From the periphery into the centre

For life-long Aucklander Anton Blank, the city has been a place alternately hostile and receptive to his identity as a gay Māori man.

He recently contributed to a new book of essays Tāmaki Makaurau 2025 which contemplates the changing, shifting nature of life in our largest city.

Here’s an edited version of Anton’s essay.

 

In 1966, when I was four, I moved to Auckland with my parents and sister. Before that we were in Panguru in the Hokianga, where my parents, Pius and Arapera, taught at the local high school.

It was an almost entirely Māori community. The Pākehā who were there provided services and ministry to the local whānau. There was my father Pius, a Swiss migrant,  plus one teacher, the shopkeeper and his wife, and the nuns and priests at the convent on the hill overlooking the village.

I started school early at four years old, a privilege negotiated by my parents and the primary school teacher. This allowed my parents to work without having to organise childcare. Arapera had my sister Marino and me in bassinets in the classroom when we were newborns, and later Arapera and Pius employed a local wāhine to care for us while they were teaching.

When I started Auckland schooling at Birkdale North Primary School in 1967, I was slightly ahead of the other students. I was also in a class of predominantly Pākehā children and socially this was easy for me, because of the influence of Pius’s intense parenting and European point of view. Te ao Māori was a type of mystical cosmology which Arapera held to tightly but didn’t share with her children.

I was intimidated by other boys, and my earliest sensory memory is social anxiety. I didn’t have the rough and tumble characteristics associated with my assigned gender. Sport made no sense to me — I didn’t want to chase other children. Attached to the social anxiety was a deep shame about my homosexuality, and I lived with a constant fear of being called a sissy.

Across all the domains of my early life, I was integrated into the assimilationist system of the time. I was much more comfortable in suburban Auckland than Panguru, where I was very aware of my conflicted Māori identity, my otherness. I think this is common for Māori of my generation, and even now being Māori is something I explore and navigate daily as I move about my life.

Beach Haven and Birkdale, the connected suburbs where I lived and went to school were superficially dull and uninteresting, populated by a mix of working and middle class whānau. But there was the omnipresence of the sea, so close that we could access the beach at the bottom of our street. And with the sea came the beauty. There was a clutch of local Māori artists and intellectuals living there. Hone Tūwhare, Rangi Wilson and Toi Te Rito Maihi were all friends of Arapera, who was a writer and poet.

The last 10 years of Arapera’s working life were spent teaching English literature and te reo Māori at Auckland Girls’ Grammar School. Arapera was an eccentric raconteur fond of reciting Shakespeare to her students, and she had been headhunted by the principal, Charmaine Pountney, a high-profile lesbian activist during the 1970s and ‘80s.

Arapera and Charmaine’s tino rangatiratanga politics aligned, but Arapera was challenged by Charmaine’s sexuality, and later also mine. When I came out to Arapera in 1989, she screamed at me: “Why did you have to give in?!” Ten years later, she could chuckle over the absurdity of her behaviour, but it really did take this highly intelligent woman that long to get her head around the prevalence of homosexuality as an immutable human phenomenon.

Arapera’s influence on her students cannot be overstated. She infused them with feminism, self-confidence, English literature and tikanga and te reo Māori. Journalists Maiki Sherman and Annabelle Lee-Mather are two of her former students, and I’ve met many of others in influential roles over the course of a 40-year career working across Māori development. To this day, these women adore my mother. In their eyes, she is a saint.

My father Pius migrated to Aotearoa in 1952. He never lost his thick European accent, and there was more than a touch of Einstein about his Germanic demeanour and intellect. Pius said “ja” instead of “yes”. When I went home for a few months in my early 30s to deal with a bout of depression, Pius spoke to me about Sigmund Freud as I lay on the couch. He was as remarkable as Arapera, but very reclusive, very Swiss.

A primal scream for Posie Parker 

In a strange social and political evolution facilitated by the likes of veteran feminist Germaine Greer and novelist J K Rowling, today it is women who are driving the persecution of trans people.

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) argue trans women aren’t women and have successfully convinced the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that a person’s gender definition is determined by their sex at birth.

TERFs are supporting the entrenchment of the gender binary, which at its core reinforces notions that the biological differences between men and women also play out in gendered characteristics and personality traits. This dated and cliched discourse typically ascribes men characteristics such as leadership and independence and women the corollary of empathy and cooperation.

For most of us, the gender binary is errant nonsense because we all share characteristics from both sides of this artificial gender divide. The binary is a flawed social, not scientific, construct.

Before gender conservative and TERF Posie Parker arrived in Auckland to proselytise the locals in March 2023, her Melbourne rally had been attended by neo-Nazis. Aotearoa’s then prime minister, Chris Hipkins, an LGBTQIA+ ally, made it clear that, from his perspective, Parker wasn’t welcome here. Resistance percolated across queer Aotearoa and a gathering of LGBTQIA+ people would attend Posie Parker’s rally at Albert Park on March 25, 2023.

I walked to Albert Park with another friend, queer theologian Russell Hoban. He is now challenging New Zealand’s hate crime legislation, which doesn’t protect LGBTQIA+ or 16 other marginalised groups, and the case is currently awaiting a ruling from the High Court. Watching Russell in action, I’m reminded that all things are possible when we are courageous.

By the time we got to Queen Street, we could hear a cacophony of cheering, music, and the drumming of pots and pans from Albert Park. What would unfold has been widely reported: Parker was drenched in tomato sauce and would quickly flee the country.

But what the media coverage didn’t capture was the joy and celebratory euphoria of the event. It really was quite something. I bumped into Māori make-up artist and influencer Kylee De Thier, who was enraged by Parker’s TERF proclivities.

De Thier was raised in Gisborne and had never had a formal “coming out” with his whānau. They had always supported his sexuality and lifestyle choices. For me, 40 years his senior and having survived a very rocky introduction to my gay identity with my liberal parents, this was quite an epiphany. It was evidence of a massive shift in the national psyche. When parents assume their children are heterosexual, they inflict a primal wound on the queer child.

Broadcaster Timothy Giles and his queer daughter Diva were also there. Timothy is a long-standing LGBTQIA+ ally and when it comes to the issues of the day, we are completely aligned. We met on a variety of dance floors during the 1990s populated by the likes of writer Peter Wells, filmmaker Garth Maxwell and artist Lisa Reihana. The period inhabits my Tāmaki memories as a hedonistic arc of self-discovery.

Thirty years down the track, my life is clean, a term used to describe drug addicts in abstinence, and for the most part, very peaceful. I spent more than 20 years in nightclubs, terrified at the prospect that this phase of my life might end. Coming out the other side, many of the friendships from those years have morphed into relationships that are more stable and supportive.

Parker lasted less than 10 minutes on the Albert Park rotunda before she was shuffled to safety by the police. The event was shut down and she hadn’t said a word.

Russell Hoban and I then wandered down to Aotea Square, where Destiny Church had finished a march up Queen Street. Destiny was quickly outnumbered by the sizeable rainbow contingent who continued the fracas that had been unleashed at the park. Pinned in from all sides by the shouty protesters, Hannah Tamaki filmed the gay rage with her iPhone, smiling and self-satisfied.

The whole day represented something much greater than an anti-TERF protest, and on the walk back to Ponsonby, I felt affirmed, elated — “seen”.

I forgive you

No one could have predicted that we would be where we are right now. I had naïvely assumed that as we marched towards social freedom and equity for all, the benefits of these social changes would be self-explanatory, and conservative resistance would dissipate and eventually disappear, like a kind of natural evolutionary extinction. This is honestly what I believed.

Now I’m emerging out of a state of shock, steadying myself because to stay in the despair is to percolate in defeat.

When Destiny Church members were charged after storming Te Atatū Library, I decided to go to their hearing at the Waitākere District Court. It was a small creative action I could take. I wanted some agency in the middle of the madness. So off I went with two friends and a banner that declared “Toitū Takatāpui”. The catchphrase referenced the 2024 hīkoi, because here we were as queer Māori in a parallel universe, fending off hatred from complex external forces.

We were pushing back with love.

No one was allowed into the courtroom or waiting room. We were asked to stand on the other side of the street. But over the course of the day, I had friends and colleagues texting “Toitū Takatāpui!”

I had a voice, which is a very central driver for me, intrinsically connected to my sexuality. Long before I came out, I had a strong sense of my own mana, instilled in me by my parents. “I have mana, you have mana,” Arapera would say as she processed the implications of the homosexual law reforms of the 1980s.

Growing up during the 1960s and ‘70s, queer identities were invisible or peripheral. I always wanted to migrate from the periphery into the centre. Writing helps me pursue this raison d’être. There is no life without language, and literature becomes a therapeutic practice.

Over time, intersectionality has increased the range of human identities —incorporating intersecting categories like gender, sexuality, indigeneity, ethnicity —and the patriarchy that used to call the shots is now destabilised. Rather than trying to occupy the centre, I move across the cultural and digital landscape engaging with many identities. It feels much more democratic and exciting. Everyone has a role.

Watching the Destiny Church whānau emerge from court, I felt aroha for these brown disciples of Brian Tamaki, who was nowhere to be seen. I wanted to call out “I forgive you!” and I now regret that I didn’t. Our rainbow identities force us to create chosen families of our peers and kindred spirits, and we have much to teach the church about love. Toitū Takatāpui.

The joy!

On a beautiful sunny Sunday in June, I am walking the coastal path from Milford to Takapuna surrounded by the Gay Tramping Group. After Takapuna, we will wander inland to the estuary by Shoal Bay, which looks across to the Harbour Bridge.

Never have I seen the bridge from this specific perspective, and looking across the suburban undulations, the Sky Tower rises but the CBD is not visible. The best descriptions of the Auckland of my adolescence can be found in Paula Morris’s Queen of Beauty, and today I am surrounded by it.

There’s a particular clinker brick that was used during the 1970s that proliferates here. The houses are well maintained and there is a lot of ugly architecture from the 1980s and ‘90s, nestled beside the villas and bungalows. It is peaceful, not a whole lot going on, residents washing their cars in driveways, and I realise that I don’t miss this aspect of life on the North Shore. I was glad to escape it because it reinforced the sense of isolation I felt as a teen.

I have lived in my apartment near the corner of Karangahape and Ponsonby Roads for 15 years, and the small cluster of areas that I move about in day to day — Grey Lynn, Ponsonby, Westmere, Herne Bay, the city centre — bustle gently. When I first moved into the central city almost 20 years ago, I wondered why I hadn’t done so earlier, because I could be myself in the neighbourhoods, surrounded by like-minded Aucklanders. The only other place I would want to live is Zurich.

When I open the doors onto my deck, I look down at the North-Western Motorway, up to Symonds Street and across the city to the Sky Tower. I feel connected to humanity. The studio I’ve been renting in Zurich is even noisier, on Hirschengraben behind the Kunsthaus. It is both a bolthole and a sanctuary: the traffic and city noise are strangely comforting.

Today’s urban walk across Tāmaki is very civilised. Out of 18 walkers, there are perhaps six Pākehā, no Māori apart from me, and the remainder a veritable potpourri of internationals. I’m intrigued. A Russian woman in her late 20s immigrated to Tāmaki shortly before Covid-19. It took her years of planning and saving to make the move. She was motivated to come here so that she could live her queer life freely. There’s also a couple from Papatoetoe, and we swap stories about finding a purpose during the third age.

We catch the ferry back to the CBD from Devonport. It’s been a beautiful day, and I realise I almost never spend a whole day outside, even though I know how good it is for the wairua.

A few nights later, I’m at the Tim Melville Gallery for the opening of Lissy and Rudy Robinson-Cole’s exhibition. Their Wharenui Harikoa is a wharenui constructed of crochet-covered polystyrene. The walls and ceiling of the wharenui are neon-crimson, and its decorative pou mimic those of traditional whare, but they are multi-coloured. There’s a sweet whimsy to the work, which is part of its message of healing and aroha.

This exhibition is an explosion of joy, as the prattle of local and international oligarchs interrupts the collective serenity, like torrents of rain during Auckland winters.

 

This essay is extracted from Tāmaki Makaurau 2025: Essays on life in Auckland, edited by Damien Levi (Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi) and published by Auckland Council Libraries.

Anton Blank (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu) has a background in social work, communications, Māori development, public health and literature. He was the principal investigator of the 2016 report “Unconscious bias and education — a comparative study of Māori and African American students.” Anton’s creative fiction and non-fiction have been published widely, and he is the editor and founder of the Māori literary journal Ora Nui.

E-Tangata, 2025