"These Are Just a Few Examples of Our Daily Oppressions": Speaking and Listening to Homosexuality in Australia's Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–1977

Australia's Royal Commission on Human Relationships was an initiative of the progressive and social democratic Whitlam Labor government. Instituted in 1974 with the unusually broad terms of reference to investigate "the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships," it was the first inquiry into such a topic in the world.¹ The three commissioners (Justice Elizabeth Evatt, journalist Anne Deveson, and Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane Felix Arnott) delivered their final report in November 1977 after taking evidence from hundreds of both expert and ordinary Australians on a tremendously diverse array of aspects of intimate life. Framed as a response to social, cultural, and technological change and conducted in the hope of a "better understanding of Australian society and the challenges it is facing," the commission's findings offered a wide-ranging analysis of Australian private lives.² It made more than five hundred recommendations on a huge array of topics, including sex education, parenting, gender roles, domestic violence, contraception, adoption, and child abuse. Thirteen of these recommendations related to homosexuality. That the report addressed homosexuality at all was testament to the tenacity of gay and lesbian activists who had worked to place gay and lesbian issues on the commission's agenda through their testimonies and submissions. The commission's inclusion of gay and lesbian experiences was controversial: the Catholic Church challenged the validity of the commission to hear testimony from homosexual people. Yet gay men and lesbians were nonetheless able to use the commission to make strategic claims on the Australian state in the mid-1970s, when decriminalization of homosexuality was yet to be achieved in most jurisdictions and the radical dreams of gay liberation were fading and fragmenting. The commissioners were presented with two opposing points of view on homosexuality throughout their deliberations, but they were persuaded by the claims of gay and lesbian activists not just on the question of decriminalization but also on the need for redefining ideas of family, sex education programs, and antidiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians.³

This article examines the ways that lesbians and gay men made citizenship claims upon the state in mid-1970s Australia through the case study of the Royal Commission on Human Relationships. Seeking rights and protections from a newly receptive social liberal state, gay men and lesbians framed their experiences through narratives of suffering, exclusion, and citizenship. The Royal Commission on Human Relationships facilitated and legitimated a kind of sexual citizenship for homosexuals, challenging the heteronormative model of citizenship, which had long dominated Australian political life.⁴ The term "sexual citizenship" is deeply contested, and in her 2017 review essay, Diane Richardson noted that sexual citizenship is a multifaceted concept, understood in a variety of ways. Much of the scholarly work on sexual citizenship has analyzed the ways that conventional frameworks of citizenship are underpinned by normative understandings of sexuality and gender. The concept has also been used to theorize the ways in which rights are granted or denied to different social groups on the basis of sexuality.⁵ These insights are underpinned by the work of feminist theorists of citizenship like Carole Pateman, who argued that established citizenship models rest on a patriarchal "sexual contract" between men and women.⁶ Indeed, since the formation of the Australian nation in 1901, the benefits of Australian citizenship had been distributed through the white heterosexual family unit, which was structured by a gendered divide between the public and private spheres.⁷ Second-wave feminists from the 1960s onward contested this public/private split, telling stories of experiences of inequality and violence in the private sphere in order to claim public rights and protections and articulating a citizenship identity that did not rest solely on their roles as wives or mothers. Similarly, lesbians' and gay men's evidence to the commission revealed their tangled and multiple understandings of the state and its seemingly new possibilities. Their testimonies also contested the public/private split as they sought to...