Auckland's Pride Festival may have been closed by Covid but the LGBTQI+ community are still celebrating. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
Auckland's Pride Festival may have been closed by Covid but the LGBTQI+ community are still celebrating. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
Back for its seventh year, the annual Samesame but Different LGBTQI+ Writers and Readers Festival returns in 2022 with a five-day programme that boasts an incredible collection of novelists, activists, journalists, essayists, playwrights and poets and is this year online.
Emma Barnes
I write poetry: a field dominated bylove, its griefs, anguishes and pleasures. It's doubtful I would be a writer if I hadn't loved. Attempting to understand love brings me back to the page, repeatedly. Love is not easy. Love is never just two people. It's reflected back at you from the community.
Emma Barnes.
The first time I was harassed on the street for my love was in my early 20s and the last time was a few years ago. I'm 41 and, in many respects, the world is more open-seeming but it is still fraught. Love transformed my life and it could have transformed my life sooner had I not felt so much shame. Many of my early relationships were secret. Things built in secret don't thrive well. Mushrooms can grow in darkness. Love, not so much.
It took me a long time to stop thinking there was something wrong with me because I was queer. I was born in the 80s! A teen in the 90s! We imagine all the struggles of queer identity are long gone but it's not true. Young people still experience similar things. I hope for a future with less shame and more love.
Emma Barnes is part of panel discussion "Looking back, Looking forward: The legacy of takataapui/LGBQTI+ writers", online on February 19.
Shaneel Lal
Queer bodies come out of the closet, but our minds drag the closet with us into our adult lives. Thirty-six years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the epidemic of queer loneliness has spread throughout my community.
Shaneel Lal.
I am 22 years old and I have never held hands with someone I like in public. This is a very small thing but it is one of the many small gestures of love that has never been mine. This is just one of many things that heterosexual people aren't even consciously aware of doing that I have never been able to do. Queer people sacrifice small gestures of love every day in order to be safe and, when we choose to love publicly, our love becomes a revolutionary political act of defiance. But I want my queer love to be just my queer love.
Queer children grow up hiding who they are to avoid bullying and to minimise the fear of being disowned. Much of our adult lives revolve around undoing our internalised queerphobia. It isn't the laws that haven't changed. It is the culture of homophobia, transphobia and queerphobia that has staggered behind. It is time to change hearts.
Shaneel Lal is part of panel discussion "Writing Outside the 'Lines': Non-Traditional Writing", online on February 19.
R.W.R. McDonald
My teenage kids ask me why I'm single. It's weird, they say. Why don't I go on a date? And they're not totally wrong.
R.W.R. McDonald.
I'm waiting. And when they are adults, I'll tell them a story. About what happens when you can't openly love. Of two young men drawn together and hurled apart. Never together to shield each other from the pain inflicted by others. So much avoidable pain. The damage religion caused. How one man toed the family line while the other couldn't. How not everyone could be strong. I'll explain to my adult children what it felt like to grow up in a time and culture that vilified and despised your very essence.
Today, I tell my kids how much I love them. That being their dad is the best thing to ever happen to me. That they are who they should be, they can openly love who they want — consensually and with love and respect. That they are enough.
That I appear weird to this new generation - not because of my sexuality but because I'm not actively exploring it - fills me with a great hope for the many who deserve the same, yet are still unable to.
R.W.R. McDonald's talk "For the Love of Nancy Drew". online on February 20./
For details of the Samesame but Different programme, see https://samesamebutdifferent.co.nz/2022-programme/
I was born bad. In 1980, the year I was born, I was illegal. Homosexuality law reform decriminalising homosexuality didn't come into effect until August 1986 and I have memories of the discussions and debate surrounding the bill which only passed 49 to 44 votes. This caused me, at the age of 6, to cast myself as the "Bad Guy". I was personally triggered during the recent debate for the bill to ban conversion therapy, thinking about a young person of 6 like myself listening to some of the vile arguments.
Hayden Tee.
I know something now that 6-year-old Hayden didn't know, something that has given me such comfort and sense of ownership, pride and belonging. One word, takatāpui. Before colonisation, the Māori people of Aotearoa acknowledged, welcomed and celebrated the existence of what we today use a collection of important, vital and hard-fought-for letters (LGBTQIA+) to dissect, delineate and categorise us. One glorious word, takatāpui, I'm still at the beginning of my te reo journey, for the longest time I literally couldn't find the language and then with one word I belong. I can now cast myself in my own story however I want. Love whomever I want and I know deep in my heart that it's right because I am at peace. Love is love!
Hayden Tee's Bad Guy plays at The Wintergarden, The Civic on February 19. The show is going ahead at red alert level with a reduced capacity. For details, see https://www.aucklandlive.co.nz/show/bad-guy
