Grey heads having a gay old time

My father’s hobby was breeding and racing thoroughbred racehorses. This could prove both lucrative and costly. One positive feature however was that he got to meet and befriend a host of interesting people and one of these was a man named Lou Fisher. Lou Fisher was an Australian and managed a theatrical company for David Nathan Martin. Martin was an Englishman who had settled in Australia and produced a great many stage shows that toured Australasia. Both men were Jewish.

Fisher was regular guest at our home whenever one of the Martin shows came to Wellington. On the odd occasion they were even staged in Masterton’s Regent Theatre. I recall he brought both English comedian Tommy Trinder and later pianist Winifred Atwell to Masterton. The upshot of all this was that our family always got the best seats in the house to these productions, I assume for gratis, and we were always invited backstage either at intermission or after the performance to meet and mingle with the cast.

On one occasion we had front seats in the dress circle at The Follies Bergere on Ice staged in Wellington’s grand Opera House. On that occasion I found myself sitting next to Walter Nash, at the time New Zealand’s Finance Minister and later to become the Labour Prime Minister. During the performance I noted that neither he nor his wife smiled, laughed or clapped like the rest of us did in the full-to-capacity theatre. He was perhaps the most dour man I had ever encountered.

On the journey home I talked about Mr Nash’s surprising lack of joviality with my parents. Dad said he was a deeply religious man and the risqué jokes and scantily clad young ladies would not have been to his taste. In the 1950’s risqué jokes weren’t really that risky and there was absolutely no profanity. In fact in David Martin’s biography he was quoted as saying that there were two things he couldn’t abide and they were “off-colour comedians and overweight chorus girls.”

Backstage, after the show, as a pimply pubescent teenager, I certainly enjoyed meeting the perfectly-proportioned female cast!

This has been a long prologue to where I’m heading, but I thought about all this last Wednesday night when I saw those who had inherited Walter Nash’s political party laughing, dancing in the aisles and clapping at the passing of the marriage equality bill. I tried to imagine Walter Nash, whose framed picture is still a feature on most Labour party office walls, sitting in the gallery with the predominantly gay crowd and wondered just what he would have thought about the surprising turn of events.

Earlier in the evening I had watched Campbell Live where a poll of viewers voted against same-sex marriage 78 per cent to 22. Hardly scientific I admit, but you could argue that many members of parliament chose not to vote the way the constituents might have wanted.

Somewhat surprisingly, the gay marriage debate was set alight by three unlikely heroes, Dr. Paul Hutchinson, Chris Auchinvole and Maurice Williamson - all of them grey-haired, conservative MPs.

Williamson became an overnight celebrity....well overnight really. The New York Times called him a gay icon which came as a bit of a shock to his wife and Ellen DeGeneres is desperate for him to appear on her show. He could even consider resigning from parliament and go on the lucrative world-wide speaking circuit. It’s made a small fortune for Sarah Palin.

In hindsight the three National MPs were probably wise to tread the course they did. Liberal causes inevitably become mainstream and those who oppose them are sometimes made to look foolish years later when the imagined moral degradation and other dire consequences predicted simply don’t eventuate.

Sanctioning same-sex marriage is all very well, but I am fearful of legalising so-called “recreational” drugs which I suspect is the next raft of permissive legislation on the horizon.

It is more than likely that our next government will be a coalition between Labour and the Greens and with that unholy alliance, anything could happen.

A couple of weeks ago Green Party Co-leader Metiria Turei claimed on Maori TV’s Native Affairs programme that Maori growing marijuana are developing entrepreneurial and horticultural proficiencies. She said growing the illegal drug helps develop “real skills” among Maori, particularly in disadvantaged areas.

Decriminalising marijuana is a Green Party policy and is certain to be a condition of their coalescing with Labour, so we’d better start steeling ourselves for the degrading affect this will have on society.

However I tend to agree with Mr Williamson that the sky won’t fall with the passing of the gay marriage legislation.

From 1840 to 1867 homosexual activity amongst the male population wasn’t only illegal in New Zealand, it was punishable by death. It was finally legalised in Fran Wilde led legislation in 1986.

I’m happy, just as long as they don’t make it compulsory.

“Many years ago I chased a woman for almost two years, only to discover her tastes were exactly the same as mine: we were both crazy about girls.” - Groucho Marx 

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Things aren’t always as they seem

The chairperson of the Greater Windytown Regional Council, Frangipani Wildflower, walked the walk. On this occasion the walk was the one named in her honour on the concourse leading to the vast entrance to the Eastpac Stadium on Windytown’s waterfront. She was holding the report from the consultants commissioned by the Wire-Wrapper Governance Review Working Party and she was not happy with it contents.

“Smoke and mirrors” Martyrdom Laud-Mare Garrick Darnwell had once said about her claim that annually her council spent eleven million more dollars in Wire-Wrapper than they received in rates, and now the report seemed to confirm his treasonous utterances.

Ms Wildflower was fuming over the inaccuracies in the data used and the assumptions made, particularly as the consultants had not bothered to meet with her people to discuss the details. The report might just have well have been written by Lewis Carroll, she considered.

Meanwhile in Carleton, the Laud-Mare, Kim-Jong Maka, was grinning like a Cheshire cat. All the ducks were falling nicely in a row. He looked proudly out of his office window on to Holy-way Street and noted that it was looking more and more like Pennsylvania Avenue every day, despite the contractors, Newfield’s, taking an age to complete the transformation.

There was no doubt the new Ventilation Centre had an air of Washington’s Capitol about it and over the road the old Moronic Hall, shifted back to make way for the new boulevard and once the site of that pesky upstart Henry Paul’s radio station Tomorrow FU, bore a strong resemblance the White House. Perhaps his council could purchase the residence, he mused, and allow it to be the Laud-Mares abode.

He must check up with his Chief Executive Colon Wrong and find out when the new signs planned for each end of the town proudly declaring Carleton “The Heart of the Wire-wrapper” would be put in place. That he reckoned would be the piece-de-résistance; daffodils were after all, a relic of the past.

His inauguration and the swearing-in ceremony was now just months away.

Meanwhile Ms Wildflower had stopped her power-walking and looked down on Quarterloo Quay just in time to see Windytown’s Laud-Mare Cecelia Wade-Green ride past on her bicycle. Ms Wade-Green gave her a cheery wave which infuriated Frangipani even more. No wonder the good people of Wire-wrapper were wary about linking with Windytown to form a super city, she determined.

Windytown’s daily newspaper The Dumb-Post had recently castigated Ms Wade-Green and her council for falling asleep at the wheel. “Wakey, Wakey” screamed the front page headline after her somnambulant councillors belatedly discovered that somewhere along the line a large number of council staff had lost their jobs and Ms Wade-Green’s new temporary office accommodation was going to cost ratepayers $350,000.

Going to sleep on the job was scarcely going to encourage the hard-working folk in the Wire-wrapper to join forces with Das Kapital, Ms Wildflower conceded.

And yet there were persuasive linkages. Frangipani and her husband owned a substantial dwelling on the outskirts of Graton and Cecelia had a batch nestled in the picturesque bush in the Monger-too-weary Valley. Ironically Ms Wildflower’s council was planning to flood the area to create one of the new irrigation dams and in so doing, blocking the Wade-Greens’ access.

Despite this impasse, to all intents and purposes Cecelia and she were Wire-wrapper people themselves so surely it would be their destiny to rule the roost.

“Over my dead body,” said Kim-Jong Maka.

“The one thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to freedom.” - Eugene McCarthy. 

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Losing the battle of the sexes

Two news items caught my eye last week. In one we were told that surveys have shown that people over 60 are overwhelmingly opposed to gay marriage compared to their younger counterparts who are more liberal. The message implied being that the older generation are more straitlaced than their subsequent offspring.

But then on the same day we were informed of the dubious deeds of a Slovakian bike rider named Peter Sagan. The runner-up in the 2013 Tour of Flanders, Mr Sagan, standing aside on the winner’s podium, dared to pinch the backside of one of the two women who were busying themselves planting kisses on victor Fabian Cancellara’s cheeks.

Despite the symbolism of being kissed by scantily clad women and then spraying champagne all over the place, groping them beforehand is strictly off-limits and a grovelling apology was demanded and shown worldwide on television. Fair enough; I was naturally mortified to see Sagan defame the dignified and completely non-sexist tradition of Podium Girls.

I am therefore loath to admit that in my “straitlaced generation” days, pinching women’s bottoms was not uncommon. There were generally two responses. The recipient would either turn around and say, “Cut that out” with a grin on her face, or turn around and say, “Cut that out” with a face as black as thunder. I’d have to concede that the latter reaction was more common. However retribution, as far as I am aware, was never called for and so it was worth taking the risk.

This reminded me of a (true) story that perhaps best illustrates the gap between the generations.

Amelia Langdon - not her real name - was one of life’s great characters. She would have been in her seventies when I first met her, which was back in the 1960s, and she was diminutive, bespectacled, grey haired and always, when the occasion arose, the life of the party. Her husband Arthur was more circumspect. Upright and sartorially elegant he was intensely proud of his wife, despite her gregarious nature compared to his own.

I caught up with them very every year at the Meat Retailer’s conventions. Arthur was a Master butcher of good standing in a provincial North Island city. “Amy,” as she was fondly known, enjoyed a tipple and would kick up her heels at the various social functions that tended to be an integral part of our conferences. Having expended all her energies however she would often be one of the first to retire.

Such was the case one night when the convention was held at the Chateau Tongariro. A grand hotel for a conference and a party. With Amy and many of the wives tucked up in bed at about midnight the rest of us sat around the guests lounge with Arthur Langdon sitting thoughtfully at the bar nursing a whisky and a cigarette.

I don’t know why or how, but someone was describing the colour of something which they said was “nipple pink.” Without shifting his stance Arthur quietly told those of us present that there was no such thing as nipple pink. Nipples, he claimed with quiet authority, were brown. We all assured Arthur that this was not the case. Everyone knew that nipples were pink. But Arthur was insistent. He was willing to bet his last sausage that nipples were brown. The term “nipple pink”, he espoused, although regularly used, was a complete and utter misnomer.

There were a number of women in the bar, most of them not connected to the conference at all, who started to show an interest in the claim. They furtively checked out their own nipples by quietly pulling the top of their garments forward, peering privately breastwards and without exception all came up with the same startling conclusion; that Arthur was absolutely right: nipples are brown.

The least surprised in the bar was Arthur and while we looked on with new admiration for his worldly wisdom he dropped another bombshell. There was one exception, well two if you think about it, he told us, Amy’s nipples were pink. Now Amy was not an Albino, but according to Arthur, due to some minor pigment abnormality, her nipples really were pink. It was astounding fact that just a few minutes previously we were arguing that all nipples were pink, yet we now didn’t believe Arthur that Amy’s weren’t brown.

Given that we were all still in shock from the first disclosure, Mr A. S. F. Langdon, purveyor of fine meats, found himself surrounded by a bar full of unbelievers. The proof however was readily available. “Come upstairs,” said Arthur, “And I’ll show you.”

You’re never going to believe this, but we all trouped upstairs, women included, to the Langdon bedroom and arranged ourselves around the bed upon which Amy was lying sound asleep and snoring softly. “No need to wake her,” Arthur assured us, quietly pulling back the covers. He gently eased the straps of the nightdress off his wife’s shoulders, and sensitively lowered the top to reveal her breasts, resplendent with their distinctly pink nipples.

Now I need to remind you here that Amy is in her seventies, tiny, small boned, grey haired and lying on her back. Without wanting to put too fine a point on it, and hopefully without giving offence, this was no erotic scene. But it was dramatic evidence of the claim made.

We all assembled back at the bar and admitted that Arthur had indeed proved a couple of points. It was drinks all round and Arthur was the toast of what was left of the evening.

If you thought that Amy would have been furious at this invasion of her privacy you couldn’t be more wrong. But then this all took place before feminism was established; when women were still able to laugh at themselves. Arthur must have confessed to her when they woke up next morning because at breakfast she was busy going around the dining room telling all those who had missed the action what had happened.

Typically, she thought it was a huge joke.

Now, just remind me again, which is the straitlaced generation?

The Danube isn’t Blue, its Green – The title of a Spike Jones song from the 1950s

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Church and state drifting apart

When I was about 13 years of age I was a choirboy - cassock, surplice, boy soprano et al. It was quite a commitment. Choir practice was on Tuesday and Thursday evenings; attendance at church was at 10 am on Sunday for Holy Communion and then again at 7 pm for Evensong. The venue was the St Matthews Anglican church in Masterton’s aptly named Church Street and as I recall the congregations were evenly divided gender-wise.

I’m not sure what brought on this burst of piety which only lasted a year or two and probably ended when my voice broke and hormonal temptations in keeping with that experience made other options more appealing. Whatever, I have never regretted the episode as it seemed to herald the possibility of an extraordinary life. Tabloid newspaper headlines of the day would regularly scream: “One time choirboy now feared gangland boss,” or: “Britain’s biggest brothel proprietor was once a choirboy,” or even: “Wealthy playboy started out life as pious choirboy,” although it’s possible I dreamt up that last one.

In his autobiography, My Life, David Lange reckoned the Methodist church was the Labour party at prayer and in Britain it is claimed that the Church of England is the Tory party at worship. I’m not convinced that these categorisations were ever really applicable, though while I was hitting the high notes at St Matthews the Methodists were congregating, literally just down the road, and certainly one of their clergy, the Reverend Russell Marshall, became a minister of the crown in Lange’s fourth Labour government.

Last weekend Easter came and went with much of the populous completely ignoring the death and resurrection and probably spent a good deal of the time lazing about in near perfect weather gorging chocolate eggs.

These days religion seems not to feature hugely in our mainstream media or in the annals of parliament. For our political masters this is undoubtedly an outcome of an oft-quoted, but slightly skewed slogan that religion and politics don’t mix.

But like it or not, politics and religion are inextricably linked. Religion is taken seriously and practised regularly by more than a quarter of all New Zealanders and attracts more players than rugby, yet our mainstream politicians seem to believe that its dictums ought not be seen nor heard. The religious traditions that affect and mould our lives are conspicuous by their absence in most of the speeches and debates that take place in the corridors of power.

And yet there are whole rafts of moral issues that are of direct concern for people of a religious persuasion and these include same-sex marriage, broadcasting standards, holiday trading hours, the integration of church schools and alcohol reform.

There was a time of course when the church and government were virtually interchangeable. The first schools and hospitals were church initiatives, as was social security. The great universities - Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Yale and Harvard were established by the church and history shows that nations of the past rose and fell according to their adherence or otherwise to the Ten Commandments.

Politicians who are agnostics and atheists could scarcely argue against the premise that Christianity is the essential foundation of Western civilisation. Most Western art, much Western literature and a good chunk of Western philosophy becomes fairly incomprehensible without at least some acquaintance with the Bible.

However, perhaps as a direct result of their Christian-inspired good natures, New Zealander’s have also been pretty receptive to other religious influences. Mosques now dot the landscapes of some of our larger cities and the diversity they bring is generally welcomed. Even the Maori renaissance, with its gods and taniwhas, totally contradictory to the good news the early missionaries implanted, is given more than a modicum of tolerance.

And yet when the cardinal links between our religious tradition and political progress that are pivotal to this country’s understanding of itself are ignored, the human story that fused them together remains untold and leaves the field wide open for extremists to set the agenda. The end result is the worst kind of tyranny, directed by opportunistic charismatic leaders who claim with frightening audacity that God speaks to them exclusively. The inevitable outcome is that the positive part of what faith has to offer a community and a country is totally misunderstood and to some extent ridiculed.

Canny politicians, sensing the confusion, sidestep the issues altogether and the vacuum remains.

From my limited observations it would seem that church congregations today are predominantly female. As in so many institutions, the male members of the species seem to have abdicated their responsibilities to seek other more pleasurable pursuits.

Perhaps their voices broke.

“When a man talks loudly against religion, - always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions which have got the better of his creed.” - Laurence Sterne

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