<i>Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand Barry Reay Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand. By Chris Brickell. Auckland: Godwit, 2008. Pp. 430. $49.99 (paper). How does one write a nation’s history of same-sex desire and practice when there is almost no national sexual historiography? What would such a history look like when there is little to engage with in terms of local theory and practice? An answer, an optimum outcome, is Mates & Lovers. Chris Brickell’s pioneering work combines his sophisticated knowledge of the international literature with enterprising national archival work to produce what must be one of the most significant national histories of male homosexuality ever written. The title is quietly subversive in a New Zealand context, for it refers to Brickell’s country’s obsession with mateship, with close male bonding and the kinds of privileged masculinity that such relationships declare. Mates & Lovers is an attempt to queer this national (indeed Australasian) preoccupation. Yet the book can also be read with profit by an international readership. The history of same-sex sex is of worlds that are simultaneously recognizable and different, and one of the dangers of writing sexual histories is the imposition of modern meanings and interpretations where the forcing of the familiar forecloses any discussion of the different. It is ironic that this inability to read the past becomes most acute with recent history and that historians are more willing to recognize complexity in the sexual premodern than the modern. Rather than assuming a single history of homosexuality, historians now consider a variety of categories of male same-sex desire—friendship, sodomy, effeminacy, inversion—in the period leading up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when homosexuality itself became a type. But even that final category, whether “homosexual” or “gay,” should not preclude modern multiple forms of same-sex sexual expression. The book’s subtitle, A History of Gay New Zealand, implies a sexual certainty that its author is immediately keen to deny. The word gay, he points out in his preface, is not meaningful in its modern sense until the 1970s, and so he does not use it for his histories of earlier decades (“it is important to consider the vocabulary of sex and intimacy in its own specific context”), though the obvious risk is that mindsets will have already been reinforced by that very naming in the title (9). It could be argued that Brickell never reconciles this tension between sexual ambiguity and identity. Thus he [End Page 328] has men who “laid the foundations for the emergence of a modern gay identity” and an “emerging ‘queer’ world” (what could be more teleological?) while simultaneously stressing male same-sex uncertainty, ambiguity, and “imprecision” in his sexual history (8–9, 16–20). Yet his emergent “modern gay identity” dissolves almost at the moment of its making (20). Perhaps Brickell will have his proverbial cake, but even those who look for the sexual teleology will appreciate his careful, indeed loving, construction of the richness of male homoeroticism in New Zealand’s past. Friendship, that category of varied inflection, lies at the heart of Brickell’s analysis, the mates and lovers of the book’s title. Because it leaves traces of the expression of same-sex love and passion, friendship illustrates perfectly the indecipherability of the history of homosexuality. Friendship was a highly ambiguous term that covered a range of sexual and nonsexual expression. We simply cannot assume that male friends were lovers, as close male friendship—including affectionate address—was a cultural commonplace. The companionship of men was stressed rather than the sexuality of their interactions. Yet this very closeness could lead to something more. We can see friendship visually in the tantalizingly intimate, nineteenth-century photographs of male friends—who may, or may not, have been what we would call more than friends. The temptation for historians, not entirely resisted by all, though scrupulously avoided by our author, is to read too much into these friendships. The book ranges from early British settler society in the 1840s to the visible gay culture of the 1990s. The themes and imagery—drag, homosexual effeminacy, physique culture, the impact...