Analysis - Pride has long been criticised for not speaking to or serving Māori and BIPOC LGBTQI+ communities. How can it move towards honouring the Indigenous folks who championed the movement?
Liam Brown. Photo: Supplied / Joshua Hurst
Pride is defined differently from person to person. The experience of many is that the month-long festival is a celebration of queer joy in all its facets - rainbow flags adorning the streets as you flaunt your queerness in the face of a society that although has come far, still discriminates against us.
Pride creates community, power, strength and resilience.
I do not speak for all queer people of colour, nor do I speak for all Takatāpui Māori when I say that up until very recently, I have never felt like I have belonged at, or in, the giant jigsaw puzzle that is Pride in Aotearoa. To me, Pride is a month-long circuit party celebrating white, able-bodied queerness - pushing the most privileged to the front of the crowd.
There's a lot to unpack when it comes to the existence of Takatāpui at Pride.
One of the first agitators of the Gay Liberation Movement in New Zealand was Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. At a panel celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the first Gay Day - which was the first Pride celebration in Aotearoa - Te Awekotuku described the moment she was given an award to study in the US but was denied entry to the United States because she was a "known sexual deviant".
Te Awekotuku is among many queer wāhine Māori who are the reason I get to stand here today as a proud, Takatāpui Māori. They are the reason I get to exist and revel unapologetically in all my queerness for every minute of every day.
Going back even further, the story of Tūtānekai and Tiki shows the existence of Takatāpui pre-colonisation, one of the many pūrākau and kōrero that proves that we have always been here.
Despite the deep-seated struggles of tangata whenua in Aotearoa, you would hope the reclamation and normalisation of takatāpuitanga would be led and centred on the indigenous people of this whenua. However, Pride, and related festivals, have long been criticised as having a monocultural lens that doesn't speak to or serve Māori and BIPOC LGBTQI+ communities.
Elyssia Ra'nee Wilson-Heti is the Creative Director of Auckland Pride, having come into the role eight months ago ahead of the 2022 Auckland Pride Festival. She was integral in the organisation of Pride events across the whole festival prior to its cancellation.
She says brown women have been doing the most, but when you hear about those who championed Pride from the beginning, you must wonder when the efforts of all the brown women and femme folk got written out of the narrative of Pride.
"When did we get written out of the history? Because often, the people who are doing the heaviest lifting, and the most emotional labour; the pioneers of our community - are usually brown, indigenous women."
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku leading Auckland Pride Festival's 2020 Our March Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
I have felt a recent shift though, I can say wholeheartedly that Auckland Pride made me feel like I belonged within the movement that is Pride. Presenting a body of work in Britomart for the duration of the Pride Festival for Te Tīmatanga (Auckland Pride's first Takatāpui Festival) made me hyper-aware of the way we, as Takatāpui, can take up space in places we're not seen - in order to be seen. It's a consistent fight that hasn't stopped since the first ever Gay Day.
Wilson-Heti described Te Tīmatanga as "a gift to the city," saying the work across the board was phenomenal and spoke for itself.
Being a part of Te Tīmatanga and having a 48-panel display in the middle of the Britomart Atrium, where my body was on show for the duration of the festival, was conflicting; on one hand, I was so proud to be a part of something that is so much bigger than I am but on the other, I was just as confused as to why it took so long to get to the point of having a queer, Māori-led festival in Aotearoa.
Meanwhile, in Te Whanganui a Tara, Pride festival co-chairs Tahlia Aupapa-Martin and Vivian Lyngdoh acknowledge that Pride is a historically white event. Along with the rest of the board, they say: "We know that takatāpui do not always feel they have a place in Pride events. Pride is still very, very white.
"We are working to undo this by platforming takatāpui excellence wherever we can."
Wellington Pride are set to run their annual Pride Festival in September, after cancelling the February 2022 festival at the beginning of the Omicron Covid-19 peak.
Both Aupapa-Martin and Lyngdoh agree that the onus to make Pride more equitable for Black and brown folks falls on them harder than their white counterparts - which speaks volumes to how Pride operates - not just as an organisation, but as a staple in the queer community.
Wellington Pride's vision statement - titled Te Whāriki, which was recently voted in at their AGM - says its current experience shows that Matauranga Māori are excluded - meaning that the Wellington Pride Festival "contributes to the structural violence in Aotearoa, and the structures that drive cis-hetero-patriarchy." The document says the board and members broadly value equity, however have no way of staying in tune with dynamic changes within the community.
Liam Brown's work as part of Auckland Pride's first Takatāpui Festival - Te Tīmatanga. Photo: Supplied / David St George
This year, Wellington Pride has put an emphasis on calling the community in to help it re-structure the festival to make it equitable for all who wish to attend. One way they've gone about this is putting an emphasis on community consultation - through events such as their annual general meeting - something I didn't expect. When they stepped into their roles as co-chairs, both Martin and Lyngdoh acknowledged that Pride needed more community consultation in order to bring the community along on the journey towards the festival in order to make it an event that everyone can benefit from.
Having lived in Wellington for just short of three years, I had never been aware of any community consultation within Wellington Pride, which is largely because up until this year, it hadn't really happened. Then again, I was so detached from Pride that it's not surprising that I didn't know much.
Te Whāriki says that by the creation of the activation plan, which will map out steps to achieve their vision of a more equitable Pride, our future experience will see mātauranga Māori centred in Pride.
All of this is all well and good, but it takes the community showing up to make the concept of community consultation work.
"The representation you see on the board is representative of who shows up," Aupapa-Martin says. It goes back to historic factors surrounding racism that make Pride an unsafe environment, not just for Māori, but for any and every person of colour that enters the space.
Lyngdoh echoes this, acknowledging that there are, in fact, racists in our community.
Wilson-Heti from Auckland Pride says people need to mobilise and get together in order to see tangible shifts in the way Pride, not only as an organisation, but as a force in society, works.
"The onus is not just on the board," she says, "We are seeing a shift but there is a lot of mistrust within our BIPOC communities during pride. Nobody has been actively listening to people's concerns."
Wilson-Heti describes the happenings within the current Pride landscape as a "slow cultural burn towards change".
Personally, I'm hopeful that what we're seeing is just that. There are things that the community need to do in order to aid this burn; the main thing being showing up to events.
At the 50th Anniversary of the first Gay Day, communications and engagement manager for RainbowYOUTH, Meghan Collins, said showing up to events like AGMs is the only way we will see change.
I don't know if, or when I will feel comfortable in the spaces that Pride operates in and around. There are efforts being made, and witnessing the change happening before my eyes, albeit gradually, is encouraging and makes me very hopeful for the future.
By the time our generation have left these structures and the future leaders of the community take over, if we've done our jobs right, all the foundations will be laid to ensure that Pride is accessible, and equitable for all who wish to attend.
