From Camp to Queer
I just recently finished a very good read of 'From Camp to Queer' - a book about gay Australian history, from the beginning of gay liberation in the 1970s to the 1990s. I found it a fascinating read, and it put into context many aspects of Australian gay culture and filled in a few gaps. Before I get to some of my more specific observations about the Australian gay history, one the things I kept thinking about when I read the book was how incredible it was that at 31 years of age, I was for the first time reading a real account of Australia's gay community! (By the way, by gay, I am using it in its inclusive form, covering men, women, homo and bi etc. If you read the book, you get an appreciation of the strident beliefs that different people have held over the years about different terms of identification, such as gay, homosexual, lesbian, queer - which have often been used, rejected, and then sometimes resurfaced. Anyway - I digress.)
And I hazard a guess that I am not the only adult gay Australian not to have ever read a gay history book. This is such a big gap and it made me think about the importance of knowing stories, history, and understanding what went before us, in order to better understand who we are and have confidence about ourselves. Unlike most other minority groups, gay people tend not to know their own history... for a number of reasons. First, we don't have parents reinforcing our minority identity - as say, Jewish, or Aboriginal tend to. Also, the fact that there is a gay history has really only been publicly acknowledged, and thus recognised as valid and real since the 1960's at the earliest. So, I guess other groups have a head-start on queers with that. We have a bit of catching up to do, and books like 'From Camp to Queer' are a great way of doing that. So, in terms of what the book's focus it traces how within the context of the feminist, Afro-American, and Aboriginal rights revolutions, grew the first gay liberation movements. What is interesting to me, is how groups within the gay world - often corresponding to what seem to be different generations - had different approaches and philosophies about what it meant to be equal members of Australian society. Some wanted to be left alone in their gay enclaves, and not attract attention of broader, often-hostile homophobic Australia. Others, thought that gay law reform was the way to go in achieving equality, and this approach can still be seen in the activities of the mainstream gay organisations today, including groups like the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby. Others, sought a more radical re-imagining of society, so that no one was required to fit into any fixed relationship models. They would probably reject equalising law such as marriage, for example, as they reject marriage out of hand as an institution - for queers or straights. What struck me is what a rigid, binary view many people held. By that, I mean that they felt you had to choose one approach or the other, rather than recognising the importance of a variety of options to cater to the diversity within the queer world. Unfortunately, the exclusivist, narrow view often seemed to result in people sometimes being told that their way of being gay/lesbian was not valid and this causes serious harm to the well being and self-esteem of some people. That's often the fate, it seems, of a minority fighting for acceptance - intolerance within the minority group of dissenting views which don't tow the line. Hopefully things are getting a bit more open-minded, and within the gay world, there is room for those who believe, for example, that we should fight for the right to marry and those who aren't interested in it as an institution. To fail to recognise that we're at least as diverse, if not more so, than non-queer Australians and thus an acceptance of many philosophies should prevail, is incredibly short-sighted and not good for the well-being of Queer Australians.
