Unintentionally complicit

Brian Tamaki’s crusade against Pride — which included Destiny Church members storming Te Atatū library to disrupt a children’s event hosted by a drag king — isn’t just about his version of Christianity, writes Anton Blank. It’s about preserving the power of the patriarchy.

 

Brian Tamaki is enraged by the emergence of LGBTQI identities and voices. He thinks gay power poses a threat to Christian family values, and, more importantly, the patriarchy.

But his crusade against the rainbow community isn’t just about faith — it’s about control. Tamaki, like many conservative men, is terrified of what happens when rigid gender norms collapse. Because when masculinity isn’t defined by dominance, where does that leave him?

That’s why his church’s Pride festival demonstrations were driven by men in T-shirts from his men’s programme, Man Up. No sissy homosexuals in Tamaki’s corner — just real men protecting wāhine and tamariki from the onslaught of the so-called rainbow agenda. He called it “Pride propaganda,” warning that drag queens are hellbent on sexualising the children of Aotearoa. Christian fundamentalists have been spinning this fake news since the gay protests of the 1960s.

But maybe Tamaki should be looking closer to home. Three months ago, one of his church’s youth leaders pleaded guilty to sexually abusing boys from one of their youth groups.

Masculinity is a social construct. Boys are taught from birth to associate being male with leadership, dominance, strength, and assertiveness. These gender expectations are reinforced through a complex interplay of parenting, politics, books, media, sport, and fashion. Men’s clothing alone tells a story of constraint: sportswear, workwear (jeans, boots and worker jackets, built on the mythology of the rugged labourer), and business suits designed for control and conformity.

Artists and writers who want to challenge these masculine norms have expressed their rebellion through fashion. From the 1930s until he died in 1999, gay icon Quentin Crisp wore makeup and softened the impact of masculine attire with scarves and other flamboyant accessories. British artist Grayson Perry has created an alter ego based on Camilla Parker Bowles to help him interrogate British culture.

This type of self-expression is often referred to as cross-dressing, a derogatory term associated with hackneyed prejudices about transgender women. Ask yourself: Do clothes have a gender?

Even today, men who step outside the lines of masculinity risk ridicule. There’s no place in the patriarchy for men who display the softer characteristics associated with femininity — like collaboration, compassion, empathy and beauty.

Some heterosexual women are complicit in reinforcing these traditional roles. From what I can gather from popular culture, they expect their husbands to protect them, tell them they’re attractive, and assume a leadership role in the partnership. I know this to be true because I am currently tumbling down the Married at First Sight Australia rabbit hole, which, this season, includes a Māori contestant. As a voracious consumer of popular culture, I’m often left wondering whether we have evolved at all as a species since we emerged out of the cave.

But tikanga Māori offers up another model: one where gender roles weren’t always so rigid.

In kapa haka, men and women wear variations of the piupiu and display a range of human emotions such as pride, rage, sorrow and joy. Before we were colonised, men shared in the nurturing of children — and I see this in Māori fathers today, especially as we continue to look to our history and reclaim the practices of our tūpuna. I also work with many wāhine Māori who are thriving in leadership roles, corporate warriors who can hold their own in any boardroom.

That said, tikanga does need to evolve to reflect our lived experience. I don’t like the strict separation of genders on the paepae. To me, it’s forced and unnatural.

Ngāti Porou has a tradition of women participating in whaikōrero, but my observation is that the iwi’s most renowned female orator, Whaia McClutchie, was exceptional. At her tangi in 1992, I was with my mother Arapera. Koro Dewes waved at her from the other side of the paepae, encouraging her to step forward to speak. But when she spoke, contrary to her modus operandi as an opinionated feminist raconteur, Arapera was shy and uncomfortable. Whaikōrero didn’t come naturally to her.

Brian Tamaki wants to turn the clock back to the dark ages — when there were only two genders, men ruled the roost, and women were biblically compliant. He’s being emboldened by increasingly noisy and powerful patriarchal ideologues, drawing energy from global movements that see equality as a threat.

Destiny’s Pride Festival shenanigans included the storming of Te Atatū Library to stop a drag king reading to children (who then had to be locked behind closed doors to protect them from the much scarier Destiny church mob) and an attempt to stop the Pride Parade by an entourage of Man Up members doing the haka. It was reminiscent of Trump supporters storming the Capitol, but with a reo soundtrack.

Tamaki will frame the Auckland Pride disruption as a victory, feeding his congregation the usual fear-mongering rhetoric. “I would smack someone who was trying to pervert my child in a room,” Tāmaki later told his followers. The more he is criticised, the more validated he will feel — because, in his mind, Christ came with a sword.

And yet, Māori leaders have been strangely muted about this. Compared to the fierce opposition to the Treaty principles bill — legislation that will likely go nowhere — takatāpui rights barely register. Social media is full of aroha for the rainbow whānau, but where is the vocal, public advocacy for our safety and rights?

Eru Kapa-Kingi emerges as a rare exception, a millennial thought leader, making razor-sharp connections between colonisation, the oppression of LGBTQI+, and the responsibility of heterosexual Māori to step up.

“This hate is perpetrated on the most part by straight men,” Kapa-Kingi said on social media. “We need to use our privilege to stand up in solidarity with the rainbow community. You can’t stand up for tangata whenua rights and at the same time perpetrate hate towards the rainbow community.”

He doesn’t call it intersectionality, but that’s what it is. Our identities — indigeneity, gender and sexuality — are interconnected. Even within the Māori population, some groups are more likely to encounter discrimination than others. Māori women, for example, are among the most imprisoned groups in the world. In the US, trans women of colour are the most likely to be murdered. The layers of our identity create unique patterns of prejudice and violence.

At a rainbow community gathering at Albert Park last weekend, Kapa-Kingi was there, speaking out against the hate to the soundtrack of Kylie and Britney hits. Most of the speakers were young and brown, and there was a youthful Marxist naivety to their rage against capitalism and neoliberalism. But the star of the show was Sharon Hawke, who reminded the crowd that true tikanga embraces diversity and uplifts rainbow love.

The church casts a long shadow across contemporary Māori identity. Our cultural rituals are so saturated with Christianity now that many Māori don’t see a separation. It seems impossible now to extricate one from the other.

While Māori generally support rainbow rights, many are also Christian. And on some level, they will feel conflicted about Tāmaki’s agenda. So, they become passive observers, unintentionally complicit in the hatred of takatāpui.

 

Anton Blank (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu) is a queer publisher and writer living in Tāmaki Makaurau. He is a regular contributor to E-Tangata.

E-Tangata, 2025