It is exactly two weeks since the Destiny Church blackshirt rally on Parliament, yet those angry brown faces remain etched on my mind. Fathers and sons (there were some women around but the men and boys were the ones to the fore) in thrall to Pastor Brian Tamaki's message that homosexuality is the product of a screwed up family life and acceptance of it undermines good family values. Satan's work. Currently much of GayNZ.com's news and feature coverage relates to Destiny, its up-market cousin Maxim, and homophobia in various guises. We'll try to leaven these stories more in the coming weeks with other aspects of gay life in New Zealand. But Destiny and Maxim, despite their protestations, are a very real threat to the well-being of glbt New Zealanders and our families. I'd like to relate two very personal stories. Both are from my own family's experience. When I finally came out to my mother almost two decades ago it was a couple of years after my father had died. Immediate family is always hardest to take "the coming out risk" with, but all my friends and workmates had taken it well, my sister was cool, so I finally took the plunge with Mum one winter's day while visiting her down in Otago. She took it quite well, just a bit disappointed as most conservative parents are when they realise their offspring will have to take a personal path very different to what was envisaged. No grandkids, that kind of thing. She knew life for gays was fraught with difficulty and worried, as mothers do, about how her child would fare in life carrying this "burden". As a newlywed she had, in less enlightened times, seen the notorious Parker/Hulme case unfurl. And a tragic situation a few years later and much, much closer to our family had heightened her awareness of what homosexuality could lead to. Somewhere in her mind she knew there were those who said being gay was a willful choice, or even the result of bad parenting. She's damn proud of the way she and Dad brought up us kids, with good reason. I suspect that gnawed at her until she needed to talk to someone. She turned to the person who had, outside the family and close friends, offered her the most solace and perspective on the relatively early death of my dad... her Presbyterian minister. He understood Mum's concern and he understood homosexuality. "It's just the way he is," he told her. "He didn't choose it for himself and I'm sure God isn't judgmental in these things." And, equally reassuring, "It is nothing to do with the way you raised him, it's just something that happens sometimes." Mum was on the way to acceptance, of my sexuality and our family life. Two years later I brought Sam along on a visit and she didn't blink an eye. She was even concerned that we should have our preferred sleeping arrangements. She's been cool about it ever since, and luckily my sister arranged a couple of grandchildren which filled that particular gap. Unlike my mum's minister, Pastor Brian Tamaki is brainwashing the parents and children of his Destiny Church that homosexuality is an abomination, an affront to God and the result of a seriously screwed up family life. Publicly he has stated several times that in a balanced, moral family there will be no gay offspring. Taking into account the size of Destiny's youngish national congregation and the estimated occurrence of homosexuality in the general population I estimate there will be a thousand homosexual people in there somewhere. The older ones unaware or in denial. The younger ones, let's say 500 of these kids, yet to tackle the issue. When they start to realise they are "different" they will know, because of what they are being taught, that they are "bad people". Just imagine the corrosive influence of that "knowledge" circling endlessly in a devout and confused teenager's mind. When their sexuality becomes an issue what are the Destiny-brainwashed parents going to think of their children, and themselves as parents. If the family is the most important thing and they have failed God's plan, as defined by Tamaki, how much self-recrimination and doubt is going to cycle through those families before something explodes. And when they seek guidance from their spiritual adviser, a Tamaki-trained pastor who "knows" that these parents have screwed up in their primary role of parenting and that gay offspring are in the throes of a Satanic willfulness against God, what hideousness will unfold? Who will crack first... the 500 or so gay Destiny children? Their 500 Destiny mums? Their 500 Destiny dads? I said I had two stories to tell. Names in this next family story have been changed and placed obscured because my awareness of some of it is filtered through 45 years of quiet, whispered rememberings of now-elderly relatives and neighbours. One or two facts may be a bit wobbly but this story is, none the less, true. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of family outings to a cold Invercargill beach to dig for toheroas. We were often accompanied by Mary, the area Plunket nurse who lived in the little Plunket house over the back fence from our place. Her practical advice and caring attitude touched the lives of many of the families and children I grew up with. Ours was a small Southland farming service town, almost totally pakeha. Mary was Maori. She knew better than any pakeha how to dig faster than the toheroas could burrow, and she delighted in nibbling the tongue tips raw before they could retreat into their shells, a taste we just could not share! My dad always recalled with great fondness her earthy sense of humour over a glass of beer. Mum remembers gentler moments to do with Karitane milk powder, regular weighings and afternoon teas. "Remember Mary," the adults would say years later. "She was a real trick!" Anecdotes would be retold, including the one about the area doctor, the Plunket nurse and the bottles of illegal Hokonui whiskey that the Plunket Society was probably lucky not to know about. Dad, tough enough to walk away from a WWII bomber crash, said one tiny sip just about killed him. Mary was a lesbian. Everyone in my parents' circle apparently knew, yet amongst her friends and neighbours in small town 1950s rural New Zealand no-one seems to have held it against her. Not even the devout Catholic parents next door. Remarkable. She was a damned good friend and a damned good Plunket nurse. Mary had a girlfriend who lived in a small, isolated, marae-based settlement up past Dunedin. Occasionally Ripeka (let's call her Ripeka, sadly no-one remembers her real name now) would appear to stay a few days with Mary. Eventually the strain of living apart with only occasional togetherness must have been too much and Ripeka caught the train south and moved in with Mary in the little Plunket house over the fence behind dad's blackcurrants. The shit hit the fan. Within days Ripeka's family worked out where she was and why. A carload of big angry brown blokes turned up one morning and dragged Ripeka out of the house and back to the "embrace" of her family. We can only guess at the misery of that morning and the coming weeks. It took a day or so for Mary's neighbours to put two and two together and there seemed little they could do after the fact. But Mary was made of stronger stuff. A month or so later she headed north in her little Plunket car and somehow returned with her lover, much against Ripeka's family's wishes. This time the neighbours were seriously worried for them both. A kind of early neighbourhood watch scheme was thrown into place. The men kept watch by night, the women by day. Those men are all dead now, their surviving wives vague on the details. But a few days later there was somehow a repeat of the kidnapping and Ripeka was gone. Mary tried and tried over succeeding months to contact Ripeka, nothing worked. Mail was returned unopened, phonecalls hung up, visits rebuffed. Two young Maori women in love with each other were aggressively isolated. Probably without Ripeka's knowledge. Soon Mary too was gone from our small town, though no-one knew where to. Perhaps she had managed to link up with Ripeka again and perhaps they'd moved away, further afield. Then word reached our town through whispered but reliable sources, probably the area doctor. We children weren't told that one day Ripeka had walked away from her family's "embrace." She walked out to the Otago coast, kept walking into the sea, and never came back. Within a month, blamed by the family for Ripeka's suicide and tormented by the loss of her lover, Mary, who used to nibble the tips off toheroas and soothe tiny babies and young mums, who could throw back a slug of Hokonui and would tickle us kids in the back seat of our Vanguard on Friday night shopping trips to Invercargill while dad pretended to be angry at our giggling, killed herself. I never saw any of those angry brown faces that marched into our town. I never met Ripeka and I now have only a half-memory of Mary. But two weeks ago as I watched the Destiny rally of bigotry and intolerance dressed up as surety and piety I saw those angry brown faces on the move, and I wept. Jay Bennie - 6th September 2004