You Should Read "Crossing the Lines".

I went to a book launch at The Women's Bookshop the night before we moved back to Level 3 lockdown here in Auckland. It was packed, a great night, a celebration. And deservedly so. 

The books is "Crossing the Lines" by Brent Coutts, and it's excellent in so many ways.

Just look at that cover!We've been doing this stuff way before Ru Paul.

Crossing the Lines is a book that adds hugely to our understanding of the world of gay men in New Zealand, and it does this by giving us a rich historical context and background to a world few know much about or have thought of.

If you think "gay history" seems a bit forbidding, don't be put off. This is fascinating, and more than that, it is in places deeply tender and moving. He is telling real stories of real gay men who might seem distant in time but whose lives I believe are familiar in so many way to our own. He shows us what it was like to be gay, more accurately to be homosexual, the term they used, in New Zealand back in the 30s and through the Second World War, and the decades after. 

The book revolves around the lives of three gay men, Harold Robinson, Ralph Dyer, and Douglas Morison. All somewhat "arty" before the War, they were members of the official military Concert Parties, in the Pacific and later in Egypt. Most of their work was as female impersonators, they got to go to war and serve their country in drag, but there's so much more to this than that.

"Female impersonators" were a big thing back then. There is something carnivalesque about it, something subversive, when it's done well. There is a queer code that sits under the apparent innocence of a performance. I think that's been lost to some extent with the mainstreaming of drag these days, some of the subversive quality has gone. Probably in part due to the fact it's just much less shocking to us. A cock in a frock doesn't really shock. In a more repressive era it had much more disruptive power than today.

These men also had sex, affairs, sometimes with other gay men, sometimes with straight guys, and they loved as well.

He tells other stories as well,  other gay men whose lives crossed their paths over this time. Some are deeply moving, but you can read it to find those. And there were the closet cases, the ostensibly straight but at least bi if not gay men among the officers who could be allies or dangers depending. Situational homosexuality was a thing - guys who were straight but in need of sexual or emotional contact.

Harold Robinson had a pre and post war career in dance, and after the War married the notorious Freda Stark, one part of the lesbian love affair that ended in court and scandalised Auckland in 1936. She famously danced naked except for a G-string, coated in gold paint, at the Civic. The cafe there "Starks" is named for her.

Personally I found it intriguing to learn that Brigadier Dove, the grandfather of boys I was at school with, was well known to those in the know as bisexual. A pillar of the establishment with a hidden side.

Some of these men did face problems, even court martial when discovered, it wasn't all fun and games for everyone by any means.

I guess for me in reading this, it is the way the central trio negotiated their way through the world, before, during and after the war, that I find so fascinating. We were illegal, scorned, rejected and reviled. Yet these men and others formed circles of friendship and created some of the building blocks of the gay world I came out into in the late 70s that have gone on to become part of the foundations of queer life in this country today.

It's good to see that not everything happened in America, and to remember the American template doesn't fit onto every other country's experience. Given the sheer size of American cultural power often it seems to be the only lens the world is viewed from. Even in its attempts at radical activism American cultural hegemony can be felt. We have our own history and heroes that we should be proud of.

Brent has taken an incredibly complex set of resources, including photos, (some really wonderful photos),  official records, oral histories and private archives and woven them deftly into a story that speaks to us today.

I found it a fascinating read, and was disappointed when I got to the end: I wanted more.