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Good evening and welcome to Unity Books and thank you all [00:00:30] for joining us to celebrate the launch of, that's What I Am, oral Histories of Older Lesbians by Lois Cox. I think it's extraordinary that there are stories that continue to be told, and I feel very proud that at Unity we believe in all of those stories being told, and it's a real privilege to be here with you tonight. Lois. Um, and to be able to launch this and see it go forth into the world, can I ask you all to put your hands together and congratulate [00:01:00] Lois on this achievement? Tonight we'll hear from Lois, as well as Hillary Lapsley, the publisher and writer of the preface of the book, and Lori Lee of Ka Mahara, formerly the Lesbian and Gay Archives. Lodged within the National Library. Uh, but before that, before I hand over to the much more interesting part of the evening, I do have to go through the, the health and safety. So if there is a fire, please exit through [00:01:30] the sliding doors onto Willa Street and then move yourself well away from this building. You've kind of gotta go right and left, although it would probably be better for everybody just went left and around the corner. Um, we ask that you congregate on Mercer Street and if there's an earthquake. Well, um, the building, the building itself is very safe, but we can't say that the books won't fall off the shelves. So you probably know the drill. It's to, to drop and to protect yourself and grab a book [00:02:00] by all means. And if you can manage to read at the same time, you're very welcome. Um, but now I'm going to hand over to Hillary. Thank you. Koto, it's very nice to see all of you here. And, um, we are absolutely thrilled. Lois and I are the co-publish of Lois's book, um, through our small imprint called Town Belt Press. And I wanted to just say a few words about why we published the book [00:02:30] now, when Lois had written the manuscript in about the year 2000. Well, we began writing crime novels together and advertising. Uh, this is our, our most recent one, and we started to get used to, um, a taking a book through the publishing process. And I had read Lois's manuscript some time [00:03:00] back and I thought it was wonderful, and then I didn't think about it for a while. And then after we published three of our crime novels, the idea came up that Lois's book really did deserve to be out there in the world. Um, so, um, she did some revision and we put it through our wonderful computerized publishing program. And, um, one of the things we were really thrilled about, 'cause first of all, we thought we'd just give it a a type [00:03:30] script cover. Because we couldn't quite think what to put on the cover. And then we decided to approach our usual cover designer for the crime novels. And he asked us to supply a lot of photos of lesbians in the 1990s and thought that he would do a montage, and that sounded pretty good. So we went. Put went and had a look at a lot of parties and had a look at whether people would agree to be on the cover. But in the [00:04:00] end, um, he suggested this, uh, lovely photograph because he thought, and I think he's quite right, it showed the joyous, um, interactions between women in the lesbian community. And, uh, if you look at it very carefully, you'll see there's a younger Lois, um, sitting on the edge here. Um, so we're very pleased about the cover. So, um, in, in writing a, a preface for the book, um, I, I [00:04:30] did just, I just wanna read a, a paragraph because, um, I tried to summarize why now, and, um. I, I say, as well as being an invaluable document for historians, it is very readable. The woman's stories are funny, brave, sad, shocking, and inspiring. They portray times that are passed now and unique, and the organization. The material into life stages and themes makes for a group [00:05:00] biography, giving the reader a vivid picture of women loving living their joys and triumphs. And there's struggles with the forces against them. And Lois, a contemporary of the woman she interviewed from time to time, compares the woman's stories with events from her own life making I think the, the book even more engaging. Um, but now I wanna pass over to Laurie Lay, who's gonna say something about why it's really important that we record [00:05:30] and publish our stories. Yes, thanks. Uh, uh, my name is Dr. Lori Lei and I'm here in a, my capacity as a board member of Ka Mahara Queer Archives of New Zealand. And I wanna thank Louis and Hillary so much, uh, for inviting me to. Speak at the coming out, uh, pun intended of this, uh, incredible book. Um, for those of [00:06:00] you that aren't up on the name change, we used to be leggings, um, kwe means to, to carry or to bear, and Ma mara ino means memory or knowledge. So we at the archives carry the memories of our queer communities. From the past, present, and into the future, and. We are really excited about a book like this, which will become part of our archives. We are a charitable [00:06:30] trust. We're, um, housed at the Alexander Turnbill in the, um, national Library, and we actually have. Funds to support others who are interested and want to do oral history projects. Our curator, who's sitting right here, Linda Evans, has expertise in oral history and we collect and preserve oral history projects, so we can also act as a repository for people who are interested in doing. [00:07:00] Um, oral history projects. I think, uh, a book like this is, is so important for learning about our queer Una and fa Whakapapa. Um, and I think it affirms queer lives. Uh, there's a Maori aka Toki that says A familiar face stars, one's memories, a collection of memories is a community scene. And having read some of this book and talked to Louis and, and Hillary, I think this is really a community that was.[00:07:30] Invisible and this book has, is, is making them seen, uh, which really as a, as a queer person makes me feel incredibly, uh, affirmed and, and I think is very, very important and, and valuable work. And I feel very proud and privileged to be some small part of it. And that Kwe Mahara is. Is here supporting. Uh, if you don't know much about Kwe Mahara and you want to know more about the Queer archives, there's at least three other [00:08:00] board members in the room, Allison and Gavin and Linda again on the front row. So find us, um, after the launch, have a chat because we would love to talk about our work. Uh, in collecting and preserving and making available for researchers, uh, records and papers and, and history of, of queer, um, nui. And I'll pass it on to Lois now.[00:08:30] Well, Kiara Koto, I am really pleased to see you all here and I haven't got my glasses, so I can't read anything. Oh, they on No, no. Wrong one. Got different glasses. When you get old, you need different glasses. I take these. So apart from the little kerfuffle about the glasses, the first thing I wanted to say was that although I appear as the author [00:09:00] of the book. It's the storytellers who made the book possible. It's really 17 people wrote this book. It was me and there was 16 storytellers. Uh, and it began, um. I hope you got the idea that as a series of oral histories, which have been lodged in the national library and two people helped me with the interviewing Moira, Aberdeen and Anne Ruck. Anne has sadly died Indonesian just this month. 16 women agreed to [00:09:30] tell their stories. So the book has 17 author and they're all women involved in the lesbian community, and they all had a strong connection with Wellington and they were all older. So a couple of things about the book. First, um, it uses pseudonyms. So if you've come to sort of get the dirt on somebody, you know, you may not recognize them. And if you think you do, you may be wrong. Uh. Some of them [00:10:00] wanted the pseudonym, so it was more sensible for everybody to have them. And secondly, over half of them have died where that is the case. Their real names appear in brackets when they're first introduced. Their deaths really made me realize how lucky we are to have the tanga of their recorded stories. So older. Older is a flexible term. Um, as Hillary said, um, I was more or less the contemporary of some of these women, [00:10:30] and we thought older was 50 at the time the storytellers were, were, were recorded. We thought over 50 was older. Now, some of you who were younger may still think that, but I now consider 50 to be the prime of life and 60 year olds are middle age. There's something funny actually about the national library, although it's called, um, the old older lesbians, they have actually cat in the catalog. One of the names is middle aged. So they know that [00:11:00] that's just middle aged. Um, right. Um, yeah. So what that means, of course, is that now they'd, some of them would be in their nineties. Or the mid to late eighties, I, I'd have been a very young one, and the stories in the book stopped before the year 2000, so that's long enough ago that their lives to that point were immeasurably different from the lives of lesbian women today. And that, I think why, why the book [00:11:30] is so interesting. Now, if I'm allowed to say my own book is interesting. It's not just mine, it's other people's as well, 16 of them. So each storyteller's life is unique, but when the stories they told were put together, they showed a lot of similarity in their reaction to the society they lived in. So the book doesn't tell 16 separate stories in 16 chapters like this. It instead, it picks up on various ways in which groups of the women dealt with the culture at the [00:12:00] time. So each chapter of the book talks of what New Zealand was like in the different decades when the women were children and teenagers, adults, and finally at different times in their lives when they saw themselves as lesbian. And the last chapter talks of the very vibrant lesbian community that existed by the 1990s in Wellington. So first of all, most of 'em were teenagers in the 1950s, and it's really hard to imagine that [00:12:30] now New Zealand was very prosperous, but it was socially and culturally conformist. The range of acceptable behavior for women was very limited. I heard somebody talking about the social equity, what's going on at the moment today, and she was saying they just want to put us back into the house dependent on men and having children, something like that. Well, that's what it was like in the, in the fifties. Uh, the range of acceptable behavior really was so limited. Uh, women were [00:13:00] expected to be. Wives and mothers and sex was not talked of. Most of the women had never heard the word lesbian, or if they had, it was in a very negative way. One woman heard it talked of and asked her brother what it meant, and he said it was about. Women who cut their hair very short and wore bush shirts. So, although she did have a, she did have an affair with, with a woman, Fred, but she knew it [00:13:30] wasn't lesbian because it couldn't have been, they didn't wear bush shirts, they didn't cut their hair short. Um, and they, they had of course been community, uh, a bit earlier, but not very open. Uh, it was often based around sports or drinking in certain bars, and it was quite closet secretive. And that's where it varies from the book. The women's stories show that it was the women's movement of the late sixties and seventies that brought about a different sort of lesbian community, one that wanted [00:14:00] to be open and recognized, hence Pride of course. Uh, so that's the one that women eventually joined. So being lesbian wasn't just having sex with women. One lesbian theorist suggests it was having sex with women, calling yourself lesbian and taking part in the lesbian community. I want to read extracts from a couple of the women's stories that show how they changed over time as the world changed around them. The words are exactly as they are recorded in their oral history. [00:14:30] So first I'm going to quote from Joan, who was one of the oldest women born in the early thirties among the storytellers, she'd had a brief relationship with a woman when she was at teacher's college. Then she said off to the Rome Olympics in 1960 with several friends and ended up in a relationship with one of them. It was over by the seventies, so it had lasted for seven years. But then she had a brief affair. In 1979 and that set her thinking [00:15:00] here, she's. I honestly can't remember any detail over those years of my feelings about women and how I actually came to find out more and more about lesbians. There must have been books around that I got hold of. I think the word was more familiar. There was more publicity about it, and I came back from that holiday. Wish she'd had the affair. And I started thinking about this, I suppose, and I can remember the time when I came out to myself and said, I am a lesbian. I was in my little [00:15:30] unit that I'd bought, and I can't even remember what I'd been doing beforehand, but I know I'd gone into the bedroom for something and this subject must have been going through my mind. I went into the bedroom and I stopped in the bedroom and I said to myself. I'm a lesbian and I've never felt anything like it before. A feeling of such joy and ecstasy. I finally knew what I was, I'd identified something and I was dancing around the kitchen and around the bedroom and [00:16:00] thinking, oh, it's wonderful. It's wonderful. Of course, I didn't know what it really was really like, didn't she? So that was me coming up to myself as a lesbian, and then I began to take a lot more interest in it. So that's when she joined the community as well. So that's her. Uh, so where are we? I want to quote from somebody else who's a bit younger and that is, um, a, a decade younger. I've written to myself as a note, [00:16:30] um, and it's Louise. She'd been in the States with her family and become involved with the civil rights movement there, but not gay rights. She came back to New Zealand and began work in the public service. Ha ha. What happened? She met the woman that I first realized I was in love with. We became very good friends quite quickly over a period I realized that I was in love with her, and on one occasion I told her and she slapped my face. I [00:17:00] wasn't surprised. That came after quite a soul searching time that I'd had because before I told her, of course, I recognized that I had to tell myself. I thought, that's what I am. I'm a lesbian. And my mind went straight back to studying psychology. The first year at university, they described homosexuality as a form of schizophrenia. In other words, you were mad. So I thought, my God, I'm mad. I. That was my first thought. I've lost it. Well, I thought [00:17:30] I'd better see a doctor. That's what you do, isn't it? If you're mad, you go and see a doctor. I doubt it is actually. But so, so I remember phoning the family doctor and said, doctor, I need an appointment with you. I need to see you quickly. And he said, I'll see you tomorrow at nine o'clock. Yeah, well, I couldn't get it out of my mind, of course, and I stayed awake the whole night and working atlason fors. I came to the conclusion in the end that if something calls from you all the best in you love [00:18:00] kindness, unselfishness, you know, all those things which we take to be good in our society, how can it be mad? And how could it be wrong? So I decided then that the world was wrong and that I was fine. So I got up in the morning and I rang the doctor's surgery and I told the receptionist, it's all right. I don't need to see you. So what we have to say is that in the end, a lot of the world came round to her point of view, and it was much easier for [00:18:30] her to come out to herself than it had been for Joan, for example. And that was generally true. As the women came out, they found lesbian community, and as New Zealand became more liberal and their sexuality more protected by human rights legislation, it was a lot less painful for them to do so. So that's not a bad place for me to stop. The storytellers lives show how much better people survive when their environment is, is accepting. And I hope this book will remind [00:19:00] us that we should not let our society plunge back into prejudice. Thank you. Thank you, Lois. That was wonderful. And the book is truly launched so people can go and buy it. Lois is available for signing. Will that be at the desk over there or will it be at this desk? Be at that side. It'll be, it'll, she'll be over there able to [00:19:30] sign your book, and there's food and drink and people, so why don't you just enjoy yourselves?
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