I was asked last summer, in anticipation of what was at that stage going to be the Asia Pacific Out Games, if I could come up with 'something cultural'. “People in Wellington did it so well down there, we've got to have something up here in Auckland,” they said. I thought about it and came up with two ideas. One was that Aotearoa New Zealand has a tremendous history of LGBTQI writing. The other was that LGBTQI film making here was equally strong. I pretty soon realised I could only work on one area, and chose writing. I decided to create a platform for the writers of Aotearoa New Zealand to speak out. The idea was that visitors from the Asia Pacific would see what we were like. Our stories would tell our story. Well, as we know, the Asia Pacific Outgames didn't come off quite in the way envisaged (although there will now be a replacement Proud to Play sports festival instead.) But by that time I was already very busy, and enthused, with the idea of putting together a celebration of LGBQI identity as seen by our writers. I decided to call the Festival 'samesame but different'. I was helped by an early enthusiastic endorsement from Witi Ihimaera, but other writers soon came on board such as Joanne Drayton (who wrote the New York Times best-selling biography of crime writer Anne Perry - who has local fame as one of 'the brick in the stocking' teenagers who killed one of their mothers in 1950s Christchurch - the basis of 'Heavenly Creatures'.) Our stories are our own and stretch from the hyper-talented Samoan-New Zealand playwright Victor Rodger whose Black Faggot title says a lot to Stevan Eldred-Grigg whose Oracle