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Bennett & Tom's Excellent Adventure
New Zealand
Remote Beauty, Lesbian Isolation
It takes more than covert homophobia and straight discomfort to disrupt a lesbian couple's stay in Kiwi land.
by Jennifer Calkins
Will you hand me that spatula, hon?” I never would have thought it, but those seven words were enough to make a room full of Kiwis stop dead in their tracks. All conversation in the communal kitchen came to a screeching halt.
“Uh, sure. Here you go,” I said warily, glancing around the room, praying for someone, anyone, to continue with what they were doing.
My partner Emily spent a semester abroad in New Zealand last fall, and my aunt very generously offered to buy me a plane ticket to visit her down under. Emily would be finishing an independent study project while I was there, and we could stay at a youth hostel that cost $7 a night for a room.
I never worried that New Zealand wouldn’t be gay-friendly. I heard somewhere that Australia has the largest gay Mardi Gras on the planet, so I committed a huge faux pas and associated the two countries together. Unfortunately, that assumption was not correct.
(A disclaimer: I did not see all of New Zealand; my conclusions are based on stays in Opoutere, a town that consists literally of two dozen houses, a youth hostel, and a phone booth; and in Hamilton, a medium-sized college town. I’m not sure whether attitudes are different in other parts of the country.)
I flew to New Zealand alone, an adventure in itself with the new regulations from September 11, and after 24 hours of being on a plane, I would have been excited to be anywhere on solid ground. As I was leaving customs, very proud at having made it through successfully, I noticed a huge mural of a rainbow on the airport wall. I figured it had to be a good omen.
Emily described the place we would be staying as remote, but Opoutere completely redefined the word. After leaving the airport, I needed to take two buses to get there; I didn’t realize how much trouble I was in until my second bus turned out to be a guy named Ken driving a beat-up van. I was his only passenger.
New Zealand is startlingly beautiful. There’s just no other way to put it. Lush, green, jagged hills dotted with sheep, goats, and even deer lined the curvy roads we raced across. As we sped along, I tried both to keep up with what Ken was talking about and to keep my lunch where it was supposed to be. In his thick accent, Ken chatted about New Zealand’s huge agricultural industry, informed me that there are indeed more sheep than people, and how Kiwis pride themselves on being ecologically “green.” I could instantly see what he was talking about; the landscape was unblemished by litter, and the only human influence that I could see was the pavement on the road (even that was pretty scanty in some places), and fences keeping the livestock where it was supposed to be.
We turned a corner and suddenly the ocean swept out before me. It surprised me to see that tall green mountains plunged dramatically into the sea, unlike most of the beaches I had ever seen. The aesthetics of New Zealand blew me away again, and I hadn’t yet been there a day.
I fell in love with the hostel as soon as I arrived. It was a cluster of short, white clapboard buildings with a common kitchen and big, airy rooms. There were kayaks to borrow, a trampoline, and a porch off the back with an amazing view of an estuary, a sand spit, and the ocean beyond that. We could see the white spray come up over the sand spit and rocks whenever a wave pounded the shore.
As beautiful as this place was, it was surrounded by a wildlife refuge, and that’s about it. Emily was about to go out of her mind when I arrived, and the fact that she had been watching birds for four hours a day for her independent study project didn’t help the situation. After my epic journey and her epic boredom, and the fact that we had been apart for three months, we were both really happy to see one another. However, it soon became clear to me that people in Opoutere were not exactly used to having gay couples frequent their hostel.
There was no overt homophobia, just uncomfortable silences and glances whenever we entered the room. Nobody tried to make us feel unwelcome, it just seemed that they’d rather us not be there. It seemed that homosexuality in any form was just not talked about. Because there were new people coming and going every day, Emily had been placed in a camper where she could stay for the duration of her study. I, however, was assigned to a room where several other people were bunked, and the only reason I used that room was to get changed and to store my stuff. Every night, I walked to her camper through the common room with my toothbrush and pillow with a sheepish look on my face.
Midway through my visit, we decided to venture to Hamilton, an inland city relatively close to Opoutere. We hired a cab to drive us 30 miles to the nearest bus station. I looked forward to seeing some New Zealand civilization and to experiencing a different part of the culture; we figured that a city would also provide more diversity and anonymity. We were also in desperate need of groceries, and without a car, we had few options.
As we walked hand in hand down the busy streets of Hamilton, people stopped to gawk at us. People craned their necks out of car windows to stare. People winced and nudged their friends and pointed. It was bizarre. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced in the States. There were no rainbow flags, no gay bars, no other visible gay people as far as the eye could see. Essentially, we were specimens under a microscope for all the citizens of Hamilton to view. That’s not necessarily a great feeling.
After a few days, we traveled back to Opoutere with more food staples and a new understanding of how Kiwis really feel about gay people. There were two options to this situation, however: we could let it bring us down, or we could have a great time, anyway. We chose the latter, and spent several wonderful days hiking, swimming, kayaking, bird watching, relaxing, playing chess on the porch, and marveling at New Zealand’s beauty.
In the end, we were only really out to two people, and both were Americans. One woman was a psychic healer, so we figured she already knew anyways, and the other tagged along with us on a walk to the beach. It was exhilarating not to have to hide around these two women, and it made our last few days really memorable.
Needless to say, the hostel owner was not terribly sad to see us pack up and go, but it was sad for us, knowing the chances that we’ll be there again are slim. We did leave our mark, however: just before our cab arrived to take us away, we slipped several copies of The Advocate and Girlfriends into the stacks of magazines in the common room.
Jennifer Calkins is a recent graduate of St. Michael's College and lives in Georgia.