New Voices, New Groups, New Concerns

The initial impact and inspiration of the first gay liberation groups was beginning to bear fruit. In 1974 new groups emerged in Palmerston North. Dunedin, in Nelson and Gisbourne, in Rotorua and Hamilton. The turmoil associated with their emergence pointed up the comparitevely greater difficulty and complexity of the coining out process in smaller provincial centres, and brought a social emphasis to group activities which as persisted outside the main centres.

Three issues dominated 1974. The first, arising out of a Lesbian Conference in March and the foundation of the Gay Feminist Collective, was the ongoing issues of the place of lesbians within the movement and the need to strengthen links between gay liberation and the feminist movement. This has met with partial success. Gay participation in the abortion debate set a precedent which has been extended to active interest in issues ranging from conversation to the SIS Amendment Bill.

The second issue, aired by the indefatigable Felix Donnelly and chewed over at Easter at the third National GL Conference in Wellington, concerned the homosexual and religion. The Quakers and the Methodists had long displayed an openness to gay members. Many of the churches, while supporting law reform, had not really come to grips with the issue of reassessing their traditionally harsh condemnation of homosexuality. A new possibility presented itself in 1975 with the visits of Rev. Lee J. Carlton of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a church found to minister to the needs of gay Christians which, were not being met elsewhere. The MCC's founder, Rev. Troy Perry, himself visited Auckland in January 1976 and, almost exactly a year later, the Rev. Peter Alexander-Smith was the first MCC pastor appointed in New Zealand. The measure of his concern for his charges had sadly to be judged by the sorrow attending his sudden death last year, ending a ministry of less than two years' duration.

The third issue was law reform, for in mid-1974 Venn Young introduced his private member's bill. I single out law reform rather than the new concern with the plight of gay parents, or the strengthening identity of a transexual and transvestite group within the movement, or the invitations to CLF members to visit and take part in schools programmes (an activity which has flourished uncontroversially in many parts of the country, the editor of the NZ Tablet notwithstanding) because there has been and still is diverted within the movement as to how important law reform is.