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Next up, We've got Victor Rogers. Victor Rogers is feisty, He's funny and he's fiery. Victor is one of New Zealand's leading playwrights, and his acclaimed plays include Black Faggot Sons and My Name is Gary Cooper of some background. He is currently mining dual Scottish roots as Robert Burns fellow at Otago University. Please, ladies and gentlemen, make some noise to Victor. [00:00:30] Glad I didn't have a fashion emergency just there. And this is the first time I've worn these pants this year. It's pretty touch and go. I have to say, um, you know, like, Paula, I'm gonna take a kind of secure, uh, approach to this. This question. Um and, um, you know, the past is another country, as they say, and this this question totally took me back into the past. It took me back to, uh, my life in Christchurch, [00:01:00] where I grew up with my, uh, with my mother. Um, it took me to prima two. Where, um, because the lights like Paula didn't really I don't think it turned on by one particular book. I think the light was turned on reasonably quickly. This this question made me remember, And two, watching a guy in my class be mean to girls. And he obviously didn't like girls. And I remember clear Isabell having the thought he's gonna have girlfriends when he's older and I'm not. [00:01:30] So the light was on, I think even then, but, um, the light was definitely on when, um, I was a slavish devotee as a child of Rona Barracks gossip, um, a Hollywood movie magazine. And I come from a born again Christian upbringing, and I read a story about Janice, Ian and one of Rona Barrett gossips magazines where Janice Ian said she realised she was gay when she was 11. [00:02:00] And as an eight year old, I felt really guilty that I already knew that I was gay and I carried that guilt for quite some time. Yeah, just just listening to Paula, then II I because I'm a Gemini, I can flip flop very easily and I. I had one book in mind to talk about which I will. But one book which came to my mind just now, was it's probably the most influential book in a funny way of my life, as as a book called um A a pictorial history of the talkies, um, that my mother gave [00:02:30] to me as a I think about a seven or eight year old because I had an interest in films very early on. And within this book, which had, um, pictures from, say, the the the very first talkies right through to about the mid seventies. Early mid seventies, we had Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling in the nude and women in love. We had, uh, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton going at it. And who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? We had [00:03:00] big glamorous, um, full page portraits of Dietrich Gabo. Betty? Yeah, I guess the light was on. I love them all. I loved them all. Um, one big book for me, which is getting to the book. That sort of, I guess, did turn the light on was a book, um, that my mother bought me when we were in Samoa. Just on the eve of my 12th birthday. We went for a two week holiday so that I could explore [00:03:30] my Samoan roots, which I'd never grown up with. And we got our bags on the seventh day. Um, so, by the time, uh, Mum bought me a book uh, that I chose. And that book happened to be bloodline by Sidney Sheldon. Um, and as an 11, almost 12 year old, that was pretty exciting. Um, I remember going back into my form two class and one of you know, I'd read all the sex scenes, obviously, And And the the one really knowing kid in our class going You know what come means [00:04:00] right, don't you? And I was like, Yeah, yeah, sure, no idea. But, um, bloodline turned me overnight from a hardy boys fan into a Jackie Collins. Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz devote. And, uh, you know, I was a slavish follower of all those authors for quite some time. And I just remembered, uh, just before I did a project in form five on Hollywood Wives. If any of you are familiar with that amazing [00:04:30] literary home, uh, which got an a plus. Thank you very much, Mrs Musco. Um, again, The past is another country. This is something I haven't thought about for a long time. This took me back this question. The the book that turned the light on took me back to being a very nervous, um, very, uh, school boy. in my school uniform going into a tawdry little second hand bookshop to buy an out magazine. [00:05:00] And, um, you know, I still remember the fear of of buying that. I can't believe I did it in my school uniform, but I did. And, um, that would have been about the fifth form. And that's when I started to look in the the school library or not the school library, the public library in Christchurch for different literature, gay literature. And, um, you know, around that time, I wanted nothing more than to be in a relationship with Tom. Uh, and that was that was very real for me. Thank you. [00:05:30] One of the books that, um I got out of the library and I think I had read about it. In Out magazine was a book called Boys on the Rock, which I don't think is that well known now. But at the time, I think I was pretty, um, pretty full on. It was a It was a book about a young swimmer getting getting his groove on as a young gay man. Um, it's a book that my mother discovered beside my bedside table and happened to read the scene that was at the, you know, the most [00:06:00] bench back bit of the of the book. Um, and I do remember telling my mother, you know, I just like the writing and my mother going along with that. Thank goodness. Another book that I discovered but which I haven't ever read completely. Um, and a lot of you, I'm sure, will have, um, will know it, uh, a boy's own story by Edmund White, which is the first time I came across the term corn holding. Thank you, Edmund. Very instructive. But, [00:06:30] um, the book that maybe didn't turn the light on but really has stayed with me from that that time in the in the past is a book that I found, um, when I was about I guess in my last year of high school, So about 16. 17. And that book is, um, another country by James Baldwin. So this was reading about another country for me, you know, literally and figuratively. This book really opened up a world. I knew nothing about Greenwich Village in the fifties. [00:07:00] Um, and it opened up a, uh, a black point of view, a non-white point of view which, for me as a mixed race person was a revelation. Um, and, um, you know, I was very thrilled. Um, years later, uh, when I was in Paris and I met someone who had hung out with, um, ja, James Baldwin and Eve Mon and and, um, he'd been at a dinner party where allegedly James Baldwin had been fondling [00:07:30] Joe Frasier's balls under the the table. One of my favourite anecdotes from my time was in Paris, one of the things that really struck me about this book. Another country which is called on the on the cover, the classic novel of love and hate between black and white man and woman man and man was the man and man bit. And the thing was just about every character, every male character in the book. But I think one white advertising agent, [00:08:00] um, had a gay experience with another character. And this this for me, was it was it was thrilling, but also yeah, um, what's the word? It just it just, uh it blew my mind. Of what? What? What was possible and what What could be out there beyond Lynwood High School, and, um, there were, uh, two characters that really stuck with me because I haven't read [00:08:30] this again in in complete in its entirety since I read it in the seventh form. But the the the the cat, the character who gets the ball rolling is Rufus a, uh, a black jazz musician who kills himself. And it's his suicide that, um, is the catalyst for the action in the book. And, you know, he is, um he at some stage, uh, sleeps with a character who ends up sleeping with another character, Valdo who is a, um a, uh, struggling novelist. [00:09:00] And, um, yeah, this is I'm just gonna read a very brief little excerpt from this because reading it reading it now, I know I wouldn't have understood all of it, but, um, yeah, I like reading this book. Uh, what was it like to be a man condemned to men? He could not imagine it, and he felt a quick revulsion quickly banished for it threatened his ease. But at the very same moment, [00:09:30] his excitement increased. He felt that he could do with Eric whatever he liked. Now Valdo, who was accustomed to himself to labour to be the giver of the gift and enter into his satisfaction by means of the satisfaction of a woman surrendered to the luxury, the flaming tapa of passivity and whispered in Eric's ear a muffled, urgent plea. Thank you, James BN. [00:10:00] Next up, we've got Cole Myers. Cole is a writer, an actor, a director, an artist and activist whose work is focused on creating spaces for trans people, queer people and people with disabilities and in mental health. Ladies and gentlemen, Cole Myers. [00:10:30] Oh, yeah, I. I really love how everyone's kind of had their own take on things. Um, no one really did Exactly what we were supposed to do, which I think is is wonderful. Um, I'm again going to flip it very much on its head as well. Um, for me, there wasn't really a book that turned the light on at all. Um, there were a lot of sci-fi, a lot of fantasy books that kind [00:11:00] of I think looking back on it now really offered a kind of a kind of transcendence of form of mind of reality, really, which I was so desperately seeking. Um and so I think as as writers are very good at doing. I'm gonna sort of twist the metaphor slightly and say that it wasn't so much a case of a book that turned the light on, but, um, a book that kept the light on because [00:11:30] for me, I find it impossible to talk about the uncovering of my identity without talking about the pain that covered it up. Um, for me, that was a a deep depression anxiety, uh, eating disorders, addiction, suicidality, um, and really, they were all just a terror of what I already was that had been twisted into this thing against myself. Um, [00:12:00] and I realised last year during a particularly bad patch that actually my suicidality was old enough to vote, which I thought was kind of amusing and tragic at the same time. Um, and I look back on it now, and I feel this very intense warmth for myself back then and everything that I went through and that I struggled with, um, when I was really sick, I couldn't read. I couldn't read at all. Um, there was no room for anything else other [00:12:30] than this excruciating intensity of of suffering. Um, so to get back to the point, the book that turned the light on for me was really the book that kept the light on. And that was my own journaling. Um, there I could express what I couldn't work out how to say, um, I could commune with my past Selves and whether they were in a better place or a worse place than I was. Um, I felt a kind of kinship with them and [00:13:00] was able to develop a sort of kindness towards myself. Um, the detachment really, of my own words from my current pain allowed a space for that warmth to grow. And the words felt connected enough to be meaningful but detached enough that I would actually listen to what they had to say. Um, because we were always better at listening to other people's advice than taking our own. Um, I feel like writing about our own lives. We can [00:13:30] find the balance that we didn't have when we were living them. Um, and for me, it also involved a sort of distilling of things and finding the clarity underneath the rest of the noise that was in my mind and in my life, um, writing about our own lives as well I find draws our attention to how much we create our own life story lines. Basically, how much we write the narratives. Or we read the cultural narratives that often reduce [00:14:00] us down to single layers of people or single notes. And then we're just expected to continue to play the same notes over and over and over until we die instead of, um, this symphonic rush of of reality and of being, Um and that's what I was searching for in other books and other stories. It was that raw, real, vulnerable connectedness, Um, that at least if I had to keep going, [00:14:30] um, there were other people that were walking it with me. And when I began to share my own writing, I think it was because I had never written it for anyone other than myself that it actually spoke to so many other people because it did have that real raw truth to it. Um, and there's a beautiful quote that I that I read recently that totally spoke to me and I. I feel like it probably will speak to other people as well. Um, it's by Juno, Diaz says. You guys know about vampires. [00:15:00] You know, vampires have no reflection in the mirror. There's this idea that monsters don't have reflections in the mirror. And what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in the mirror. It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them at a cultural level, any reflection of themselves and growing up, I felt like a monster. In some ways, I didn't see myself reflected at all. I was like, Hey, is something wrong with me that the whole society seems to think that people [00:15:30] like me don't exist? And part of what inspired me was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors that I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and not feel so monstrous for it. So for me, I feel like reading and writing are like inhaling others and exhaling our own. And I think our time [00:16:00] has come particularly for trans people to not hold our breath anymore, um, to write, to turn the lights on, but also to keep the lights on. Um, because I think it's it's really important to see ourselves. [00:16:30] I'm now gonna do a poem. Hopefully it also involves those points as well. Yeah, I hate how much time it took me to become myself. I hate that. I wasn't sure if I should say time or pain [00:17:00] because they both still feel like the same thing. I hate that. Every time I was hurt, I learned to feel like I deserved it. That someone else always had a stronger claim over my body. I hate that eight years of anorexia still press against my skin when I see feminine beauty and yet now masculine ideal scream [00:17:30] along my sinews too. I hate that. Even as I wait for surgeons to cut away my breasts, beauty imagery whispers to me, Why aren't yours as perky as hers? I hate that after a medically necessary total abdominal hysterectomy with bilateral cell pingo ectomy that my first wave of relief was not that I had made it through the operation, but that I could now no longer be made to carry a pregnancy against [00:18:00] my will. I hate the medical terminology rolls off my tongue easier than enthusiastic consent If it did, and that some people might only understand this when it's coming from a man. I hate that all the ways I taught myself to speak up and stand ground against the roar of male privilege and now the same things that someone else might have to shout over to be heard. I hate that when I walk alone at night, I still cross the street when I see [00:18:30] a man coming towards me only now to the lone woman on the other side, I'm the one she threw two khakis through her fingers, for I hate that Men I've just met make room for me in their casual misogyny, where objectification is a bonding exercise, that I still don't feel comfortable exploring my own attraction to women because I don't ever want to be the man that makes her feel like I felt. I hate that Calling myself a man [00:19:00] feels like I'm amputating 27 years, and I hate that. It took me so long to realise that men and women aren't either, or that when someone asks my gender, I still find it hard to breathe and that I now feel obliged to reply man, when the closest answer is silent. [00:19:30] I hate that it was testosterone in my veins that taught me I deserve to take up space. I hate that. The day people stopped yelling Dyke and started yelling, Fag instead felt validating. I hate that. Don't be a pussy really means don't have one and that my pleasure is still less important than appearance. That self acceptance is such a radical belief and that not killing myself will [00:20:00] always be my most revolutionary act. And I and I hate how ashamed I still feel to say that or Penny [00:20:30] ask me to come next day. We've got Jeremy Hanson. Jeremy edits the House style Bible home and has been a judge, often with painfully raised eyebrows and a strange smile on the various teams at decor on the block. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeremy Hanson, [00:21:00] I should have sent you a bio I'd almost forgotten about. The block erased it from my memory. It's been really interesting doing this exercise and trawling back through the book shelves to find the book that turned on the light. Um, so I'd like to start by taking a little bit back in time. I grew up in rural Hawkes Bay in a place called Where My father was one of two teachers at the little local primary school My mother helped out at school, [00:21:30] she baked fantastic bread, and she played Helen Reddy's I Am Woman loudly and often because the school was so small. My father was my teacher from when I was five until I went to high school. But this didn't seem strange because it was a small community in which everybody knew each other. Excuse me. Dad had a huge vegetable garden and lots of back copies of the whole Earth catalogue. My parents were both aspiring hippies who still seemed to feel really comfortable in quite a conservative rural area. [00:22:00] They were also enthusiastic readers, and our dining room was dominated by bright blue shelves that were bending under the weight of all the books that were stacked on them. I spent a lot of time immersed in the big book of news photographs from Life magazine and even more time reading about the travails of Charlie Brown and Mum and Dad's Peanuts compendium. We also made weekly trips to the Hastings Library, but apart from a period of being obsessed with the famous five, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys I can't remember a lot of books from my [00:22:30] youth as clearly as I remember the thrill of a new Superman or Batman comic because they were great. We didn't have TV, but our parents were fairly relaxed about what me and my brothers read. The main thing they said was that we were reading it all, so that was all pretty idyllic. And then things changed because we live far away from the city. So I went to boarding school to nay Boys High School, where sport ruled and any deviations from the narrowly defined norm weren't really tolerated. In some ways, I was lucky because I was good at cricket [00:23:00] and I managed to achieve a degree of acceptance because of this. But I feel intensely jealous when I read books like Rupert Everett's fantastic autobiographies and hear about all the guys he shagged at boarding school, and I didn't have sex at all at this stage of my life. I had no idea what gay was, and there never seemed to be an opportunity to have sex with anybody. Gayness was only referred to in a derogatory way to tapper Chocolate speedway driver. Lovely terms like that and [00:23:30] I was so naive. I didn't really know what other guys were talking about when they called each other that, and it was too risky to ask, let alone be caught in the act with a schoolmate, which would have been a fate worse than death. I was talking last night with a friend about who's the same age as me about, um, growing up in the eighties, and we both concluded that we sort of felt like we lived in an apocalyptic era and fourth form we all went to see the day after, um and then we had to write about it in English class afterwards. And for those of you who didn't see it, [00:24:00] it's a film about the nuclear Holocaust where, you know, the the Earth gets kind of wiped out in this skirmish between Russia and the US. And there's very little life left afterwards and related to this. Just as we were kind of contemplating the alluring mysteries of sex AIDS happened. So we were bombarded with images of men dying in terrible ways, and we knew that sex could kill. In some ways, this made us kind of lucky because we grew up knowing how to protect ourselves if we were ever [00:24:30] lucky enough to get some action. But that lucky day was years away from me. I'd grown up without ever meeting an openly gay man. Homosexuality was almost completely invisible, and my parents were liberal, but they'd never talked to us about that. One of the first times I remember having to actively confront the possibility of being gay was one day when I was 14 and I was walking down Napier's Main Street with a group of friends from school. We were all in uniform and somebody stopped us to ask us to sign a petition [00:25:00] against the homosexual law reform bill. I'm really embarrassed to say that I signed it. This was partly because of pure ignorance and partly because all the guys I was with were signing it as well. Peer pressure as a really powerful thing. And I'm sure I can remember feeling quite queasy. As I wrote my name on this petition, I knew it would kind of come back to haunt me. I think to not sign it, though, would have risked meant that I was risk being called a faggot that I would have had to explain myself somehow. And at that time that risk seemed a bit too much to bear. [00:25:30] I was thinking when Joe was talking about winning the, um, geography prize at school because I was going through my school years and thinking about them in quite a negative way. But then I remember these kind of lovely flashes of rebellion when Jo was talking about that. I remember that in seventh form I won the English Prize at school and we got given this book token that we would go and purchase a book with, and then the headmaster would present it to us, and I book. Maybe this is the book that turned the light on, Um, Pamela Stevenson's How to Be a complete bitch as my life. [00:26:00] Yeah. Um, but denial is a really powerful thing, and mine persisted for quite a long time despite the Pamela Stevenson purchase. Um, I went to Otago University, which felt like an incredible release after being locked up in a boarding school for five years, but I still didn't really feel free enough to be gay. In 1993 I moved to Auckland to study journalism, and it's so weird to think about this now because that's only 23 years ago. And it feels like about 100. You know, there was no Internet. There were no no cellphones. Um, [00:26:30] no YouTube. If you wanted to contact a friend, you kind of called an empty room across town and hope that somebody was in it. Um, I was completely in the closet, and I didn't feel like there was a way to ask questions about anything that really mattered. I'd never had sex with a man. I had no idea about how to be gay. Um, and the closest I've gotten to gay porn was sneaking glimpses at the Burt Reynolds centrefold. My grandma's really tattered old copy of Cosmopolitan. And I just attended a couple of festival films in which a couple of guys passed, but that was pretty much it. I kind of instinctively [00:27:00] knew that I liked men, but I didn't know how to be gay. So there was this enormous chasm between the place where I was stuck and the place I wanted to get to, and it was kind of a bit like taking a leap into a void and the point I wanted to make is that it was books that helped me get there. I was too scared to go to a staircase nightclub, for example, when I found out it existed. But I could stand in unity books and feel literary rather than desperate. I could buy books with gay characters without feeling like I was completely outing myself, [00:27:30] and I could read about these characters and work out how to be gay myself. I found it too difficult to choose one particular book that turned the lights on. So I've chosen a few. And part of the reason I was so pleased to be able to ask to talk tonight is that, as Paul mentioned, um, dangerous desires. That Peter wrote was one of the first books I came across in one of my greatest discoveries in those years. It was full of individuals instead of stereotypes, and it made it seem like I could find my own way of being gay. I also wanted to mention desperate [00:28:00] remedies, which was also released in 1993 the film that Peter Co directed, which was joyously gay and mischievous, and that kind of filled me with optimism with the added bonus that Kevin Smith spent a lot of time in that film with his shirt off. And I wanted to make that point about optimism and joyousness, because at that point, so many of the books I read that featured gay characters were really heavy going. Um, if you've given a lot of these books to somebody who felt they had a choice about their sexual orientation, they would have definitely [00:28:30] been given being gay a swerve because it was like most of the writers that, um, you know, watched the nuclear Holocaust in the day after and had decided to write their personal versions of it. I loved the book Night Swimmer by Joseph, which was wildly romantic, except for the fact that it was told mostly in retrospect and the love interest at the centre of the story had been swept up to see while swimming at the beginning of the book. I really enjoyed the book Fucking Martin by Dale Peck, But the main character had been abused by his stepfather and was taking lots of drugs [00:29:00] and not in a very fun way. I couldn't find this particular volume of gay short stories at home when I was writing this. But I remember so clearly a story in one of them that really resonated with me about a ginger kid growing up in a sunburn Australian summer, which is a metaphor for not fitting in that stayed with me really vividly ever since. I I'm sorry. I can't remember the writer's name. I also wanted to mention with him Nights in the Garden of Spain, because that book was an incredible book at the time, and I think the more you think about it. In retrospect, [00:29:30] um, it becomes even braver and more sensational. But even at the end of that, the character ends up, um, kind of cast out from his family and by his own desires. And there's a a feeling of lament I felt at the end of that book, and I often think of Nick, which came much later. The wonderful, conflicted character at the centre of Alan Hollinghurst. It's great book in the line of beauty, he starts out, um, happy and carefree, and then he's completely crushed by the English class system. Um, I also wanted to mention Timothy [00:30:00] Conor Graves holding the man, which is such a beautiful love story that also ends in complete devastation. Um, and more recently, this is still going on. I read a little life and which, which is a wonderful book. The main character in that Jude is a person who, um is remarkable in many ways but also can't escape his own tortured upbringing of abuse and struggling with his own sexuality. But there are also really important books in my life that were stories of redemption amid the suffering I [00:30:30] remembered column Tobin's The Blackwater Lightship, which is really fascinating in the way it combines the kind of heartbreak of AIDS. And it has this kind of cathartic coming together of a family redemptive as the main character is dying. There were other books at the time, also published in 1993 that were really powerful calls to arms like Michelangelo's Queer in America, which was a really interesting argument for not staying in the closet and a really galvanising one for me at the time. But more controversial, he controversially he [00:31:00] was really in favour of aggressively outing people and in order to normalise homosexuality and take away the stigma of it remaining secret. I've over the years, I've read everything I can by Derek Jarman, whose fearlessness still never ceases to amaze me. And I like I wanted to bring him up here because I've been talking about bleakness. But I always come back to the book that he wrote about his own garden in Dungeness, which shows how beauty can come out of bleakness, and the bleakness itself can be beautiful as well. Now, [00:31:30] I don't know about you, but for me, books serve as real markers of a life. I don't really keep photos or other Mementos, but I can look through the books on my shelf and remember a lot about the time and place that I bought them and what I was doing at the time. So even though I don't reread books often, they stay with me. I am. I now live with my husband, Cameron, Um, who I married five years ago back in, and I was thinking about that when I wrote about this, because this is a life I could never have pictured for myself and most [00:32:00] of the characters in the books I read I don't think would have pictured that for themselves, either. It certainly wasn't in any of the fiction I read at that time that this was a possible outcome. Um, so I feel very lucky. But I also wanted to use this opportunity to say that I don't feel like I would have got here without those books and the characters in them. So I wanted to kind of express my gratitude for all of them tonight. Thank you. [00:32:30] Thank you, Jeremy. Next up, we've got Michael Stevens. Michael is currently the programme director for the Rainbow Tech and is an occasional blogger and social commentator. He's had a varied career ranging from demolition work in New York in the early eighties to teaching English in Istanbul for eight years. Being an HIV activist as well as working in academia, books, music and art have always played a great part in his life. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Stevens. [00:33:00] Wow, Thank you. It's, um it's a privilege to be here tonight. Um, I'm probably gonna walk because I tend to walk as I talk. The the book that turned the light on there were so many, but I'll cast myself back, particularly to a time as a suicidal 16 year old 15 year old at King's College, boarding some of some themes coming back again. Um, in the seventies. So I was born in 61 [00:33:30] 1976 77. I knew I was gay grow, you know, going to a boarding school like King's, surrounded by naked teenage boys. Man, you knew you were gay if you were gay, and as far as I can make out, um, you know, I never had sex at school. What I found out afterwards was that, um all the straight boys were running off to the bushes and juking off together and finding out who had the biggest dick and all of us. Gay boys were too terrified to let on to anybody that we might actually be interested in each other. Um, what a wasted [00:34:00] opportunity. I was suicidal. I'm serious, I. I walked around in that my last year at Kings in 78 I walked around with a razor blade in my pocket. Um, I could not see a way to balance. I was already sexually active. I've been having sex since I was 15. Um, with being outside, doing the bogs, going to the public toilets, Um, I couldn't figure out how I could countenance being a loving son from a strong family, A family where I grew up surrounded by books. Um, every room in our house had books. [00:34:30] Um, how could I be this person that my family loved that I thought was a good person and be this terrible thing this this homosexual, which just seemed awful and again as other people have touched on, What did I see around me? I could see Hudson and halls. I could see John Inman, and I can remember very, very vividly, Um, watching a naked civil servant and thinking, Wow, that resonates with me as a 15 year old. It terrifies me. I don't think that's who I am, [00:35:00] but, God I, I understand. And I recognise who he is. There was, um, a time walking up high street, um, around, I think, where Unity Books is now and a sandwich board on the footpath, uh, of a you know. And I noticed it from time to time because we had our family warehouses down on Fort Street, so I'd often be in that part of town. And there would usually be like a half naked man in the forest with a knapsack over [00:35:30] his shoulder or sometimes a half naked man on a pile of rocks like it climbed a mountain. And it said out the alternative lifestyle. And I was for, you know, for quite a while I thought it was about tramping, and I thought, Well, these guys are hot that they get for these covers in these magazines. Maybe I should take up tramping. I don't know. I didn't I finally figured out up the stairs was a bookshop, and that's what it was. And it was a I. I tweaked and I went up there and terrified [00:36:00] Brett Shepherd, who some of you will remember in a shiny green. I don't know what kind of fabric suit, um, with his poly could have been, you know, Sweet 16, me coming through the door as so many other of my contemporaries did, and I and books. And here was the first time that we actually, you know, we might laugh about Brett. We might laugh about out. They brought in the books that other people didn't bring in. And for me, I found the front runner by Patricia Warren. And [00:36:30] some of us have, you know, and I did too. Um, in my older years, derived it as sort of gay Mills and Boon. But when I read it, it was amazingly powerful because it talked about love. And for me, the key thing that makes me a gay man is not who I have sex with. It's the fact that I love and want to be loved by other men. That is what makes me gay. It is my emotions, you know, my sexuality. Um, that's an expression of it, but it's actually [00:37:00] about love, and that's what it comes down to. And this book gives a really positive story about two men finding each other falling in love. And unless it then goes on to have the typical tragedy of one of them dying, Um, but it still is about love. And that is the book that for me it sent me a really powerful message to give me this thought that you don't just have [00:37:30] to have sex to be gay. You can love, and that is what being gay is about. And I remember trying desperately to get my father and mother to read it, and they were, like, horrified and didn't Of course, um, this is the same copy that I bought in 1978 or 77 in the art book shop. I have kept it all those years. I hadn't read it for I don't know how long. I I took it out last year. I thought, I'll give it another run. I'll [00:38:00] see what it's like. I'll see how it stood up and it stood up really Well, I think, um, it's pre AIDS. So it talks about a world of, um, homosexuality that is very, very different from, um, the post AIDS world. But, um, it talks about love. It talks about death. It talks about the possibility of, um, two men having families having Children because there are three generations, um, that come through this book. So in many [00:38:30] ways, it's really contemporary, you know, they just sort of accept the fact that you have a sperm donor. You have, um, you know, a surrogate mother and you have a baby, and that's just written in here as a really normal sort of thing. The one thing where I think Patricia Warren got wrong, um is that she talks about, um, men describing their penises as their roses, and I've never heard any of us use that terminology. I took his rose in my mouth. [00:39:00] No, it just doesn't work. But, you know, um and, uh, what I was, you know, thinking back about this too. She's actually an accomplished scholar in her own right. She's a leading. She taught herself, apparently Ukrainian. And she's a leading, um, authority on Ukrainian literature. Who would have guessed? Um, as I was going through it again the other day. There are so many bits in there that I thought I could read this. I could read that I could take out this excerpt. I didn't, um and I won't because it's so hard to pick from among them. But [00:39:30] this book again, perhaps it didn't turn the light on, but, um well, in some ways, it did, you know, because it just showed me I didn't have to be a John Inman caricature. I didn't have to be someone, as as I would say now, as noble and as extreme as, um, Quentin, Chris was you could be a man and fall in love with another man and have a life and be together, and that is what this book talked to me about [00:40:00] when the rest of the world 19 seventies New Zealand had no idea and had no way of messaging that to me or to anybody else. So I'm really grateful for this book and I'm never going to lose it. Thank you, Michael. Finally, by no means least we have under her [00:40:30] real name at Alias a K, a diesel dike poet is a writer of poetry, lesbian, flash fiction and short stories. She has won the title of Maki Poet for 2010 and 2012, And for 2015, she was the winner of poetry. Idol has been competing in poetry and spoken word competitions regionally and internationally. Since 2008, Diesel dike poet has performed at Heroes Out West Garnet [00:41:00] Station and poetry live at the Thirsty Dog. Some of her poems have been published in socialist and feminists magazines and she has amassed over 700 poems. She is currently a psychologist by profession, but she would love to write full time. Ladies and gentlemen, um can you hear me? Ok, [00:41:30] um um Peter uh and, um well, as introduced me um my name is, uh I hail from the, um, [00:42:00] peninsula originally. So that makes me and, um I live here, and I live and work here in Auckland. Um, what an amazing lineup of of, uh, speakers we've had tonight. Would you like to just give them a a round a clap Again? Thanks. Now, um, I will be, um, doing, um, some spoken word or one [00:42:30] piece of spoken word poetry. Um, but I you know, listening to these guys, um, and women, um, has kind of, um, agitated memories, I guess, um, about my own journey, uh, into who I am today. And and I make no bones about I'm I'm Butch. Um I'm sis a butch dike. And, [00:43:00] um, I remember four years old, being four years old and watching the television set in my grandfather's house, which was the only house in mania with a television, and it been very crowded in in the lounge room, and I think it was Angela Door. Do you remember Angela Dior? Um, presenter was presenting the news, and the first time I saw her, I thought she was gorgeous. I walked [00:43:30] up to the television set and laid my lips on the screen, and it was electrical. Ah, yeah. And, uh, the rest of the just wanted to watch the news. Um, two years later, uh, I remember my crush crush I had on my first child, the first woman in my [00:44:00] life, I suppose. And, um, you know, it was one of those things she met, like, happiness on a sunny day. And I don't know if you can kind of relate to that, I'm sure you all could. You can recall such incidences, I suppose. Um, and then my favourite, um, author was, um the book [00:44:30] that really, um, affected me deeply was and, um, I guess it kind of projected me into the to the Maori, uh, to the to the Maori movement, Um, as well. And, um, there are such a lot of, uh, lesbians and gays in in indigenous people's movements. And, um, I've had the pleasure [00:45:00] and privilege of, um of getting to know those people. Uh, and I'm sure that's going to continue until I die. This, um, poem is entitled. I was thinking whether I do woman or girlfriend, but I hear that dangerous desires is tomorrow night, and I've been, Um it's been suggested that I might leave that palm until dangerous desires for tomorrow night. Um, this poem, then is entitled [00:45:30] Overdrawn. It seems everywhere I go, I cross your path, But I never catch your eye. I guess that's kind of good, because it means I don't have to bear your glare yet. I bet I'm added to your conversations, just not in a good way. All I feel I'm good at with you are these probabilities. And if you can't be bothered to include [00:46:00] me in your null hypothesis, then let me speak to you in a language you understand. If your X can't see Y again and why can't find X on the gradient at all? Then, hypothetically speaking, I can rewrite this equation to read X plus Y equals XXY where X equals me. Y equals you and XXY equals the sum total of Venus squared minus. All men are from Mars, period. That's right, baby. A butch [00:46:30] rush and lick Third Rock from the sun here on Planet Dyke where IXX and right behind you in the queue for happiness Pay attention! You read from my letters that I'm right here with you. on the curve at double XYNZ, waiting patiently for you to take a break. See, recess isn't regress if you breathe less. It doesn't mean to say that whoever's floating your gender fluid boat right now take your breath away. Incidentally, problem solving may be my forte, but yeah, nah, this [00:47:00] isn't foreplay for the place of a play isn't in Playwright. I'm on the sidelines of this stage avoiding stage fright spotlights and stage lights say, Don't make your brain bright So let's avoid the theatrics and have a drama free play date Because I'm hoping you think my poetry games tight. OK, you're not just another woman, all right? You change me like my words whenever you're around, Do they jingle like a pocket full of $2 coins scattered across times tables? As I recall, the nights and days we never spent. You [00:47:30] saved me, and I'm hoping I can build up your interest just enough to call to account that river Bank of tears over there where I deposited those words and in the same breath I wallet, keys, phone packing. I I check myself for I'd love for us to cash in on what we have going on here. See, currently your currency is unlike anything I've experienced before. You move me, you puzzle me. I feel like I'm some kind of misfit piece to a heteronormative [00:48:00] jigsaw puzzle. I get tongue tied scrabbled. It's like crosswords getting to know you, but I'm hoping you can add it all up and decipher. See, love is kind of like a lesbian sudo. And just to let you know, I want to sum up to be that dike you can go to because I know the next time I see you you won't be reenacting play schemes that look like daydreams going on in my head. But will my courage give me the green light? Or will my cowardice reign red [00:48:30] Red Like the rose I proposed I would give you with some pros and some I told you so. You are beautiful red like you would blush the bees knees No mascara Your lush smile that grinds interest air for what is love But poetry's dust red like our faces in a twilight sunset eclipse Serenity to never ever make you wonder Honey, are we done yet? Read like this [00:49:00] poem and me in the red about to sign off on a major transaction, so please don't withdraw. Thank you. [00:49:30] Thank you. So, ladies and gentlemen, um, the panel I'd like to thank you for bringing back memories. I'd like to thank you for sharing your stories. And I'd like to thank you for touching everyone in this room and bringing all memories to life rather because I think it would be hard not to find anyone who hasn't been in this room tonight hearing your stories, sharing your words, hearing your thoughts, not being touched, and reignited some sort of flame within them. So thank you. Panel Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to catch up with the panel outside, they've got books outside that are for sale. [00:50:00] So you can buy them, They can sign them. And you can answer any questions that you might have If you would like to come back tomorrow. There is a full day of programming tomorrow right here in this room. So if you can't make it But you would like to send a friend, then get on social media, tell them how wonderful night you've had it. The same same, but different. It's not here on Sunday it is at station. But if you'd like to come back tomorrow as part of the same same but different festival, then they'll be right here against as a four days programme. It's been wonderful having you here, Peter Wells. Thank you so much for allowing [00:50:30] this to happen and engaging this and making this happen. Um, for everyone that has worked on this project. Have we had a good evening this evening? We look forward to your social intercourse in the four hour you get the book. Let me see you. Good night.
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