Unpublished Post-War Writing and Emergent Gay Cultures

Abstract

The 1950s and ’60s were pivotal decades in the emergence of modern gay life. New Zealand’s cities expanded rapidly after the end of the war, and the size of homosexual networks grew quickly. There were profound contradictions too. While many men partied, others were imprisoned for same-sex activity. A homemade queer literature accompanied these changes, and four examples illustrate the tensions of the time. The first, an essay called “De Profundis for Today,” was the work of Dunedin businessman Ernie Webber, who wrote it in Mt Eden Prison in 1957. The second piece, an early 1960s novel titled “The Rock Orchid,” is by Bert Pimley, a fellow inmate of Webber at Mt Eden. The third and fourth pieces, short essays by Auckland man Don Goodsell, are very different in their context and tone. The evocatively titled “Did You Ever See a Dream Limping?” and “The Night is Young and We’re So Beautiful” tell not of imprisonment but of the social opportunities of New Zealand’s cities during the 1960s