Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand

A visitor uses the card catalogue of Te Pūranga Takatāpui o Aotearoa, the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand.

The Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand | Te Pūranga Takatāpui o Aotearoa, known as LAGANZ, is an archive in New Zealand. LAGANZ is owned by a registered charitable trust on behalf of LGBTTIFQ communities, which LAGANZ defines as anyone who is takatāpui, fa'afafine, intersex, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, including any members of Pacific indigenous communities. LAGANZ is housed in the Alexander Turnbull Library of the National Library of New Zealand, in Wellington. The collection includes a variety of archival material, including books, periodicals, manuscripts, audio-visual material, zines, t-shirts, badges, condoms, banners, and other ephemera.

Organisation

The main aims of the LAGANZ trust are to provide an archival repository for LGBTTFIQ people and organizations. This involves assisting LGBTTIFQ people and organizations to preserve their archives; actively collecting and preserve archives; and making the archives available for community use.

Additional aims of the LAGANZ trust include promoting education and scholarship on LGBTTFIQ histories and cultures.

History

Resource Centre

LAGANZ was initially established in 1977 as a resource center for the National Gay Rights Coalition (NGRC), an activist group that agitated for gay rights in New Zealand. The NGRC believed collecting archives was "a necessary tool in the struggle for social change.” It also acted initially as the archival repository for organizations affiliated with the NGRC, though soon grew its collections to encompass, by 1986, the archival records of about 80 New Zealand organizations, including the New Zealand Homosexual Law Reform Society, various chapters of the Gay Liberation Front, and the AIDS Support Network.

In 1981 the archive became an autonomous collective known as the Lesbian and Gay Rights Resource Centre (LGRRC). In 1984, a trust board was established to oversee the growing collections.

During the 1985-1986 homosexual law reform campaign, Phil Parkinson was both the campaign's chief researcher as well as LGRRC administrator, utilising the archive to aid activist efforts in the successful push for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Fran Wilde, the Member of Parliament who had introduced the Homosexual Law Reform Bill to Parliament, wrote a letter to Parkinson thanking him and the LGRRC for their work:

The enormous work the Centre did with the Human Rights Commission and in supplying me and my allies in the campaign for homosexual law reform with intelligence and information was crucially important to the success of our efforts. Without the foresight of the National Gay Rights Centre in establishing the Centre and your efforts to organize and make available the information it had collected we would have found it difficult to mount such a persuasive argument in favor of an equal age of consent.

Post-arson attack

On 11 September 1986 - not long after the success of homosexual law reform - the LGRRC was set alight by two arsonists. The fire however did not do major damage thanks to secure filing cabinets and the quick and effective work of the fire brigade.

The Alexander Turnbull Library aided the LGRRC to recover from the damage, providing space and security in its own premises while the damaged site was evacuated. Some materials were stored in volunteer Roger Swanson's garage, and at the New Zealand AIDS Foundation's Awhina Centre.

On 30 March 1988, an agreement was signed between the Alexander Turnbull Library and the LGRRC, that the archives would be housed by the Library but continue to operate autonomously under the newly formed Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand. Parkinson and colleague Sara Knox were appointed the first honorary curators.

The shape of the LAGANZ trust was finalized in 1992.

Activity

LAGANZ has hosted two conferences, both of which resulted in publications. The first conference, named "Outlines" was held on the 15-16 February 2003 in Wellington, in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Women's Studies Department at Victoria University of Wellington. It was the first conference to focus specifically on LGBTTFIQ history in New Zealand. The second was held on the 1-2 December 2006 and focused on the homosexual law reform campaign.

Numerous events have been hosted by LAGANZ, such as "Out of the Ashes" held on 15 September 2022 to celebrate thirty years of the LAGANZ trust, and a presentation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in conjunction with Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand on 10 March 2023.

Working-bees are held regularly by LAGANZ, so that members of LGBTTFIQ communities can assist in the trust's work.

In 2020, LAGANZ received a grant from the Rule Foundation's Rainbow Wellbeing Legacy Fund, "towards establishing their ongoing digitization project to make Aotearoa’s rainbow history more accessible for future generations."

LAGANZ and two of its trustees, Roger Swanson and Will Hansen, were featured in local television-documentary on Whakaata Māori called Queer and Here.

Publications

LAGANZ has published two collections about queer histories in New Zealand, both edited by Alison Laurie and Linda Evans.

• Outlines: Lesbian and gay histories in Aotearoa (2003), featuring work covering an array of queer histories across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• Twenty Years On: Histories of Homosexual Law Reform (2009), focuses on the campaign leading up to the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986 and includes first-person accounts alongside more academic chapters.

LAGANZ has also worked alongside local zine collective Wellington Zinefest to self-publish three volumes in the Archive is Alive series. The zines were the outcome of free workshops run by LAGANZ and Wellington Zinefest.

Several publications about queer histories in New Zealand have drawn significantly upon the LAGANZ archive, including Chris Brickell's Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand, Laurie Guy's Words in collision: the gay debate in New Zealand, 1960-1986, and Brent Coutt's Crossing the lines: the story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in WWII.

References

This article "Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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