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  • From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual
  • Robert Aldrich
From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual. By Robert Reynolds. Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 199. $19.95 (paper).

The first formal homosexual emancipation organization in Australia, the Homosexual Law Reform Society, was established in Canberra in 1969. It was followed in 1970 by the Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP). By 1972 CAMP had split, a dissident and more radical group forming Gay Liberation. Robert Reynolds's From Camp to Queer is an in-depth examination of the early years of these gay movements, focusing largely on the debates that took place in Sydney and Melbourne in 1972. [End Page 384]

Filled with the ardor of rebellion and activism, members of CAMP and Gay Liberation debated issues, published newspapers and position papers, and held lengthy and heated meetings. They argued about the relationship between men and women (even whether they could share the same meeting venue), the relationship of bisexuality to homosexuality, "promiscuity" versus monogamy, public and private sex, whether or not it was necessary for members to come out, the type of organization and strategies that would best advance their goals, the value and detriments of a gay "ghetto," the limits of "gay citizenship." A barely unified gay liberation "front" was itself fragmented by doctrinal quarrels and challenges from radical lesbians, gay Marxists, and those who espoused other tendencies. All of these topics Reynolds discusses in From Camp to Queer.

Theory took precedence in the faction fighting as liberationists sought to (re)define what it meant to be gay or lesbian and how sexual movements could change or overturn social orders (or if they should try to do so). Many who took part in the debates were would-be revolutionaries whose views were often utopian. However, in Australia, which had no earlier tradition of homosexual activism (as, for instance, did Germany), the worthy-minded participants tackled important personal and social issues in a new fashion. Reynolds charts these debates and unravels the themes. He provides a critical perspective on the search for self-fulfillment through discovery of sexual authenticity and transcendental sexual experiences and notes the paradoxical retreat from politics that these positions could engender. But even if liberationist stances resulted in narcissism, they performed a therapeutic purpose for identity formation.

Identity was the core of the debate (identity for both individual gays and the movement), and Reynolds analyzes the way that homosexuality moved from being considered an incidental to a central component in personal identity. CAMP and Gay Liberation meetings, encounter groups, and consciousness-raising sessions were, he says, sites of identity articulation and differentiation. The "narratives" of participants embodied struggles to define new identities. With an interest in psychoanalysis, Reynolds says that the debates proved crucial in terms of psychotherapeutic sensibility, defining a reconceived type of homosexual. Reynolds's theme is the "self" and the ways homosexuals "went about re-making themselves," "creating a community to call home" and reacting with the outside world. Reynolds also suggests, convincingly, that the positions of these years foreshadowed postmodern "queer perspectives"; indeed, "queer theory" in the early 1990s invented nothing not already evoked twenty years previously. "In many ways," he states, "the first moment of queer was Gay Liberation."

This book is lucidly written, and its author takes very seriously the permutations of ideology, deftly deploying contemporary theory to understand the theoretical arguments of the 1970s. Identity and ideology [End Page 385] are nevertheless rather removed from the social context. The volume provides little biographical material on the leaders of CAMP or Gay Liberation. Only after well over a hundred pages does Reynolds note that Gay Liberation meetings took place weekly in Sydney. Readers get little idea of the dynamics of these meetings, the importance of different publications, the wider effects of the arcane discussions, or the actual political practices promoted. Gay liberation, in this view (which may coincide with reality), was more talk than action, and From Camp to Queer focuses on about eleven months of talk. The book is based on ephemera issued by the movement and its various members and, curiously, makes reference to only a couple of interviews with...

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