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ISSN 1446-4896

As of 19 November there had been 66 arrests of women and men petitioning for homosexual law reform in Hobart's Salamanca Markets. Local authorities have tried to prevent a Gay Law Reform Group stall, despite tolerating stalls for other political causes. The arrests have occurred each Saturday morning: 9 on 22 October, 13 the next week, then 27, then 17. On Saturday 19 November no arrests were made; the Council had permitted a stall but forbade any poster display or identification. When posters went up there was a dispute, but no arrests.

40 Sydney supporters picketed the Tasmanian Travel Centre in King Street at lunchtime on Monday 7 November, to coincide with the first court appearances in Hobart.

The Tasmanians deserve a great deal of mainland support. We mobilised well in solidarity with our British sisters and brothers against Thatcher's anti-democratic Section 28. With such a dynamic and.resolute campaign against a law with a 21 year penalty for consenting male/male sex, and with such outrageous attacks on the right to organise and speak out politically in our own country, our obligations are clear.

That the reactionary Tasmanian state government has banned explicit AIDS education material, and that its premier has said that homosexuals are the only people who are unwelcome as visitors or settlers, only compounds the urgency of the fight.

GSG hopes to assist the Tasmanian group in calling an international day of action for early in 1989. In the meantime money, petitions and letters of support should be sent to Hobart.

The Call to Australia resolution introduced into the NSW upper house on 22 September has been debated twice since, most recently on Thursday 17 November. It lias not been voted on yet. Nile wants to prohibit the promotion of homosexuality in NSW and ban the annual Mardi Gras. The Labor Party has introduced a substitution amendment on AIDS response, but this is subject to a further National Party amendment banning promotion of homosexuality in NSW schools.

With "promotion" dangerously undefined, we risk legislation that bans any honest discussion of sexual matters, and unprecedentedly wide-ranging censorship. We do not know whether debate on this resolution will resume in the upper house, or if it will eventually lapse without vote.

Violence and harassment by National Action and like minded groups has been on the increase lately, against Uniting Church leaders such as Rev Dorothy McMahon, against lesbian anti-racist activists, against African women, journalists and Aboriginal activists. In addition Jewish grave stones in Sydney have been vandalised,, perhaps in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against German Jews.

Lesbian and gay rights supporters should be prepared to join in any defence campaigns that are initiated by Gay and Lesbian Immigration Task Force people who are working in coalition with others being attacked by the thugs.

GSG continues to meet at 8pm on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at Men Opposing Patriarchy, 4ih floor, 56 Foster St, Surry Hills. For meeting details phone Ken on 211 0499 (10-6pm). Next dates are 24 Nov, 8 Dec. On 22 Dec, we'll have an end of year celebration (ring to find out venue). Next year's meetings will start 12 January, we'll skip the 26 January meeting cos its a holiday, and on 9 Feb, we'll have visitors from the Waratah Deaf Association to talk about issues for the lesbian and gay deaf community. GSG. PO Box 380. BROADWAY NSW 2007

It's virtually impossible to talk about lesbian politics or a lesbian movement because there are a myriad variants of lesbians and lesbianisms. There are the essentialists, the spiritualists, the separatists, the socialists, the non-feminists and the feminists — the list could go on.

Likewise it is difficult to talk about a lesbian movement in the same way one can talk about a gay male movement. Lesbians, as a political force in the wider world, have been located both within the women's liberation movement. And they have been critical and defining influences on those movements. Sometimes they have been in both of them, sometimes they have absented themselves from the male gay liberation movement; and sometimes there have been lesbians in each arguing with those in the other camp that they shouldn't be there at all. And all the time our autonomous lesbian movements have continued to operate.

So I have tried to confine my comments here to a kind of middle ground, to those areas where I think lesbians and gay men are starting to come together on political agendas, and some of the elements we have in common, and in common with the left in general in trying to think afresh about the arena of personal sexual politics. This convergence of interests, if such it is, comes at the end of a whole era where it was no longer proper to speak of gay politics as if that term absorbed both men and women. There has been an entire era in which symbolic name changes have been a very important thing. The Gay Counselling Service has become the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service: the Gay Immigration Taskforce has become the Gay and Lesbian Immiigration Taskforce, the Gay Rights Lobby has become the Gay and I.esbian Rights Lobby.

Nor has it been just a matter of semantics. That differentiation came out of a real differentiation which erupted in fairly bitter battles in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties, as gay men and lesbians trying to work together realised that they often had very different agendas and different ways of organising which made it extremely painful to try to maintain that coalition. Interestingly, however, in the last twelve months there has been a resurgence of coalition politics among gay men and lesbians. Most of the groups in the broader gay and lesbian community are now mixed groups and. while women are still a minority in many of those groups, they are no longer a powerless minority: we're no longer just addendums to organisations: we are critically and centrally placed wiihin those organisations.

That change has not come about simply through a change of heart, or from a decision that we all want to give each other a second chance,or be nice to one another. Rather, it has come about because of some changes in the objective political situation, such that the political arena provides us with shared political agendas now, much more than in the early 'eighties. We've also had the benefit of the influence of our parallel movements in the United States and in Britain which have demonstrated the importance of coalition politics in fighting the conservative political and moral agendas of the "eighties.

By coalition politics, incidentally, I mean not just combination with our gender counterparts, but also with the left in general, and the creation of links with anti-racist struggles and progressive movements across a broad spectrum. The upsurge of the New Right, and the election of the new government in New South Wales in particular, mean that the issues which we still have to fight will increasingly be shared issues between lesbians and gay men and have shared agendas.

In New South Wales, the Festival of Light now wields much more power than before and they are frankly trying to stifle homosexuality in all of its manifestations, trying to reproduce Thatcherism in NSW. And while the expressed justification for these attacks may be AIDS, their proposals would equally affect lesbians even though we are, of course, the lowest risk group.

Indeed, the Greiner government in NSW has its own conservative moral agenda, which is going to affect lesbians and gay menspecifically as, indeed, a whole range of other groups, broadly speaking the disadvantaged groups in our community.

Again, the Victorian summary offences legislation was used recently to arrest and convict a woman for a sculpture in Mildura which had an explicitly lesbian text. It is worthy of note that in his summing up the magistrate explicitly referred to the problem as one of the "promotion of homosexuality" which should be stopped

More generally, there will be problems with the continued funding of the few explicitly gay and lesbian autonomous services. In NSW there is now a tax on the 20-10 gay and lesbian youth refuge, with the suggestion that maybe the best thing for it would be for it to be brought under the umbrella of the Wesley Central Mission (the mind boggles!)

Sympathetic bureaucrats are suggesting that women working in women's services should delete as many references as possible to the words "lesbian" and "feminist" in their submissions. And there will he funding problems with internal progressive units in government departments. Already the Anti-Discrimination Board is being starved of funds. The cuts in education m NSW will affect the non-sexist programs which are dear to the hearts of lesbians

On the federal level there is also the question of immigration rights, the recognition that there are, in fact, gay and lesbian Australians who are unfortunate enough to fall in love with people of other nationalities, and who want to live together. The gay and lesbian immigration taskforce is, aside from the AIDS organisations, perhaps the largest and most flourishing gay or lesbian political organisation in Australia, with attendances at meetings in Sydney, for example, of seventy people a month. It's interesting that the taskforce has worked closely in coalition with other groups concerned about the upsurge of racism in the immigration debate, and has worked in organisations where, before, we would never have been invited, such as the new national immigration forum being convened by such respectable groups as the Australian Council of Churches and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils.

All this suggests that there is likely to be a high visibility of the gay and lesbian movement in the next couple of years - probably much higher than in the recent past — which is not to say that this comparatively low profile of the movement should be confused with political inactivity. Lesbians and some gay left men have been highly visible in a whole range of political issues and organisations over the last few years. In the January 26 march for Aboriginal sovereignty and land rights in Sydney, the gay contingent was large and the lesbian contingent was huge. We've seen lesbians and gay men active in solidarity struggles; lesbians have been key and critical players in the peace movement, and in the education sphere. So there hasn't been any let-up of specifically political activity by lesbians and progressive gay men.

Now, however, we will very likely see it supplemented by a much higher profile in the areas of explicitly homosexual and sexual politics.

And, indeed, it's impossible to discuss the state of lesbian politics without raising the question of sexual politics. And here I'm bound to say thai it seems to me, on both an individual and a collective basis, there's been a retreat on the left from a scrutiny of personal sexual politics. One of the major breakthroughs of the women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement in the early 'seventies was in deprivatising the area of sex and sexual relationships and bringing them into the arena of sexual politics. I sometimes wonder now where all of that energy has gone.

There are still pockets of men and women consciously or deliberately worrying the bone, especially among the younger generation of lesbians and feminists. But it seems lhat many of us who lived through the turmoils of the 'seventies have retreated from that arena of personal sexual political struggle. We're still active on issues that bear on the sexual domain, like abortion, AIDS and sex education — and that's good. But it's different from thoughtfully, collectively and publicly examining the meaning of sex in our lives, and how the conduct of our personal sexual practices and relationships is influenced by and, in turn, impacts upon, our political views and aspirations.

I'm personally not surprised by this retreat because many of us who lived through the 'seventies got a bit bruised and bloodied and battered in them. But I think that it is a problem. I think that wc have lost that ground; I think that the conduct of sexual relationships, the conduct ol our personal sexual politics, have become reprivatised in a way that I didn't think would be possible after the 'seventies. It hasn't been reprivatised within the four walls of the family home, as was the case before, but within the comfortable circles of our small political and cultural tendencies.

I know that, within the lesbian movement, if we could characterise it as such, wc had some dreadfully difficult debates in the early eighties between lesbians and feminists with completely different views about that arena of sexual politics. Wc had major battles which focussed around issues like censorship and S&M and paedophilia, but which were really about the role of sex. How can you reconstruct your unconscious mind, which has been so deeply formed and scarred by this capitalist and patriarchal society? How much can you push the margins? What's the boundary between pleasure and danger? How do women cope with the fact that, for us, sex is never ambiguous, that because we have objective oppressive relations in our society, for women sex is always ambiguous, iy is always potentially both pleasure and danger? Those were some of the questions we faced. We split over that, and ultimately we retreated into our own areas. Some focussed on the dangers of the sexual domain, and major campaigns against censorship, for example, and S&M. Others focussed on the pleasure idea of libertarian release, of a myriad forms of sexuality. And we've never brought the two sides together again.

It seems to me that gay men are precisely at that point now, too, because for the first time in their history, gay men are also faced with that ambiguity of sex — that it is both pleasure and danger. I hope that gay men will be able to hold those two poles together, and not split in the way in which the feminist movement split over those issues. We need to reopen thedebate over sexual politics on that level, and not just stay in the safer domains where we can fight more easily around the issues that impinge on it, but which allow us to remain silent and privatised about the actual conduct of sexual relationships, the actual form of our sexual practices, and how these actually impinge upon our politics. How can our politics change them? And where our politics in fact are useless, and unable to change them, do we have to live with what we've got?

BETTY HOUNSLOW works at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Sydney.

These two articles were originally delivered as talks at Sydney's "Politics in the Pub" series at the Harold Park Hotel in August.

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This page updated 18 SEPTEMBER 2014 and again on 26 APRIL 2017

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