Turning the Inside out: Pre-Liberation Literary Worlds in the Works of Frank Sargeson, James Courage and Bill Pearson (Essay‪)‬

In 1985, while debating the Homosexual Law Reform Bill, Norman Jones MP declared male homosexuality to be 'anathema to most human beings'. (1) He claimed to represent the views of the 'average' New Zealander, and to uphold the sanctity of procreative heterosexual marriage. Jones believed that the Bill was repugnant. After all, he argued, its backers would decriminalise what he called 'abnormal sex between males'. Jones insisted that gay communities were an anti-social and corrosive force without a history or place in society, one that threatened to rend asunder the very fabric of New Zealand society. In spite of 'spurious talk about human rights', homosexuals, he claimed, remained part of a '[w]ay-out sexual orientation' which favoured indiscriminate acts of violation and carnal lust at great cost to themselves and society at large (pp. 3522-3523). Views casting homosexuals as inherently compromised--as deviant, disordered and unnatural--were not unique but characterised much of New Zealand's dominant public discourse surrounding sexuality throughout the twentieth century. As some recent scholarship has pointed out, however, queer New Zealanders were far from invisible; nor were they a silent minority, despite their perceived cultural marginalisation. (2) Resistance to normative identity constructs occurred at a number of levels, from overt confrontation such as street protests and political agitation, to the more subtle, such as the rejection of normative gender roles through dress and performance and the appropriation of key public spaces for sexual and intimate encounters. For many queer women and men, textual resistance, both in the form of fiction and non-fiction, offered further means for registering protest against repression.