Film - Jary Nemo, 'From the Personal to the Political', 2016

Introduction: Hard 1970s style rock music plays over vintage Super 8 footage of a Gay Lib March in Melbourne in the 1970s. Young people walk the Melbourne streets carrying placards such as ‘Gay Sisterhood’ and ‘Lesbians are Women Too’, they are lively and exuberant and shouting their message to the world. Trams run past. Some demonstrators are moved on by police.

Dennis Altman (Voice Over): “I think it's important that we understand that social change comes about because people collectively start asking for it. I think that's something that every generation has to learn in its own way.”

Graham Willett (Voice Over): “It's not about equality, I think that's the thing that's hardest to get across to people. Gay liberation didn't want equality, they wanted transformation of everything. Liberation wasn't about equality for gay people, it was about sexual freedom for everybody, everybody was going to be free.”

Barbara Creed (Voice Over): “What was so refreshing and liberating about this was you could hug and be friendly with guys and there were no sexual undertones or come-ons or whatever.”

“It was totally relaxing and there probably weren't that many with the women either because given the way women were sexually repressed in the 70s it was very difficult for a lot of women at that time actually to initiate relationships as well because we didn't have a language and we had to invent a language of our own.”

Graham Willett (Voice Over): “Of course it wasn't just about sexual freedom, there was an opposition to monogamy, for example, that was quite strong, rejection of the pair bond, jealousy and all those kinds of things.”

“Of course, not everybody agreed with all of these ideas, but really, they were the ideas. If you want to argue against something, that's what you're arguing against.”

As the voices speak the visual record of 1970 demos continues, rock music returns briefly, and then all fades to black.

Graham Willett, Historian, Seated Interview: “It was an intensely radical period in Australian history, the campaign, the movement against the Vietnam War and conscription had really reshaped Australian politics.”

“People were taking to the streets. Around the Vietnam War there were events virtually every week, you could go to something. A speak-in, or a teach-in, or a public meeting, or a protest, or a big demo.”

“It was a period of agigation. It spread very rapidly to other groups in society. Mostly inspired by the Americans, so women's liberation, Aboriginal politics, which took the form of black power, is the term they used at the time, and gay liberation, which arrives from then.”

Jude Munro, Melbourne Gay Liberation Member, Seated Interview: “I suppose I was one of the initiators of Gay Liberation Front in Melbourne. It was based really out of Melbourne University but came to represent the whole of the gay community in Melbourne.”

“I had this very strong sense of social justice. I couldn't understand why as a lesbian, why what I felt was so much part of me, and such a natural feeling, why it was in a sense not recognised by society.”

Barbara Creed, Melbourne Gay Liberation Member, Seated Interview: “Melbourne Gay Liberation was probably one of the most if not the most important events of my life. I was invited by friends I was working with to what they called a meeting of gay people. I didn't really know what that meant, it was to be at Melbourne University. My friend at work and her partner, were the only other lesbians I knew at that stage. We're talking about early 70s, even though I'd had a long relationship at school with another girl. I didn't really know any other gay people at all so I was very excited. I said, "I'd love to come.".”

Peter McEwan, Melbourne Gay Liberation Member, Seated Interview: “I was actually in a bar called the Woolshed Bar. In those days, because we were so illegal, we were essentially sexual outlaws, the only places we could go to were often fairly dire, fairly divey places. This place was in the basement of the Australia Hotel, and it welcomed us. It welcomed Aboriginals, people who would come out of Pentridge and they would go straight there. As outsiders we were welcomed as well, along with a load of other alcoholics, and so on. It's where you'd tend to gather. I was there one day and met this vision called Julian and we went on a date. He took me on a date, and that date was the first Gay Liberation meeting at Melbourne University.”

Andrew Hansen, Melbourne Gay Liberation Member, Seated Interview: “My gay life, my homosexual life was outside university, and then one day all these little posters started to appear around campus. I thought to myself, hello, that's probably me because I'd made quite a strong decision when I was about 12. I'd realized that I actually liked boys, girls wasn't going to be my thing, which made me different from everybody I went to school with.”

“When the posters went up about, around the uni I thought I might think I'd better go to that just in case I meet somebody, and I can't remember but it was in the Menzies building, the Ming Wing at Monash, and I can remember before the lunch time where the meeting was supposed to happen. I hang about on the campus going, if I go to this it's going to be a huge joke, and the rugby team, and all the engineering students are going to line up outside the building and as we get out of the lift we are going to be punched to the ground and kicked to death. But I had resolved, and I went, all right, I'll go.”

Graham Willett: “Melbourne Gay Liberation starts with this meeting at the Drummond Street restaurant. It starts meeting at Melbourne Uni almost immediately, they have Friday night meetings. They're very big meetings, 50, 60 by all accounts. They're doing an enormous number of things.”

Hard 1970s style rock music plays with montage of images from 1970s demos, picnics, graffiti such as ‘Lesbians are Lovely’ ‘RSL Oppresses Gays’, posters for Marches, flyers for demos, meeting minutes, meeting rooms and Super 8 footage of 1970s Womens Lib and Gay Lib Marches in the centre of Melbourne and a Gay Liberation Picnic in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens in 1973.

Peter McEwan (Voice Over): “Because our ideology such as it is was was very much based on the feminist analysis of society, and how the patriarchy oppressed us all, we took that all on board. What we would do, is we would actually explore things like our own sexism, for instance. Our own internalised homophobia. It was really about coming to terms with the fact that we are good, and therefore we can be proud.”

Barbara Creed (Voice Over): “The photos and the films we made they were for us.”

“We probably enjoyed them immensely particularly where people were out there marching and looking different and carrying placards. These demonstrations were large eventually, they filled Collins Street or Bourke Street and footpaths were also filled with onlookers staring, trying to work out what was going on.”

 “What I was trying to do when I took the photographs or retrospectively I think what I was doing was trying to or capture moments amongst all of us that showed us as a family in a way. Because that's something that came out very clearly in our consciousness-raising groups that most of us had never felt at home in our own families. And so what gay liberation did was create another family.”

Graham Willett: “I guess the wildly utopian hopes of liberation obviously weren't achieved, but so much more was achieved than people really thought could be. A lot of it was about revolutionary overthrow, in fact the incremental changes were much more than people, liberationists especially, would have expected.”

Peter McEwan: “It was never aggressive, it was never political. We were just ... The power came from being ourselves. That, to me, was the nub of Gay Liberation. Having done that, of course, you would want to move out into the world and take on people who had challenged you for being sinful and evil.”

Jude Munro: “I think it was the impetus for all of the change movements associated with homosexuals in society, and law reform, and a whole series of other things like employment conditions, superannuation, housing, and so forth but it was also the partnership that was established between that movement, and other activist movements.”

Andrew Hansen: “The fabulous networks of people walking into this room today, and meeting up with people that I haven’t seen for years, or largely haven’t seen for years. I’ve been aware of them being busy in our society working for change, and being leaders, and that’s so fantastic. I feel like I’m one of the foot soldiers but I think that Gay Liberation shows you that you don’t have to be one of the leaders. You do have to turn up though, and be there, and as I said before, don’t take no for an answer.”

 Graham Willett: “In fact, the movement managed to reform society quite strongly and decisively. At the time, the sense that we were taking on this huge task wasn't really intimidating to people. It was an exhilarating opportunity, and the responsibility of doing it was something that people felt very strongly.”

Ending: The credits roll as a lively disco style dance tune plays.

'The Founding and Importance of Gay Lib'

Lucinda Horrocks: Could you start by saying where you fit in to Melbourne Gay Lib?

Dennis Altman: Well I fit in to Melbourne Gay Lib because in 1971, at the end of 1971 I published a book called Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation and that played a role in the early days of the gay movement in Australia. And my memory which is very unreliable is that in connection with that I came down to Melbourne and apparently spoke at an early perhaps the beginning of the first Gay Liberation meeting at Melbourne University. My memory of it is much more connected with a certain person whom I then spent the night and some subsequent nights with. Actually that’s important because I think that one of the great things about the movement was it clearly was the personal, was political and that was an extremely important way in which people bonded, met each other, formed relationships that have continued to some cases even until today.

Lucinda Horrocks: So what, if you had to kind of tell a young person today what it was like to be a young person in 1971, how would you explain it?

Dennis Altman: You mean a young a young gay person?

Lucinda Horrocks:  Yes, a young gay person.

Dennis Altman: A young gay person in 1971. We're talking ... Look I think that it was a time when homosexuality was still heavily seen as an illness, a sin or deviance. That was a pretty heavy burden for people to carry. It was also just the beginning of seeing depictions of homosexuals about women and men in film that weren't entirely stereotypical and unpleasant but even so the dominant view if one saw homosexuals in film or television was essentially that they came to an unhappy ending and classically they died tragically at the end.

I think the great difference was that we had to invent a world. Somebody young now who is coming to terms with their sexuality, have got a whole number of worlds that they can quite easily move into. And of course they have a huge amount of access through the sort of media that we didn't know, couldn't imagine, we didn't have the web, we didn’t even have portable phones. People now can access a whole set of images about what their lives might be like.

Lucinda Horrocks: What's your major recollection of that moment in time that you wanted to share with us today?

Dennis Altman: Look, I've got mixed recollections because for me it's all mixed up with something which for me has been essential which is to become a writer, and I've never thought of myself as an activist and insofar as I’ve been an activist is because as a writer that's given me access to certain media outlets etcetera.

I think, if I think back to the history of the movement in Australia, I remember the first ever demonstration, first ever gay demonstration in Sydney the end of 1971 when a very small group of us including some what we'd now call straight allies went down to the headquarters of the Liberal Party in downtown Sydney to demonstrate against the endorsement of a right-wing Christian as the Liberal candidate for a very safe Federal seat.

It is sort of ironic that you know more than 40 years later one could imagine a similar demonstration against the Liberal Party for endorsing a conservative Christian for a very safe seat. Of course the thing that has changed worth saying is the Liberal Party have actually in the last 6 months endorsed two openly gay men for extremely safe seats. That I think is something we couldn't have imagined back in the 1970s.

Lucinda Horrocks:  You told me just before that we needed to understand the difference between a demo and a march.

Dennis Altman: Oh, well a march ... Well, I think that you know, the simple explanation is demonstration is static and the march moves. This was a demonstration, I mean there was a group of us there were photos, so my memory is quite good on this, holding balloons. I'm not quite sure why we held balloons but yeah we all stood outside the Liberal Party headquarters. Of course the famous march that has become I guess the symbol of the gay movement in Australia or the queer movement in Australia is Mardi Gras, which began as, grew out of, a whole set of events commemorating Stonewall, which had been the American beginning of Gay Liberation, and led to a march down Oxford street which is the genesis because of the history of it, became the genesis of what is now Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney. Which I'm sure everyone watching knows is the biggest street party in Australian life and much more fun than Moomba.

Lucinda Horrocks:  Sorry, I have to laugh at that yes can you ...

Dennis Altman: At this point the interviewer burst into historical laughter and was unable to continue.

Lucinda Horrocks: How does the Melbourne Gay Lib's story fit into that broader context?

Dennis Altman: I think that very quickly, from the very beginning of the 70s we saw a number of groups emerge right across the country and it's important to remember this is the period that the writer historian Donald Horne talked about, this is the time of hope. It's the period that leads up to the election of the Whitlam Government at the end of 1972. It's the period in which there had been increasing amount of social movements. Growing out of Australia the very very big Anti-Vietnam war movements and I think pretty well everybody who was part of those early queer movements had probably been politicised through the debates around Vietnam, through the beginning of the support of Indigenous rights and then most importantly of course, the new wave of Women's Liberation. It's impossible to think of Gay Liberation without also talking about Women's Liberation and the enormous impact that had.

In my case, I mean I remember very clearly, I can remember flying to the US in 1970. Those days you couldn't fly nonstop across the Pacific so we stopped in Honolulu and I bought a copy of Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics which for me has always been the determining tome of women's liberation, though of course there were many others, and the huge upsurge in issues that really had not been talked about until the late 60s is all part of this period. For us, I think that's really important to remember that Gay Liberation always saw itself as part of a bigger radical social movement and felt a lot of empathy and connection with other radical social movements, something that I very much regret we've lost today. Of course now we have a queer movement that often is very very insular and quite uninterested in making links with other forms of social protest.

Lucinda Horrocks: What are you hoping that this story will say about that period of time or about the Gay Lib story?

Dennis Altman: I think it's important that we understand that social change comes about because people collectively start asking for it. I think that's something that every generation has to learn in its own way. I think there is always a problem with these sorts of programs of indulging in too much nostalgia which leads to what we now sometimes hear, complaints not so much I think with the queer world but more generally, that the young are not political, the young are not active, which isn't true. I think what happens is as we get older we don't necessarily recognise that the forms of activism may change. As someone who is technologically still living in the 20th century, I'm very conscious of fact that I'm probably not aware of a lot of the forms of social activism now going on.

I think there's a story, I mean I would like this story to be part of our general school curriculum, it is part of the way in which Australia has become the sort of country it is today. For me the relative successes, and I think we have been successful, of the queer movement is part of the larger story about the relative success of multiculturalism and creating an Australia in which it is accepted, that there will be a lot more diversity than there was when people at my age were growing up.

Lucinda Horrocks: What's your favourite image or photo or iconic visual from that period?

Dennis Altman: Well, when you asked me that I did immediately have this flashback to an image of four of us outside that Liberal Party headquarters in Bligh Street Sydney all holding balloons with very stupid expressions on our faces but that's not I think an iconic movement [image]. I don't know that we have an iconic image although I think that some of the images that were shown in the exhibition that this documentary's relating to could well all become iconic. I think there is something that captures the combination of personal commitment and collective action that's very powerful. I'm not sure that four rather geeky looking people standing together with balloons quite does it.

Lucinda Horrocks: Did anyone ever figure out or remember why the balloons?

Dennis Altman: I've never asked. That's what you do right? I mean I suspect somebody probably stopped at Woolworths on the way down to the CBD and bought them, you know, could have been streamers could have been, well couldn't have been firecrackers but they're illegal. Maybe they weren't then, I think balloons have visual and presume that it represent, you know, you let them go they float up into the air and they represent hope.