The first seed of the idea for Queer Aotearoa came to me during a regular dog walk. Even more shocking, it was only a year after I was born that it became illegal to deny someone a job or rental property because of their sexuality or gender identity. I had always imagined New Zealand as a progressive little utopia at the bottom of the world but, for queer people, progress came surprisingly late compared to places like the UK.
As someone who benefits from the hard-won rights of activists who risked everything to challenge a repressive status quo, I was embarrassed by how little I knew about our own history. This glaring gap in access to our own history made me realise how essential it was to preserve these stories.
With time running out, it felt urgent to capture the voices of those who had been part of these movements while we still could. Working with producer Orlando Stewart was a no-brainer. This treasure trove helped us visually support the stories shared in interviews. I think audiences will be surprised by how progressive some attitudes were in the past. Condensing all of these stories into six half-hour episodes was no small feat shoutout to our brilliant editor, Sacha Campbell.
When we started this project, I saw it as history worth telling. We sat down with 35 interviewees for the series, and many shared the most difficult experiences of their lives. Mike Puru spoke about his fear of being publicly outed β a fear that became a reality for other entertainers. In , events from or can feel distant or even irrelevant.
But as recent events here and across the world have shown us, knowledge is power, especially for minorities whose rights can be stripped away with the stroke of a pen. We gave a lot of thought to how we could make the show broad enough to resonate with people who are still working through their identities, as well as straight cis-gendered people.
