Sex education, homosexuality, and social contestation in 1970s New Zealand

Abstract

This essay examines the relationships between homosexuality and sex education in New Zealand during the 1970s. It argues that reading sex education debates and resources provides a useful way of exploring connections between the ontologies and politics of sexuality at that time. In particular, the advent of social movements concerned with sexual issues marked a turning point in homosexuality's appearance within formal and informal modes of sex education. During the 1970s, sex education and related debates became a key site at which various conceptualisations of homosexuality were constructed and contested. By analysing the struggles between radical and conservative perspectives, we can see how same‐sex desire came to symbolise changing sexual mores, as well as broader ideas about social order and social change.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by a Humanities Division Research Grant from the University of Otago, and the author is most grateful to Rob Joy for his research assistance. Staff at the New Zealand Head Office of the Family Planning Association have been most generous with archive access permissions and access to their own archives. Two referees provided helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. This contrasts with the periodisation in Stychin's account of the situation in the USA, where he argues that 1960s revolutionary consciousness gave way to reformism and rights‐based approaches during the 1970s (Stychin, 2005, p. 93).

2. Good discussions of the rise of Gay Liberation movements elsewhere on the globe can be found in Adam (1995) and Adam et al. (1999).

3. Men and women worked sometimes together, sometimes apart (Hall, 1992). Most of the New Zealand Homosexual Law Reform Society hierarchy was male, while Gay Liberation was mixed; many lesbians were involved with more general feminist initiatives, even though their relationships with other organising women were not always straightforward (Dann, 1985; Te Awekotuku et al., 1993; Collard, 2006).

4. Decriminalisation did not finally occur until 1986. Sexual relationships between women had never been illegal in New Zealand. Boggs (1995, p. 349) notes that during the 1970s the new social movements in the United States and Europe became more diverse in ideology and strategy than the 1960s groups, and this was certainly the case in New Zealand too.

5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick contrasts these views, characterising them as either minoritising or universalising. The minoritising view concerns itself with a ‘small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority’, while a ‘universalizing view’ understands homo/heterosexual definition as an ‘issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities’ (Sedgwick, 1994, p. 1). While the minoritising view suggests homosexuality's containment to a limited number of individuals, the universalising view evokes a set of universal sexual potentials and socially contingent, open and contested sexual categories (Sedgwick, 1994, pp. 1, 85).

6. The Tribunal criticised Itch for offering advice ‘at a crudely physical level, and pursuing gratification for its own sake’. Itch's editors wondered whether the ruling of indecency ‘is not as a result of the sexual material but as the result of the political attitudes that are conveyed’ (Anonymous, 1974a).

7. While the title implies youthful exuberance outdoors, the book was actually named after a completely innocuous painting by Flora Scales, a little‐known New Zealand artist (Alister Taylor, personal communication, 20 June 2005).

8. The All Blacks are the members of New Zealand's national rugby union team.

9. Some have argued that New Zealand moral conservative groups were yet insufficient in number, coherence and influence to constitute a social movement as such, something that did not happen until the 1980s (for example, Ryan, 1988, p. 79). This seems debateable; there were interconnections between groups, just as in the gay liberation movement. In any case, given that moral crusades have been defined as social movements, ones that resist ‘social changes in the nature of norms and values relating to moral issues’, or seek to create and enforce ‘moral rules’, the argument over when a crusade becomes a movement quickly becomes circular and rather pointless (Wallis, 1979, p. 92).

10. On moral entrepreneurs, be they righteous crusading reformers or the reinforcers of new rules and norms, see Becker (1973, chap. 8). On Whitehouse, see Wallis (1979, chap. 7).

11. Meanwhile, the British edition of the Little Red School Book was a target of Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners' Association (Wallis, 1979, p. 127).

12. There was no discussion of peeping toms or hippies in the British edition of the Little White Book, so this may have been added specifically for the New Zealand edition (Anonymous, 1972b).

13. NZ Truth took the credit for its ‘exposure of homosexual activists peddling their wares in secondary schools’, a theme that was endlessly repeated by other commentators (NZ Truth, 1979d, p. 17).