Saturday at the Bee Hive

Am at Black Coffee wondering how this weekend is going to turn out. It is another beautiful autumn day, still warm, and people are actually still swimming in Oriental Bay. My Irishman has reneged on renting the room as I thought he would, I am not surprised, so I now have another person, a Maori girl, waiting in the wings. Patience and confidence is the name of the game. I have a great room to rent and there are few like it in Wellington, probably none at all!

It's pinball paradise in Black Coffee, for all ages!

After the market at Newtown I have an interesting French movie to see. It is a social comedy about family and getting older indecently (role played by Claude Brasseur), so it may be relevant for me lol! It is a screen adaptation of a smash hit Parisian play so I hope it translates well to the screen.

This is before the 'big event' at Parliament House where Tiwhanawhana is doing the intro to the 30 year NZ Gay Law Reform commemoration in the Banquet Hall, a place which I visited the other day. This is an odd semi-circular room with bad sight-lines, an acknowledged failure in design, but we'll just have to make-do. What may be interesting is the program after our three-Waiata beginning. 

Yesterday Tom told me of the history of the intense labour of about three or four local professionals who worked out their heart and souls, and pockets, into establishing this long overdue law reform to ease the alternate society into the twentieth century. NZ had been labouring under Victorian era law for two hundred years, and it was just illegal, as it is still in some countries, to be gay. Well with the aid of sympathetic MP Fran Wilde, the Bill was passed very successfully after much money and serious lobbying, but the fight is never over, as there are always minorities to look after. In this case it is the Trans and intersex population.

Today there were initially supposed to be three or four luminaries speaking at the commemoration, but one of them, a former social worker-counsellor, for personal reasons was asked to remain silent by two of the lesbians organising the event. Result, an enormous stand-off. Who knows the result? There may be no-one of significance speaking, unless, as Tom suggested, he gets ex MP Fran Wilde to invite said person to the stand to speak, which is the only proper thing to do. Again, it is the problem of parochialism in this small country, and also strident feminist lesbians who had nothing to do with the reform in the first place as their sex was never discriminated against. Lesbians were legal, it was just gay men who needed to assert their rights to be who they (we) are.

It is interesting to revisit the political activism which I lived though in the seventies. In 1978 I was in the first Sydney gay march which resulted in the now mammoth Mardi Gras Parade which is happening this weekend. I was also in NYC when the drag-queen trannies revolted against the police bullying at the Stonewall Bar in 1969. This is the moment when gay people were empowered to resist the authoritarian and antiquated laws existing everywhere, and the world, at various paces, followed it its wake. Also in 1969 I was in Paris when the students were revolting, and I joined them in their fight spending a night in a Paris lock-up, much to my enjoyment. Such were the days of youth and exciting change. This gay freedom which now exists in New Zealand was hard fought for, and goes back over thirty harsh years with many suffering during the long years of discrimination and fighting to change the law.

So tonight at the Bee Hive is the initial event for the six months leading up to the August date when the law was actually passed. Let's hope it comes off well, and not half-cocked as it unfortunately appears it may be.

Tomorrow's very big fair....

Pell still ringing untrue...he must be sacked!

Sometimes good comes from a Catholic education....Jim Moriarty, centre,  is one such boy.