Unfortunately, the ideologically driven Canadian federal government isn’t taking no for an answer, and despite British Columbian police, Vancouver Downtown Eastside small business, and provincial political support, the Harper administration still intends to take the case to the British Columbian Court of Appeal, and then probably all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, the court of highest jurisdiction in that country.

It’s a war of ideology versus pragmatism and current constitutional safeguards for the existence of the facility, given that its closure would represent the loss of ‘life, liberty and security’ of IV drug users who might otherwise turn to crime, sex work, risk dirty needle use or face injury and death from substance-abuse related health problems. However, defenders of the facility are confident of the facility’s ultimate survival and defeat of the federal Health Minister Tony Clements, who seems solidly wed to an absolutist prohibitionist ideology that has no time for evidence-based harm reduction and risk minimisation practical public health care.

Recommended:

James Keller: “Battle over Insite expected to go to Supreme Court”: Globe and Mail: 03.07.08: http://www.globeandmail.com

Catholic critics include Catholic lawyer Frank Brennan, who condemned the new police powers as ghastly interference with civil liberties and against church teachings on human rights. While the institutional church supports the actions of the Iemma ALP state government, Father Brennan cited Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963), which stated that human rights and civil liberties should be regarded as ‘inviolable.’  According to Dr John Sweeney at the Edmund Rice Centre, Christ himself  ’died for free speech,’ and Father Brennan added that the proposed legislation was out of all proportion when it came to Catholic pilgrims and their sensibilities.  

Even Sydney’s APEC forum meeting and the Olympics hadn’t generated this degree of curtailment of freedom of movement, freedom of expression and application to multiple venues. Meanwhile, it’s generated a cheeky t-shirt competition, some of which have appeared at the Sydney Morning Herald’s website. Far from generating a wave of euphoria amongst the faithful, this blue elephant has generated increasing controversy amongst Catholics and opponents of their institutional church’s sectarian public policies alike. 

Recommended:

Linda Morris, Joel and Jano Gibson: “Catholics split on right to annoy.” Sydney Morning Herald: 03.07.08: http://www.smh.com.au

Due to the significance of Chris’ book, I thought I’d take a more scholarly perspective in this second review of his work, given space and time availability in this format. How does Chris’ work compare to other national LGBT histories?

As Chris himself has noted, once he started digging, he was deluged with intimate remembrances, ambiguous photographs and the minutae of court cases and medical journal reports and records. He was treading a well-worn path in terms of internation LGBT historical work, and reading Mates and Lovers, I was strongly reminded of Clive Moore’s pioneering work about Queensland LGBT history, Sunshine and Rainbows, which used similar historical traces and personal documents to reconstruct the lives of LGBT Queenslanders in that traditionally conservative to right-wing Australian state.

British and Canadian LGBT histories have the advantage of historical vintage and longer continuous (European) settlement and written history, and it is no wonder that the work of Rictor Norton (Mother Clap’s Molly House, 1994), Emma Donoghue (Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture: 1988-1810), and Jeff Weeks (Sex, Politics and Society, 1981) has the advantage of rich seams of evidence as a result. For that matter, Gary Kinsman’s Regulation of Desire (1987) is similarly rich and evocative, although as with Moore’s history of LGBT Queensland, national differences are instructive to locate and scrutinise. 

New Zealand tended to be a later arrival, and perhaps due to the blase attitude toward male sex with men, and late advent of administrative centralisation in Wellington, Chris appears to have had a paucity of official records to consult in this context.

In my earlier review, I noted that there were one or two minor criticisms that I have of this excellent, groundworking piece of work. One is the absence of organised homophobia. As my own specialty is dealing with this, I realise that there are problems with the profound absence of archival materials from nineteenth century conservative Christian pressure groups in our national archives. It would’ve been interesting if the protagonists in Chris’ book had had any run-ins with these people, but such was not the case. Of course it is important to celebrate the tenacity, courage, heroism and resistance of our foreparents, but we’d gain an even more precise measure of that through delineating the scope and scale of organised homophobia and its apologists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Laurie Guy’s Worlds In Collision (2002) tells us about conservative Christian perspectives in the sixties, it doesn’t go back any further. Added to which, that author’s evangelical Christian bias is obvious when it comes to the seriously flawed section on homosexual law reform.

On looking over it, I realise that the book needed to be as circumspect as possible when it came to another key formative influence in gay men’s lives- homoerotica. I’m not being prurient about this, but as someone grounded in media studies, I find it interesting that Canadian LGBT historical studies focus so heavily on the censorship and importance of homoerotica, primarily due to the extraordinary backwardness of Canada’s Customs and censorship tribunals compared to its otherwise exemplary inclusive social policies. Homoerotica does play an important role in our everyday lives, and is often the first source of affirmative depiction of sex and intimacy between men that many older gay men were exposed to, during the sixties and seventies onward.  It would have been instructive to have had a longer section on the censorship battles of the seventies, eighties and nineties, and whether or not gay pulps played the same role as their lesbian counterparts did in valorising our sexual identities from the sixties onward.

None of the above is intended to lessen the considerable awe and admiration that I feel toward Chris for the importance and magnitude of Mates and Lovers as the richly detailed, pioneering contribution to LGBT New Zealand history that it indeed is. However, as I’m sure he’d agree, it is a pioneering effort, and the histories of homophobia and homoerotica in this country remain to be written. That does not diminish the magnificence of Mates and Lovers as the benchmark against which all future NZ LGBT histories will be compared.

As I’ve earlier provided a capsule biography of Michael Dillon, the first recorded female to male transsexual, I thought I’d focus on some more particular details involved in this biography of the world’s first transman.

Michael lived an austere professional life, whether as a mechanic, or after he’d gone to Trinity College, and qualified as a doctor. When it came to relationships with others, it never got beyond dancing due to the painful skin grafts from his legs that were neccessary to create male genitalia.

This may have served as an insurmountable obstacle to his relationship with Roberta Cowell, the first transwoman recorded in the United Kingdom. Roberta was living as a woman, taking oestrogen, and wearing female clothing. Dillon proposed that if her surgery went ahead and they married, they could move abroad to become an invisible straight couple, and then adopt a child, whereupon Roberta could settle down to become a housewife. Unfortunately, as one can see, Michael had some very conservative ideas about gender role polarisation, which may be another reason for the breakdown of their relationship.

It is a shame that no-one has seen fit to reissue Michael’s pioneering volume on transgender rights and reassignment surgery, Ethics. In it, he distinguished transvestites from transsexuals and the pain that the latter felt from body/mind conflicts over their biological sex. He did so nearly twenty years before Dr Harry Benjamin coined the phrase ‘transsexual’ in reference to the glamorous Christine Jorgensen after her much-publicised surgery.

As well as transgender history, Kennedy also gives us some wonderful insights into interwar lesbian and gay mores. Radclyffe Hall had just published her Well of Loneliness in 1928, and despite its prohibition, bootleg copies became cherished heirlooms amongst lesbians of the time, who handed copies to one another, and copied the coiffure, wool trousers and white buttoned shirts amongst the Oxford lesbian set during Michael’s time there. However, Michael (nee Laura) Dillon wasn’t a lesbian- he hated his initial female body, and to mbrace lesbianism would have meant that he had to accept it.

Meanwhile, Robert Cowell (23) had just become an RAF fighter pilot in 1941. There was no trace of the future Roberta, any nascent breast growth or genital anomalies. After crashing during a mission over Germany, he became a POW in Stalag Luft I in a rat-infested, chaotic and unhealthy environment, leading him to hunt feral cats for food. Mental illness and alcoholism were rife, and to keep himself sane, he dreamed about building racing cars after the war was over.

As I noted in my earlier review, Michael had met kindly and altruistic plastic surgeon Harold Gillies by then, whose compassion and warmth sustained Michael during his initial surgical modification. Due to the heavy demand on wartime plastic surgery due to war injuries though, his full reassignment surgery had to wait until after the war.

In 1945, Robert was finally liberated from the concentration camp, but after he went home to his family and started building racing car engines as he’d always wanted, something else was still missing. Then he realised that he liked dressing in women’s clothing, could pass as female, and had a “ female”  unconscious, according to a psychoanalyst consulted after his divorce in 1948.

In the late forties, Robert became an investor and director of Sheridan of London Designs and entered the world of fashion. He found a supportive endocrinologist who gave him oestrogen, leading to breast growth, thinned facial hair and thickened head hair, as well as weakened wrist muscles. And then, Robert met Michael Dillon, who performed the surgery that made her Britain’s first transwoman, in 1951. Gillies finished the work, providing Roberta with facial surgery and a vagina.

Across the Atlantic, Christine Jorgensen had just arrived back in the United States after her own reassignment surgery in Copenhagen. Roberta Cowell decided to cash in on her counterpart’s revelations in 1954, and initially posed as an intersexed person. Unfortunately for Roberta, her father was a surgeon, and had been there when Robert was born, and he testified that was not the case. However, her memoir was still one of the first accounts of gender dysphoria and transsexual life and aspirations, preceded only by the work of Lili Elbe in the thirties, and Christine Jorgensen across the Atlantic.

Michael was far more closeted and discrete. He had contacted two peerage listing publications to press his claim to succeed his childless brother as a peer, leading to one sympathetic modification, and an unfortunate oversight. By the late fifties, he’d joined the merchant navy and became interested in Gurdjieff, theosophy and Tibetan Buddhism. In 1958, he was inadvertantly outed, although Debrett’s Peerage was sympathetic to his claim.

By that time, Christine Jorgensen and Roberta Cowell were living bleak lives on the US entertainment circuit, and at home, after the failure of the latter’s business ventures.

Michael travelled to the Himalayas to become a Buddhist monk, but his efforts were hampered by his lack of assimilation to the arduous and hostile environment, as well as a conservative treacherous older mentor, Sangarakshita, who proved to be a nuisance insofar as the question of Michael’s gender identity was concerned. Despite the surgery, his mentor interfered repeatedly with Michael’s ordination attempts, and “women” and “hermaphrodites” were ineligible for monastic ordination and vows. However, cumulative malnutrition and arduous physical exertion took their toll, coupled with Chinese border skirmishes related to disputed Himalayan border territories with India. In May 1962, Michael died.

It was left to Pagan Kennedy to tell this man’s remarkable story, and we owe her a great debt for that.

Predictably, the Chaser boys remain their usual irreverent and rowdy selves, and their spokesperson, Julian Morrow, agreed with those who wanted the legislation repealed, and urged civil disobedience as a consquence.

New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione defended the extra police powers granted, saying that they were neccessary to control events on the same scale as large sports and entertainment events, and that such conduct wouldn’t be tolerated at an AFL or NRL game. Given how seriously Melburnians take their AFL, I think that’s a poor example- vigorous dissent usually occurs if one’s favoured team loses, in my own experience as a spectator.

The NSW Bar Association pointed out that such activities as the Rugby World Cup and Sydney LGBT Mardi Gras didn’t request or require such blatant attacks on free speech and meaningful religious and philosophical freedom.

Absurdly, even groups that represent victims of Catholic clergy paedophilia have had these sanctions placed on them, if they decide to protest against the extravaganza, according to the Broken Rites support network for survivors of such child sexual abuse, who have been contacted about what is ‘permissible.’ Broken Rites members are angered at this latest instance of stonewalling and suppression of critical debate about the abuse of clerical authority, which sadly, they are not unfamiliar with. Shamefully, the Australian Catholic Bishops have made no response to Broken Rites’ requests for parish in solidarity with those who have so suffered. If abuse victims rights proponents wanted to protest, they would have to submit their prior details to the police, as protest without police ‘clearance’ is illegal.

However, the No to Pope Coalition is unfazed by this, and has said that it definitely intends to still hand out condoms and stand up for civil liberties and reproductive and sexual health during the next month.

Recommended:

Jono and Joel Gibson and Linda Morris: “Protests Need Our Blessing, Say Police” Sydney Morning Herald: 02.07.08: http://www.smh.com.au

“Chaser Boys Laugh Off WYD Rules” Daily Telegraph: 01.07.08: http://www.news.com.au

“Youth Day Police Powers Defended” Daily Telegraph: 01.07.08: http://www.news.com.au

Annabel Stafford: “Police Tell Victims Groups How to Protest” Melboune Age: 02.07.08: http://www.theage.com.au

Sometimes, I wonder if LGBT New Zealanders don’t have an overly romanticised view of our continental neighbour. True, Mardi Gras is a fabulous party, and Melbourne’s DNA is a highly informative and readable magazine. However, in terms of actual legislative progress, Tasmania, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory all have inclusive adoption reform, while Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory have registered partnerships…and the Rudd administration is intent on maintaining the Howard administration’s federal ban on same-sex marriage. 

While its federal anti-euthanasia ban is under attack, it doesn’t look like there’s any similar action planned against that extremist piece of legislation, which is further than even the United States has gone. Couple that to the raid on Bill Hensen’s Roslyn Oxley9 gallery exhibition in Sydney, and one wonders whether John Howard’s decade in power has severely damaged Australia’s formerly expansive belief in human rights, civil liberties and other democratic institutions.

Under the NSW Government’s repressive legislation, it will be illegal to “cause annoyance” to World Youth Day participants, through even such minor instances as wearing t-shirts that challenge Catholic dogma and orthodoxy, handing out condoms at rallies, or conducting the sort of cheeky subversive response that the ABC’s Chaser boys are infamous for, similar to that at APEC. If one doesn’t comply, then there’s risk from a $A 5500 fine.

The NSW Bar Association, NSW Civil Liberties Association and NSW Green State MP Lee Rhiannon have all criticised this draconian measure, which applies to museums, galleries, cinemas, Darling Harbour, the Sydney Opera House and Randwick Racecourse (site of a Papal Mass), while 500 Sydney state schools and 35 rail and train stations will face baggage searches and even possible strip searches. Rhiannon observed that if someone flashed at a WYD participant, they’d only attract a $A 1100 fine.

I’m getting rather tired of the Vatican, and conservative Catholics, belief that the assertion of their particular sectarian religious dogma should take precedence over everything else, including deeply cherished and core attributes of democratic societies like free speech, faith/state seperation and meaningful religious and philosophical freedoms. One hopes this atrocious legislation is declared ultra vires and struck down by a court of higher jurisdiction, even if it is only in effect during this month.

Recommended:

Jono and Joel Gibson and Linda Morris: “Thou Shalt Not Annoy on Youth Day” Sydney Morning Herald: 01.07.08: http://www.smh.com.au

“Strip Searches Okayed for World Youth Day”: AAP: 01.07.08: http://www.news.com.au

Most lesbian, gay and bisexual New Zealanders would agree with me that transgendered/fa’afafine/whakawahine folk have made notable contributions to our communities, and that they are integral elements of the diverse rainbow of our numbers. For example, Express’ commendably broad coverage of Agender’s latest conference in its latest issue is one such case in point.

New Zealand can be proud that we are a trendsetter when it comes to transgender rights, such as recognising gender identity status as a continuum, or reading gender identity into gender when it comes to family law and anti-discrimination  law. Both instances show that we are at the cutting edge of transgender legal theory and practice, even if we have yet to actually experience a test case that will see the full effects of the Solicitor General’s Crown Law Office opinion transformed into legal practice.

Predictably, given its national origins, much of this book deals with case law, legal reform and public health initiatives within the United States, although there are three standout chapters that deal with additional issues. One chapter discusses the Colombian Constitutional Court’s trendsetting jurisprudence when it comes to intersexed infants and informed consent. Willy Wilkinson has contributed a useful chapter that deals with San Franscisco’s civic gender identity anti-discrimination ordinances and public health initiatives. Mauro Cabral and Paula Uittiro discuss transgender rights concerns in Argentina, while Dean Spade offers a particularly incisive essay on the transgendered poor in the United States, and how the New Right/Christian Right distorted emphasis on marriage and central government welfare slashbacks have savage consequences for those who do not fall into heterosexist concepts of ‘authorised’ sexuality, ‘orthodox’ gender identity and kinship relationships.

This is an enthralling, gripping work, and I am pleased to recommend it, given its salience to our own struggles and strategies for justice and inclusion for the transgender communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Saint: Anthony Dahl Personal Log:

At long last, our Theocracy of Redeemed America starship  Crusader is drawing closer to our new home, which Saint: Doctor Carlos has christened Oceania. Its primary, AUCHE- 03116BV, is almost an exact duplicate of our own Sun, and Oceania itself has landmasses in roughly the same configuration as the Damned Earth itself, which we left when our Hallowed Theocracy was overthrown almost two centuries ago.

[There are things that I don’t dare write in the log. Bram. It’s forbidden even to speak his name. He was my lover before Prophet Avram Carlos began to suspect and ordered his Visitation. But Bram stayed loyal and did not betray me, so he was vacced. Yahvei, I don’t even know if there are or were any other samesexers onboard this vessel.

And this Oceania, so much like our old 21c Earth, it aches. Humanoid ‘aliens’ (except it is we who are truly the aliens on their world). No destructive new pathogens. Their females have conscious control over their own fertility, so reproductive freedom is not an issue here. None of the radio, television or comp-mediated communication networks here refer to ‘homosexuals’ either. Damn it, no, I will not use their infernal term sodomis to describe myself. I will not.)

At last, landfall on a new and virgin world.

[Appropriate metaphor, that. And the Crusader could not remotely be called virginal itself, when it is more like a withered elder. Or one of the Prophets. Our hydroponic crops are failing, and we ration food and medical supplies for the Prophets and Soldiers of Christ, so the maternal and infant mortality rate is high. Deck XXXIV is still sterile after the meteor impact three years ago. Ah, Oceania. We can turn you into a hades like this wretched hellship if you let us].

Oceania has two natural satellites, which are named something like Solace and Comfort. There’s an orbital space colony visible as we draw closer.

[Damn it, no weapons visible either. Nothing. Why am I just passively awaiting all this? If I had any guts at all, I’d blow this damned hulk to shreds if I could get anywhere near the control deck. ]

We are approaching rendezvous. This is a great event, first contact with life so similar to our own.

[However, still alien, and so the Prophets intend to use the Theomarines to make a surgical strike, decapitate their political leadership and use their shuttlecraft to invade the world below us.]

I see Theosargeant Abraz as he passes me.

[Bram’s murderer. He makes a cutting motion with his hand, which means that I probably die after Crusader secures this world. I don’t care. I’d rather vac this whole cabin rather than treat any of the Prophets or their damned butchers, so help me].

Contact. Our hosts come forward, their arms outstretched.

[Huh? The Theos are buckling, faceplates full of blood and gore?! But, there’s no excessive rad, no native pathogens, no hard psi. I see Abraz turn and run, as the death sears his ranks. Nearly here. And so are those obese, porcine, senile Prophets. He tears off his faceplate, and I can see he’s bleeding from his ears, nostrils and mouth. He takes aim as I smash the glass on the decon/vac panel, resolving to take him and as many of those other bastards as I can manage before he shoots me. His skin begins to flake, his hair turns grey and then falls away, he starts to haemorrhage heavily from his orifices. And then, suddenly, he gasps as his hand jerks upwards, and he fires into the ceiling. Goodbye, murderer.]

And at last, I can talk aloud about what I have witnessed. Even if I die now, it’ll be worth it. This paradise is safe from those who wanted to rape it. But I don’t. Because right then, a cluster of naked willowy males surround me, carressing me, unbuckling my suitpants and easing off my tunic, kissing, touching and exploring my body. I begin to cry as I lose the last of my clothes, and step forward into my new life. I tear the hated crux from my neck, and throw it into the waster. I am not alone, either. There are female Oceanians, and they lead Andra from the scullery, and aged Marthi from the ships archives, and other males, who lead Garic from engineering. All as naked and newborn as I am.

Oceania: Nilam 21, Year 8046:

It’s been years since that last entry. I can add this last codicil. On this world, telepath and samesexer genes are colocated, and my new friends and lovers are called the Reefs. Ironically, though, it wasn’t anything they, or their world, did that routed the Crusader’s mercenary hordes. It was us. It turned out that there was a mutant microspore onboard the hellship that turned toxic when we made worldfall. And the Reefs later told me that samesexer human genes conferred immunity.

As I lie here, amidst the warmth of my lovers bodies, I am one and at peace. Oceania, you have given me life and love, and I will always love you and your precious people until the day I die.

Graham Capill isn’t going to be paroled. According to the Fairfax Stuff website portal, the Parole Board is unconvinced that he’s not still a risk to children. The article recounted the story of his conviction and nine year prison sentence for rape of three female children during his time as Christian Heritage Party leader. Those victims understandably thought that he might still present such a risk, and it is good to see that their input was treated with such gravity and seriousness.

The Department of Corrections and Rolleston Prison was not prepared to release Capill until he attended a Kia Marama child abuse prevention programme, although Capill’s lawyer, Jonathon Eaton, raised the issue of whether Capill could be released at the same time as attending a STOP child abuse prevention education programme.

However, I was concerned to see that some members (of the fundamentalist community???) wanted his early release. I find this further indication of the lack of comprehension of the gravity and seriousness of paedophilia and endemic ‘cheap grace’ for members of the fundamentalist community who commit grievous criminal offences.

Meanwhile, in Australia, a Commonwealth Senate committee is divided over whether the Commonwealth Parliament should repeal that nation’s federal anti-euthanasia ban on the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory being able to make their own laws on the subject. Three ALP senators support such amendments, while another ALP senator and three Liberal senators oppose removing the anti-euthanasia ban. Federal ALP PM Kevin Rudd is also anti-euthanasia. Federal Green Senator Bob Brown, a gay man, is the prime mover behind the proposal.

“Parole Denied: Capill Still A Risk to the Community: http://www.stuff.co.nz

Michelle Grattan: “Battle looms over euthanasia bill” Melbourne Age: 27.06.08: http://www.theage.com.au

Celebrated Black British independent film-maker Isaac Julien has produced Derek, a beautiful and lyrical homage to the late Derek Jarman, who died from AIDS in 1994. This retrospective tribute celebrates his life through incorporating an interview, several extracts from his films, and the inimitable Tilda Swinton reminisces about her role as the muse to the pioneering British independent gay filmmaker as well as noting the changes in London since his death, both for better and for worse.

The Universe of Keith Haring is a Franco-Italian documentary about Keith Haring, a brilliant graphic artist whose graffiti and street art inspired work transferred easily into the art world, and was much in demand, with positive responses to his celebratory imagery. He partied with Andy Warhol, Grace Jones and Madonna during the halcyon New York late seventies and early eighties, before dying tragically young from AIDS at 31.

Further details on both films can be found at:

The New Zealand Film Festival Website: http://www.nzff.co.nz

Screening Times:

Derek: Sunday 20 July (i) 12.15 pm (ii) 8.30 pm

Universe of Keith Haring: Thursday 31 July 12.30 pm: Saturday 2 Aug 11.15 am.

Also Recommended:

Derek: The Movie: http://www.derekthemovie.com