Gay culture in a small province.

Wallace, Lee

Review of Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand, by Chris Brickell (Auckland: Random House, 2008).

With its wide margins, vertically set captions, faux aged pages and split bindings and full-bleed cover photograph of the Hero Parade's marching boys hidden below a seemingly staid dustjacket, everything about Chris Brickell's Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand suggests it has been designed with an eye for the History category of the Montana book awards. Bearing the Godwit imprint, Brickell's book deserves to be a contender, not just for those elements of visual design that make it a pleasure to leaf through, but also for the lucid accessibility of its broad account of gay culture as it has developed in New Zealand across the twentieth century. Mates and Lovers is a splendid example of New Zealand social history, a genre that has always had, after all, a higher cachet with the general public and its adjudicators of merit than in the academic environment from which it loosely proceeds.

Although he puts up a good front, Brickell is not a trained historian but a sociologist of sexuality, a disciplinary affiliation that emerges in Mates and Lovers's final chapter where the book's early emphasis on the gendered constraints of colonialism-familiar from a hundred other accounts of the making of New Zealanders--is reassembled according to a full-blown theory of social constructivism. That shouldn't put the general reader off, however, since Brickell mostly tells his story straight. Gay history, he notes at the outset, is not a matter of record but a history lodged in the gaps of official culture, which is given over to institutional orthodoxies, both public and private. In order to reconstruct sexual history, the gay historian must therefore employ an essentially speculative methodology and Brickell testifies to the importance of photographic illustration in his own process of sexual conjecture. In photographs, he notes, remain clues to everything not said about the relationships that pertain between men, such as the eloquent detail of the touching knees of Mr Greem and Mr Collie in the double portrait with dog that provides the dust-jacket image to his book. Somewhat surprising, then, that Brickell's most reliable resources for the reconstruction of pre-1980 gay history are not the many previously unpublished photographic illustrations sourced from various collections but official records, particularly verbatim transcripts of evidence provided in court cases of sexual assault, and government-sponsored reformist inquiries into this and that social problem (the overcrowding of men's penal institutions, for instance), and published tabloid accounts of putative sexual scandals (the advent of bodgie youth culture) as filtered through the editorial mindset of the day.

Cross-referencing these sources with biographical accounts and oral history interviews, some undertaken by him but many drawn from prior research into queer culture in New Zealand, Brickell puts together an account of an emerging gay subculture that has its antecedents in the almost compulsory homosociality of nineteenth-century colonial culture. Traced back to missionary William Yate's sexual intimacy with his Maori charges in the Bay of Islands in the late 1820s, Brickell's early New Zealand is a rough and ready kind of place that supports a very pragmatic relation to male-male sexual possibility but also registers the legal, medical and psychiatric discourses that will help define homosexuality as it emerges in the twentieth century. Brickell is very good at charting the incoherent persistence of these dual accounts of same-sex sex from the late nineteenth-century until the present day and their deployment by both those men who engage in sex with other men and those who seek to account for it, be they specialists Oswald Mazengarb) or popularists (the over-excited editors of Truth). On the one hand, homosexuality is simply a sexual proclivity or act that any man might engage in should circumstances dictate; on the other, it is a complex sexual pathology restricted to a particular identity type. None of this is news to those of us who read in sexuality studies, though that doesn't lessen the satisfaction of seeing the classic Foucauldian paradigm mapped out with local precision. What does lessen the pleasure, however, is Brickell's writing style, which only a loving mother would mistake for camp. 'The first chapter of Mates and Lovers', he tells us, 'follows men down the muddy streets of colonial Dunedin and along the twisting paths of Oamaru's public gardens, pokes its nose into bars, baths and a Victorian asylum, and peers into the backyards and theatres of the Wairarapa' (p. 14). Against this twee tone, the blunt language of the court transcripts seems to shine with irony and wit: 'I heard him say that he would suck for a length of time. I did not hear him say what he would suck' (p. 34).

This point about style is not a minor one. Try as he might to evoke the 'erotic cityscapes' (p. 39) of early- and mid-twentieth century New Zealand, Brickell's intentions keep running up against the limitations of his prose. 'The voyages themselves oozed exoticism' (p. 109), he writes, thereby extinguishing the sexual allure of overseas travel. Nor is his methodology sufficiently rigorous, his argument sufficiently original, to make up for this shortfall. Despite the eleven hundred footnotes, the massive secondary literature on gay subculture and queer historiography sits surprisingly lightly on Brickell, who seems not only content to provide a general account of the local conditions of a sexual contradiction already diagnosed elsewhere but also reluctant to press his arguments to the point where they might contribute to a wider international debate. Instead of simply noting that late nineteenth-century New Zealand culture was surprisingly relaxed about physical affection between men that may or may not have had a sexual aspect, Brickell could pursue this observation further. Did colonial New Zealand present a seamless masculine sexual permissibility or did it provide a more concerted training in homoeroticism that was not inconsistent with homophobia? Were the consolidating categories of metropolitan gay life (the dandy, the pansy, the queen and the queer, all of them well documented in Mates and Lovers) simply transported to provincial colonial settings or were they differently inflected in the vicinity of indigenous sexual cultures? Brickell's reluctance to engage these kinds of questions, all of them well framed in the now substantial literature on late Victorian same-sex culture, makes him seem slightly Pollyannaish, accentuating the capacity of New Zealand culture to accommodate same-sex relationships except, of course, when it doesn't, as in the few documented cases of violence against homosexuals he unearths.

For a historian, even for a sociologist, Brickell can seem remarkably uninterested in the queer phenomenon he is describing, as if it were enough to assert the vibrancy of gay life and its increasingly public profile against the otherwise bland backdrop that is 'square' (p. 148) New Zealand society. The persistent intersection of gay and straight worlds, for instance, is nowhere more compellingly evidenced than in his accounts of the sexual culture maintained on the Wellington and Christchurch inter-island ferries and overnight passenger railcars in the 1970s and '80s. Drawing on the recollections of homosexual stewards, Brickell reconstructs sexual encounters between uniformed staff and gay and straight passengers on the Maori and Silver Star that involve a 'phantom gobbler' (p. 234) or require the expert timing of stage farce yet has nothing to say about how this opportunistic sex fits with the strongly unionised culture of the Union Steamship Company and New Zealand Railways. What kind of an administration, for instance, routinely drew up shift rosters that distinguished between straight and gay crews and acknowledged that 'married seafarers preferred the Hinemoa for its break in Christchurch, where family homes were more affordable', but 'homosexual crewmen' (p. 234) opted to stopover in Wellington, with its developing gay scene. Likewise, although his book charts a continuous link between theatricality and homosexuality and has a lengthy discussion of the cross-dressing performances integral to the Kiwi Concert Party's success in both war-time and on the trans-Tasman stage circuit, he has little interest in the relation between homosexuality and the history of either amateur or professional theatre in New Zealand. In the final chapter he simply notes that post-gay liberation 'theatre, formerly one of the most important entry points [to queer culture], is squarer than it once was' (p. 363). The history of homosexuality when it finally does get recorded is, it seems, only ever the history of itself.

By not pursuing these lines of inquiry Brickell loses the opportunity to consider not just how gay history might reconfigure our complacent understandings of labour or entertainment history but also the larger question of how New Zealand gay history might depart from a general gay history, the roots of which can be traced to metropolitan modernity and the spatial practices of urbanization. Although toward the end of his book he asserts that New Zealand gay culture is a 'home-spun' (p. 341) phenomenon, an ingenious mix of local and global influences perhaps best typified by those Air New Zealand stewards who smuggled in pornographic publications that were then on-sold alongside local magazines promoting gay liberation and gay-geared services such as men's grooming and body toning, the contours of Brickell's overall argument are in close concordance with Robert Reynolds's 2002 revaluation of the pre-gay history that went into making the Australian homosexual. 'The upheavals of the 1970s', Brickell insists, 'were not transplanted from Europe and America in prefabricated form, even though Stonewall and other international events were certainly influential. New Zealand queer networks flickered into life during the nineteenth century and consolidated during the 1930s and 1940s, and these were the foundations on which the political movement was built. Although the revolutionary rhetoric of the early 1970s was new, the conduits through which it travelled took many decades to establish' (p. 345). While impossible to dispute, the very portability of this argument--it works not just for Australia and New Zealand but is in complete accordance with George Chauncey's massively influential account of the rise of the US gay liberation movement through prior decades of informal friendship networks, formal homophile associations, underground public-sex cultures and those overground cultures that are synonymous with homosexuality without needing to say so--suggests that the terms of analysis still kilter towards a globalising account of homosexual identity that makes the difference in gay culture here the same as the difference in gay culture elsewhere, which is to say no difference at all.