The title of this recording is "A Happy Memory". It is described as: In this documentary a group of men reflect back on a happy gay memory. It was recorded in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand on the 13th February 1999. This is a podcast recording and features the voices of Gareth Farr, Shane Town and Steve Danby. Their names are spelt correctly, but may appear incorrectly spelt later in the document. The duration of the recording is 16 minutes. A list of correctly spelt content keywords and tags can be found at the end of this document. A brief description of the recording is: In this documentary a group of men reflect back on a happy gay memory. The content in the recording covers the decades 1970s through to the 1990s. A brief summary of the recording is: This summary encapsulates a podcast titled "A Happy Memory," recorded in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on February 13, 1999, featuring the voices of Gareth Farr, Shane Town, and Steve Danby. Throughout the 16-minute recording, these individuals reflect on their past experiences and share nostalgic anecdotes that symbolize the essence of their identities and the resilience they have demonstrated over the years. The documentary-style podcast spans across the decades from the 1970s through to the 1990s, meticulously touching upon personal narratives, each with a unique blend of emotion and humor. Anecdotes range from a fleeting encounter with a charismatic visitor that almost sours due to an ill-timed odor, to a surprise trip to Australia for a heartfelt birthday reunion, defying the distance that separates loved ones. The joy found in these stories is interwoven with reflections on relationships, cherished family moments, and coming of age in a time when the societal acceptance of queer lifestyles was markedly different. One particular story narrates the whimsical misunderstanding of traditional Maori carvings, while another reveals the anxious anticipation of finding community and acceptance upon moving to Wellington. One of the voices shares a sublime expression of having a crush, drawing on the universal experience of longing and the internal acknowledgment of one's identity. Further emphasizing the significance of community, personal memories tied to Vinegar Hill, a known gathering place for the gay community, are joyfully recounted. Perhaps one of the most poignant aspects explored within the podcast is the collective remembrance of those lost to HIV/AIDS. The speakers lovingly preserve the memory of friends who have passed away, keeping their legacy alive through vivid stories of their vitality and the irreplaceable imprint they have left on their lives. These narratives are interspersed with instances of assertiveness against discrimination, like taking a stand against a corporate giant to uphold gay rights, thereby showcasing not only the personal victories but also the broader strides towards equity and inclusion. The recording culminates with a serene observation of public affection between two people, a testament to progress and the increasing freedom to express love openly. This documentary captures the emotions attached to these memories and immortalizes them as a testament to the resilience and humanity of the gay community within its historical context. The full transcription of the recording follows.  It includes timestamps every thirty seconds in the format [HH:MM:SS].  The transcription begins:  Oh, OK. So, like, there's a Scottish boy, there's a Scottish boy, this gorgeous Scottish boy who, um, I met in Wellington, and he was only here for a week, and I had this wonderful time with him, and, uh, I keep saying No, no, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I couldn't possibly No, no, no. And he was like, Oh, come on, come home to my hotel. Oh, no, I'm not that sort of girl. I don't do that sort of thing. And then he, um he said, Well, look, let me walk you back to your car. I said, [00:00:30] I've got to go home now. I've got to go home all the time thinking Oh, come on, Gareth. Come on, Go for it. Go for it. Go back to his hotel. No, no, no. Yes. No. Yes. No. So he said, OK, I'll walk you back to your car. And, um my car was parked on Tennyson Street next to the symphony orchestra, and we were just walking down Tennyson Street and he said, Come on, kiss me. Come on, kiss me. And I said, Oh, what the hell, right? And, um oh, he gave me the best kiss I'd had in ages. It was just fantastic. And [00:01:00] I was just standing there with this perfect moonlit evening. Perfectly, perfectly romantic sort of scene out of a movie. And then all of a sudden, this absolutely ghastly stench of rotten seafood from cooked straight seafoods, which was over the road, just wafted over the two of us. And he just sort of pulled himself away and stared at me in absolute horror. And I was like, What? No, it's not me, he said, Oh, thank God [00:01:30] for that. I thought I just made a terrible mistake. I was like, It's the seafood place. I do wash, you know. And, uh, that was the end of my beautiful romantic evening. Luckily enough, the next night I went back to his hotel room, and it was much better. There was no, um, rotten smell of seafood, so they made me laugh. Though I've been in a relationship now for 10 years, and about three years ago my partner [00:02:00] was made redundant and he decided that he was going to go and see some friends of his in Australia and have a break after working for the organisation he'd been with for 20 years and he went off to Australia and I spent the first week that he was away miserable because I missed him because we hadn't basically been away from each other for any length of time. And some friends in [00:02:30] Australia rang me and said It's his birthday when he arrives the day he arrives at the part of Australia, they live in and go out of Sydney and they said, Why don't you come over? We've got a group of friends together and we're gonna have a birthday party for him. So I thought that would be a good idea. And when I rang him a couple of days before that, I said, Uh, I would be working the next two days, so I'll ring him After that, I'll ring him on his birthday in the evening, so that was [00:03:00] fine. I rang the travel agent who said Oh yeah, when do you want to fly over there? And I said, Oh, I want to fly tomorrow morning first flight out. So I did and I flew off to Sydney, caught the train to Gosford. I'd never been to Gosford before. It was pitch Black didn't know it was an hour and a quarter out of Sydney. Didn't know where I was going to found my way there, Didn't know the people I was going. The people that were meeting me at the other end but managed to catch up with them. They [00:03:30] picked me up, and the next day my partner was arriving on the train and we arrived at the railway station. After he'd rung, he didn't even know I was there. And to see him recognise me after I got out of the car and burst into tears and give me a big hug in public with no fear of what was going on was just great. And it's a moment I'll treasure for the rest of my life. [00:04:00] I remember when I was about 10 and my baby brother had just been born and we went up to Waitangi with the family and that was me, Mom, dad and my elder brother and my baby brother, and we went to the meeting house at Waitangi, and [00:04:30] my father was I don't know what he was doing, but he was hanging the different, um carvings in the house, so I went along and did the same thing until someone pointed out to me that I was actually hanging the men's dicks. But no, I don't know if that was like for telling of things to come or yes, I'm kind of one of those ones, [00:05:00] and I just never lived down. I was asked to leave, um, secondary school about three weeks into the seventh form for a variety of reasons which I will not go into. And my mother pulled me and I went down to Wellington, sort of. I got a job within an hour, and then I went back to Masterton, and then I sort of had to pack [00:05:30] up and move moved down to Wellington, and, um, my mother pulled me aside and she sort of she didn't quite know how to say this in any way at all, but she she didn't know I was gay at that stage. We hadn't had the coming out talk and she she sort of said, Well, look, you know, you really do need to be aware of, um gay, um, not of gay. She didn't use that of dark. Yeah, of of men lurking in alleys, who might [00:06:00] draw your aside because of your cherubic looks, and she actually used the word cherubic looks. And I can remember thinking at that time that Wellington was an hour and 40 minutes away on the train. And really, I couldn't wait for that hour and 40 minutes to be over and that I was hoping that one of those men might just be on platform nine waiting for me when I got there. Needless to say, he wasn't, and it took me about three months to find Wellington's gay community in 1976 or whatever [00:06:30] having a crush. It's, I think, it's it's that's a fun part of being. I think probably it's a fun part of being straight as well. But having a crush on someone, it's It's sort of affirms that you you are a person. You you feel for someone that you have the capabilities to feel for someone. I've only had 11 real crash, and it's sort of like, um, it's sort of like was the [00:07:00] trigger point to to actually admit that I'm gay and then to come out because that was the time I had a crush on my roommate, not at the time. He wasn't my roommate, but I had a crush on this guy. He was from Warehouse, and he he moved in around April. And that's sort of when I noticed him. And that's when the crash develops. And at that time, I haven't had a crush before and I didn't know what was coming over me. Yeah, and, um, I sort of knew his roommate at that time, [00:07:30] and his roommate wanted a single room, and I had I had a single room, so I took the risk of swapping rooms with them and I actually moved in, probably about two weeks later, after my exams. And, um, yeah, I moved in with them and spent the rest of the second semester with him. So it's kind of fun. Yeah, I guess for me, in a way, when I was thinking about [00:08:00] this, I thought the gay memories that mean the most to me as gay things are the gay people who I remember who aren't here anymore. And it's funny to say that this is a happy gay memory, but I guess there's things I know and that I remember that no one else does about people we're never gonna see again and a couple of esoteric things, things that aren't events or anything. It's I can [00:08:30] see the spring and my friend Lee rans Field's Walk Lee died of AIDS, I suppose, five years ago now. But all I have to do is just visualise them, and I can get a whole aspect of his vivacity and his joie de Viva from the way he moved. And then someone who no one will remember now who was never a very out there gay person didn't have a big circle of friends. Quite quiet was a guy called Wayne Dunn, and he died [00:09:00] of AIDS, I suppose, 12 years ago, a long time ago, Um, and it's a note in his voice. I remember. And when I think of Wayne, I hear that note. And it's not as if he's never gone because he's still 23 and now I'm pushing 40 somehow he sort of preserved an aspect. But all I've got left, in a [00:09:30] way is a vague, fuzzy picture of what Wayne Dunn looked like and a certain note that I can remember hearing in his voice. And if I ever hear anybody else making the same sound. Wayne's back with me, and we weren't close. We weren't good friends or anything like that. But that's something that is preserved in the wiring of my brain. That's kind of like a happy gay memory because he lives on in it, and I think that's quite neat. [00:10:00] Um, every year in Wellington, over the Christmas period, there's a gay camp at a place called Vinegar Hill, and about five years ago I went out there with a group of friends and we arrived about seven o'clock at night, and we all put up our, um, tents. And it was really good because all the people around us helped put up [00:10:30] the tent, helped us put up our tent. We had a great big, huge tent. There was about six of us in this big tent, and we blew up our lidos and things, and it's really, really roughing it. You know, there's no proper toilet facilities, nothing. And anyway, um, II. I decided to take a walk down to the river and I'm walking down to the river and I see this woman, and the next thing she turns around and [00:11:00] she's got a chainsaw and she's chopping up firewood. And I said to her, What are you doing? And she says, I'm chopping up the firewood fire tonight and he's this really butch guy and a frock with a chase. I think that's my funniest. [00:11:30] I got really distraught when and that question was asked because the first thing that came to mind was a complete blank. Um, I couldn't find a specific memory that revolved around me being a gay man, and that made me happy. Um, I mean, I could obviously take well, to me, it's It's an obvious tack that there are. There's I've got [00:12:00] lovely, happy memories of sexual experiences as a gay man. But I wanted the question to be broaden that I mean, yes, a wonderful happy memory of the first time at the age of 14, ever actually having sex with another male, a school friend. And it was It was mystical and magical and sensual and sexual, and it was like learning to breathe. It was something extraordinary. So yes, happy. But that wasn't as gay male, certainly not as a gay adult male anyway. So I sort of rack my brains [00:12:30] about a happy moment as a gay man. And the next thing that came to mind was taking on my my employer, um, a large airline company over a human rights case, um, discriminating against against gay employees in terms of not honouring or allowing special leave when partners are injured. And I fought and I fought and I fought over a six month period and one they backed down change the policy. And that was [00:13:00] for me. It was a wonderful, defining moment. It was great that an individual gay man could stand up against a corporation with billions and win because he knew he was right morally and legally. Finally. So, yes, that was that was a moment of triumph and victory and pride. Perhaps so I'm not sure it was happy. I mean, what came to mind was OK, if you've won World War Two, you're glad you won. But are you happy you had to fight the war? Probably not. So yeah, happy and then [00:13:30] actually walking here this afternoon. It was a lovely moment, walking past the library and sitting in the sun with two guys, maybe in the twenties, on a park bench, and they were obviously sitting there enjoying the time and the day. It wasn't until I got a little bit closer. I was just that. One of them had his arms around the other one's shoulder and was just gently stroking the side of his neck and obviously lovers or friends or whatever it was, that was lovely. That was a really happy moment, just seeing these two guys completely at ease enjoying themselves [00:14:00] in public. The full transcription of the recording ends. A list of keywords/tags describing the recording follow. These tags contain the correct spellings of names and places which may have been incorrectly spelt earlier in the document. The tags are seperated by a semi-colon: 1970s ; 1990s ; Aotearoa New Zealand ; Australia ; Christmas ; Circle of Friends Memorial ; Events ; Gareth Farr ; God ; Gosford ; HIV / AIDS ; Job ; People ; Shane Town ; Steve Danby ; Tennyson Street ; Vinegar Hill / Putai Ngahere Domain ; Wellington ; birthday ; camp ; change ; coming out ; community ; face ; family ; fear ; friends ; fun ; gay ; hell ; hotel ; hug ; human rights ; individual ; library ; other ; policy ; programme ; romantic ; scene ; school ; sea ; secondary school ; sex ; straight ; time ; travel ; voice ; walking ; women. The original recording can be heard at this website https://www.pridenz.com/a_happy_memory.html. The master recording is also archived at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand.  For more details visit their website https://tiaki.natlib.govt.nz/#details=ecatalogue.1089135. Please note that this document may contain errors or omissions - you should always refer back to the original recording to confirm content.