Yes, indeed: inside the same-sex debate

• Sharon Verghis

  @SVerghis

  
• 11:00PM December 28, 2018
• 36 Comments

A year on, three markedly different books examine the trajectory and the aftermath of this landmark vote.

In Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s Journey to Marriage Equality, Shirleene Robinson and Alex Greenwich provide a forensically detailed ­inside account of the Yes campaign, from its origins in 2004, when the Marriage Act of 1961 was amended to exclude same-sex couples, through to the unsuccessful High Court challenge, last year’s public vote and the convoluted, bruising and ultimately inglorious political machinations of the main parties to exploit this most personal of campaigns for political capital — at whatever cost.

Robinson and Greenwich’s book is detail-rich and meticulously charted: a comprehensive historical document of an important moment in Australian life. But to me Yes Yes Yes is at its best in the personal moments in the chronological flow: Penny Wong’s plea for her children to not be considered “lesser”; US president Barack Obama’s declaration after the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of marriage equality on June 26, 2015: “Love is love”; time tragically running out on the marriage equality clock for Peter de Waal and Peter Bonsall-Boone, partners for more than 50 years, after the latter died in May 2017; Magda Szubanski’s moving speech at the National Press Club linking gay rights to the expansion and confirmation of human rights: “There is an old Polish saying: ‘We are fighting for our freedom and yours.’ ”

The book concludes on a happy note: “that senseless discrimination against a section of the Australian community had finally ended”. Love conquers all, is the message.

But does it?

Going Postal: More Than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, picks up where Yes Yes Yes ends. It is a nuanced and thought-provoking read.

Edited by Eades and Son Vivienne, it shines a light on not only the emotional trauma suffered by many in the aftermath — “the ongoing grief of having our lives, and those of our children, be up for public debate” — but the voices often unheard in the mainstream Yes campaign: indigenous Australia, migrant Australia, working-class Australia, anti-gay marriage Australia, transgender Australia.

Wiradjuri writer and activist Edie Shepherd, who tartly comments on the “overwhelming whiteness” of the Yes campaign (“Didn’t you know, this was all about white cis people who want to get married?”) sums up the marginalisation of these voices: “We would often wonder where we fitted in. It was certainly not in the No camp — but the Yes side didn’t seem particularly interested in us either.”

The shadow of history loomed heavily over the Yes campaign. In effect, this was the first time that white mainstream Australians had to fight for basic civil rights and acknowledgment of their humanity. But did they do enough to harness and integrate the wisdom and experiences of indigenous Australia?

Shepherd doesn’t believe so.

“The wider Yes campaign had so much that they could learn from us,” she writes.

“We knew what it was to have the broader public debate the validity of our humanity … just look at the 1967 referendum.”

“As blackfellas, we knew all too well that debates about marriage were not just about the act or institution of marriage. Not all that long ago, our mob was forced to request permission from the state to marry who we wanted to marry. The postal survey was a painful reminder of how marriage was used as one of the many tools to subordinate us.”.

Shepherd makes another crucial point in addressing the historical place of homosexuality in indigenous culture.

Contrary to belief, it has long been part of the warp and weft of community life: “Some of our oldest art depicts queer relationships and in many communities brotha boys and sista girls held respected positions.”

Another arresting contribution comes from Omar J. Sakr, a bisexual Arab Muslim poet born and raised in Liverpool in western Sydney.

Here we have a rare window into being queer and Muslim and working-class: the invisible, voiceless world of “closeted wogs and Arabs and Pacifikas” and its interplay with the ingrained conservatism present among sections of Australia’s migrant classes.

It is a tough place to be gay, certainly: Sakr recounts the email his now dead father sent him at the start of the year comparing homosexuality to paedophilia and bestiality, his aunt joking about hanging him if he turns out to be gay, his sister’s WhatsApp message calling him an abomination.

Against this hostile backdrop, Sakr, not surprisingly, is terrified when he tells his tough, macho older cousin that he is bisexual. In a flurry of amusingly theatrical Arabic insults, his cousin explodes. But later he offers love and support, a roof and a bed.

When Islamophobes conveniently condemn “ethnic enclaves” that voted no, Sakr says they not only overlook the fact of an ­incomplete demographic picture — “How many people like me had left the area and were voting from their new locations?” — but the fierce ties of kin and love and loyalty so binding that he will always find sanctuary, no matter what. In contrast, “The white conservative world could never conceive of loving me, even imperfectly.”

The ambiguities and complexities of gay life in Australia also come vividly alive in the short stories included in All Being Equal, the latest edition of Griffith Review.

The stories were submitted to the journal’s annual Novella Project and the judges were Benjamin Law, Melissa Lucashenko, Dennis Altman and Aviva Tuffield. It is a rich read, from an account of growing up in a cult in Queensland to the road journey of a working-class Geraldton boy and his French boyfriend to visit family, listening to Kylie (“poof doof”) and facing down small-town prejudice.

In these small spaces live the multiple realities of gay life in Australia.

Lucy Neave’s Fantasias for Flute is a small masterpiece. It tells the story of Meg, a young Brisbane woman who has fled a complicated personal life to work at a horse hospital in Dubai. Much is unpacked in a few pages: loneliness, gambling addictions, recovering from trauma. When she was a child, her father Kevin shot and killed their mother. Was it an accident or deliberate?

Along the way we see everything from Dubai’s exploited migrant worker underclass to the healing powers of music, to the Middle East’s nuanced attitudes towards homosexuality. A former girlfriend who unexpectedly turns up in Dubai asks Meg: “Wouldn’t you get flogged and sent home if you even kissed a girl on the street?” But as with all things, it’s not black and white.

Then there’s Miriam Sved’s All the Things I Should’ve Given, a tale of tough country girl Jo and urbane, cosmopolitan Abbey, a poignant study in a love affair riven by faultlines: of class, of country versus city, of parental expectations and prejudices.

Sved considers relationships from all angles: fathers and daughters, the generational schism between young activists and the anti-gay marriage tribe of “1978 deviants”, the carers of the “walking cadavers, their stick-thin arms, skin peopled with lesions at the AIDS ward”, the pulses of fear and desire in a gay sauna where the terror and self-disgust of a young Middle Eastern boy sits alongside an older man’s fear of sexual rejection.

But it is Daniel Young’s disturbing electric shock of a story, Shanghai Wedding, that resonates with me the most. It is centred on an explosive love affair between Billy, a shy white Aussie law student from Brisbane, and Qiang, a charismatic international student.

This is a tinderbox of a story, taking in not only the cultural chasm mixed-race gay couples have to negotiate against the backdrop of Asian cultural taboos around homosexuality — including sham marriages made by tongzhi, gay men in China — but also, most powerfully, domestic violence in same-sex relationships.

Billy is used as a punching bag for Qiang’s self-loathing: his shoulder is dislocated, ribs cracked. But, like a battered spouse, he remains loyal. Against Australia’s epidemic of spousal violence, it presents a sobering picture.

Wounds from our own brokenness, our own experiences, are the thread that runs through these stories. The wound, as Rumi said, is where the light enters.

Sharon Verghis is a journalist and editor.

Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s Journey to Marriage Equality

By Shirleene Robinson and Alex Greenwich

NewSouth, 336pp, $29.99

Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’

Edited by Quinn Eades and Son Vivienne

Brow Books, 312pp, $32.99

Griffith Review 62: All Being Equal

Edited by Ashley Hay

Text, 264pp, $27.99

Sharon Verghis

@SVerghis