Purpose: Feature celebrating 25 years since Homosexual Law Reform in New Zealand. Originally appeared in Express, New Zealand’s LGBTQ+ news outlet
My role: Executive editor (feature writing)

This issue we celebrate 25 years of Homosexual Law Reform in New Zealand. It was a tough campaign – those involved in the campaign had to educate the public whilst facing intense scrutiny from some and outright hatred from others. Hannah JV traveled to where it all began – our nation’s capital – to meet former MP and reform bill sponsor Fran Wilde, as well as reform campaigners Alison Laurie and Bill Logan, to find out more about the campaign that changed the lives of LGBTQ+ New Zealand for good.

The date was 07 July 1984. The location was the office of Fran Wilde – an MP in her first term as the representative for Wellington Central. On this day, a constituent visited Fran and asked her a life-changing question. It’s been 27 years since the question was asked, but Fran Wilde still remembers it clearly.

“I was asked if I’d support homosexual law reform if it were introduced and of course I said yes,” she chuckles. “But then I was asked, ‘Would you sponsor a bill if no one else would?’ I hadn’t really thought about sponsoring a bill, other than the fact that homosexual law reform was something that needed to be done. Then, after the 1984 election came a ‘Hello Fran, you said you’d sponsor a bill’. My life was forever changed!”

Fran’s life wasn’t the only one changed forever. Thanks to her assertion that a law reform bill would go to Parliament, a group called the Gay Task Force was set up. One of the founding members was Bill Logan, who was part of a closeted community that hoped for an out.

“It was impossible to be out and a gay man,” says Bill. “No one in any real job would want it known they were gay, and if it were known they wouldn’t admit it. There was no such thing as being ‘out’ – it didn’t happen! ‘Out’ was for kids – since gay liberation there had been a small number of students and marginalised people who would be open about their gayness, but to anyone else, coming out would be a disaster!”

Lesbian sex was not criminalized in the same way male homosexual sex was, which allowed lesbians such as historian Alison Laurie to live life openly. This did not mean that they lived their lives without prejudice, however. Not by half.

“When any kind of homosexuality is illegal, then every other kind of homosexuality will be stigmatized, and in a de facto sense, criminalized,” says Alison. “You can’t have one kind of homosexuality illegal and another totally accepted.

“The movement began among a number of gay and lesbian circles. It had lesbians who had come through feminist circles or had come out of marriages, conservative gay men who wanted the law changed so they could live their lives openly and radical young men who came out of gay liberation. It was quite the united front.”

The ugly head of opposition

Alongside this groundswell of support for the decriminalization of homosexual acts came resistance from right wing circles that opposed the idea. By the time the Homosexual Law Reform Bill was introduced in March 1985, opposition had mobilized.

“We kept the contents of the bill pretty quiet until it was introduced because I didn’t want MPs to think about it in advance,” says Fran. “In those days there was a gentlemen’s agreement that all bills would pass the first reading, so the bill passed its first reading and then we knew it was all on from there. We never thought the campaign was going to be low key, but we never anticipated that the response would be like a nuclear explosion, rather than just a normal fuse being laid.”

The bill itself had two parts: part one decriminalized male homosexuality, while the other provided anti-discrimination law protections for lesbians and gay men. Fran says those promoting the bill realized very quickly that this was not going to be an easy fight.

“We knew we were going to have to run a public information campaign to get it through, but the size and the scale of the campaign was something completely different from what any of us had anticipated,” she says. “We not only had to educate the public - we had to campaign to people in electorates to say to their MP that it’s okay to vote for the bill – there were a lot of scared MPs out there and they needed pushing. There was a lot of focus on the electorates of MPs who were swing voters.”

The ABC of G-A-Y

“The biggest problem we faced was that a lot of New Zealanders simply didn’t know anything about homosexuality or anyone who was gay,” says Fran. “It was an issue that no one talked about. There were the usual stereotypes about gay men and there were calls about child molestation (complete nonsense) but people didn’t know what to think. Gay men were thought of as criminals and were highly closeted, so people didn’t know who was gay. The stereotypes existed but the knowledge did not.

“The first thing we did was build a campaign around information, so we used tons of data from all over the world. Whenever an argument against the bill was made, we well- rehearsed well-reasoned replies that had a medical, social or even religious basis. I became very familiar with The Bible over this time! We had a lot of statistics about the myth of gay men and child molestation that we used to throw out whenever someone in Parliament would try and pull that line.

“We made sure we got as much as we could in the media, but we also used opinion leaders and also focussed on the swinging MPs. We armed constituents with data and got them to talk to their MP; we tried to get a groundswell of acceptance in the electorates. We never changed the opinions of the extreme people, but we educated a huge number of people who just didn’t know. Their fears were based on ignorance and they suddenly got this huge amount of information.

“We did public opinion polls and we could see support for the bill going up. It was a pretty highly organized campaign. There was the public information part, the political lobbying part and the public demonstration part – we had to organize all these strategies. I was a lot younger then so I had a lot more energy!”

Come out, come out, wherever you are

The biggest focus of the campaign was one that hit New Zealanders on a very personal level – little by little, gay and lesbian New Zealanders started to come out of the closet. In a time where you could be imprisoned for homosexual acts, Bill said this took immense courage and put many in the community under immense pressure.

“We had all spent our lives being careful about discussions about sexuality, and suddenly there was all this talk that impinged on who we were and the people we associated with,” he says. “It was extremely difficult to come out because most people strongly disapproved of homosexuality. So we supported each other and gave each other courage to tell our parents, our workmates and our spouses.”

Fran says, “The constant outings made people think that homosexuality wasn’t such a bad thing after all – it made them think twice about wanting to criminalize people they knew. It gave a face to homosexuality, and these faces in turn gave the public firsthand knowledge.”

Outings were an effective strategy when it came to public education, but Bill says this time was also a hugely taxing and stressful time for people coming out, especially given that the bill wasn’t to see its final reading until 16 months after the campaign began.

“We started asking ourselves what would happen if the bill failed,”says Bill.“We knew it wouldn't go back to the way it was before – these mobilized conservatives would start to enact the present law. There was this enormous sense that there was a lot weighing on it; everyone could feel it and everyone was worried. There was nothing pre-ordained telling us the bill would go through. We were on a knife’s edge over this.”

“During this time there was a sharp increase in gay bashing. One incident I remember vividly happened to an older man who was a regular patron at a gay bar called the Victoria Club. He was a nice old man who was there every weekend – he’d sit there quietly and have a drink. He was bashed up and that was the end of his independence; he went into an old people’s home.

“Add to this the fact that we knew a lot of our people weren’t coping psychologically and knew that suicides were happening – this debate that promised our freedom was making people’s lives scary and uncertain. There was a sense of fear, which was elevated above the normal fear of being outed. The worst part was that in a sense, we were responsible for this elevation. We knew in the long run it would be good for more people, but it was horrible to create this social tension that was resulting in suicides. How do you cope with that?”

Alison says the only way to fix the community’s downward spiral was to fight fire with laughter. “We took action to improve morale, held parades with balloons and the like and it was fun. People really enjoyed the events – we would sing and chant; some people were dressed up. We appealed to camp culture by giving it a send up, and as far as we were concerned, we made our side of the argument seem like the one you wanted to be on. Who would want to side with the angry conservatives?”

The life & times of Norman Jones

The very name Norman Jones should strike fear and disgust into the hearts of any LGBTQ+ New Zealander. Known as “The Mouth from the South”, Jones made it his life’s mission to see the Homosexual Law Reform Bill struck down by any means possible. Lucky for the pro- reform campaigners, Jones was a caricature they could use to their advantage.

Jones lives on in folklore as the National MP who uttered the infamous quote, “Go back into the sewers where you come from”, but re-telling this oft-quoted line merely scratches the surface. Throughout the reform campaign, Jones used filthy rhetoric, hate speech and descriptions of sexual acts that even the most liberal censor wouldn’t let through on tape. His attempts to have the bill squashed were fervent and frightening, but his calls that the public not “gaze upon them... too long – you might catch AIDS” simply added to the high camp fiasco the pro-reformers wanted at public meetings.

“Norman Jones was wonderful,” laughs Bill Logan. “He was brilliant! He was the best thing we got; a caricature. He got us so many votes by being crazy! His colleague and fellow bill-denouncer Graeme Lee was this sort of dour, Christian do-gooder and there was nothing funny about him at all – he was serious and proper, but Norman Jones used colorful language and was just silly.

“He refused to debate me because he thought it would give us publicity, but eventually a program in Australia convinced him to do a debate with me, on the proviso that it would only be shown in Australia. I remember Jones going on and on about sodomy, and I said, ‘Mr Jones, I’ve never met anyone as obsessed with sodomy as you are’. He replied, ‘It’s a magnificent obsession!’ I didn’t answer him... what can you say?”

Fran has similar musings about dealings with Jones.

“Parliament was just gross! I’d have to sit there listening to all of this shit about graphic sexual practices. It was just awful! We began to realize that they got such pleasure talking about these things that you've got to question where they're coming from! To tell you the truth, there were a lot of questions about some of the opposition...”

When asked to describe Norman Jones, Fran recoils and convulses, and then lets out a disgusted “Urgh!” Recalling a radio interview she did with Jones makes her blood boil even further, and she begins to slap her boardroom table as she retells it.

“We were sharing a microphone so we were sitting really close together. The host said to him, ‘What if your son was gay?’ and Norm said, ‘I’d put him in a mental institution’. He made me so angry – he was so despicable and virulently prejudiced. Not to mention vulgar – where were these stories coming from?”

God Bless America

The truth was that the anti-bill rhetoric – as well as the money that funded the campaign – came from American sources. Alison says she and some members of the Gay Task Force tried to trace the money back through to the States but kept hitting a brick wall.

Fran says, “They were well resourced – they were getting money and campaign tactics from the US – they were a pretty powerful voice out there.”

Bill can now see the humor in it all, however, and quips, “A lot of the really graphic stuff that was said in Parliament was fed to them by their American advisors. They were obsessed with the minutiae of other people’s sexual practices. To be honest with you, they seemed a bit jealous, really.”

Meanwhile, when it came to funding the pro- reform campaign, those in support of the bill had a little bit of help. Bill says the Victoria Club and the Dorian Society helped a lot, as well as a few “individual rich gay men from Auckland”, who helped fund things such as polling or newspaper adverts.

Alison says, “They had the money and Wellington had the activists. When we did the full-page advertisement, Wellington put all the names in with no money, whereas Auckland ran the same ad with the same names but paid for the campaign!”

God bless the Sallies?

The anti-reform side’s second biggest ally came from the Salvation Army, which was well-resourced to fund a nationwide petition that sought to put a stop to the bill. Ask anyone who was old enough to remember 1986 and they’ll tell you about this petition. Why? Because this petition reached more New Zealanders than any other petition has, and it had fear of outing on its side.

I’ve never given the Salvation Army a cent since the campaign. They had a lot of people leave because of the debate.

“By the first winter of the campaign, there were a lot of nasty things being said, and the petition was being sent around,” says Bill. “This petition was enormous – it was the biggest petition in the whole history of New Zealand and it was against us! You came across this petition everywhere and it was demoralizing to find people collecting signatures for it at every turn. We started to have this bleak sense of a debate we could lose.”

HUG, COB, CHE – keep up!

While this insidious campaign for signatures pressed on nationwide, the pro-reformers began to form groups that could write submissions in support of the bill. Alison jokes that they “formed a group a minute”, but she’s probably not far off. Alison herself lists off her credentials as a spokesperson for not only the Gay Task Force, but also the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and a giant umbrella group called Coalition for the Bill (COB), which brought together a number of special interest groups that supported Homosexual Law Reform. Meanwhile, a groundswell of straight solidarity came in the form of HUG – Heterosexuals Unafraid of Gays. A straight title for straights; many people joined.

Bill laughs that keeping giant groups like the Task Force together was like trying to juggle knives.

“Queers don’t have much in common except that they’re queer,” he laughs. “We all wanted an expansion of freedoms and on that basis we worked together. We were together all the time, but it just nearly fell apart all the time too.

“The Wellington Gay Task Force was a group for everyone – sometimes the meetings had five people at them and sometimes they had 400. The balancing act was trying to keep almost separatist lesbians and old, misogynist gay men together, and I was in the middle juggling; that was fun! Someone would want a demonstration and others would want something else, so both sides would get as many people to the meeting as possible. I’d have to say, ‘One thing is for sure, we need to work together and like each other’ and people would generally calm down.”

“Done!”

One thing the Wellington Gay Task Force seemed to agree on was the need to “crash” anti-bill rallies that sought to convince the public that homosexuality deserved to remain illegal.

The first of these big rallies was at the Knox Church Hall in Lower Hutt, an event Bill recalls well.

“We all went out to the event. They had this line up of people on the stage – fundamentalist Christians, Norman Jones and the Salvation Army. They started to say some really horrible things about gays and lesbians, and we started shouting back. It began to look messy; it looked as if we were just spoiling the meeting.

“Norman Jones began using this to his advantage and shouted that were being unreasonable. He said, ‘We paid for this – if you want to have a say, you’ve got to pay for it’. I said, ‘Done!’ Then I jumped up and thought to myself, ‘What the fuck am I going to do now?’ So I put my jacket down in front of the stage and everyone came and poured money onto it so Alison and I could do our bit. It was glorious theater.”

Two weeks later, a similar meeting at the Wellington Town Hall was so over run by pro- reform protesters that the event had to be shut down.

“Oh, we were so obnoxious,” laughs Alison. “Before we went to the Town Hall we distributed leaflets with little songs like ‘If you tore up the petition, clap your hands’. When we got there, some of us held up signs that said ‘LAUGH’, like they used to use with live television audiences. Norman Jones and these horrible people would be on stage trying to make a point and our people were hysterically rolling around in the aisles. It was like a pantomime!”

Our very own Nuremberg Rally

The antics of the anti-reformers came to a head at the presentation of the Salvation Army’s petition in September 1985. Fran recalls the event with horror.

“The petition was like the Nuremberg Rally. They had all these kids from the girls and boys’ brigade and they had a carton from each electorate. They came up the stairs with people from the Salvation Army. I was between the two groups because I was an MP – all the people in the crowd were yelling and screaming, and meanwhile they had music and uniforms. I remember standing on this low wall between the hard sealed bit and the grass – they kept playing the New Zealand anthem and waving the New Zealand flag and I was yelling, ‘Don’t let them steal our flag! That’s our anthem too!’

“Later on, once the petition was presented, we started going through all the responses; we had a whole team of volunteers. We checked every single name and there were names like ‘K. Marx’, ‘M. Mouse’ and ‘D.Duck’ – no doubt from people who were signing the petition under duress. It became a bit of a sham; it had no validity whatsoever.”

The final lap

Throughout the campaign, many people tried to have the age of consent suggested in the bill changed. The argument was that if the age of consent was raised above 16 (the age of consent for heterosexual sex), more MPs may vote for it and the bill’s passage would be smoother. This did not fly with pro-reformers.

“It had to be equality; that was the whole point,” says Fran. “The interesting thing about the age of consent was that when we were doing the committee stages and we got to the clause with the age in it, the people leading the opposition to it voted for 16 for the age of consent because they thought that no one in their right mind would vote for it. We were happy!

“At the final vote, there were still a lot of people unhappy with the age of consent but they understood if it didn’t go through, what’s next? We couldn’t have the fundamentalists winning and taking on another part of our human rights.”

The big night

“On voting night, you had to either go into the ‘ayes’ lobby or the ‘nays’ lobby,” says Fran. “You have to come up, say your name and be ticked off. We were so nervous that we weren’t going to get the numbers but had a feeling that it would pass by a slim majority.

“On the night, I remember some MPs coming and standing in the ‘ayes’ lobby to see if we had the numbers. There were two MPs who came in and stood in the ayes lobby, and when they realized we had the numbers, they went and voted against it. They were both quite liberal MPs and I was really pissed off with them; they didn’t have any spine.”

At the announcement, Bill and Alison sat anxiously in the public galleries. Fran took her seat in Parliament and waited for the verdict. The call “the ayes have it” was made and an eruption of jubilation filled Parliament.

“Once we won, we went over to the Victoria Club,” says Bill. “Trevor Mallard was working for Fran Wilde at the time – I threw my arms around him and gave him a big hug... He was a little horrified at being hugged by a gay man in a gay club!”

From here to hereafter

Despite threats the opposition would try to appeal the decision, Norman Jones and his cronies never mounted an attack on the now Homosexual Law Reform Act. Fran says she heard nothing out of him after it passed.

“I didn’t really speak to Norman Jones ever in his political life, unless we had to share a debate,” she says. “He died of a brain tumor in 1987.”

As for her place as the harbinger of change and the annual reminders of this, Fran says, “I suppose it’s understandable that we keep getting interviewed, because it was so important for a particular group of New Zealanders and they want to keep celebrating. Over the years it’s become part of my personal history and it’s interesting that people have spoken more and more of it, particularly when I’m speaking in public.

“That change has been really interesting. When the campaign was all on, people were terrified and it was very divisive, but now people don’t even really think about it. But that’s what the fight was about – it was to make being gay be ordinary.”

Bill says 25 years is a time to look back and reflect, but to also see the road to further equalities ahead.

“Although this was a watershed moment and it led to a lot of good changes that followed, there are still places where it’s horrible to be gay – namely at home and at high school.”

Alison says, “If you don’t know the history of a community and don’t know how the rights have been won, it’s very easy to assume these rights have always been there. This means you’re less likely to be vigilant about protecting these rights and are less likely to act decisively if these rights are attacked. We know history repeats itself.

“Our freedoms are robust, but they’re fragile.”