- ELI MATTHEWSON: In the early 1960s, New Zealand was a very quiet country. The nuclear family is en vogue; baby boomers are growing up, and we're still a few years off the sexual revolution and the rise of counterculture. It was almost like a utopia ` if you were straight, white, and probably best if you weren't a woman. It was illegal for gay men to have sex; trans people weren't a consideration, and as for lesbians, politicians didn't even think they existed. (LIGHT, UPBEAT MUSIC) - Homosexual activity is a criminal offence in New Zealand. - What goes on behind the bedroom door's their business, nobody else's. - And we've got sex organs; they've got a function to perform, and homosexual acts is not one of them. - Homosexuality is not a homosexual problem. It's a heterosexual problem. - 'We're everywhere' is their motto, but still, many gays and lesbians feel they have to play straight. - There's going to be a crusade for the family unit and what is right, and I support that. - We're talking about ` not gay people or homosexual people ` we're talking about their behaviour. - You're down the drain! You're back into the sewers where you've come from! www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2025 (SOFT MUSIC) - The period prior to World War II is really interesting. The Auckland waterfront, by about 1907, was a place where men would meet each other, pick one other up and go and have sex somewhere. And by the 1920s, the theatre scene had a kind of queer element to it. And in some of the smaller centres like Whanganui, the boarding houses and the hotels and the public gardens were places where men would meet. I think there was a real distinction between middle class, well-off men, whom no one paid much attention to their homoerotic life at all, and men who were either itinerant or working class were less likely to have private places to meet other men. That meant their sexual culture was more likely to be public, which meant it was more visible to police. - ARCHIVE: Male homosexual acts are punishable by severe penalties. The penalty is up to five years jail. Indecency with an animal warrants just a three-year penalty. - It wasn't unusual for a man to get a four- or five-year prison sentence for having sex with another adult man. And there were some attempts at chemical castration of prisoners, which I'm only just learning about now. (SIRENS WAIL) (TENSE MUSIC) - It was very difficult to be gay in the '50s and '60s, and the fear of a legal prosecution was, substantially, a fear of being exposed. - In order to live a life among my heterosexual friends, I must not make it known that I am, in fact, a homosexual. Therefore, in fairness to them, and in fairness to myself, it is absolutely essential that I remain anonymous. - For society at the time, the political consequences of being visible could be catastrophic. When you consider how many queer men don't wanna show their faces in 2025, imagine how scary it would have been to do that in the '60s. - Everything was under the rug and you never came out. That was the reason, I think, that people felt it's so difficult to deal with their sexuality because there was no where to come out. The amount of prejudice that existed in employment was huge. - You're 70 years old. - Yeah. - And you're not ashamed of being a homosexual. - No, I'm happy. - Why wouldn't you let us see your face? - Well, because of the... relations ` brothers and sisters, if they saw my face, well, they'd just` they would discard me. - It was, I guess, what happens when you're oppressed and you hide. You hide yourself. You lock yourself away. (CHILDREN CHATTER INDISTINCTLY) - I remember the phone call coming through, and Dad and Mum was pretty upset. So, something had gone down and they explained that Uncle Allan had been killed. - Allan was in Christchurch for an event. He lived in Blenheim and he had gone to Hagley Park, and it was a known cruising spot for gay men at the time. What he didn't realise is that there had been a spate of attacks at that spot. - He was killed by a number of young men who set out, in their words, 'to bash a queer.' - The thing that made me just, like, cry my eyes out when I first read it was about him offering to buy them fish and chips. He could tell that they were up to no good. You know, he just kind of obviously wanted to defuse them, but still with incredible kindness and generosity. Um, yeah. - The young men responsible were tried in Christchurch. The jury acquitted them. - The jury was swayed to acquit the five teenage boys after the Crown revealed a 'damning' piece of information from Allan's past. - Allan had heard that the cops were looking for gay men in Blenheim, so he voluntarily showed up at the police station and was like, 'I heard that you were arresting people for no reason, so you may as well arrest me.' And he was convicted for an indecent assault between two men, which I, like, can't really fathom... how brave that was. - When you see the court transcripts which questioned Uncle Allan and the fact that he was a homosexual, that he had been in court, you know, he was a 'pervert'. So that's how it was presented and how it was taken by the jury. - Allan Aberhart's death ignited a movement among underground gay organisations. They wanted to see legislative change that could prevent further acts of hate. - But what good is changing the law going to do? Aren't you gonna have to change people's attitude towards you? - Yeah, quite definitely, we are. But the most immediate thing about sort of law reform is that, you know, people are getting hurt and badly hurt and their lives are being wrecked. - I think most people would think of you as deviants or perverts. But are you not at all ashamed of what you are? - (CHUCKLES) - Nah, I'm proud. - We're proud. - No, why should we be? There's no reason why we should be. - We've been` - We're not doing anything wrong or harmful or anything. Um, where's my phone? It's right there, son. No. I'm certain that's your phone. No. This is my phone. The one with the googly camera, no scratches. This is not my phone day Santa. This is mine boy frog. Not true gnome king. Is so Man-Witch. Elf lord. Elf lord. Mince and cheese. Mince and cheese. Not-ting. Yes it is. You could ditch that old dunger. There's a few ways I can get you a new one. Yes! this is your... Shhh... VOICEOVER: We've made it easy to get you a new phone, whenever you want. One New Zealand, let's get connected. - Excuse me, madam, would you like one of these? It's in support of Gay Pride Week. - No. - OK, right. - Well, really, we're back in the dark ages as far as homosexual law is concerned. It's illegal. It's as simple as that. - At the present time, we have laws against murder, rape and robbery. If these were removed, I'm quite sure they would greatly increase. And if we're going to legalise homosexual acts, they will increase too. We're going to have a situation where a middle-aged man can say to a youth, 'There's no law against it, so come on, let's do it.' - The fact that our sex lives were illegal, I think it engendered a whole sense of disrespect for the law and legal institutions in general among a lot of us, because it was just so patently absurd. (CROWD CHANTS INDISTINCTLY) - ELI: Gay action groups lobbied liberal MPs to champion their cause for homosexual law reform. There was one young MP who was cool enough to hear them out ` Wellington Central's Fran Wilde. - I was lobbied by the gay community in Wellington and they said, 'Would you vote for homosexual law reform?' as we called it then, and I said, 'Of course, that is such a big hole in our justice system.' I didn't know that there had been several attempts to change the law, none of which were successful. That's what started it for me. - ALL SING: # All over the world... # - In the papers, on television, there was a whole load of negativity. But ironically, for a lot of us, that meant, you know, screw you. We're gonna fight for our rights. - There were some, you know, gay men who stood up, but they were in jeopardy of being arrested. And so a lot of lesbian women did stand up, and` - Cos we all came to the conclusion that if we didn't stand up at some point in time... - They'd come for the lesbians. - ...they'd come for the lesbians too, you know? - Church groups and conservative MPs believed that legalising gay acts would pose a risk to society and disrupt the status quo. - Norman Jones ` the biggest bigot threat to New Zealand! - I was outraged seeing people with the petition standing in Henderson. I was outraged at reading the lies and terrible things that were written in the media or said on television that directly impacted on me as a young gay man, and it motivated me to become very politically involved. - It's homosexuals today, Samoans tomorrow; it'll be the Jews after` - There's fuck all wrong with the queers! - MAN: ...religious bigot. - It's the bloody straights you watch out for! - That's what the homosexual law brought out, was the people, the richness of the tapestry. You had Maori and you had Pacific, and you had Pakeha, you know, coming to join forces. - People really felt like we could have` we could change something and we could be really political. And there was a real push for that. It was Bastion Point through to, you know... - Springboks tour. - Springboks tour. Homosexual Law Reform Bill, all those things, everything. - Nuclear Free, you know. - Everything was really ripe at that time. - The campaign for homosexual law reform coincided with a rise in activism and social protest movements within Maoridom. - This place is Crown land. And the cause to be removed for expelled... All trespassers... - Many Maori gay, lesbian and takatapui individuals felt compelled to support causes for their rights as tangata whenua. - You know, Maoris were protesting everywhere. - We're fighting to have Te Tiriti o Waitangi recognised; we're fighting to be allowed to speak our language anywhere. And I guess, for Maori organisations, it's like, this is what we're gonna focus on. That thing there about sexuality, nothing to do with us. - ALL CHANT: ...mai whakawhiti te ra. A, upane! - And so Maori organisations didn't make submissions to that law. Equally, we had no Maori saying 'no' to the Bill. They did not stand beside the churches. And I think this is an important perspective to make sure that we bring into the space. - Step right up, folks. Put your money in the box. If you don't spend it here, you'll spend it on something silly down the street! We wrote a song about every single one of those things. We wrote a song called Bastion Point. We wrote a song called Radiation Burns. We wrote a song about, um, you know... - About women loving women. You know, 'Oh my God, this had an interesting title.' You know. (CHUCKLES) - So what happened was that we would always be invited to all these protests, and we'd end up singing. - BOTH SING: # Graffiti raiders, # graffiti writing tonight. # - So we became quite a public face. - We were visible and vocal at the same time. You know, when you got a mic standing in front of you, you can wield a bit of power. - FRAN WILDE: The decision-makers at the time, the parliamentarians, were mainly elderly white males, and my generation felt that we had no voice, really, in the decision-making. We needed to change. We quite urgently needed to change. - ALL CHANT: ...clap your hands! - And then you had the haters who stood up and, you know, that famous` - 'Go back to the sewers...' - 'Go back to the sewers where you came from.' You know? - I mean, we don't even mention his name ever. - And that's why you're so concerned. You're down the drain! You're back into the sewers! You're back into the sewers where you come from! - One of the fiercest opponents was Norm Jones, who seems like the sort of uncle that would make you dread Christmas. - Righto. You produce your core speakers. For God's sake, don't sit them alongside me. Put 'em over here somewhere, will ya? (CROWD JEERS) - The fact that someone was allowed a place of prominence and said those kinds of things was scary. (ALL SING CHURCH HYMN) When the Salvation Army came out saying it was going to put considerable energy into stopping this Bill... - It's them or it's us! - Boo! - ...people with considerable financial resources on their side. We didn't have any money; we didn't have any resources at all. It became clear to us that we were gonna have a long and hard campaign. - Are you aware of the fact that people can go to prison for being actively homosexual? - No. - And does that concern you at all? - No. - You're quite happy that people can go to prison for that? - It depends what the law says. If the law says they go, then they go. - There was a great deal of stereotyping, which had been always the case about gay men being sexual perverts and child molesters. Those stereotypes we had to change. And the biggest way of changing it was for an ordinary New Zealander to understand that somebody, some guy they knew was gay and wasn't like that. - When you're confronted with so much, um` with those negative forces, you're all of a sudden gonna wake up and go, 'Nah, no more.' - A group calling themselves the Coalition of Concerned Citizens launched a massive campaign to collect as many signatures as possible, aiming to pressure MPs to vote against the Homosexual Law Reform Bill. - ALL SING: # He is risen from the dead... # - There were several parts of the campaign that were very important. One was the presentation of the petition, which was done at Parliament. - It was a very big petition ` the biggest petition ever in the history of New Zealand. - And they had hymns and prayers and, you know, jingoistic stuff. And this was meant to scare the MPs, because each one of them would have seen a carton full of signatures coming up. - It was so choreographed, and what we called it immediately was a Nuremberg rally. And it was reminiscent of Hitler rallies. - Do not vote` vote to legalise sodomy in this country! - These are the ones who are the perverts, not the gay and lesbian community. And if this Bill doesn't get through, then who will be next? That's my question today. 'Actually, what it did was it scared New Zealanders.' People were sickened by it, actually. - REPORTER: The petition's now going to a parliamentary select committee. Some people have questioned the validity of signatures, and individual MPs will now be able to scrutinise it. - For a signature on a petition to be accepted, that person has to be on the electoral roll, and they looked through every single box. During the course of that, they found that there were pages and pages of obviously kids' signatures, and this had been sent around schools or Sunday schools or organisations where the kids were just told, 'Sign here.' - Actually, many of the names were just nonsense. I don't know how many times Donald Duck signed. - Mickey Mouse, perhaps, several times. It was a bit Mickey Mouse. Etc, etc. People who were forced to sign actually didn't want to and would write a false name. Thousands and thousands of them were disallowed because they simply were not real. - ALL CHANT: Gay rights! - What do we want? - ARCHIVE: In Wellington tonight, marchers took to the streets in their thousands. - ALL CHANT: Gay rights! - You know, I can remember at Wellington Town Hall, it was a rousing night, and there were haters there And there were people who, you know, didn't want us. And then there was the gays and lesbians, and it was all rainbows and balloons and celebration and music and fun. And in the end, the people who were watching that in New Zealand, they just thought, 'Those gay people are having an amazing time and celebrating. 'And the haters, they are just...' - Scary. - 'Scary. They're just too hateful.' - (CHUCKLES) They really` They kind of blew their own protest. As Mum said to us when we were little, you know, you never wanna hate anybody cos it's gonna hurt you more than it hurts anybody else, and I think that's what happened with them. - The Bill was subject to a conscience vote, allowing MPs from any party to vote based on their personal beliefs. This made the outcome unpredictable as members could vote against their party lines. - If I have made the wrong decision so far as the voters are concerned, then I stand or fall by that. - I've thought about it long and hard, and at the end of the day, my conscience felt that I must do so ` vote for the Bill at 16. - And get the rainbow confetti cannon out, cos it passed! - Celebrations are continuing in the gay and lesbian communities today after the Homosexual Law Reform Bill passed successfully through Parliament. - It was incredible work to those activists at the time, to those MPs at the time, and that was a cross-party achievement that I think our country should be really, really proud of. - What do we want? - ALL: Gay rights! - When do we want them? - FRAN: In the end, this became a fight for the hearts and minds of New Zealanders, and that if this Bill had been defeated, there were other things that New Zealand had come to value that would be pushed back and changed ` things that helped women. Um, rape laws and etc, etc. They would have all been rolled back as well. - ARCHIVE: And Auckland Hospital's new clinic believes the law change will help them combat AIDS. They say that decriminalising homosexuality won't increase AIDS; rather it will make people more willing to come forward for treatment. - The Homosexual Law Reform was definitely a major issue with the HIV AIDS. You know, HIV AIDS and legislation changing always went hand-in-hand. (SOFT, URGENT MUSIC) - It's believed that before the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill, a thousand men were convicted of homosexual offences. In 2018, the New Zealand government acknowledged the harm and enduring stigma these convictions inflicted on these men and took steps to right this wrong. - AMY ADAMS: So today I'm announcing that the government will introduce a new scheme to enable historical convictions for homosexual offences to be wiped. Convictions for those offences remain on records. This means that they can appear in criminal history checks, and that those New Zealanders continue to be tainted with the stigma of criminality. - # Kui, kui. Whiti, whiti ora e. # Whiti ora ki te whei ao ki te ao marama e... # - Allan Aberhart's memory was honoured on the 60th anniversary of his untimely passing when the local putoi lifted the tapu from the place of his attack. - It was something that... needed to be done, and... it was something that we as a family probably` We really valued it, and I think it was, um, well overdue. (SOMBRE MUSIC) It is part of our story. And as Grant Robinson said to me on the day, he says, 'It's part of the rainbow community's story, too ` a really important part.' - Homosexual law reform was the first significant step towards equality for gay men in this country. But the fight is far from over. - It's unacceptable for politicians to think that they can rule people's lives, about their culture and their sexuality. You know, it's never gonna happen. Not while we're alive. Not while we're alive, eh, Jools? (CHUCKLES) - I think sometimes about what would have happened if that law reform hadn't gone through. And Norman Jones' side in the debate had won, what would have happened to us as a community? - The battle for homosexual law reform was a hard-fought struggle to end the oppression faced by countless gay men. While today we no longer live in the shadows, It's crucial to remember that this victory was achieved less than four decades ago, and the fight for full equality continues. Captions by Kitty Wasasala. Edited by Jessie Puru. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air.