Solidarity Forever

By Will Hansen (he/him, PhD student in History at Te Herenga Waka)

“Look out, straights! Here comes the Gay Liberation Front. We are the people you warned us about – the people who are not supposed to exist.

We are the pretty, velvet-arsed boys in Grammar school uniform. We are the truck-driving, cigar smoking dykes. We are the aging queens from the Shakespeare, clad in purple crimplene. We are the black studs hustling K’ Road you see illuminated in the lights of the strip joints…

You straights – look down Queen Street, at the person whose sex is not readily apparent. Are you uneasy? Or are you made more uneasy by the stereotype gay, the flaming faggot or diesel dyke?…

We will never go straight until you go gay… Nor will you ever be rid of us, because we reproduce ourselves out of your bodies – and out of your minds.”

Roger Blackley, a member of the Auckland Gay Liberation Front, wrote the above words around 1972. They are an excerpt from a longer piece titled “The Makeup is Cracking,” written by Blackley in response to Black lesbian-feminist Martha Shelley. He copied the first lines from Shelley’s iconic 1970 “Gay is Good” manifesto, where she announced the dawn of a new age of queer radicalism. 

Blackley’s own additions, however, are the most fascinating. Blackley paints a vibrant picture of Tāmaki Makaurau’s queer landscape in the early 1970s, from the Shakespeare – a restaurant which still stands on Albert Street – to Karangahape Road (“K’ Road”). Blackley firmly situates gay liberation as being a part of Aotearoa’s local queer communities. He doesn’t just write about gays and lesbians – he writes about queens, butch dykes and gender non-conformists whose “sex is not readily apparent.” This was not a cisgender movement. As Blackley confirms, trans people were central to local gay liberation. 

Many people have heard of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, the famous supposed “birthplace” of gay liberation and pride. Stonewall was important, but these American events often overshadow Aotearoa’s own beautiful, powerful and radical queer histories, which can teach us so much about what it means to persist, to resist oppression and continue the struggle for liberation.

When thinking about Aotearoa’s queer histories, it is important to always begin with the understanding that before colonisation, takatāpui – Māori of diverse genders, sexualities, and sex characteristics – were an accepted part of society (I highly recommend Dr Elizabeth Kerekere’s PhD thesis, ‘Part of The Whānau: The Emergence of Takatāpui Identity - He Whāriki Takatāpui’ to learn more). Repressive laws and attitudes, brought to Aotearoa by European colonisers, were not just a side-effect of colonisation, but a mechanism of colonisation, a way for colonisers to suppress te ao Māori and impose colonial, capitalist hierarchies.

In the face of this colonial anti-queer oppression, queer people continued to exist and resist. By the 1960s, disparate queer networks had become consolidated communities. Queer people gathered in particular pubs and cafes, and developed a coded language that enabled them to communicate in secret. People of a variety of genders and sexualities during the 1960s referred to themselves as “kamp.” They used “kamp” in a similar manner to how we use “queer” today; it signalled a sense of collectivity, a shared understanding that they were bound together as outsiders. 

In Pōneke, one well-known kamp hotspot was the Sorrento, a night-time café. There, dazzling queens with wigs piled high danced cheek-to-cheek with butches decked out in shirts and ties. The Sorrento’s manager was renowned whakawāhine Chrissy Witoko. Witoko was famous for her outrageous outfits – including once using a spider crawling over her all-white outfit as a living “brooch” (!) – and her no-nonsense approach to would-be queer-bashers, “thumping” them before they ever got a chance to do harm. In Witoko’s venues, kamp communities could thrive. A lesbian-feminist named Tighe Instone recalled that one time, in the early morning hours, all the Sorrento’s clientele hopped “in a great long line hanging on around the waist of the person in front of them, all singing and dancing up one side of Ghuznee Street and back down the other.” Queer life was not always one of silence and isolation; it could also be a life of fun, friendship, and community. 

Kamps in the 1960s may not have been marching down the streets with placards or sending petitions to Parliament, but they were undoubtedly, profoundly political. Through choosing to come together as queers in specific spaces, to share knowledge with one another, to speak the same language, to care for one another and defend one another, kamps were ending the crushing isolation of queer oppression. By building, sustaining, and defending kamp communities, they created the possibility for group consciousness.

Kamp communities laid the foundation for gay liberation and lesbian-feminism in Aotearoa. The first local gay liberation group was founded at Auckland University in 1972 by Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku and her kamp friends. Te Awekōtuku had long felt the need for a queer activist group. She had been part of kamp communities for many years, but her comrades in anti-war and feminist activism criticised her for being so open about her sexuality. So, in 1971 Te Awekōtuku applied for – and won – a scholarship to study in the USA, where she planned to research gay liberation and Red Power. But, on 15 March 1972 – only two weeks out from her proposed departure date – she discovered the American consulate had stalled her visa because she was a known “sexual deviant.” Outraged, she stormed down to the Auckland Uni lunchtime forum and gave a fiery speech, challenging her fellow queer students “to stand up and be counted.”

The Auckland Gay Liberation Front was born. Early meetings were attended by a very diverse crowd – including “transsexuals and tranvestites” – who together decided to adopt “gay” as their collective term. Their manifesto, informed by Marxism and feminism, declared that their “long-term goal” was to “rid society of the gender-role system which is at the root of our oppression.” Since sexism was so embedded in colonial, capitalist society, gay liberationists believed that liberalism and law reforms were ultimately ineffectual. Only a revolution – where gay liberation connected with Māori sovereignty, socialism, feminism, and environmentalism – could bring about “sexual self-determination” for everyone. 

The Auckland Gay Liberation Front’s first months were a whirlwind of protest. Because shame and the threat of violence and discrimination had kept queer people closeted, the key strategy for gay liberationists was public demonstration, which meant sit-ins, rallies, and street theatre. 

Sandy Gauntlett, a trans feminine non-binary person, was an early member of the Auckland Gay Liberation Front, and I had the immense pleasure of interviewing her in 2022. Her favourite Auckland Gay Liberation Front protest was a “kiss-in” at Aotea Square. She told me: “We were having a good ol’ kiss-in, when the diesel dykes started kissing the men, and the men started the trans, it was just hilarious! Everyone got freaked out!” 

In 1973, Gauntlett moved to Rotorua and established the Rotorua Gay Liberation Front. Operated single-handedly by Gauntlett, she corresponded with over 100 locals, helping queer people feel less alone, and making sure the public were aware that queer people existed everywhere. In the group’s magazine, Defiance, she wrote about how those at “the extremes” of gender, “the drag queen and heavy, butch dykes,” were often looked down upon by other queers for failing to conform to “acceptable Gay behaviour.” And yet, it was these same people who “were the very first Gay martyrs”: 

…years before most of the rest of us were even daring to come out of our closets…before GLF was even thought of…these liberated brothers and sisters were helping to draw public attention to the plight of the homosexual. Are we not ourselves being repressive if we refuse to acknowledge these individuals and all they have done for our cause?

From the kamps to the gay liberationists, it is clear that trans and gender diverse people have always been integral to gay and lesbian life and politics. In a moment where trans people are facing unprecedented attacks, where a very small but very vocal minority of cisgender gays and lesbians are rejecting community with trans people, these histories remind us of the power of solidarity. The huge array of queer communities which live in Aotearoa have never been discrete, but instead deeply, materially intertwined. In the coming years, may we honour Aotearoa’s queer histories by working together. We have always been strongest when we have stood shoulder to shoulder.