From Helen Razer speaking on gay culture and the arts to Tom Cho talking about his story of coming out, our Big Gay Week last week covered a lot of ground. Here’s a selection of three videos of our Big Gay Week events.
In her Lunchbox/Soapbox talk, Helen Razer questions the ghettoisationof gay identity in the arts. In Coming Out Stories, five speakers share their personal accounts of the agonies and ecstasies of telling all to loved ones, friends and the wider world. And in The Only Gay Book in the Village, four leading gay and lesbian writers and artists discuss how sexual identity relates to literature.
(Click to watch video.)
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The Only Gay Book in the Village
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To mark the Wheeler Centre’s Big Gay Week, Rodney Croome, campaign director of Australian Marriage Equality and an honourary lecturer in Sociology at the University of Tasmania, writes yesterday and today on marriage and gay men. Read the first part of this essay, published yesterday.
Recent whole-of-population studies provide a picture of gay men being no less – and in some studies actually more – monogamous than others. The notion that gay men are sexual experimenters is a slander from those who think it a bad thing and a conceit among those who think it good.
The fundamental similarity of gay and straight relationships comes as a surprise to ordinary Australians. Growing tolerance of same-sex relationships has seen gays and lesbians increasingly spurn inner-city ghettos and relocate to, or stay in, suburban and regional areas. In turn, this has familiarised heterosexual Australians with the daily lives of same-sex couples. An excellent example is the large factory in Hobart where my partner and several other openly-gay people work. The most remarkable thing about them is that their relationships and families are so very unremarkable in the eyes of their mainly blue-collar colleagues. Naturally, when these heterosexuals see that the lives of their gay friends and co-workers are much like theirs, they begin to ask why their legal rights aren’t too.
My assertion – that there is no relevant difference between straights and gays that would disqualify the latter from marriage as we know it – is bound to spark accusations that I am an assimilationist out to dismiss all that is good about being gay. That would be wrong. I am all for the acknowledgment and celebration of difference, where it exists. For example, on the question of Tasmanian identity, the Hobart-born Altman and I take opposite positions to the ones we hold on gay sexual identity. Altman dismisses the idea there is anything significantly different about Tasmania. I hold firmly to the view of Richard Flanagan and others that Tasmania is geographically and culturally “another country”, and a fine one at that. I also recently defended the importance of a distinct gay identity in response to Helen Razer’s assertion that there is no need for it, especially in culture and the arts where she believes it simply marginalises and trivialises the contributions of gay people.
But my case for gay distinctiveness is not one that seeks to draw a thick line between two inherently different sets of people. It is not based on the black and white view that the only choice minorities have is to be separate or the same. At best, gay men (and for that matter Tasmanians) are embellishments in the stories other people tell. We are parodied, demonised, lionised and generally not taken on our merits. Mostly, we are missing altogether. This means that, more than others, we are called on to question who we are, who others are and where we fit. We have to negotiate more boundaries and rely more on own narratives. By doing so we become more self-conscious and more conscious of others. It is the insight and cultural richness that may arise from all this which is a difference worth celebrating.
In my response to Razor I illustrated this more nuanced view of the value of identity by drawing on that period of European history that gave us Marx, Kafka, Freud and Einstein. When Europe’s Jews were released from their ghettos in the 18th and 19th centuries, I wrote, they didn’t all suddenly cease to be Jews. They were freer to identify to whatever degree they chose with their inherited ethnic and religious identity, to enrich the broader society of which they had become a part with whatever they considered valuable about this identity. The result was a contribution to western culture from the descendants of emancipated Jews that was unthinkable while the ghetto lasted, and without which the contemporary world would be unimaginably different. I imagine the same future for LGBT people. As we are freer to interact with the society around us in more complex ways, so we will also make a far richer contribution to that society than is imaginable today, a contribution drawn from but not limited by our sexual or gender identities. Integration will not mean assimilation.
So it is with same-sex marriage. Allowing same-sex couples to marry will not profoundly change marriage or gay people. Culturally and legally each has already grown to meet the other. Like other steps towards legal equality and social integration, marriage equality will mean gay people are increasingly free to contribute to society all that we are, including the experience we have gained from being excluded, and from our struggle to end that exclusion.
Helen Razer will be speaking Thursday lunchtime at the Wheeler Centre as part of the Lunchbox/Soapbox series. Her topic will be ‘Giving Up on Art’.
Midsumma storytellers Jennifer Cayley and Jan Andrews
Melbourne’s premiere arts and cultural event for the GLBTI community Midsumma Festival began on the weekend.
For events of a literary bent there’s the international visitors, Canadian couple Jan Andrews and Jennifer Cayley who present The Book of Spells.
Their storytelling promises a blend of magic realism and a celebration of queer culture. The performance is a re-imagining of what it is to be a witch, following a young girl’s journey of self discovery. Andrews explained to MCV recently, “A witch is loving, loyal and hopeful. And all you have to do if you want to become a witch is say, ‘I am a witch!’”
Also on the programme is Words On Wednesday, a series of readings kicking off tonight with Jean Taylor, and next week Tom Cho reading from his forthcoming book. There’s also a queer poetry slam, Word Is Out and many other literary events over the next couple of weeks.
Oslo Davis looks at the other kind of same-sex relationship. Recently his work was part of the Artist and You project at NGV. This cartoon originally appeared in the Age.
On Saturday the US repealed its controversial policy on gays and lesbians serving in the military not revealing their sexuality. Better known as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the policy had long been criticised as marginalising gay and lesbian servicemen and women.
Writing in the Huffington Post, former tennis great Billie Jean King said the decision “should have been a no-brainer” which she sees as “a celebration of doing the right thing”. She praised President Obama’s role in the decision likening it to President Harry Truman’s 1948 Executive Order to integrate African Americans into the military.
She concluded saying:
I am proud to be an American and I am honored to have the men and women who serve in our armed forces put their lives on the line to protect our nation. Their race, gender or sexual orientation does not matter to me. What matters most is their commitment to our country.
The Atlantic reported on Friday that former presidential candidate John McCain was making a “last stand” to keep the controversial law. The magazine reports fragments of McCain’s speech:
“There will be high-fives over all the liberal bastions of America,” he [McCain] predicted, from “the elite schools that bar military recruiters from campus” to “the salons of Georgetown” and the “talk shows” where people — “most of whom have never have served in the military” — will crow over the law’s repeal.
One of the “crowing” talk shows will be Ellen Degeneres who applauded the move on Twitter saying “Thank you Senators for pushing us one step closer towards full equality.”
With the publication of his latest book, Fortune Cookie, Bryce Courtenay cements his reputation as one of Australia’s most popular novelists. It’s surprising then that he came to writing late in life – after another life as an advertising executive and looking after his son.
He recalls the loss of his son Damon, a haemophiliac who contracted AIDs, and how this personal tragedy led him to write April Fool’s Day. He also recalls his advertising career that gave him material for Fortune Cookie.
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