Gays bear the brunt of the divisive same-sex marriage debate

With the No campaigners still fulminating over last weekend’s mass-texting by the Yes campaign, it’s useful to remember what happened almost 40 years ago on a Saturday night in Sydney.

It was June 24, 1978, and a daytime protest march was under way to commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York. About 2000 people marched down Oxford Street towards Hyde Park. The crowd swelled as the marchers called for people to leave the bars and join them. It was an exhilarating moment but it would end in mass beatings and arrests.

The organisers, the Gay Solidarity Group, had a police permit for the march, which railed against discrimination; homosexuality was still illegal in NSW and would remain so until 1984. But midway through the parade police revoked permission and tried to disperse the protesters. Some of them regrouped at Kings Cross, where the police swooped in with batons; 53 people were beaten, thrown in paddy wagons and later arrested.

This was a time when gay people were expected to hide their sexuality. The 78ers were revolutionaries who threatened the status quo. Reminding Australians of what they achieved in a parade that later became the annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras helps put some of the ugliness around this debate into perspective. It’s easy to think of the parade today as little more than a colourful celebration of gay pride, but the circumstances of its origin offer a study in contrasts. The rights won by Australia’s gay community have not come without a struggle, within the gay community and outside it.

Three days after the protest The Sydney Morning Herald published the names, addresses and occupations of those arrested, causing deep distress to people forced by the law to live in denial of their sexuality. People lost their jobs as a result; they became estranged from their families and some took their lives. It would be 38 years before the Herald and the NSW government issued an apology for the ignominy and pain they created.

Darren Goodsir, the Herald’s editor-in-chief at the time of last year’s apology, said: “We acknowledge and apologise for the hurt and suffering that reporting caused. It would never happen today.”

But today gay people find themselves asking whether the acceptance won in the past four decades was genuine. Homosexuality has been decriminalised, gay people are members of parliament, running our biggest companies, and among our most celebrated athletes. Being gay is no longer a career killer. The NSW Police Force, the Australian Defence Force, politicians and public servants all march alongside LGBTI Australians in the Mardi Gras parade each year. Last year Malcolm Turnbull became the first sitting prime minister to attend the parade in an official capacity.

Yet a year later gay people are being forced to plead politely for equality, and we’re angry about it.

The question on the postal ballot form is just about whether two people of the same sex should be able to marry, yet fear and loathing is being piled on to the question by the No campaign. For many LGBTI people this is nothing more than a national opinion poll on whether it’s OK to be gay.

It’s difficult to swallow the accusations of hate from the No campaign when on Twitter and Facebook there are photos of rainbow flags covered with swastikas, the beaten-up face of Kevin Rudd’s godson, and connections being made between journalist Ben McCormack’s guilty plea on child pornography charges and the push for same-sex marriage.

The postal survey was bound to yield a bitter and divisive campaign. This is a yes or no question — it’s all or nothing for both sides. The idea this ought to be a “respectful debate” is frankly just magical thinking. Many of those decrying the campaign tactics are the same people who said we needed a public vote on this. They can’t have it both ways.

But for me, as a 50-year-old gay man, more alarming still are the divisions emerging within the gay community. Friends are fighting with each other and disagreeing over the Yes campaign’s strategy. Some people are simply more passionate about it than others.

Gay people also are fighting with their straight friends, colleagues and families. I have gay friends whose parents unquestionably accept them and have welcomed their long-term partners into the family, yet they have told their children that they will be voting No.

A win for the Yes campaign will certainly be a moment of great joy for the LGBTI community, but it’s naive to think fights between friends and families will be forgotten after the celebrations on November 15.

The gay community could see this coming and warned that any sort of public vote on the matter would be toxic. Why couldn’t our elected politicians see that? We’re a broad church but we’re being held accountable as a whole for the words and actions of a few extremists. We’re being told how to behave and that we should just put our internal squabbling aside and get on with winning the vote.

Despite divisions in the gay community, almost no one disagrees with the idea that marriage equality is a good thing; the disagreements relate to the process and the methods, not the outcome.

Gay people my age and older are nothing if not resilient. I finished high school in 1984, the year homosexuality was decriminalised. I came of age at the height of the AIDS crisis and by my 25th birthday I knew plenty of people who had died. The emotions from that time are never far from the surface, but this year it has been hard to push them back down.

The depressing thing about this is it didn’t have to happen this way. Last week The Economist summed up the Australian same-sex marriage postal survey for its international readers in one succinct sentence: “To solve a row within his party, the Prime Minister creates a national furore.”

Win or lose in November, there are gay and straight people who, regardless of political allegiance, will never forgive the government for imposing this debate on the Australian people, for igniting hatred and forcing us to revisit the hurt. The rifts this campaign is causing within the gay community and outside it will most certainly not be healed by Christmas.

David Meagher is the editor of The Australian’s Wish magazine.