This thesis contributes to the burgeoning field of the history of sexuality in New Zealand and seeks to distill the more theorised and reflexive understanding of the subjectively understood queer male identity since 1948. Emerging from the disciplines of History and English, this project draws from a range of narratological materials: parliamentary debates contained in Hansard, and novels and short stories written by men with publicly avowed queer identities. This thesis explores how both 'normative' identity and the category of 'the homosexual' were constructed and mobilised in the public domain, in this case, the House of Representatives. It shows that members of the House have engaged with an extensive tradition of defining and excluding; a process by which state and public discourses have constructed largely unified, negative and othering narratives of 'the homosexual'. This constitutes an overarching narrative of queer experience which, until the mid-1990s, excluded queer subjects from its construction. At the same time, fictional narratives offer an adjacent body of knowledge and thought for queer men and women. This thesis posits literature's position as an important and productive space for queer resistance and critique. Such texts typically engage with and subvert 'dominant' or 'normative' understandings of sexuality and disturb efforts to apprehend precise or linear histories of 'gay liberation' and 'gay consciousness'. Drawing from the works of Frank Sargeson, James Courage, Bill Pearson, Noel Virtue, Stevan Eldred-Grigg, and Peter Wells, this thesis argues for a revaluing of fictional narratives as active texts from which historians can construct a matrix of cultural experience, while allowing for, and explaining, the determining role such narratives play in the discursively constructed understandings of gender and sexuality in New Zealand.

This thesis focuses on a transformational but disregarded period in New Zealand’s twentieth century history, the era from the arrival of the Marines in 1942 to the arrival of Rock Around the Clock in 1956. It examines one of the chief agents in this metamorphosis: the impact of American culture. During this era the crucial conduits of that culture were movies, music and comics. The aims of my thesis are threefold: to explore how New Zealanders responded to this cultural trinity, determine the key features of their reactions and assess their significance. The perceived modernity and alterity of Hollywood movies, musical genres such as swing, and the content and presentation of American comics and ‘pulps’, became the sources of heated debate during the midcentury. Many New Zealanders admired what they perceived as the exuberance, variety and style of such American media. They also applauded the willingness of the cultural triptych to appropriate visual, textual and musical forms and styles without respect for the traditional classifications of cultural merit. Such perceived standards were based on the privileged judgements of cultural arbiters drawn from members of New Zealand’s educational and civic elites. Key figures within these elites insisted that American culture was ‘low’, inferior and commodified, threatening the dominance of a sacrosanct, traditional ‘high’culture. Many of them also maintained that these American cultural imports endangered both the traditionally British nature of our cultural heritage, and New Zealand’s distinctively ‘British’ identity. Many of these complaints enfolded deeper objections to American movies, music and literary forms exemplified by comics and pulps. Significant intellectual and civic figures portrayed these cultural modes as pernicious and malignant, because they were allegedly the product of malignant African-American, Jewish and capitalist sources, which threatened to poison the cultural and social values of New Zealanders, especially the young. In order to justify such attitudes, these influential cultural guardians portrayed the general public as an essentially immature, susceptible, unthinking and puritanical mass. Accordingly, this public, supposedly ignorant of the dangers posed by American culture, required the intervention and protection of members of this elite. Responses to these potent expressions of American culture provide focal points which both illuminate and reflect wider social, political and ideological controversies within midcentury New Zealand. Not only were these reactions part of a process of comprehension and negotiation of new aesthetic styles and media modes. They also represent an arena of public and intellectual contention whose significance has been neglected or under-valued. New Zealanders’ attitudes towards the new cinematic, literary and musical elements of American culture occurred within a rich and revealing socio-political and ideological context. When we comment on that culture we reveal significant features of our own national and cultural selves.