Queer History Month Aotearoa — Pūmahara Ia Te Wā 2024 hui taumata

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Celebrate Aotearoa’s first Queer History Month

Aotearoa’s first Queer History Month Pūmahara Ia Te Wā happening this July was breathed into being by Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa and the National Library.

To celebrate join us and a panel of speakers to mark the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in Aotearoa on 9 July 1986. We will talk about how we can strengthen our queer archives and networks to better carry and preserve Aotearoa’s often fragile queer histories and memories.

The theme for this year’s Queer History Month Pūmahara Ia Te Wā is:

He kitenga kanohi, he hokinga mahara. He kawenga mahara, he hāpori kitea

A familiar face stirs one's memories, a collection of memories is a community seen.

Programme

9am — Mihi

9:20am — Opening addresses: Alexander Turnbull Library and Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa

9:30am — Poet Laureate Chris Tse

9:35am — USA LGBT History Month 30 years on with Rodney C Wilson

10am — Paramanawa (morning tea)

Toitū Te Tiriti

10:20am — Upholding Te Tiriti in community and in the archives with Dr Elizabeth Kerekere and Kevin Haunui

11:30am — Takatāpui and HIV/AIDS histories with Dr Clive Aspin

12:30pm — Tina (lunch)

Kaitiakitanga

1:15pm — From LAGANZ to Kawe Mahara with Dr Elizabeth Kerekere

1:30pm — Mana taonga with Kawe Mahara kaitiaki

2pm — Queer activism in Aotearoa with Will Hansen

2.30pm — Paramanawa (afternoon tea)

Whanaungatanga

3pm — Dr Rebekah Galbraith, Rainbow Studies Now organiser, Te Herenga Waka

3:15pm — Dr Welby Ings on Ia: The Rainbow Collection

3:30pm — Dr Patrick Thomsen on The Manalagi Project and Repository

3:45pm — Dr Ashwinee Pendharkar on the Alexander Turnbull Library Contemporary Voices and Archives and PrideNZ.com

4pm — Closing address

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Libraries as kaitiakitanga of queer histories

Around Papatūānuku libraries are queer people’s chosen whānau. We come to libraries seeking ourselves and our histories, seeking the manaakitanga to find our stories, seeking the affirmation that our memories and our communities are not only welcome but actively invited in and protected. Learning about our queer tīpuna and our taonga affirms queer lives and is a vital part of the whakapapa of takatāpui and tāgata Moana in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Queer people always were and always will be.

Inspired by the United States of America’s Black History Month (founded in 1926), the world’s first LGBTQ+ History Month was founded thirty years ago in the United States. Since its founding, 18 other History Months have emerged, including most recently in Italy, Cuba, and Uganda. Aotearoa New Zealand’s history month will be the world’s twentieth.

Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa

Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa (formerly known as the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand Te Pūranga Takatāpui o Aotearoa) is a rich pātaka of queer and takatāpui taonga and stories. ‘Queer’ is an umbrella term for people who identify with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions and innate variations of sex characteristics, in acknowledgement of the fluidity of identities and the multiple acts of identifying and finding ourselves through time and space.

Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa welcomes the many intersections with other identities, communities and politics that ‘queer’ holds. Kawe means ‘to carry, convey, bear’ and mahara means ‘memory, recollection, knowledge’. Kawe Mahara stands for carrying the memories of all our takatāpui and queer communities in Aotearoa from the past, present and future, so that our communities can grow and thrive. Having survived an arson attack in the 1980s, and kept alive by volunteers through decades of discrimination, Kawe Mahara is a testament to the power of community archives.

Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa

About the speakers

Prof Elizabeth Kerekere (she/her/ia) (Whānau a Kai, Ngāti Oneone, Te Āitanga a Māhaki, Rongowhakaata, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Co. Clare, Co. Tipperary) is the chair of Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa. Elizabeth is a LGBTQIA+ activist and scholar of national and international renown.

She has been active within Rainbow and youth development sectors for over 35 years and mentored over 60 youth leaders. She is founder/chair of Tīwhanawhana Trust which advocates for takatāpui to “tell our stories, build our communities and leave a legacy”. Elizabeth’s PhD on takatāpui identity and well-being is required reading in universities here and overseas.

Her takatāpui suicide prevention resources are used in health and school settings across the country and Elizabeth has brought Te Tiriti o Waitangi/takatāpui-based advice to research projects addressing assisted reproductive health and family formation, LGBTQIA+ youth health and well-being, trans and non-binary health and well-being, and intersex human rights.

As a Member of Parliament in the last term, Elizabeth broke records with the petition that led to banning conversion practices, contributed to new gender markers on birth certificates for trans, intersex and non-binary people and she introduced the term ‘takatāpui’ into legislation for the first time in the reform of the health system.

Elizabeth’s framework for takatāpui health and well-being Te Whare Takatāpui is currently being applied to the health system and she was appointed Adjunct Professor in Public Health at Victoria University of Wellington this year.

Kevin Haunui (he/him/tane/ia) (Te Whānau a Apanui, Ngāti Kahungunu, Tūhoe, Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Ūenuku, Āti Hau) is the former chair of Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa (2011– 2023).

Kevin’s role and work reflect a strong sense of social justice and improving outcomes as a member at the intersection of the marginalised communities with whom he strongly identifies; LGBTQIA+, Takatāpui, and Māori whānau. He is an advocate, community leader, academic and researcher working to connect understanding, visibility, capacity and capability, and relationships for LGBTQIA+, Takatāpui and Māori whānau, communities and allies within Aotearoa, across the Pacific and further afield.

Kevin is currently a Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington involved in a project investigating the relationship whānau bereaved by rangatahi suicide have with the coronial system. He has also recently been involved with research of Sex (among men) and the Prevention of Transmission Study (SPOTS) and the experience of Indigenous Women Living with HIV, a multinational study involving India, Nepal, Canada, Aotearoa, Nigeria, Per, and Guatemala.

Jessica Moran (she/her) is currently seconded to the role of Acting Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library. In this role she leads the teams responsible for developing, maintaining, and providing access to the Library’s documentary heritage and taonga and is responsible for developing the research collections and services of the Alexander Turnbull Library, particularly in the fields of New Zealand and Pacific studies and rare books.

Her substantive role is Associate Chief Librarian, Research Collections at the Alexander Turnbull Library, where she is responsible for managing curatorial, acquisitions, digital collections, and archival processing functions for the Library.

In the 11 years she’s been with the Library, she has worked as a digital archivist and head of Digital Collections Services, before becoming Associate Chief Librarian in 2021. Before moving to New Zealand in 2012, she worked in university, special, and government libraries and archives in California.

Rodney C Wilson (he/him) began his career in education in 1990 as a secondary school history and government teacher in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, USA. It was there in 1994 that he both publicly announced to his students that he is gay, becoming the first out-gay K-12 teacher in Missouri to be tenured, and also founded the first-ever (then called) Lesbian and Gay History Month, celebrated for the first time in October 1994 in the United States.

He picked October to mark the first (October 1979) and second (October 1987) LGBTQIA+ marches on Washington, D.C., demanding equal rights, to tie History Month to National Coming Out Day on 11 October (NCOD was founded in 1988), and because October is within the academic calendar of secondary and post-secondary schools in the United States and was not already claimed by other history month celebrations such as Black History Month (February in the USA) and Women's History Month (March in the USA).

In addition to teaching at a secondary school, Rodney has taught English to Spanish speakers, GED-preparation to incarcerated 17 to 21-year-olds, and since 2011 has taught American history and world religions at a community college in rural Missouri.

In 2021, he co-founded the International Committee on LGBTQ+ History Months, a gathering of representatives from many of the other History Month locations around the world, including New Zealand, the world's 20th Queer History Month. “LGBT history gave me self-confidence as a gay person and strengthened my resolve to live, as best I could, an honest, open and integrated life.” He is the subject of the documentary-short Taboo Teaching: A Profile of Missouri Teacher Rodney Wilson, which is now available for free viewing on YouTube.

LBGT History month

Clare O’Leary (she/her) is a Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa trustee, co-curator of Queer History Month Aotearoa 2024 Pūmahara Ia Te Wa, and the New Zealand representative on the International Committee of LGBGT+ History Months. Clare is a documentary filmmaker and identifies as lesbian/queer. In 2022 her film about gay artists Geoff Dixon and his partner, indigenous artist Arone Meeks, Geoff Dixon | Portraits of Us, premiered at the 2022 International Film Festival.

In the mid-80s she formed lesbian alt-punk band Vibraslaps, with Dianne Civil, Gina Cole, and Suzanne Darragh and their EP was distributed by Flying Nun Records. Clare was the founding content director at NZ On Screen and has worked on the creative and digital content and sector strategies for NZTE, NZ On Air, National Library of New Zealand, and NZEIR writing early reports on digital economies.

She originally trained as a nurse and went on to work in youth and community health education including sexuality, safer sex and decriminalisation of sex work, HIV/AIDS (Awhina Centre, Wellington). She worked for many years leading and facilitating the education programme at Mary Potter Hospice and has worked in areas of mental health and addiction. She is currently working on a rangatahi research project with Dr Clive Aspin at Te Herenga Waka and has a new film project in development.

Clare O'Leary

Dr Clive Aspin (Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Whanaunga, Ngāti Tamaterā) conducted the first research into Māori HIV/AIDS in Aotearoa. He has worked in public health research for over thirty years in Aotearoa, Australia, Canada and for the World Health Organisation. He was recently awarded the prestigious Sir Rangi Hiroa prize for his contribution to Māori public health research in specialist areas of HIV/AIDS, sexuality and suicide prevention.

Award-winning researcher focused on Māori health equity

Chris Tse (he/him) was born and raised in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. ‘Tse’ is pronounced ‘teece’ (it rhymes with ‘peace’). Chris studied film and English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. In 2022, he was named the 13th New Zealand Poet Laureate. In January 2024, his term as Poet Laureate was extended to the end of August 2025. His poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction have been recorded for radio and widely published in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Best New Zealand Poems, Sport, Turbine | Kapohau, The New Zealand Listener, Landfall, Asian Cha, Poetry New Zealand Year Book, Sweet Mammalian, Cordite Poetry Review, Poetry, Capital Magazine, and The Spinoff.

Chris Tse

Mani B Mitchell (they/them) is a Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa board member. Mani is an intersex, queer, non-binary activist, who was born in the 1950s and grew up in remote rural Aotearoa on a ‘rehab’ farm in the shadow of the Second World War. They come from a whakapapa of storytellers on their father’s side, and their interest and passion in queer histories has grown gradually as they have sorted their own story, both to understand it and to actualise a sense of self that was beyond anything that was available to them as a child growing up.

Two queer people that massively impacted their own unfurled self are the dancer and choreographer Michael Parmenter and the playwright and actor Lorae Parry. Michael’s dramatic solo performance of Long Undressing stays with Mani to this day as an act of extraordinary raw courage.And in a similar transformational time in Mani's life so it was with Lorae’s play Eugenia, which helped unpick their societal notions of gender and crashed open brilliantly new doors of possibility.

Mani says that “Histories, stories, are like life itself — precious and fragile. Unless we actively seek to preserve our stories and our taonga they can and are easily lost. At this time in our history when who we are as queer people is under broad attack around the planet, this act of preservation of storytelling and capture is even more urgent and prescient.”

Prof. Welby Ings is a professor on narrative design at Auckland University of Technology. He is a gay man and a consultant to many international organisations on issues of creativity and learning. In the 1980s he was arrested numerous times in Aotearoa during the struggle for homosexual law reform.

Welby is also an internationally acclaimed author, designer, illustrator, and film-maker. His book Disobedient Teaching has become an influential reference in rethinking pedagogy and the culture of schooling. His 2022 feature film Punch won numerous international awards and received the New York Times Critics’ pick.

In 2001, Welby was awarded the Prime Minister’s inaugural Supreme Award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence and in 2014 and 2022 he was awarded university medals for his contributions to research, pedagogy, and creativity.

Seuta’afili Dr Patrick Thomsen (Sāmoa: Vaimoso, Vaigagā) is a senior lecturer in Global Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland. He is the director of Fofonga for Pacific Research Excellence at Waipapa Taumata Rau and Principal Investigator for the Manalagi Project funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand. He claims the title of New Zealand’s number-one Mariah Carey fan.

Dr Rebekah Galbraith (they/she) is a research librarian, writer, and scholar based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They hold a PhD in English Literature from Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. Their research interests include auto/biographical writing, queer literature, experimental writing, and the Modernist novel. Outside of academia, Rebekah enjoys trail running, playing guitar, ferreting second-hand bookstores for lesbian pulp fiction, and getting stuck into their vege garden. They are a keen cricketer, and last summer threw their first hat-trick ball.

Will Hansen (he/him) has been a trustee of Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa since 2017. He has helped coordinate the recent Archive is Alive workshops in collaboration with Wellington Zinefest, and more recently is embarking on a project Trans and Intersex Arc focusing on trans and intersex archives. Will is also a PhD student at Victoria University of Wellington, studying histories of queer activism in Aotearoa.

Dr Ashwinee Pendharkar is an academic and heritage professional with a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. From January 2021, Ashwinee has been the inaugural Curator Contemporary Voices and Archives at the Alexander Turnbull Library. In this role, she leads the organisation’s efforts to build an inclusive documentary heritage reflecting the rich diversity of cultures, languages, and identities as well as events and formats hitherto marginalised and/or under-represented in the collection.

On 1 July 2024, she stepped into the role of Team Leader, Collection Development (Legal Deposit) and is looking forward to continuing the mahi in this space.