A celebrated civil rights anniversary arrives amid fresh fears of shifts in societal sentiment.
Forty years of progress does not always guarantee another 40.
The Homosexual Law Reform Bill, which decriminalised consensual sex between men aged 16 and over, passed by just five votes on July 9, 1986, becoming law on August 8.
University of Otago writer and historian Prof Chris Brickell said there was nothing inevitable about the 1986 reform.
"Oh, it was hard won," Prof Brickell said.
Wellington Central MP Fran Wilde’s member’s Bill, introduced in March 1985, had two parts — one decriminalising sex between men, the other outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
The second part of the legislation was rejected, and it took another seven years for that to pass in 1993 as an amendment to the Human Rights Act.
Before 1986, laws against homosexual men were never enforced evenly.
Prof Brickell’s study of about 500 men jailed for sex with other men at New Plymouth Prison between 1917 and 1954 exposed a stark class divide.
"The policing of homosexuality through that period was largely working-class men and shopkeepers, small business owners, this kind of thing, but not the elite," he said.
His examination of the men incarcerated under the New Plymouth regime showed a complete absence of wealthy individuals and professionals.
Except for some shopkeepers, the prison population contained no politicians, academics, lawyers or established commercial figures.
Armed forces personnel enjoyed similar protection.
During the 1940s and 1950s, civilian men who engaged in sexual relations with military personnel were locked up, while the servicemen involved were often not.
"In court sometimes a man might say, ‘oh, yeah, and then I went to this guy’s flat and then people dressed in drag and then I had sex with this guy and then we went and had sex with that guy’ — not guilty."
Early policing was mostly of Pākehā.
"That was because the cities were more Pākehā than Māori because that Māori rural-urban migration didn’t really kick in until the 1950s."
Asked whether the four decades since the law change had been an unbroken advancement of additional rights for the LGBTQIA community, Prof Brickell was no longer certain.
"I would have said so until maybe two or three years ago, and now I’m just not so sure."
Human rights amendments, civil unions and marriage equality had followed law reform, but then came "Trumpism", the culture wars and the international rise of the far Right, he said.
New Zealand now had "probably the most socially conservative government" of his recent lifetime, a coalition "trying to define what a man and woman" were.
Parliament is considering the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill now before a select committee.
"There are still perils out there," Prof Brickell said.
Queer events now sometimes had security guards at entrances, something he had personally never encountered before 2020.
"Even in Dunedin, I’ve been to an event with security on the door."
Modern accusations of "grooming" were the old idea of "moral contagion" repackaged, he said.
"There’s nothing new about that. It’s just got new language attached to it."
Reflecting on the resurgence of right-wing ideological battles, history offered a grim warning, he said.
"So the past is always with us, right? Whether we know it or not.
"I don’t want to say that nothing changes because, of course, it does, but that we have these echoes and traces of the past that just keep coming back to haunt us," Prof Brickell said.
