A hard road in a queer old city

 

Gay pride: Alex Cooper, left, with friend Saffron Cox in front of the Farming Family statue in central Hamilton. (Picture/SARAH BROOK)

  

Unusually placed: The statue of Riff Raff in Hamilton's main street is a rallying point for the gay community.

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/features/waikato-focus/4027811/A-hard-road-in-a-queer-old-city

16 August 2010

It's been 24 years since homosexuality was legalised but Hamilton's lesbian community still finds there's a stigma attached to being gay in the Waikato. TRACEY COOPER reports.
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The blokes who jeer at Saffron Cox and call her a dyke most likely share something in common with the Hamilton 18-year-old. Not that they'd admit it.

"My biggest issue is finding a woman," she says.

Cox doesn't mind being called a dyke because, she says, "it makes me feel good about myself".

The out and proud young gay woman says being heckled by boorish blokes during a night out in town is about the worst case of homophobia she's seen since moving to Hamilton from Te Aroha last year.

"I think it's pretty good here actually."

Cox spends time on Facebook and is a member of the Wipe Out Homophobia group and has been surprised at how many anti-gay groups they find and report, most of them US based.

"I think New Zealand is a lot more accepting than the US, for example. It's like every second person there is Catholic or something."

Cox belongs to university gay support group Askew and was one of about a dozen members at a lunchtime meeting on Wednesday, following the end of the gay Pride Week on Tuesday. She was one of the few willing to talk openly about their sexuality and be photographed.

Others say they'd happily talk "but my parents get the Waikato Times".

It shows the potential stigma which can still affect gay people in a society still firmly rooted in heterosexuality.

It was during her early teens in Te Aroha that Cox first began to consider herself gay but it took until earlier this year to "come out".

"It gradually happened," she says.

"From about 13 I liked girls but I liked boys too and I thought I might be bisexual. But this year I lost all interest in boys and it feels really good.

"My dad thought he'd done something wrong or maybe it was just a phase, but it feels too comfortable to be a phase," she says.

She says her sister has also come out as being gay and her family "were cool with it".

"I had a great aunt who was always gay. They were not surprised."

Cox says the step from initially considering herself bisexual rather than gay was relatively common and one which her lesbian friend, Alex Cooper, also took.

Cooper, who says she's "not obviously gay," says that was how she broke the news to her parents.

"I told them I was bisexual then later I said, 'well actually, I don't like boys'.

"That's the way it happens quite a lot.

"It's all fine now though."

While a grandfather of hers was a pastor and had trouble accepting her, she says one of her grandmothers was gay and "big in the scene".

In Hamilton, that scene is largely based around Victoria St nightclub Shine, which has been open since late 2007.

The sheer presence of a gay bar in the city's main street is something of a landmark in terms of acceptance of the gay community in the city. As is the presence of the Riff Raff statue across the road, which Lynda Johnston, the co- chair of umbrella agency Hamilton Pride says is a "quite provocative" statue for any city centre.

"It's quite unusual to have this very queer statue in the city," Johnston says.

"It breaks with convention around gender and is sexually ambiguous."

Johnston, a geography lecturer at Waikato University, long pondered the question: what's it like living as a gay person in Hamilton in 2010.

Why, she could rightly ask, should it be any different to anyone else living in Hamilton in 2010?

"It's an interesting question.
"For the most part, cities are pretty much straight, apart from small pockets of very colourful, out there gayness," she says, citing places such as Karangahape Rd in Auckland.

If you walk around most cities, they are "pretty much heterosexual spaces".

She can't help but note the obvious contradiction between the heterosexual Farming Family statue at one end of Victoria St and Riff Raff at the other.

"The Farming Family is interesting. It demonstrates a relationship we don't normally see [in civic monuments] either."

As part of Pride Week - which finished with a sex toy party on Tuesday night - Johnston helped organise a panel discussion on the university campus where a documentary of Riff Raff creator Richard O'Brien was shown.

"He reflected on what Hamilton was like and said he's very proud of what he called his bronze erection in Victoria St and that it's kind of in complete contrast to the Farming Family."

This week O'Brien - speaking about his ongoing attempt to be allowed to live in New Zealand - said he only wanted to belong.

"I'm a peculiar-looking person. I'm a trannie - but I'm their trannie," he says.

In 2004, Hamilton unveiled the statue of his Rocky Horror character, creepy butler Riff Raff, which was placed on the site of the barber shop where he worked before going to Britain.

There was a big street party to mark the unveiling of the statue and Johnston says the statue has become something of a rallying point for Hamilton's gay community.

"On Transgender Remembrance Day on November 20 we usually gather around it. It's to remember people who have been harassed, abused or killed because they are transgender. We hold a little candlelight service," Johnston says.

But despite the presence of the statue, Johnston says there is still a way to go for the city to be totally accepting of its gay community.

"If you saw a couple of men kissing for example, people would still go 'hmmm'. That public display of affection, when it's a same sex couple, there's a disruption of their view of the place."

In 2006, when the city council erected a billboard featuring the top half of the Riff Raff statue and the wording: Rocky Horror Hamilton, complaints from the Mormon community saw it quickly removed.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints member Tony McKenna said at the time the sign was a "blot on the landscape" at the top of a hill just below the temple, which was seen as a spiritual place for church members and Maori.

"It [the sign] glorifies homosexual sub-culture," McKenna said.

Templeview residents' association spokesman Arnold Stoneley said the sign was inappropriate outside the temple.

"Rocky Horror is contrary to our gospel principles," he said.

The Times came out against the complaint, saying while McKenna was entitled to his opinion, "Hamilton City Council's reaction has been utterly bizarre".

"The council has agreed to replace the sign with something more benign. Given that, it's difficult to know which group is being the most stupid: the Mormons for wanting it removed or the council for agreeing to set a precedent it may live to regret. More worrying is that this incident continues Hamilton's history of intolerance that has included opposition to two pagan gods at Hamilton Gardens, an incident or two by the McGillicuddies, attacks on Hamilton's mosque and the Riff Raff statue itself."

Johnston says the opposition from the Templeview community to the Riff Raff billboard shows that powerful interest groups can still hold sway.

It demonstrated "there are still powerful groups of people who oppose gender and sexuality equality in Hamilton and could get it removed".

"It's shows there is still a lot of social stigma to being gay out in public."

This year was the fourth time Pride Week has been held in Hamilton and Johnston says she's always surprised when different people turn up at different events.

The week-long festival came about because there had been a slight rise in the reporting of HIV in the Waikato and "we thought 'what are we going to do about this'. To try to debunk a few myths, we thought we'd have a festival," Johnston says.

She says there is no such thing as a Hamilton gay community as such, with Hamilton Pride acting as a sort of umbrella organisation for many diverse groups.

"It's impossible to say we have one community. Diversity is part of our community."

Fellow Pride member Luke van Helden says the festival is about "having a presence in the community and letting people know we're out there".

"I think it's about getting people to upset their assumptions. It's the little things."

Assumptions, Johnstone says, such as picking up the phone and being asked if her husband is there.
"It's about difference and we should embrace that."

It's been 24 years since the Homosexual Law Reform Act - introduced by Labour MP Fran Wilde in 1985 - made it legal for consensual sex between men aged 16 and older and Johnston says while the legislation has been in place for many years, "in everyday reality, people do see discrimination".

She says transgender people - perhaps because they can often be readily identified - in particular still face problems.

"Transgender people have a much higher rate of depression. That's a huge problem for our community. In public it's not just a case of how they look but they feel it every moment. Transgender people remain very careful about how they present themselves, how they look and where they go."

Schools have also been identified as places where gay people can struggle.

"Young people in schools, it's a hard road for them.

"Waikato Queer Youth meets in Hamilton and some schools have their own groups but they have to be very brave. It's really difficult for them because there's such an anti-gay feeling in many schools," Johnstone says.

Van Helden agrees and says schools and employment are "still a concern".

"There's a lot of work to be done in schools.

"Day to day some people fear oppression at school, in the workplace, walking on the street.

"We should all accept difference, challenge assumptions, support diversity and have fun," he says.

That's what Cox tries to do and she says Shine nightclub is the place she heads to.

"It's really cool. Shine is the best nightclub and has the best atmosphere. Occasionally you get yelled at [on the street] but it would have been a lot worse 20 years ago.

"It's so accepted nowadays. The whole gay community is so much closer and everyone just supports you."

It's just that issue of finding herself a girlfriend.

"Woman don't think about sex all the time like men do so you've really got to get to know them well before anything sexual happens, and that's good.

"Some of my [male] friends bounce off each other like bowling balls."

She says not being obviously gay means she also sometimes attracts the attention of men.

"Some people think I'm straight, I've had men hit on me in town. Sorry."

Cooper says the weirdest thing that's happened to her - and which shows the ignorance of some people - was when a man tried to pick her up, despite knowing she was gay.

"He asked me to change for him. As if."