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Rubyfruit & Sapphire |
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Kevin Booth talks to Dr Miriam Saphirà about her life, loves and The Charlotte Museum Trust. published in Express Community Newspaper, Feb. 2007.
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The Charlotte Museum Trust |
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The Charlotte Museum Trust is an Auckland-based initiative launched in 2000 to preserve lesbian culture. The idea of a museum space was floated when it was realised that LAGANZ (Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand) are unable to accommodate cultural objects such as labyrs, paintings, glass and badge collections, not only as an archive for books and other printed matter. “One of the things about the archives is to have a history, or herstory, so that lesbians don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” stresses Dr Miriam Saphirà. “[So that] young people can know there have been people beforehand, that these things have a story… for young people to know that there was a magazine called Circle out in NZ that talked about lesbians before they were born. That would be a big difference, to know that you have some New Zealand history.” The Charlotte Museum Trust’s mission statement aims to:
Dr Saphirà believes preservation of such material is a high priority. “We’re losing [these objects]. People move from a house to a flat and then to an apartment and then maybe a retirement village. They need support and they haven’t got family to support them. Other people will pack up their things. [For example,] that was the jug that had an iris on, that was given to her by her first lover who taught her about lesbian sex. You know, all those things have a story to them, could be lost.” The trust’s name developed from the idea of celebrating ordinary lesbians. Charlotte Prime, a quiet, unassuming woman, was a regular at the 70s KG Club, who died of a heart attack. Another lesbian, Charlotte Smith, had also passed away from cancer. To become involved with The Charlotte Museum Trust as a volunteer
doing anything from fundraising to classifying artefacts to creating
a website, or to make a donation or bequest, contact Miriam at: PO Box
47398, Ponsonby, Auckland 1144; tel: 09 846 5327; mob: 021 237 0613;
e-mail: saphira@clear.net.nz |
“We
are everywhere.” It’s one of the first things I see when I
get to Miriam’s house. That badge rockets me back to the early eighties,
flatting with four strong women, all prominent in the Auckland lesbian/feminist
scene. It was a phrase I would often hear chanted, or see daubed on a
wall. The badge sits next to a raku sculpture by Paerau Corneal, an organic form suggestive of an egg, or a breast. Alongside it, a uniquely woven kete encloses a softly intimate female space. There are more badges, witch motifs, “the Mighty Queer Card Pack” – tinted lilac, naturally – and a coffee cup reading “Lesbian lips only”. Also on the table is an original edition of Circle, the magazine put out by S.H.E (Sisters for Homophile Equality), first published in 1973. These are some of the objects that Dr Miriam Saphirà hopes to protect through the initiative of The Charlotte Museum Trust. Yet there are so many more facets to Dr Saphirà’s life than this one project. She is a well-established artist who has exhibited in over 17 solo shows and many more group exhibitions. Her work includes oil on canvas and on board, etching and collagraphs on paper, bronzes and ceramics She has nine books published and has edited two anthologies, as well as receiving four awards for her work in the community. As a respected academic, she has done ground-breaking work, and her doctoral work has been quoted in parliamentary legislation projects. She has never been afraid to go against the grain of prevailing mores. Born in Taranaki in 1941, she escaped from her rural background to teachers’ college (chasing the female object of an early crush), at first unwillingly. Her first passion was to continue working the family dairy farm, but she was forced to leave by a violent, emotionally unstable brother – an event unconnected to her sexuality: After an argument over the humane treatment of their cows and the milking machine, he shot her dog. It was a pretty clear signal to get the heck out of there. She hitchhiked the seven miles to Inglewood while her parents were out and attended the interview that got her into Teachers’ College. However, she didn’t stay long thanks to the lecherous attentions of one of her lecturers. Marrying early – “One night I got drunk and got pregnant to a nice middle-class boy who after some humming and hah-ing, married me” – she had five children. It was while she was pregnant with her fourth, that she attended an inaugural meeting for homosexual law reform. The tension in her marriage understandably increased. In a few years she had made herself independent, was paying three mortgages, working fulltime and still doing papers on educational psychology. “It was pandemonium in the mornings” she recalls, “getting forty sandwiches made” and her five kids off to crèche or school. Yet she must have done something right. Her family are now closely united. “My daughter’s lesbian, and my sons say: ‘We all love women!’ They’ve been really supportive.” However, studying educational psychology, Saphirà continued to feel inadequate. Her faculty didn’t include a single paper on emotion. What motivated her to begin working with men stemmed from the fact that many sex crimes are emotional crimes. “I was interested in emotion – if these blokes could understand their emotion, perhaps they could control their crime.” “For years I was criticised because I did therapy with men, I worked with sex offenders. I worked in a prison for twelve years. I was on a bit of a crusade, trying to change sexism and violence so that women were less likely to be raped, which was where I was coming from then. For which I would be soundly criticised. When I was doing my PhD at university, someone scratched across my door: ‘kid-fucker-lover!’” Yet she was also refuting criticism from the other side of society that she was a “man-hating lesbian”: “I used to smuggle Out magazine into prison to give to gay men. Most of the sex offenders I worked with were heterosexual, although there was the odd, very repressed homosexual, paedophilic because they were often tied up with the church, totally repressed and [I was] trying to get them to come out and identify themselves as gay.” Nevertheless, she is also critical of anyone who might see therapy as a magic wand, stressing that they need to think about the way they lose their temper, the next time they get upset and angry, while driving for instance, and how they could change that behaviour, what could they have done – to see how hard it is to change your own behaviour. The subject of her PhD was slightly different, focusing on children’s understanding of sexual orientation. This was no easy road either. “I interviewed 110 children in schools but the Education Department refused permission for me to use [the words] homosexual, gay or lesbian. I could elicit the words by using pictures. I had a sample of 32 children who had mothers who were lesbian, where I could use these words, so needed to get another 32 children from heterosexual families. I naively thought parents at the university would be happy for me to conduct a short ten-minute interview with a five-minute chat on what they had done that day as a wind-down. Sadly education does not equate to reasonable thought.” Her research project might have foundered but for the salvation of the Anglicans. “Along came HUG and a minister of an Anglican church who had his parishioners clamouring at my door. This changed my attitude towards churches, but did not change my joining the demonstrations and singing outside the Salvation Army [in favour of homosexual law reform].” Her recent research has focussed more specifically on the lesbian community, particularly on trying to ascertain whether and why lesbians might be more prone to ill health, why they might delay going to the doctor, causing a medium disability to develop into a severe disability. While there is no proof (sexual orientation is not included in health statistics), she suspects that lesbians may have higher rates of fatality and breast cancer. “They talk about the Pink dollar, but there isn’t so much money around the lesbian community. There are a lot of poor lesbians.” Although she does not believe this is the main reason. Rather, she isolates an “internal homophobia”: “They feel as soon as they walk in [to the doctor’s surgery], ‘There’s the lesbian!’. So they have to be feeling good about themselves and when you’re feeling unwell, you’re not feeling so good about yourself.” She adds obesity as another factor. In 1982, she did research on what the papers contained concerning gays and lesbians. “Some we could have called neutral, but the bulk of it was negative towards lesbians and gays. Well, that doesn’t inspire young people.” Possibly environment was an influence when she attempted suicide as a young person: “I thought I was a freak. I’d looked up homosexual in the encyclopaedia. It said homosexuals had ‘arrested development’, so I thought I should be short.” She saw a bottle of poison one day, when she was feeling particularly low, and she drank it. It is lucky for the GLBT communities that she didn’t succeed. “It’s amazing, when you try something like that, the instinct to live is so strong. I immediately ran to the fridge and drank vast quantities of milk to try and stop the burning.” So does she think it is easier for young people coming out now? “It isn’t much easier but there is more stuff around. There’s the whole gender fluidity now that some people find difficult.” And “having more stuff around” is what the Charlotte Museum initiative is all about, having a place where young people with questions can go, where they can see that they aren’t the only ones, or the first ones, that there is an amazing history before us, which can uplift us and make the whole coming out process that much easier. “Lesbians are incredibly domestic. They’re very ‘nesty’, which is why it’s very hard to do fundraising activities because probably three quarters of the community are at home in the ‘burbs, just nesting [laughs].” So the message is clear: get out of your nest and back this initiative. The Charlotte Museum Trust is well worth getting behind. © Kevin Booth. 2007. |