Peter Wells, Witi Ihimaera, Stuart Main, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Douglas Wright and Michael Parmenter have to carry an unenviable burden as our current LGBT literary establishment. So, where are the younger voices?

I pondered this as I noticed that Christos Tsiolkas was a participant at the recent Writers and Readers conclave, who was there primarily to talk about his most recent work, Dead Europe. I’ve reviewed this work before, but if you haven’t already read it, please do. It is an enthralling dark exploration of atavistic currents of racism and anti-Semitism within European society, and may serve as a metaphorical fantasia related to the similar turmoil in the Serbian psyche over its Muslim, Croat and “other” inhabitants of vanished Yugoslavia.

Tsiolkas is a Greek-Australian author whose experiences and narratives are those of a second generation child of migrants, caught between his parents homeland and his own ecperiences of working class urban life, with old political and religious allegiances questioned in a metropolitan society with its own orthodoxies. That was the basic theme of his first book, Loaded (later filmed as Head On).  Probably because I’m third generation migrant on my mum’s side, from India, which has its own Hindu/Muslim atavistic undercurrents, I find his work richly resonant.

All right, so where’s the New Zealand LGBT equivalent?

We can’t blame its relative absence on small society cultural cringe. It’s not the fifties anymore, Pat Bartlett is long dead, we’re not in a recession, and we have a reasonably humane government interested in arts and literature.

It’s time New Zealand’s multicultural LGBT voices rang out, in all our contrapuntal complexity.