By Bryce Edwards.

“All liberation movements fall apart and devolve into factionalism” suggested Kim Hill yesterday in her RNZ interview with Pride festival board chairperson Cissy Rock. Although expressed in rather a negative way, Hill’s statement is one of the clearest observations of the current meltdown in the LGBTQ+ community over whether uniformed police should be allowed to march in the annual Auckland Pride parade. 

You can listen to the fascinating 23-minute encounter here: Cissy Rock – Pride Parade wrangle. The interview, which is sometimes terse and difficult, is a useful discussion of the colourful contemporary politics of identity, gender and sexuality that is part of the culture war tearing the queer community apart.

Of course if this current schism in the LGBTQ+ community proves anything, it’s that there really is no “queer community”. Instead there are broadly (at least) two different queer communities: a radical one and a mainstream one. And increasingly, it seems, the two sides can no longer be contained in one movement, let alone one Pride event.

The anti-police faction is championing a more anti-Establishment movement of protest, activism and an anti-authority ethos. This approach has a strong history in a movement that has had to fight in countries like New Zealand against a status quo that was opposed to their very existence.

The pro-police faction of the queer community now generally works alongside, as well as within, Establishment institutions such as the police, the armed forces, and corporations. After many important victories and a profound shift in public opinion, this element of the struggle has taken on a more politically mainstream character. This has meant that gay pride events have also gradually become less overtly political, and more mainstream.

These two radical and mainstream “factions” have always been there, but what’s changed is that it’s now simply proving too difficult to bridge these two sides together anymore. This has best been acknowledged by Green MP Jan Logie who says that the Pride board that organises the parade is making huge efforts to “hold together our communities, which have very different histories and realities” – see Jason Walls’ PM Jacinda Ardern says the Pride Parade is ‘at its best when it’s an inclusive event’.

The same article quotes other politicians expressing their disappointment and dismay about the Police and other institutions no longer participating in Auckland Pride. But should we be surprised about this major division in the queer community? Arguably, not.

A couple of weeks ago, when the issue first became public, I argued that the notion of a unified queer movement is akin to the idea that Māori form an homogenous group. As the Māori Party discovered, Māori as a putative political force actually can’t be easily contained in one political party: “The Māori Party was a lesson in this – it sought to represent Māori as some sort of homogenous voting group, but the contradictions of its support base meant that it broke apart (most notably with the more radical Hone Harawira departing)”

Likewise, there are very different political views and realities in the queer community, and these reflect the different demographics involved – see: The Schism in the LGBTQ+ movement over police (paywalled).

The evolution of sexual and gender progress in terms of civil rights and societal acceptance means that the whole basis of the “queer community” has changed. With important victories being achieved, the Pride march, for example, has come to reflect the mainstream majority of queers. It’s become a celebration rather than an activist event.

Politicians from all sides of the political spectrum now participate in Pride events, and large companies have become sponsors. The military, police, and prison officers have attended – increasingly in their uniforms. As part of the pride scene, now, there are rainbow coloured police cars and ANZ’s “GAYTMs” for withdrawing cash.

Not everyone in the queer community has welcomed this evolution. The more radical activists have been uncomfortable with the idea that “diversity” means banks, police, and other authority figures getting a place in their parade. For such radicals, these “oppressive” institutions are engaging in “pinkwashing” – in which institutions or corporations are seen as attempting to win over citizens and customers with superficial marketing.

There are other ways of thinking about the dispute. The Southland Times sees it as less about ingrained ideological differences in the movement, and more about the occasional problems of bureaucracy and democracy in all institutions – see: A momentarily pallid rainbow.

Here’s the editorial’s main point about the “whole shemozzle”: “Perhaps the Pride community is no more immune to eddies of disagreement, personality clashes, mishandled meetings, oldsters and youngsters exasperating each other, than the rest of us. In which case we’re seeing nothing much more than it being their turn to screw up, as malfunctioning committees are prone to do. Maybe, as one wag has noted, it’s just the case that the committee needs diversity training.”

The mainstream voices

To get a perspective on why many in the LGBTQ+ community are frustrated by the exclusion of the police from Pride, see Aziz Al-Sa’afin’s opinion piece: The not-so-inclusive Pride Parade. In this, Al-Sa’afin explains why he’s boycotting the parade. He complains about the radicals that are now organising the event: “They do not speak for me. They do not speak for my friends. And, quite frankly, they do not speak for the entire LGBTQI community.”

Also strongly opposed to the ban on the police, Levi Joule, a former editor of New Zealand LGBT publication Express, has hit out at the radicals: “Those views are outdated and out of touch with the vast majority of our community who pay taxes, raise children and have careers. The LGBT community is colourful and includes people from a range of political perspectives, religions and ethnicities” – see: Let uniformed LGBT police parade their Pride.

Joule makes it clear that the positions of the two sides are rather intractable: “it appears a small group with extremist agendas are once again dictating to the rest of the community who can and cannot participate in our parade and festival, regardless of what the overwhelming majority of LGBT people want. Similarly, a small group had prison officers banned from the 2017 parade, attempted to forcibly disrupt the Israeli embassy from marching in the 2014 parade and have asked for a number of corporations they don’t like to also be excluded.”

Mainstream allies are also putting the spotlight on the radicals in the movement, arguing that they are extremists – see, for example, David Farrar’s blogpost, So how extreme are PAPA? He argues, “The banning of the Police wearing uniforms at the Auckland Pride Parade has come about due to capture by an activist group called People Against Prisons Aotearoa. Now their agenda is not just banning of Police uniforms at the Pride Parade. They are at what is basically the lunatic end of the political spectrum. Don’t take my word for it. Read their manifesto.”

A number of international mainstream figures are being asked to comment on the dispute – see Aroha Awarau’s Rupert Everett on Auckland Pride Board’s police uniform ban: ‘We can’t pretend they don’t exist’.

It’s possible that although police might not march in the Pride parade, there may be a protest fancy-dress “police” force participating in February – see: Facebook group set up to ‘Attend Pride Parade dressed as a policeman!’ in wake of ban.

The radical voices

With a large number of the corporate sponsors pulling out of the Pride parade, ActionStation organiser Laura O’Connell Rapira has launched a crowdfunding campaign to replace lost business sponsorship – see Amy Williams’ Crowdfunding for Auckland Pride parade raises $3000 overnight. The money raised now totals about $16,000.

And along with Kassie Hartendorp, O’Connell Rapira has explained the opposition to Police marching in uniform: “Police uniforms represent oppression and violence to many rainbow folk and people of colour. Because the history of police toward rainbow folk and people of colour is violent. In the 1940s and 50s, it was still legal for gay men to be sentenced to whipping, flogging and hard labour” – see: Police and Pride: We need to heal our relationships first.

There are a number of leftwing activists in the radical camp, and activist Eva Allan has explained their strong differences with the more mainstream faction: “At the core of the current dispute is a failure of the privileged within the LGBT community to compromise in order to allow wider participation in what should be a more open, less pinkwashed Pride Parade. This is a continuation of the old politics of respectability, where wealthy LGBT people largely ignored the plight of the less well off in the community” – see: No Pride In the Police.

Laura O’Connell Rapira has also penned a political poem that nicely encapsulates the radical view – see: Brown bodies and blue uniforms.

Overseas allies are also being pulled in to give support for the radical position – see Mandy Te’s RuPaul’s Drag Race star films video in support of Auckland Pride Parade’s uniform ban.

There’s a serious ethnicity component to opposition to police involvement in Pride. Waikato University’s Leonie Pihama has outlined her problems with the police and justice system that are relevant to the decision to exclude the police – see her blogpost, A day in Twitter-Verse.

Pihama argues that many police efforts to be more sensitive to her community are just superficial: “Painting a rainbow on a car does not make that a different kind of Police diversity car, it is still a car that Takatāpui and LGBTIQ are placed into for arrest. Just like painting koru and the word “Pirihimana” on a Police car does not make it a ‘Māori-friendly’ car, it remains a Police Car.”

Finally, veteran leftwing commentator Chris Trotter has come out in support of the radicals, and he explains how “the rainbow community turned out to be so conservative” and says there’s a need to make more progress on the civil rights of those at the sharper end of current discrimination – the “trans community” – see: The Perils of inclusion.

Review by Selwyn Manning

A ghastly tale of horror and intrigue looms for Wellington and Christchurch theatre-goers as New Zealand Opera sharpens its knives before its Auckland consumers – but beware, this story of Sweeney Todd may compel you to think.

Sweeney Todd is one awful story. And the tale is retold so well by this rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s musical horror, that at times you can almost smell it, how rotten Victorian London was. But is its power to compel dread found in the mirror this story presents?

Introduction to Sweeney:

Many of you will be familiar with the story: how Sweeney Todd was once happy and married to a delightful and true wife, how the couple were blessed by a loved and loving daughter, how a corrupt judge coveted their world, how his class and power was a privilege of his time, how the ugliness of obsession became compulsion, how he convicted Sweeney on a trumped up charge, sentenced him to life as a prisoner of mother England to be served within the penal colony of Australia, and then when the beauty within the Todd family turned vulnerable the judge set out to devour all of that which was left of Sweeney Todd’s world.

Some fifteen years later, Sweeney Todd escapes, returns to England and seeks revenge against those who destroyed what he loved. In a way it’s a brilliant story, the ghastly deeds committed by Sweeney and Mrs Lovett mask the true monster of class and inequality, the abandonment of meritocracy, the privileged’s indifference and consequential loathing for those cast below it.

Indeed, Sondheim’s story transports us to an earlier time to when Victorian England was rotten to the core. Such tales, when performed well, transport us not only to another time, but conjure up the opportunity to compare their lot to ours. Often, we are delighted to realise how far we have come culturally. But then, as all forms of good art do, especially when performed as superbly as New Zealand Opera is renowned, we find ourselves challenged by our own Contemporarianism.

Prelude To Sweeney – Masterclass: On preparing to attend this opera, I chose to wear tidy but casual pants. I donned a nice shirt rather than white shirt-black tie attire, and the jacket was almost unworn but was perhaps more suited to the cool weather outside than the Civic’s special magic.

Perhaps, in hindsight, I should confess, it was a little test. Some opera-goers are notorious for being a tad snobby, and Sweeney Todd was too rich to resist.

Were Auckland’s elite happy that New Zealand Opera was performing this Sondheim ‘musical’ only to risk broadening the audience demographic?

We had chosen not to enter via the Civic’s red carpet, but rather through the right-hand side entrance.

We made for the booking office and were greeted wonderfully as always by New Zealand Opera’s staff.

With tickets in hand and having been presented with a fabulously produced and written programme, we sought not to mingle but made for the theatre’s stalls.

The ushers were delightful in guiding us to our row, then our seats. We settled in, relaxed, gazed upward and about as we always do when inside the marvelous Civic theatre.

We politely stood up, as is the custom, to let others squeeze passed as allocated seats were sought.

Then, a dreadful moment presented as one very finely suited man of considerable height and an air of boardroom elegance squeezed passed to loom above us.

Before realising we were perhaps considered casts of a lesser God, the man paused time to insist, in his patiently expressed but obviously refined vowels, that we were sitting in his seats! “Are you sure,” I replied intoning a suggestion rather than question. “Positive,” he retorted.

As I traversed my mind to consider the scale of probabilities, he beat me to it and snapped: “Show me your tickets!”

I reached for my pocket electing to annoy by deploying the Union tactic of a ‘go slow’.

But once the evidence was presented I am sad to report that on inspection, it was proven that the ‘person’ who was to become the focus of my societal-comparative-analysis was indeed correct.

We had been ushered to the wrong row, the wrong seats, and I had failed to check the bloody tickets.

Needless to say dejection set in before ejection was sought and shamefully it became our lot to squeeze passed the polite-and-the-tolerant and search out our seats with haste before the Civic’s magical shooting star heralded our journey back to acceptability to another time and place. And transported we were.

The Resurrection and the Performance:

Within seconds of the superb Auckland Philharmonia’s conductor Benjamin Northey instructing his organist to bellow out a most agonising sequence of chords, two things came to mind: Vincent Price, and, how as children, one of my brothers and I used to nick the keys to the church next door, sit on the organ stool, pump the treadle while depressing the lowest note that old Gherty could muster.

There rumbling out a diabolical racket, we would smart with devilish grin knowing our mother wouldn’t be too far away to save the community from the horror story score we had conducted.

From the first note, I had one foot in Sweeney Todd present and the other in a past which seems too long ago. Director Stuart Maunder AM has achieved something special here. He has ensured his cast performs to their strengths. And it works.

Teddy Tahu Rhodes, with respect to you, from the moment you appeared as a demon among the light you became our Sweeney Todd.

Rhodes’ voice… people if you want to hear what a real baritone sounds like then you have to see and hear this guy perform this role.

He makes Caiaphas in JC Superstar sound like a genteel grandfather.

When Rhodes speaks as Sweeney, all before him become captors with a compulsion to listen. And thank you for that, as Sweeney’s message is powerful. In performance, voice has many elements where the unspoken whispers to the inner you.

Could it be that Sweeney Todd compels us to consider what kind of character in truth we have become?

It is true that Rhodes channels a horror that lurks within Sweeney, and within this character there is time and space to pause, to consider, to realise cause and effect.

Rhodes’ strength plants Sweeney Todd’s feet firmly on the ground, which choreographs well opposite soprano Antoinette Halloran who is cast as his offsider Mrs Lovett. Halloran is the yang of his yin (or considering the characters, is it the other way around).

In any case, Halloran is a master of comic timing and centre-stage presence. And she has to be to make this production of Sweeney Todd work.

It is simply due to a well-learned and earned talent that by degrees she allows her audience to sense that perhaps Mrs Lovett’s beguiling charm is but a cloak that conceals a duality – an oscillation between hope and construct, an intention caught between love and greed that morphs into a ghastly heart.

The story has its diversions. The plight of the young potential lovers, Johanna and Anthony Hope (performed superbly by Amelia Berry and James Benjamin Rodgers) is vital so as to accentuate a corruption manifest in the evil Judge Turpin (Phillip Rhodes), the horribly sycophantic Beadle Bamford (Andrew Glover), the tragedy that becomes Tobias Ragg (performed by the marvelous Joel Granger), and the hilarity of arch-crook Pirelli (performed by Robert Tucker).

Another special mention: it pays to pay attention to the Beggar Woman (so wonderfully performed by Helen Medlyn) for she holds the key to a very clever flick of the knife.

Once again production designer Roger Kirk has created a marvelous set that anchors, transforms and transports, and yes that summary includes that dreadful barber’s chair.

Prologue to Sweeney: On exiting the Civic, my man was there standing centre-stage upon the red carpet. He had chosen not to exit but rather juxtapositioned his back to the entrance (perhaps a barrier to the hordes outside).

Again he towered above all others and sought to chat, to mingle, and again we squeezed passed with thought. The freshness of pre-equinox air greeted us, the vibe on the street was joyous. Theatre-goers were well pleased with Sweeney Todd.

Lovers lined up to share ice-creams near a shop where Royal Dalton was once sold.

On the south-side of Queen Street I felt delighted to realise the decrepit Kerridge Odeon buildings had been demolished before noticing a man to my left of prime working age and inclination sat on a blanket holding a cardboard sign that read: “Can you help me please.”

He, like some of the characters in Sweeney Todd, clearly slept rough. But his story was reality not fiction while in truth he shared a commonality as a consequence of indifference, class and inequality.

Another rested his back against a Queen Street shop wall, perhaps to take timeout from begging. And my partner said to me (or to herself): “I must always remember to bring along some cash.”

We headed for the Civic Car-park, where at the Town Hall entrance, there exposed to wind and rain, another man lay wrapped up in a blanket and prepared snuggle down to sleep off the cold.

We got in our car, exited the car-park, accelerated up Greys Avenue, turned left into Pitt Street, and worked our way passed a young man who lay amid the traffic flowing passed the corner of Karangahape Road.

Help was at hand, a group of people had placed him in the recovery position, held his hand and awaited an ambulance’s arrival.

Then, Kingsland-bound, we drove passed where Dick Smith’s used to be, and noticed a slight teenager dressed in the lightest of summertime cloth preparing to earn herself a living for the night, and I thought of how on one-late-Friday-night, at the age of thirteen years four months, Aaron Williams and I shared a half dozen bottles of beer beneath the Southmall railway bridge in Manurewa and waited for the last train to pass.

I thought then of how we didn’t realise we had our lifetimes ahead of us. And it took some four days before I could write this review. Bravo New Zealand Opera, and thank you all especially Stephen Sondheim for Sweeney Todd – for while he became the protagonist for a terrible horror (yes his actions were chosen by the monster of whom he had become) Sweeney was merely a mask to disguise what a society and culture had created.

What: New Zealand Opera.

Performance: Sweeney Todd – the demon barber of Fleet Street.

Auckland dates: September 17, 18, 21, Friday 23, and Saturday 24.

Wellington dates: September 30, October 1, 2, 4, and 5.

Christchurch: October 12, 13, 14, 15 (two performances). To discover more and purchase tickets, see: NZOpera.com.

Amelia Berry and James Benjamin Rodgers in Sweeney Todd, NZ Opera, Civic Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand, Thursday, September 15, 2016. Photo: David Rowland / One-Image.com

• Anorexia: is when a person believes they are fat, even when they are not and may have lost a lot of weight
• Bulimia: Where a person eats very large amounts of food because they are starving.  Then they worry about gaining weight so they make themselves vomit, takes laxatives or exercises to extremes.
• Binge eating disorder: Where a person eats an excessive amount of food within a short period of time (two hours) and feels a loss of control while eating.
• Other eating disorders: Where a person has signs of either bulimia or anorexia but not enough signs to definitely state they have these conditions. This category is often called Eating Disorder not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS) by doctors, and usually occurs at an early age. It is very common and doctors treat is as seriously as the other categories of eating disorder.

What causes eating disorders?

• those whose career or sport requires them to be thin – dancers, gymnasts, models, jockeys or body builders
• those who are overweight
• those with a number of different problems including childhood sexual abuse or neglect, drug or alcohol problems and unstable relationships
• people with diabetes
• those with problems of self-esteem and identity
• young people living within families that make them feel that they are only worthwhile when they are very good at study or sport, very well behaved, or thin and attractive and who feel worthless if they do not match up to the family expectations.
• people who are depressed; feeling sad or irritable much of the time, avoiding doing things with friends.
• people with high personal expectations – always striving to be perfect in everything.

• a life crisis or the death of a loved  one
• family changes
• moving home or school
• bullying
• a relationship break-up
• a change of job
• school problems
• a personal failure.

Signs to look for (symptoms)

• extreme concern about being too fat and thinking about food and dieting all the time
• increasing isolation from others
• secret eating and purging (vomiting or taking laxatives)
• food disappearing from the house, especially high calorie foods
• spending long periods in the toilet especially immediately after meals, sometimes with the tap running for long periods
• shoplifting food
• strenuous exercise routine, even exercising when injured or unwell
• severe weight changes
• sudden mood changes, irritability, depression, sadness, anger, difficulty in expressing feelings
• poor concentration and being unusually tired
• constant pursuit of thinness.