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    Now reading: inside the video archives of gay liberation, melbourne’s first queer student group

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    inside the video archives of gay liberation, melbourne’s first queer student group

    Filmmaker and historian Barbara Creed remembers the university protest group that changed a city.

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    The first meeting of student-led protest group Gay Liberation was held in a Melbourne University classroom in 1971. When videographer and future professor of film studies, Barbara Creed, took her seat she probably didn’t imagine she was becoming an integral part of a movement that would alter the course of gay rights in Australia forever.

    Across the next two years, through protests and events, Gay Liberation would bring homosexuality out from the underground and proudly onto the streets of Melbourne. Together they would motivate and support members of their community as they broke through the oppressive silence and societal judgement that came with being gay in the early 70s. The group would eventually draw to an end in 1973, with participants splintering off to lead a multitude of related action groups.

    With her Super 8 in hand between 1971 and 1973, Creed methodically recorded the waves of Gay Liberation protests that clogged the city’s main arteries for hours on Friday nights when traffic was at a peak. She also captured the movement’s meetings, picnics and the messages they spray painted on the city’s walls. Two years later, in 1975, she would produce her first documentary, Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion. It was her attempt to challenge the mainstream history that erased the lives and experiences of LGBT individuals.

    Four decades later, Creed’s films exist at the heart of her ongoing mission to preserve and highlight Australia’s queer history and provide LGBT Australians with a sense of personal heritage.

    i-D spoke to Creed about the importance of documenting gay history, the lingering impact of Gay Liberation and the role of film in social progression.

    Hi Barbara. So firstly, why is it so important for you to create artistic documentations of gay history?
    Well, it can only be beneficial because it means these documents are creating a record. Without that, gay people, or any other marginalised group, don’t have their own history. If marginalised groups can’t access their own history it makes them feel impotent, invisible and without a voice.

    It’s something I feel very strongly about changing, because the dominant straight world documents their history all the time. It’s what’s taught in schools and universities, it’s what fills the shelves of libraries – it’s this enormous documenting process that goes on and on.

    Can you tell me a bit about the movement in Melbourne in the 70s?
    We were called Gay Liberation, our name was usually accompanied on posters and signs by something like gay women, lesbians and pooftas or gay women, homosexual men — we always made it clear men and women were involved.

    The very first meeting of Gay Liberation was held at Melbourne University — it was fantastic. There were only 20 of us. We would meet regularly and out of those meetings came the first gay consciousness raising groups, where seven or eight of us gathered to tell our life stories. It was all confidential amongst the group, that was incredibly important.

    My home in Carlton was the centre for a while until we could afford to get a place. We had regular marches in the city and held dances at night club venues. The press were interested in stories so it became a sort of public interest. Back then [being] gay was a public talking point.

    What were those protests like?
    As you can see through the footage, they were always peaceful. We would fill Bourke Street or Collins Street, usually Friday evening for maximum impact, all the traffic would stop and police were everywhere, we would just march with our banners. Some people would clap, others yell abuse and then we would go off to our dances.

    Did you do other events as a group?
    We did a lot. I remember we did a gay picnic in the Botanical Gardens in ’74. Some of the guys were in drag and we decided to play spin the bottle. All of a sudden, two policemen came and said, “you’ve got to stop this, it’s not legal.” We said we weren’t doing anything wrong, we are enjoying ourselves, and no one was complaining. They proceeded to look up some old rule book on the Botanical Gardens to find rule that said you could not play games in the gardens. We said, “what about that family playing cricket?” They said they are “normal games.” By that time the press had turned up so we were all on the front page of the Sunday papers which was great because that’s the sort of publicity we wanted.

    What was the value of being active and visible in the media?
    You want media attention. You want to make yourself visible because the main reason why many people fear gay people is because the gay person is the other whom they think they’ve never even met. By putting yourself out there, which you can do by appearing on TV or marching down the street looking like anyone else, you demystify the stereotype. Unless you make yourself visible, the general public has no way of knowing that gay people are all very different and all very much like themselves, because the most powerful form of oppressing the other is through stereotyping.

    A large part of Gay Liberation was about reclaiming the language that had been used by conservative society for the denigration of gay people. How did you do this?
    So we had banners and posters that said lesbians are lovely and gay is good, that kind of thing, to reclaim the words that had been used negatively. We also took the pink triangle to use as a badge. During WW2, the Nazis put gay people into gas chambers wearing an inverted pink triangle. We took it and we put that on our weekly posters and signs.

    Do you think the Gay Liberation movement helped develop this language in Australia?
    Oh yes, absolutely. We did a lot with words; we always used the words lesbian, homosexual, faggot to reclaim language because language is always something used to oppress minorities. Having the visual supplements of photography and film would have also contributed to creating a dialogue. We went out and did a lot of spray paintings: we painted lesbians are everywhere and lesbians are lovely on brick walls. It was very important to have a visual presence.

    Can you tell us a bit about your film Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion?
    In the early 70s, I received a grant to make a documentary film. It was 45 minutes and consisted of a lot of street interviews asking people what they thought of homosexuality. Some people were remarkably tolerant and a lot of people remarkably intolerant; probably the worst response was when a lot of people kept citing a story from the bible of how god would destroy the world if gay people were allowed to exist. I remember another guy saying, we should all be flushed down the toilet.

    I wanted a record to show my friends what we were doing. I suppose because I was so interested in film, I thought there should be a record of current attitudes for the future.

    In your expert opinion, what is the power of film in social progression?
    When film began in the early 20th century, it was known as the new art form of the emotion. The idea was to make film a universal language: a language everyone spoke to help do away with difference. Because silent film didn’t need language, it could speak to anybody. The early filmmakers of the silent period said, film is the medium through which we will bring around world peace. There was this very optimistic belief in the power of cinema as a healing tool because it dealt with emotions and you could show the plight of other people.

    When I was growing up, I was really drawn to film because it enabled you to enter intimate worlds of other people — it transported you into other places, other issues, other problems.

    Credits


    Text Alexandra Manatakis
    Photography courtesy of Barbara Creed
    Video footage courtesy of Barbara Creed and Wind & Sky Productions

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