Tue 10 Jun 2008 In: Worth Checking Out View at Wayback View at NDHA
The next episode of Maori Television's LGBT documentary programme Takataapui will be broadcast at 9:30pm on Monday 16 June: Aotearoa in 1950's was a difficult time for takataapui women. Sylvia Kampaug's parents wanted her to change who she really was - wanted her to 'act like girls should' and put her into a mental institution to achieve this. But that was just the beginning. "I thought, 'fuck. I'll stay here, see if I care', that attitude you know," Kampaug says. "I'll handle that. You can't hurt me you can't do anything to me. "I had that all through life. People go to the movies - do you like comedies? I don't. I never go to something that's funny. I never laugh. I never do, cos I never had that childhood that made me like that. I don't find humour in these things… I don't laugh." Sylvia Kampaug tells her compelling and brave personal story with expert opinion from Dr. Miriam Saphira and Te Aho Tapu Psychologist, Sharon Rickard. "Lesbians ended up in Mental Hospitals for a variety of reasons," explains Saphira. "One way to get rid of people and to change them and to make them subservient is to treat them and throughout the ages the most bizarre things have been done to mental patients, so it wasn't much of a stretch of the imagination to think that we could use some of these treatments to make people straight." In the telling her tale to the Takataapui crew, Sylvia Kamphaug revealed that revisiting this material was one of the hardest things she has ever done in her life. She spent time in Arohata Prison for not conforming and 'acting up', she married a gay man and raised a family like other lesbians of her generation, initially to please others and fly under the radar. She has told her story so that there will be a record of not only her life, but one that may resonate with and tautoko other lesbians of her generation. Takataapui is broadcast on Maori Television each Monday night at 9:30pm, then repeats on Freeview's Stratos channel at 10pm. Takataapui TV - 10th June 2008