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An exhibit at the Charlotte Museum, New Lynn (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)
An exhibit at the Charlotte Museum, New Lynn (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)

SocietyJuly 21, 2019

The museum protecting, and celebrating, New Zealand’s lesbian history

An exhibit at the Charlotte Museum, New Lynn (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)
An exhibit at the Charlotte Museum, New Lynn (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)

Hundreds of artefacts connected with the lesbian community in New Zealand are displayed in a small volunteer-run museum in West Auckland.

Charmaine always had crushes on girls. When she was head girl of Auckland Girls’ Grammar, she fell in love with her deputy. Her mother warned her of the dangers of intense friendships with women, and she always carried with her a nervous, sick feeling in her stomach.

Beth realised she was a lesbian when she was living in a convent. She formed a special friendship with another nun, but they were split up when they were sent to different convents and were never allowed to contact each other again. Beth always regretted that she never had any mentors.

Sue was violent, and ended up being sent to Oakley Hospital. But things weren’t so bad – all the lesbian mental nurses she met there made her feel like she wasn’t alone.

Miriam Saphira first heard the word “lesbian” in 1972 when she met Sharon Alston, a very obvious and very out lesbian, at an Auckland Women’s Liberation meeting. When she heard the word and discovered its associations with Ancient Greece and the poet Sappho, everything fell together. Almost 50 years later, Saphira is a trustee of the Charlotte Museum Trust and tells the stories of Charmaine, Beth, Sue, and countless others, at Aotearoa’s first and only lesbian museum.

Dr Miriam Saphira, co-founder of the Charlotte Museum (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)

“It started with that quilt and that badge collection.” The first thing you see when you walk into the Charlotte Museum is a patchwork quilt made of T-shirts, stitched together by Saphira and her daughter.

“People say, ‘what’s a police car doing in there?’” Saphira says, looking up at a patch of the quilt with a screen-printed police car on it. “She was my girlfriend.” Back then, Saphira had to speak in code when she rang her girlfriend at work. “If I wanted to say… ‘Jan and Bobbi, maybe we should have them over for dinner,’ I would say ‘Jan and Robert’ or ‘John and Bobbi’ or something like that, to try and masculinise it, so we weren’t suggesting two women were coming over for dinner… We were always careful.”

Another patch of the quilt reads: “But what do lesbians do? Well, we go to work and look after children, visit friends, join political parties, grow vegetables, dance at parties, attend school, and enjoy holidays. But also run, swim, shit, sing, love, and cry.” One time Saphira’s boss, after a few drinks at a work function, asked her, “what do you actually do in bed?”

“I feel sorry for your wife if you don’t know,” she replied.

The Charlotte Museum sits in the middle of New Lynn’s industrial area, with a rainbow flag out the front that’ll make you go, “Oh, this must be it.” It holds around 800 lesbian cultural artefacts, crammed into two small display rooms and an upstairs exhibition space.

An exhibition case at the Charlotte Museum, New Lynn (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)

In 2003, Saphira took the quilt, and a badge collection, with her to Wellington for the Outline conference, with the intention of donating them to the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (LAGANZ). Over her life she had accumulated objects that carried particular meaning within the lesbian community – artworks by lesbian New Zealand artists, household objects, books, political badges, T-shirts – but Saphira and her peers had begun to ask the morbid question: what would happen to it all when they died? “I mean, they’ll be in the second-hand shop,” Saphira said. “No one will know the relevance of them.” But at the time LAGANZ could not accept Saphira’s quilt and badge collection – they told her that they couldn’t have textiles, and badges were a problem because they would rust, which Saphira has since discovered. So Saphira, along with a small group she had been working on collecting stories with, decided to start a lesbian museum. In 2007 the Charlotte Museum, named after two Charlottes who ran Auckland’s first lesbian club, the KG Club, was registered as a trust and held their first exhibition.

When I tour the Charlotte Museum with Saphira, each exhibit prompts a new story. As we approach a “Red Beryl” t-shirt displayed on a mannequin, Saphira talks about early 80s nights spent packed like sardines in the infamous Alexandra Tavern, the lesbian pub on Federal St. Every Friday night, lesbian band Red Beryl would be there.

“It was absolutely crowded. There were people crowded around the edge of the stage… Then they sat on the bar, then they stood on the bar. And then some people were sitting up on the beams! And there were people peering in through the windows because they couldn’t get in. It was so crowded. Health and safety would have had a heart attack.”

The stories of women like Charmaine and Sue are told at the domestic ware section. Behind glass is a pair of “hers and hers” towels, plates and wine glasses decorated with the double Venus sign, and a Lezzo tin of apple tea “that all the [lesbian] households tended to have in the 70s and 80s”, according to Saphira. “I don’t know whether anyone drank it.”

These were things that lesbians kept to make their homes a safe space, to remind them that they weren’t alone. “Just having these things in your house, whether it was a glass with the double Venus sign, rainbow spoons, just little things. Often, when you came home, especially if you were in the closet, these little things made you feel OK. It’s awful when you have to hide so much of your life pretending to be somebody you’re not.”

Part of the domestic ware exhibit at the Charlotte Museum, New Lynn. A can of Lezzo apple tea is top left (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)

The life of the museum has been a precarious one. Funding has never been easy, the suburban location has made it difficult to attract new visitors, and the lesbian community doesn’t seem to be in a comfortable enough position to offer up the hours of volunteer work required to keep the museum running. In the beginning, the trust faced a lot of rejections when they applied for funding, and often Saphira tried to hide the fact that she was running a lesbian museum for fear of rejection due to homophobia. “I tried to write the applications without using the word ‘lesbian.’ ‘Women’ I used a lot, to really not upset them. You know, a lot of people don’t like the word ‘lesbian’. A lot of the committees were mostly men when we started.”

Since its birth, the museum has existed in three different locations, forced to move around Auckland chasing more affordable rent. While Saphira and the other trustees have become accustomed to making funding applications, the future of the museum really depends on finding a more affordable space. Recently, Saphira applied, for the eighth time, to Auckland Council for a community space, but was again unsuccessful. Being granted an Auckland Council Community Occupancy (ACCO) would mean that rent for the museum would only cost around $500 to $1000 a year, as opposed to the $22,000 per year they are paying for their New Lynn space. The Charlotte Museum Trust ticks all the boxes for an ACCO, but every time they have applied, winning a space seems to be just out of reach. In 2017 the Charlotte Museum Trust even scored the highest against a range of criteria for a community space in Freeman’s Bay; a report recommended that the lease for the space be granted to the museum. But it still wasn’t enough, and the space was granted to another vital group, Rape Crisis Auckland.

There’s a sad frustration in Saphira’s voice as she tells me about the struggle to keep the museum open. There was the time the trust hired a truck for the Pride Parade and gave out cards to advertise the museum. “[It was an] enormous amount of effort to hire a truck, and dress it up, and go down the parade. And because our banner wouldn’t stay on the truck because it was windy, we had to get about four or five people holding it to walk down in front of the truck… It’s a big event, the Pride Parade, but you don’t get any support, really. It doesn’t spill over, not to a lesbian museum.” Despite the enormous effort and the hundreds of cards given out to people to advertise the museum, no one came.

Miriam Saphira at the Charlotte Museum, New Lynn (Photo: Shanzid Mahmood)

All the odds seem to be stacked her, so why does Saphira do it? It’s because people like Charmaine, Sue, and Beth might have found some comfort in a place like the Charlotte Museum. During her 78 years, suicide has been a recurring feature of Saphira’s life: whānau members, lesbians she knew, transgender prisoners she worked with as a psychologist in the 1970s, all lost to suicide. As a teenager, Saphira herself attempted suicide after deciding she was a “freak.”

“It was horrible. I was training as a singer, I drank this poison, it burned my throat. I became a blues singer overnight. I never sang top C again.” Saphira’s witty, nonchalant way of speaking is belied by the warmth and protectiveness she shows a younger generation of lesbians. To Saphira, the museum being free and open to the public is an important way of reducing homophobia – offering education to lesbians, and their whānau, so that they can find some assurance in knowing that there are others like them, and that they have always existed within various cultural contexts.

All hope for the museum isn’t lost – the trust has secured enough funds to last them until March, with the intention of continuing to apply for more. A couple of people have even expressed an interest in taking over the governance of the trust and continuing their mission when Saphira is no longer here. For now, Saphira continues to find comfort in the words written by Sappho thousands of years ago: “You may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us.”

The Charlotte Museum sits at 8A Bentick St in New Lynn, and is open on Wednesday from 11-4pm and Sunday 1-4pm. You can find more information on their website and their Facebook page.

Youth strikers gather in  London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)

SocietyJuly 17, 2019

Emily Writes: Where are the Millions of Dads for climate action?

Youth strikers gather in  London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)

For generations, women have done the heavy lifting in the fight for social change. What will it take to get more men to give a fuck about their children’s future?

At every question and answer session I attend, I get a variation of the same question. If it’s not asked by the chair, it’s asked by the audience: “How do we get men to care about …?”

How do we get men to care about women being raped and murdered. How do we get men to care about ECE funding. How do we get men to care about abortion. How do we get men to stand up for us.

Men do care, of course they do. But care doesn’t always mean the same thing. Do they care enough to organise marches? To protest in the streets? To make their voice heard? To lobby, to use their skills, their power, their privilege?

Mostly, no. Sorry, I know my inbox is already piling up with people calling me a man-hating slutnugget. And I could say I don’t mean all of you until the end of time and it wouldn’t matter, but I’m going to say it anyway because the question keeps being asked.

Where are the men? And how do we get them involved?

The other week I was asked this – directly or indirectly – three times at public events. The first time I went snarky, suggesting male role models were sold out at the male role model shop. The second time I went to indifference, urging people to just focus on their own activism because shit, we would get nothing done if we had to drag men along with us. The third time I just sighed and said what I know is true: I don’t know.

I don’t know why the voluntary industry is made up of women, still. I don’t know why parent co-ops are almost always women, still. I don’t know why political events are organised by women – still – with men talking at them. Still. I don’t know why marches for reproductive rights usually have not a cisgender man to be seen. I don’t know why when another woman is murdered and raped there tends to be radio silence from men in the media unless it’s to outline the ways she didn’t follow the rules.

Still.

I know why it used to be like this. Women were at home, raising the kids on their own. It’s different now: women are doing all that and working outside the home.

But I don’t know why when so much has changed, so very little has changed.

The Million Mothers movement for climate action is an incredible one. But my feelings about it are like those of a woman who wrote to me about it. She said, “The Millions of Mothers page reminds me of the Australian group One Million Women which is trying to get one million women to sign their pledge to reduce carbon emissions in their lives. All great stuff, but I think there is an elephant in the room that we haven’t addressed – I don’t think putting the emphasis back on women is the answer.”

She continued, “Having women in the workforce has been a major driver for convenience. I work and I know that to cut down significantly on using plastics I’d have to spend hours in the kitchen. Now I make some stuff from scratch but with three kids the packets mount up like nothing else. My husband bakes the odd cake a couple of times a year, but he’d rather spend his evenings watching movies.

“It seems to me that there needs to be activism getting dads and husbands and men to take this stuff on board. Women are already doing everything and then people want to make just us feel guilty about climate change. I mean it is sort of our fault, but only in a general society-needs-to-sort-this-out kind of way.

“I feel there is a disconnect between men going to work and leaving everything else to their wives and now men are still going to work and nothing else is really on their radar. But the radar we [as women] are supposed to be monitoring is huge. Kilometres of issues I have to monitor. I know I need to sit down with my husband and say – I need you to work less and bake more cakes. But where are the motivational groups for men – One Million Dads baking for climate change? Maybe they exist and I just haven’t seen them?”

Do they exist?

Before you shit the bed again feeling defensive, the gender divide and inequity in volunteering is a fact. According to data from the 2014 US General Social Survey (GSS), men are more likely then women to never give money to charity, volunteer for a charity and/or give food or money to the homeless. This is despite the gender pay gap. Women still give more money, even when they have less money.

A 2013 US Trust survey on women and wealth found that “women are nearly twice as likely as men to say that giving to charity is the most satisfying aspect of heaving wealth”.

Maybe it’s because men work more paid hours than women? They may well do, but according to the Ministry for Women, about 63% of women’s work is unpaid, compared to 35% of men’s work. A recent study confirmed what we already know: that women tend to do more housework than their male partners, irrespective of their age, income or own workloads

“Women of all ages still tend to do more household chores than their male partners, no matter how much they work or earn in a job outside the home,” found a study of Canadian women published in the journal Sex Roles.

Meanwhile a 2018 study in Victoria, Australia found that women are are doing 63% of the state’s unpaid work – about 1.7 times that of men.

The internet is full of theories about how to get men to volunteer. To give. To care. Most of them in my opinion infantalise men and treat them like giant self-absorbed piss babies. They suggest we sit you down and tell you all the ways that volunteering will improve your life and build your skillset.

The read between the lines seems clear: you men only care about yourselves, so we have to make it about you.

Well, I think that’s a great injustice to men. And the many wonderful, giving, generous men I know. I don’t believe we need to pander to men, to stroke their egos or anything else to get them on board with issues that impact their children. I don’t believe men are lazy, mean, incapable of generosity or empathy or compassion. I believe men want to use their skills and resources and privilege and power and empathy to help others. Of course they do.

Right?

I would really hate to be wrong on this one. I’ll be the first to like the Millions of Dads for Climate Action page.