‘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

The Royal Commission on Human Relationships was an initiative of the Whitlam government, instigated in 1974 to investigate ‘the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships’. The three commissioners (Justice Elizabeth Evatt, journalist Anne Deveson and Archbishop of Brisbane Felix Arnott) delivered their final report in 1977: that the report contained thirteen recommendations about homosexuality was testament to the success of gay and lesbian activists in placing their concerns on the Commission’s agenda. Through an examination of the testimonies and submissions presented by gay men and lesbians to the Royal Commission, this paper will investigate the ways that these activists framed their public, citizen identities as homosexuals, and how this framing found purchase in the Commission’s recommendations. Seeking rights and protections from a newly receptive Australian social liberal state, gay men and lesbians framed their experiences through narratives of exclusion, trauma and a nascent language of homosexual citizenship. This language drew upon the ways that women’s liberationists were framing their claims on the state and also shaped by the ways that that state was recognising these emergent political actors, such as women and migrants. By presenting themselves as unequal citizens, subject to ‘daily oppressions’, gays and lesbians worked to legitimize the homosexual sexual citizen and his or her claims on the state, even as it recast and reinforced the power of the state in the process