I think we're probably 10 seconds off the power point appearing on the wall. Um, which has a couple of images out of my own family's photo albums, which are not necessarily queer, but in some ways, gesture, perhaps towards, um, the possibilities. So today I want to look at the idea that, um his historian suggests that both sexuality and adolescent experience have continuities and differences [00:07:00] that are quite profound. Um, what I want to do today is to have a look at three lives, uh, one of which will be familiar to some of you. And the other two almost certainly won't. Um the first chap is, uh, Fred Gibbs, who grew up in Nelson in the 18 eighties and left a diary which lasted his lifetime. I haven't read all of it yet. The second is James Courage, the, uh, Canterbury lad who went on to be a well known New Zealand writer. And the last [00:07:30] is Shirley, um, she Alston who may have gone on to become a nun, But I'm slightly unsure about this. Um, actually, there's 1/4 re Trevor Nunn week, so we're going to look at Trevor last. So this material comes out of two places. The first is a shortish article that's coming out in New Zealand Journal of History in April, and the second is my 80,000 word book, which is coming out with Auckland University Press sometime late next year, depending on how organised [00:08:00] I can get in actually getting the manuscript into shape. So let's start with Fred Gibbs, of whom I don't have an early photo. I've got a slightly later one, a Nelson lad who chronicled his emotional life and diaries during the 18 eighties. So this was the period before the Oscar Wilde trial. It was a period when sexuality was both omnipresent and not particularly widely talked about, um, in a public kind of discourse. Anyway, Fred's [00:08:30] diaries that I think are fascinating and rich and interesting really recall the rhythm of his daily life, particularly his school life and his friends. The gender segregation of New Zealand society in the 19th century has been very well discussed, debated and chronicled by historians. Uh, John Phillips, perhaps the most, uh, famously, uh, famous to do so. The romantic friendship, though a really intense and ostensibly non sexual kind of relationship [00:09:00] and import, uh, from North America, in particular from Frontier Society of North America, but also Europe, to some extent, really structured, uh, young people's relationships in some quite interesting ways. Young men as well as young women or young women as well as young men. And I want to start with a quote from 16 year old Gibbs Diary from a late winter's night in 18 83 when he headed to a friend's place, the day after he wrote two or three [00:09:30] weeks ago, I app up to Jim Gully. He alone spent glorious evening. We are rather awkward with one another, as he is extremely refined, and I always feel a bore in his company. On the other hand, I am much better read and a much better arguer, and he, in a sensitive but to me embarrassing way, looks up to me for information. He professes to have no poetic feeling, but what I have seen leads me to think rather differently. On the evening referred [00:10:00] to after time, he got on a track. I'm so enthusiastic but extremely reserved and namely the influence of souls on one another, mesmerising beauties of art and sensitiveness, soul and body et cetera. Now we don't know where Fred's emotional life went in the end, or at least I don't because I haven't read all the diaries. But I think in some ways we can start to see that the an emotional world that is congruent with the kind of world, um, of [00:10:30] young people who may well have been erotically attracted to others of their own sex. And I'm going to get on to a few more tantalising pieces in just a moment. So these two carried out the discussion alone in an atmosphere of trust and mutual disclosure. Gibbs's interest in souls proved prophetic. The next year, which was 18 84 in Nelson, he became extremely close to his schoolmate, Fred Kelly, who tragically died Soon after, accidentally shot during [00:11:00] school rifle practise, Gibbs told his diary of the friendship. Something so sad has happened, he began. I have dreaded putting it on paper, he reminisces. Our friendship must have grown very fast. This was the time when I was so thick with RC. I'm not sure who that is. He made more advances to me than I to him. We must have been very intimate in a way, but he was not yet my chief friend. I was not [00:11:30] very friendly with Fred, but showed preference for RC. I think I remember finding Fred Rather awkward coming home from school as he often kept me walking from our side by side. What a fool I was. And so the sense of a kind of a friendship, courtship kind of relationship. Uh, between these two young men played out in Fred's diary after his friend had died, advances [00:12:00] were made, intimacies exchanged and friendships ranked in importance. Shared moments strengthen the bond, including rugby. There's a really interesting, unwritten history of rugby to be written in, um, New Zealand, I think. Who agrees? Yeah, it's really interesting. Rugby rugby matches were one venue through which this friendship was really kind of solidified. [00:12:30] The swimming hole was another with Kelly and another lad, Jones. Um, Fred Gibbs wrote about the formative moments in such spaces. We constantly stopped to talk now and again. We raced, and Kelly and I kept nearly abreast with Jones far behind as we got down as we got close down by Hunter Brown's hill, a beautiful sunset sunset took place. Then suddenly remembering that the other [00:13:00] two were in a greater hurry than myself to get home. I turned to descend and Kelly in a simple way, expressed my description of the sunset and both declared I was a poet. We got down at dusk, having spent a most most delightful afternoon. In fact, it was the most rapturous time I ever had. And these intense, kind of, um, emotional kind of teenage moments intersperse with an intense kind of friendship are really kind of, um, strong in in Gibbs's diary, I think he talks about [00:13:30] him chasing, uh, his friend friend Uh, also Fred, I, uh, I charged at him with a towel as hard as I could go, but he But he dodged every time till suddenly I intercepted him and he rushed right into my head down, and I caught his head between my knees. I then chased him along the path. This is, um, Fred Gibbs here a wee bit later, probably in his early twenties, Uh, on these walks in these spaces, he went to extraordinary [00:14:00] lengths to avoid young women on one walk, walk him down. Bullock spur. He wrote nearly Met girl party. Or rather, feared doing so. So continued long and hard along the line to the next spur. So he actually diverted his walking track. Um, and it dances. He There was one dance he attended, and he said, Oh, went to a dance to really had to dance with a girl and didn't really like it much. Um, so there were these kind of interesting little hints, at least in his [00:14:30] teenage years, about where his kind of, um, interests lay. A few years later, in 18 87 he would have been about 18 or 19. He spent an evening with a colleague. He wrote H and self necessarily interfere with one another. The most unfortunate result is that I get nervous and unnatural, and the concept of unnatural and and 19th century life tends to refer to, um, a kind of an erotic connection between men. Gibbs never married. Um, I do know [00:15:00] that much. So I think the 18 eighties a really interesting period. Anyway, there's actually a more romantic kind of connection between young men than that we would see in the early 20th century by which, uh, point to kind of a more militaristic kind of masculinity really started to take over James Courage, whom some of you will be familiar with. Can you spot him here in the photo? He's second from the left, began writing in 1920 some 40 years after Gibbs. [00:15:30] This is significant because a lot had happened in that time. He was the son of a run holder. He grew up in amber, a town some of you will be familiar with, and wrote a journal while he was a student at Christ's College in Christchurch. His entries for the early years were introspective, less about friends, uh, like Gibbs and more about a sense of difference from the norms of New Zealand masculinity and his father's expectations of having a son who would be a farmer [00:16:00] courage focused on his artistic temperament. He wrote of his love for music. What do I live for? My music? Yes, he referred to his slight streak of effeminacy, his love of dress. To have nice clothes, he wrote and look smart is one of my ambitions. I'm extraordinarily conceited, and I shall now put down my character. As I see it. I am fickle. My numerous flirtations show me that, and he crossed that bit out in his diary emphatically as if he [00:16:30] had admitted too much. Maybe he had, over the 40 years between Gibbs writing and courage writing, uh, the romantic friendship model had weakened. Uh, doctors and psychiatrists like Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of sexual inversion and publicised this the concept the kind of term homosexuality which first appeared in New Zealand in about 19 08 in In coverage of the Wild Case [00:17:00] in 1927 Cori wrote, I love this. What a repulsive shock one would get if a schoolboy ever said to one. My father once slept with Oscar Wilde, and he didn't like that idea at all. He set sail for England, and really, that's that kind of shift between an antipodean colonial space. Uh, and the centre of the empire in the UK was a shift that enabled and allowed him [00:17:30] to develop an identity, um, as an invert, which is one of the the the terms he sort of took up. So wandering down the street in London saw a sailor I think it was directly. I saw him approaching up the road. Something inside me switched on I tried not to look at him, surveyed the magnolias in the garden that usually works for me. Roses, Um, Then, just as he passed, [00:18:00] he looked into his face and saw a confident smile. My heart quivered like a hot light, and the blood rushed to my face. I felt lusty but intensely embarrassed. I don't even know his name. And Courage actually wrote about what he called his sexual nature in his diary diaries that were essentially suppressed until 2005, when the restrictions placed on their access expired. Um, [00:18:30] as Peter discovered when trying to access Courage's work the pre during the previous decade. Um, there's a sister, but I won't mention her too much. So really, we kind of get to see, see a sense of courage engaging with the ideas of his time. Conversations with his friends, though, were really, really important and gave him pause for thought. One mentioned only as D, challenged Courage's claims of Outsiderness. [00:19:00] You're less abnormal than you think, Dee said to me this evening. Perhaps, I replied, knowing perfectly well speaking the truth, and I was clinging to my differences. By the way, why is it that when Dee and I are alone together, we talk about nothing other than sex, giving slightly heightened accounts of our own erotic experiences. Here's AAA piece of one of Courage's diaries. Um, you can see he or his sister I don't know who actually cut pieces out before they were, [00:19:30] um, deposited in the library. Difficult to know who that who it was. Who who did that? Another friend known only as shared courage is disquiet. He was upset because I said that a Picasso drawing of some naked, spartan Ys on horseback, which he was about to buy for his room, was an awful giveaway. He was scared stiff by the suggestion that it might be too outward and visible sign of his inversion, Good heavens, as if the way [00:20:00] he spoke to women wasn't a sufficient giveaway. So this notion of the invert, the notion that one knows what an invert is and an invert is obvious. You know, this is actually a long way, uh, from Nelson in the 18 eighties to London, a New Zealander in the 19 twenties. What about young women? The teenager's book is going to look at young women's and young men's lives, and I've tried to get as much of a balance in there as [00:20:30] I can get finding material on girls, Same sex, um, attachments is actually this is a friend of Courage's. Sorry Slide, um, is actually really quite tricky. And over about four years, I was reading The Diary of Shirley Elberton, a student at Wellington East Girls College. She began writing in 1934 at the age of 14, and here's a page out of her diary. She was not interested in boys at the [00:21:00] in the least, not even if her friend Valerie's John, who apparently had willow eyelashes, you know, as a dropping into, um, you know, flowing streams or some kind of description like that. Um, she dismissed Colin, an earlier boyfriend of Valerie. She said he looks like a cabbage. So yeah, Colin didn't appeal. That's that's so that's so much the sort of thing I would have written in my diary when I was 13. Um, I have that diary. [00:21:30] I have not looked at it for this project. I sort of and I feel slightly fraudulent because I'm now looking at other people's diaries, but I'm not willing to put my own out there who sympathises me with me on this. OK, thank goodness I should stop feeling quite so guilty. Anyway, Shirley, uh, directed her affections to two young women. The first was Nancy, her school friend, friendship and a safe harbour with a way that Shirley [00:22:00] wrote about, um, Nancy. I've leaned on her all the time. She's been a kind of protection from for me from the outside world, she wrote. It was like creeping inside a good hollow tree during a storm. You know, you are safe, the tree can never bend, she noted. Then to a certain extent, I let her influence me. This image, incidentally, is not Shirley, and it's not Nancy. And if it's not any of their friends and if it's not even in Wellington, Um, it's from Methodist [00:22:30] archives in in Christchurch, and I just sort of like that kind of sense of intimacy. It is of the same era. It's 19 thirties image, and it was, uh, during a Bible class camp, which is Alison Laurie writes in her thesis was one place where girls, uh, did meet and form close um, relationships. So Bible Class has an interesting history of which I'm only barely starting to examine. The diary also chronicles Shirley's love and worship for Ru Gardner, then [00:23:00] in her thirties. And so she talked about how beautiful Ro was, how beautiful her dress was. I don't think I've ever seen her looking so lovely. The dress made her eyes such a lovely blue, and the heat of the room made her chin cheeks so pink. So these kind of descriptions of her, um, adored teacher really kind of fill the diary, and they're really, really lovely and really interesting. Um Later she would classify her attachment to RU as [00:23:30] a childish adoration. But page after page of the diary are full of these kinds of descriptions of her adoration. For the teacher, the smash or the Crush or the Pash was one form of relationship or attachment between girls. At this kind of time, uh, comes out of the UK and America in the late 19th century and, uh, surely wrote about the PA in her diary. She said [00:24:00] that her, she said of her friend Nancy Olga, a Russian exchange student on exchange. Sorry, that's Taoist, A Russian student on exchange. Nancy was very thrilled to think that Olga had such a pass on her when she'd come from such an interesting country. But it's just the law of opposites. Olga so passionate and Nancy So So the kind of opposites in this sense work within the relationship between, um girls and young women. What about those wider ideas? [00:24:30] Thinking about the idea of inversion, um, is quite interesting. It was sort of an idea that have, like, Alice popularised as I mentioned and and that kind of sense that if you are a woman attracted to a man, then you must have some element of, um, sorry, a woman attracted to a woman. You must have some element of manliness in you and vice versa. And there's one really intriguing piece in, um, Shirley's diary, where, she says, Valerie [00:25:00] White says that a particular teacher is neither feminine nor masculine, which is rather horrid because it might insinuate anything. We know what it might insinuate, but there's no kind of point at which Shirley herself kind of, um, worries or articulates this in terms of her own kind of attachment. She merely see in later diaries as late as we have. I really don't care about boys. I don't have any time for them. And her emotional energies are very much focused on other young women. Um, [00:25:30] I wish there were more diaries like this. Um, if anyone knows, if you let me know, I think, uh, they really again start to map out the possibilities. The terrain, the languages, the influences that young women who did really want to to, um, you know, develop a life around other women might sort of take up in a sort of a suggestive kind of way. Now, my last example, um, is another young man again, Um, we could talk in the question time, and I could talk [00:26:00] for hours, and I don't have hours about why it is that sources are harder to find. Um, in terms of youth young lesbian history, as opposed to queer history. Um, Trevor. Nick, I'm sort of vaguely aware of the time, so I'll just say a little bit about Trevor, um, of whom? I know a reasonable amount. I wanted to mention Trevor for two reasons. Firstly, because I sort of know a wee bit about his actual life. And secondly, because he was hauled up in court on a charge. And I just want to talk a wee bit about [00:26:30] the kind of circumstances in which, uh, teenage boys might end up tangled up in the legal system. So, uh, here, Trevor and his friends, uh, Trevor was an only child born in 26 grew up in Christchurch, went to Papa Technical College, Um, and worked as a glove cutter, a window dresser, a ticket writer, And in 1944 enlisted for service in the Navy. But before he entered the Navy Navy, here he is [00:27:00] in his uniform here and here he is sitting on, um, the I think it's the base of the John No Robert Godley statue. The one that the head fell off in the earthquakes in Christchurch Square here. So Trevor found himself in court in 1945 at the age of 18, when he'd gone to a papanui house to visit a friend he'd met at Saint Paul's Church. He later told police he invited me inside and showed me to his bedroom. [00:27:30] He then produced a number of photographs he had taken. There were scenes in portrait studies. We were sitting on the bed, he under the fly of my trousers and played with my private. He then got me to do the same thing to him. And on another occasion he returned to the house where four other chaps were there and paired off with a different young man. So a fairly uneventful, perhaps kind of sexual expression. Now, um, it got him tangled up with the law. [00:28:00] I can't tell from looking at the records how the police got involved. The probation officer recommended leniency. This happened a lot in Christchurch. In one particular circumstance, when the boys or young men were well connected from well off families, they would usually get let off. So there's a real class issue here. Um, one of the, uh, probation officers says that said that we had previously [00:28:30] born an excellent reputation. He'd never been in any trouble. And on that account, I would recommend to be given another opportunity to reestablish himself. All the youths were, um, let go on probation, and Trevor left for Sydney soon after, and I've actually had some really interesting discussions with members of Trevor's family, Um, about his kind of later life trajectory. They knew they knew of the arrest. They didn't know much about it. They didn't know too much about the [00:29:00] circumstances, but they did know that he had left for, um Sydney soon afterwards. There's another, uh, topic here of of, uh, trans Tasman queer migration, which I'm also kind of on the edges of being involved with. The other young men who found themselves tangled up in the law were those who were, um, caught having sex with older men. This again comes out of a Christchurch court file. I've looked through. [00:29:30] Um, all the Christchurch court files for the tens twenties, thirties and most of the 19 forties. Uh, what went on here? This is cheating. Um, this is not actually the Christchurch bars. It's a photograph from the ward bars in Rotorua. But the basic setup is the same. These changing cubicles along one side. Um and, uh, you and you and you and men would go into them, um, and fall around. And unfortunately for them, um, Christchurch [00:30:00] bars had one of the local newspaper editors was the moral police. And he kept dobbing everyone in, um and almost sort of entrapped them, and he'd sort of wait outside the cubicles and he'd see how many pairs of feet he would see underneath. Um, and then he'd shot them to the and stop moving around the microphone. So, wandering microphone. Um, yeah. And so there's a whole sort of history here, um, which I've also written about and can send the PDF to anyone who's interested, um, of the [00:30:30] kind of entanglement of young people in sexual relationships with older men as well. So concluding quickly. Social changes, I think have influenced individual lives quite profoundly. Uh, these include increasing access to secondary education during the late 19th century, particularly for working class young. Uh, sorry. Middle class young people like Fred Gibbs, where his social life has sort of, um, emotional effect of life developed around, uh, secondary [00:31:00] education. Most New Zealand young people did not have access to secondary education in the late 19th century. So there's that, um, so school boy networks, schoolgirl networks, the kind of world that Shirley Alston moved on with school is really central. And new ideas made their mark, including notions of sexual inversion, particularly James courage and, to some extent, Shirley Alberton. Young people talk with their friends about their sexuality, about their desires about who they liked. [00:31:30] Nothing's changed there. The state had an indirect interest, sometimes through schooling, sometimes through this kind of, um, regulatory kind of framework and just sort of thinking about, you know, in in a sense, one of the big questions with the project is the extent to which, um, young people's lives have both changed profoundly and also not, um, still the process of working out who [00:32:00] we are kind of negotiating with. What's around us, uh, you know, reading magazines, reading the internet, um, going to theatre All of those kind of things that we're reading Oscar Wilde plays. Um, the influences have changed, but that process of kind of integrating ideas hasn't necessarily, um, maybe it has, um, feel free to disagree. Of course, Um, and the kind of sense of negotiating an identity within the society that we live in and the kind of tensions between the good bits and the shitty bits like [00:32:30] Trevor negotiating that relationship between the pleasure he had with his friends and being arrested and publicly humiliated. So, you know, there's that real kind of thing between yeah, really good bits and really shitty bits. I mean, I could go on but I won't. Um I'm not allowed to. Anyway. In fact, I think the electrodes are just about starting, um, to get me under the desk here thinking, though I mean in in concluding conclusion, the past [00:33:00] and the present are somehow foreign countries, but somehow also kind of not. And I think untangling the knot of how they are and how how they are not That's too many knots. Um is really quite interesting to do. And I think that's one of the pleasures of doing history, including this kind of history is getting that kind of dialogue. Um, and really careful. Kind of, um deliberate thinking through and not losing sight of the wood for the trees, which is something I'm [00:33:30] not always the best at, but anyway, I'll stop on that point. So thank you. Thank you, Chris. I've already mentioned Oracle and Miracles as, um, Steven Griggs. Remarkable novel, much loved novel. I'll just mention quickly, uh, Shanghai boy, a work of gay fiction looking at what's somewhat [00:34:00] unflattering unflatteringly described as the potato and rice relationship. Um, but really, perhaps in terms of this session, I should concentrate on Steven's historical work. He started off with the remarkable, um, book Pleasures of the Flesh, Looking at Sex and Drugs in Colonial New Zealand, published in 1984 a long time ago. I mean, it was a fantastically early book, [00:34:30] um, through to his some of his more recent books Diggers, hater and whores looking at the social and sexual anarchy of the gold mining fields. An absolutely extraordinary kind of part of our social history onto the great wrong war, taking a decided attack against the received and by now, almost sacred version of our first World War past, David Hill, the novelist has said, has said of Stephen, um, Stephen Aldred. Grigg [00:35:00] defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to fiction. He's unsettling as well as absorbing. Um, please welcome Stephen, who will talk about the torment of the teenage years. OK, the sixties, Um, in many ways, the sixties was the hinge. Um, [00:35:30] there had been sexual revolutions before the 19 twenties, for example, Um, the sixties, though in many ways was a definitive opening up of mouths. People began to talk openly and publicly about, um, sexual behaviour that before had been talked about privately. I experienced it all at first hand. Um, I'm covering the late sixties here. Um, I was 12 in 1965 when I started at [00:36:00] a school in I was pleased that Chris referred so much to Christchurch, which is my hometown, the city. OK, so Shirley brand new suburbs sprang out of paddocks. Um, on the edge of Christchurch in the late fifties early sixties, my family lived in a standard four bedroom bungalow. It was a rather dysfunctional family. So my experiences, which were full of angst, are related [00:36:30] not just to being queer, but also being coming from a family with a cold, distant father and a bullying, angry, trapped mother. Um, so I wasn't really very well set up to navigate the sixties, but it was an interesting journey. A bumpy ride as, um, Betty Davis said, um so bland, homogenous, orderly. Christchurch. That was me in 67 my first Beatles haircut. I've still [00:37:00] got the Beatles haircut. There've been a few changes in between, and I was going to Shirley Boys High School, which had its very clear place in the pecking order of Christchurch. Chris has also alluded to Christchurch's pecking order. We were very proud that Shirley Boys High School was not a coed school where the wrong kinds of kids went. But we were also very aware it was not Christ's college and not even Christchurch boys high school. So it was an in between [00:37:30] zone, which fitted how, of course I felt about my life, the folk culture of the time. Verbally, the word pansy was used a lot. My mother would say, um, if I was singing a little song to myself while making my toast Don't be a pansy and I didn't know what she actually meant In 1965 I did by 1969. Yes, [00:38:00] I wrote about it in the Shining City, Um, my first novel to look at growing up in the sixties and in the seventies in Christchurch. It's based very closely on my own life experience in Shirley. Um, the first thing that happened in high school was I was warned by my brothers that I had to be careful [00:38:30] that the big boys didn't pull my knob off. I had no idea what they were talking about. We wore these kinds of caps to school ours were Royal Cambridge, blue and gold. And it was a rite of passage when you started at Boys High. The fourth form and fifth forms would attack the third forms and pull the knobs off their caps. But it had a sexual kind of undertone that I didn't quite understand. But [00:39:00] it was scary, but also sort of sexy somehow. And my knob got pulled off on the first day. His takes from the Shining City. In my first year, there was a scandal in Shirley Boys High this ship, the Maori. She sailed regularly from Littleton to Wellington. Um, there were two ships. It was a was the was called the [00:39:30] Inter Island Ferry. Um, it was the custom in Christchurch schools for school kids to be taken in parties. Um, in the care of teachers up to Wellington for a a day trip with an overnight passage on either the Maori or her sister ship the And on one of those trips, a science master. They were called masters. Of course not teachers. Um, Colin, um, was discovered [00:40:00] to have been sexually interfering, as the phrase was in those days with some of the boys. He was taking them into his cabin and getting them drunk, and they were having sex together. It opened up a can of worms. It was discovered that this teacher Colin, had been doing this for some time. He'd been teaching for two years at Shirley Boys High. And, um, all through those two years, there had been these encounters with boys sometimes willing, sometimes alcohol, to lubricate it once or twice close to rape. [00:40:30] Um, but because he was a master, um, he wasn't actually prosecuted. And he ran away to Sydney, where he got a job at a Catholic. He was Catholic. He got a job at a Catholic boys school and through the rest of the sixties and the seventies continued to abuse boys. And the cases were actually blown in the 19 nineties. Finally, um, I heard about all this. My parents were not particularly concerned [00:41:00] about it, so it wasn't seen as especially scandalous. It was seen as sort of the kind of thing you expected. Masters and, um, vicar were well known for this kind of thing. It was part of the culture and, of course, scout Masters. Um, nothing you welcomed, But you weren't particularly surprised by it. On the other hand, when a very popular radio broadcaster, Murray, [00:41:30] for in the same year 1965 was dragged through the courts for sexual encounters, voluntary sexual encounters, his name became a byword for disgusting. This in Christchurch. And I can still remember my mother's and father's tone of voice when they were talking about, uh, they could almost not speak the name. It was so loath. So [00:42:00] it was a curious double standard it may have been because he was intimate with almost every household. He was a very popular broadcaster. He was a very good broadcaster, too, and he hosted a popular musical light music programme that played through the day on three ZB, which was a very popular, probably the most popular radio station in Christchurch. So my mum would have been listening to him while she was doing the baking and running the vacuum. The Lux who used that word, uh, Lux in the house, um, she'd been listening [00:42:30] to, so it was like an invasion of her space. I think that was perhaps why she was so shocked and worried about it anyway. He was hounded out of broadcasting for some years, although he later came back. Broadcasting itself, of course, was very tolerant of such sexual piccalo. It was understood that, um, within the broadcasting world that many people were gay or lesbian and in fact, lesbianism [00:43:00] was, of course, different from male homosexuality. Um, we went often to swim at a place called Taylor's Mistake, and one of the institutions at Taylor's mistake were two, elderly ladies. They were probably about my age, actually, um, who wore I still remember them. They, um, bathing costumes kind of from here to down here. Um, and they were called the girls, and everybody [00:43:30] knew the girls had been with each other for many, many years, and everybody was very friendly to the girls. It was understood without being spoken about explicitly. So again, it's it's nuanced. It's not. It's not a crude oppression of gay, lesbian and other kinds of people. A lot of boys at Shirley Boys, [00:44:00] he were having it off with each other. Um, we all knew that I, unfortunately didn't have a chance to have it off with anybody. I was a bit naive. Um, but I did get winked at by one of these boys. Um, this was a group called Johnny Campbell. And the detours, um, they were all boys, um, two years older than me at Shirley Boys High. And one of these boys gave me that wink, and I thought, Oh, I think he wants to do something. But I was much too shy, so it never happened. [00:44:30] And Johnny and the tours were very much in the main street. They were, um they later became prefect. What they were up to was again winked at, not really noticed. Also, there were Queenie boys at school as they were called, and Queenie boys who had a smart mouth actually could pull it off without being bullied. It was the shy, queer boys who were bullied. One of my my one of my three or four best [00:45:00] friends was one of these Queenie boys with a smart mouth. And his nickname was BJ. Everybody called him BJ. No problem. BJ was very popular. He was very camp, um, and an accepted institution in our cohort all the way through. But other boys there was one boy, um, who wasn't a particular friend of mine. Um, he would be chased by a mob of boys in the grounds [00:45:30] of Shirley Boy calling out queer pansy. And if they caught him, they would beat him up, and the Masters would never intervene. It was understood in Shirley Boa in the late sixties that boys had to sort these things out among themselves. And it wasn't up to adults to to intervene. Also within my family, it was a big family, big out of control sort of family. Um, there were things going on, um, below the radar, um, below [00:46:00] my parents official radar, anyway, that they must have guessed at but didn't do anything about. And no doubt it was very common in lots of other families. I wrote about it in my most recent novel, Bangs, which is about my sister. Essentially, um, I have a scene where she goes into a We had a back batch. We had two batches in our garden for boys to sleep in. That's another thing about gender. Of course, boys are understood to be able to tough it out in little batches. [00:46:30] Girls, of course, needed pampering in the main house. Um, so my sister walks out into the back batch, and this is what it says in bangs. Brent and Stu in shorts and nothing else are lying on the bottom bunk together, kissing. I've never seen boy boys kiss. I stand bewildered for a few seconds, needing a few beats to understand, I stand for a few more beats, fascinated by the way those two [00:47:00] big, strong jaws are working away at one another while those four big, strong hands are all over each other's bodies. Next I turn on my heels, and that's how my family coped with anything that was a bit you just pretended you hadn't seen walked away in my family. In fact, I am one of six boys four of us fooled around with each other sexually, and my father walked in on us once or [00:47:30] twice. My mother, a couple of times each time, turn around and walk away at the same time. There was also sexual abuse in the family, um, older brothers sexually abusing sisters, which is in fact, one of the main themes of bangs. So this is the folk culture I was living in. So the family culture, the school culture, not formal culture. Um, [00:48:00] there was quite a lot of tolerance in other words. Quite a lot of room to manoeuvre, Um, regardless of the formal discourses that were going on outside the home and the school. Yet at the same time, there was an atmosphere of persecution. It was a little bit like I often thought, living in a Nazi state. Um, I later wrote a novel about a living in the Nazi state, and I came across an expression called the German Glance. People in Germany [00:48:30] under the Nazis coined this phrase it meant before you spoke confidentially to anybody. You glanced over your back and that way to see who was listening. And that's what it was like being interested in your own sex, at least for me in the late sixties, in the folk culture. But then there's the commercial culture, or what some historians prefer to call popular culture, but I think it's a product of capitalism rather than the people. So I call it commercial [00:49:00] culture. And again I go back to Johnny Campbell and the detours. Pop music was evolving really rapidly in the sixties, Um, almost every year the sound changed dramatically, and teenagers were very alert to those changes and so on and the look of people changed almost every year, too. The changes in the presentation of the body of the hair and so forth very rapid change. Many of the groups began to experiment with an androgynous [00:49:30] look. This is a very popular Kiwi group. The formula. This is the late sixties, so flared trousers, bell bottoms they were called at first. They were called flares in the seventies, um, referring to the Navy with its well known queer kind of cultural legacy and the frills the the pseudo um, Regency look and longer hair, of course, Um, so that by [00:50:00] 67 68 my mother, if she was driving now big she, um What's that look at those two? Um, you can't tell whether they're girls or boys. Everybody seemed to be having long floppy hair. Everybody was wearing bell bottoms. Um, everybody was wearing coloured shirts. Or so it seemed, although if you look at photographs, it looks much Dreier, Um, picture. But that's what it seemed to be. Um, androgynous values were certainly spreading very widely, [00:50:30] and that was made in actually at the very end of the sixties. So the hair getting longer and longer, um, and this more dandyish look spreading very different from the masculinity that I you would have seen in the early sixties. And then I was also becoming exposed not just to commercial culture but to high culture literature. [00:51:00] Shirley Boys High was actually very good academically. There were some very good teachers there. We had an excellent library, and I began to read texts that opened up things that I hadn't seen before. Um, Anna Karina has a walk on role. I don't know if anybody has noticed it for two gay men, um, who are portrayed by Tolstoy. Um, he ridicules them. [00:51:30] Um, but nevertheless, in 1/19 century novel, they never appeared in 19th century English language novels only in continental novels. And I found others in the novels I began to read. Oh, actually, this had a huge impact on me. Women in love, The famous scene where, um, Gerald and um, I forget his name are wrestling naked And where, um, [00:52:00] there's an attempt to fuse masculine energy. And, um, Lawrence goes on about the source of energy and male loins and that kind of thing that were all very powerful stuff, and that was taught at high school at Julie Boys High. Um um, in several of the novels in, he portrays [00:52:30] a character called and is in French literature anyway, probably the of the 19th century, the leading model of a strong, active, admirable queer man who is queer and proud of it and overt about it in the novel and in our French course, we read so again we were being exposed through formal high education [00:53:00] to worlds that were different from our suburban world. I was exploring New Zealand literature, too. It wasn't taught at school, but I was beginning to read New Zealand literature. I was beginning to seek it out and read it, and a few of them, a few of our Kiwi writers, gave me a strong queer vibe, too. James Courage, who's already come up? James Courage. Once I began to read, his stuff in [00:53:30] many ways became, for me, an alter ego of of mine. Um, his social background was very similar to my father's social background. I identified strongly with it, and this novel was, um, the first openly gay novel published by a New Zealand novelist published in Britain. And in fact, there were problems bringing it into New Zealand at first, but by the late sixties it was very easy to read. It was in our school library. [00:54:00] Yes, I ended up writing about James Courage in this, um, kind of quasi autobiography. It's really a fiction masquerading as an autobiography. Um, I identified so strongly with James Courage in my teens and early twenties that I imagined scenes where he is with his father with his mother. Um, I was projecting my own relationships with my own father and mother into that [00:54:30] novel. I'll probably write more about James Courage one day, too. And then there was coal flat by Bill Pearson. Um, I actually spent the first five years of my life in coal flat the little town of blackball on the West Coast before we went back to our home province, Canterbury. And, um, I only much later discovered that the protagonist of Coal Flat was originally a queer man, but [00:55:00] that Pearson was persuaded to turn him into a straight man in order to get the book published. Uh, I didn't know that at the time, but as I read that novel, I thought, There's something here. Um, the protagonist is somehow he's not really interested in women. Um, he seems more like me, uh, than and I got a very strong vibe and a strong affirmation from that novel. But all these writers were [00:55:30] writing in code in many ways. Um, and another thing that happened to me at Shirley Boys High was I got exposed to classical literature, classical art and literature. And that, of course, is a very classical meaning ancient Roman and Greek. And that, of course, is a very different ball game. This is one of the most well known. Um, Roman, uh, it's actually from a bowl of two men fucking. [00:56:00] And I began to find images like this in the art books not in our school library, but in the university library that I began to get access to by the late sixties, and I suddenly discovered that there were whole other cultures that had completely different approaches to sexuality. And then, in 69 I discovered who has already come up, or I think is going to come up in this room. Um, I discovered [00:56:30] this kind of poetry. So as a result of the spread of secondary education in New Zealand, Um and an education system that in theory endorsed the status quo. But actually, it gave you lots of ways of negotiating in other directions. I became aware of many other ways of seeing the world that weren't available in either commercial culture or in the popular culture I was growing [00:57:00] up with, Um but, you know, provided other avenues of exploration by 1969. In fact, when I first discovered um, gay liberation was beginning to be talked about piggybacking on women's um on feminism, second wave feminism and by 69 television, um, documentaries, news, documentaries and commentaries were beginning to discuss, uh, male homosexuality and [00:57:30] lesbianism openly on television. So you'd sit down with your cup of tea and your ANZAC biscuit and listen to a panel talking about whether male homosexuality was acceptable in New Zealand society. Uh, so it was a huge transition from 65 to the Murray Foy scandal to 69 so very liberating in lots of ways to have gone through the late sixties. But at the same time, in 1969 I was suicidal, So going back to that [00:58:00] Nazi state, the concentration camp metaphor I was wanting to kill myself because it all just seemed too hard. And in fact, in 1973 I did try to kill myself several times. Um, one way was with this magnificent machine. My first car, a Mari miner. Um, like lots of young men behind the wheel of a car, I would, um, often think I can't stand it anymore. And I think of driving into a tree or a lamp post. [00:58:30] And several times I steered in towards one, but never quite managed. In the end, I took the more pansy. I, um, way as my mother would have said, method of popping pills. Um, so a mixed bag, the late sixties, lots of good stuff. But at the same time, it was still really tough, uh, to be queer. Those are the main things I want to say. It was still essentially in 69 a concentration camp that I was living in. [00:59:00] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Steven. Um, it would be a wonderful opportunity to ask questions, um, of these two writers, but we've actually run out of time, and I think it's probably better if the, um, authors go to the, um, tables out there. And if you've got particular questions to ask them if you actually [00:59:30] ask them out there But please join me in thanking both the poets earlier and, uh, two speakers. Thank you very much.
This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content.
Tags