At the top of a steep flight of stairs, tucked into a small cluster of rooms that made up his studio, Ōtepoti artist John Robinson's handcrafted jewellery was carefully displayed. If you looked up, vibrant artwork stretched across the walls all the way to the ceiling – beautiful, expressive, and bursting with colour. The room was full of light and inviting. I sat on a cushioned bench by the window as I interviewed John.
John was a lovely man. I was nervous – it was my first interview – but he was kind and patient. He spoke softly and carried himself with a quiet, thoughtful presence, yet his words were powerful – especially for me, as a young gay woman. He seemed to have a subjectively positive view of his experiences as a member of the rainbow community, though it was clear he also understood the flaws of the society he was raised in. Still, I had the quiet, aching sense that he hadn’t fully recognised that he, too, had been wronged – that he carried the impact of those flaws within himself. I wanted to reach across that space, to show him that truth – but it wasn’t my place.
At 72 years of age, John has borne witness to the rainbow community’s evolution in our South-bound corner of Aotearoa. From living in fear of prosecution in the mid 20th Century, to current-day yarns with his gay models about their plans for parenthood. Through the medium of tablet drawings, printmaking, jewelry-making, sculpting and painting, he’s expressed his sexuality and those of his subjects. From his studio near the Octagon, the Otago Polytechnic School of Art graduate and former tutor tells his story – ‘cottaging’ and gay awakenings included – and why it’s important to stand up to the bullies so queer people can get on with their lives.
The Artist’s Way to Ōtepoti
John’s story of art began when he left school at 17 years of age and moved 20 minutes from Foxton, a small town north of Wellington, to Palmerston North. There, he completed an apprenticeship as a jeweller. During that time, he became interested in painting after discovering a small art gallery in Palmerston North. It wasn’t far from where he worked, and so John would make use of his lunch breaks to peruse paintings by New Zealanders like Michael Smithers and Robin White. “They were all very exciting,” says John.
There was an elderly customer named Marion Tylee, a painter who John estimates would have been in her 70s. A good one, considering that listed among her accolades is a Gold Medal from the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts for a watercolour in 1923. One day he plucked up the courage to ask, “Oh, Miss Tyler, would you give me painting lessons?” She replied, “Certainly not, young man. You have to go to someone your own age, or someone much younger than I am.” And so he did. John had travelled to the South Island because of a man and, having wound up in Dunedin, decided to take her advice.“So I applied for the art school here in Dunedin and I've never really left,” he says. That was fifty years ago.
When Rainbow was Rained on
Moving to Dunedin, John was one of the many in the rainbow community to have flocked to bigger cities. Not only are bigger cities more exciting in general – the hustle and bustle of city life certainly provides more entertainment than the solitude of rural New Zealand – but at the time, they also offered a refuge of anonymity for queer folk not possible in small towns. Historically, gay people have flocked to bigger cities. For much of the 20th century, homosexuality was not only socially shamed; it was illegal – a history that John believes everyone should be aware of.
John was 36-years-old when homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand through the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986. Or, as he puts it: “For people of the same gender to express their love physically for one another.” He recalls people being sent to prison and the “closet cases” among the queer community who lived their lives under the radar. Gay men who were perhaps 20 or 30 years older than him would go to great lengths, through “smoke screens and subterfuges”, to present themselves as straight to the wider community. “And I think a lot of young people don't realise what it was like and the effect that knowing what you do in your sex life and your love life is a criminal act,” says John. Many turned to booze and drugs to cope. “I mean, there's still a lot of alcohol and drugs in the world, that doesn't change; but it's not wholesome to be like that [...] It can be a very destructive and corrosive way to be.”
Last Easter, some friends took him to New Plymouth specifically to see the empty prison there. A grim Victorian edifice, the prison was where, from 1912 to the early ‘50s, they sent so-called ‘sex offenders’ – many of whom were gay men. A lot of people who were caught committing homosexual acts were prosecuted and sentenced to prison time. “So it sort of has this almost unknown gay history because, as far as I know, no one kept a diary that's still around,” John explains. Unfortunately, given it was 80 years ago, those who were incarcerated there likely aren’t alive to tell the tale.
If they weren’t prison-bound, gay men were known to flee the country to escape the shame among family and the community. One famous (and rather scandalous) case is dubbed the ‘Wanganui Sensation’ from the ‘20s. The closeted mayor Charles Mackay was blackmailed by someone who had learned his secret, and he attempted to silence the man who threatened to expose him by shooting him, earning him 15 years of hard labour. Once out of prison, Mackay fled to Berlin, which had a relatively free homosexual acceptance not known to Aotearoa – including a Department of Homosexuals made for the purpose of protecting gay men from blackmail. “People used to do that because it was the only thing they could do. They had to go to a bigger community on the other side of the world where they could reinvent themselves and, you know, live with a certain amount of dignity,” comments John.
“You just have to be honest with yourself”
John has always known his sexuality. Like many young people’s gay awakening stories now (whether it’s the way Timothée Chalamet rolled in the Italian countryside grass with Armie Hammer or the sexual tension between Kim Possible and Shego), it was visual media that led John to his realisation. He recalls going to the movies after school (a weekly tradition) and seeing the boys his age salivating over some Hula girls on the screen. He didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. “I was just baffled. Why did [those boys] jump up and scream and yell and carry on?” says John.
In the heterosexual world of cinema where no Hula boy equivalent existed for John, and certainly nothing compared to Call Me By Your Name, it was only later that he could look back in hindsight and pinpoint this moment as not so much an awakening, but a clear moment showing his disinterest in girls. “Of course, when you're young, you do want to conform and be accepted. It's just how it is, I think.” Despite knowing his sexuality from a young age, it wasn’t until John was nearing the end of his twenties that he began to accept himself. “I thought, well, you just have to be honest with yourself. Of course, start with yourself and with the people in your life that matter. And everyone else, it's not their business,” he says. “As long as you're being true to yourself, who cares what the rest of them say?”
In that period of time, during John’s 20s and 30s, there were a lot of interesting and socially progressive biographies coming out, detailing the previously ignored queerness of prominent 20th century artists. For example, attention was given to the writer Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women, and the way she portrayed queer people in literature. There was also a group of pansexual painters who, according to John’s recollection, seemed to be all over the place all the time. “They had this group of friends and they decided they'd always be terribly honest about themselves,” says John. By the time he was in his twenties, they were all “dying off” as he puts it, but their life stories were being chronicled in biographies. “So I took a lot of strength, I guess, from those people.”
Dunedin’s Queer Life
Despite its conservative Southland-adjacent location, sandwiched between rural towns where “gay” is still used as a cuss word, Ōtepoti has long punched above its weight in societal tolerance. John can attest to the city’s rainbow scene, having lived here since the late ‘70s. “I think Dunedin is a liberal city and is quite broad-minded and quite happy for people to live their own lives,” he says. Having said that, he’s also aware of gay men who had been sent to prison for being gay. But he’s never had any problems personally except for one instance of “straightforward discrimination”.
He was painting 20 people from the rainbow community in Southland. To advertise for volunteers, he had a notice in his studio window inviting people who might be interested in sitting for him to climb the stairs and come have a talk. One day, he got a strange phone call. The person on the other end of the phone asked, “Why are you trying to get these queers from Southland?” He hung up. About an hour later, they rang back with the same question. John’s coworker, who John notes “wasn’t rainbow”, was sitting beside him and overheard. He snatched the phone off John and said, “We’re blocking that one.” It’s something he never would have thought of doing, he says. “So there is some kind of prejudice.”
Dating in Dunedin wasn’t always as easy as downloading Grindr. To circumvent the judgemental public eye, John recalls that a lot of lonely gay men would meet one another in public toilets – or “cottaging”. “Now I never did that – well, I didn't know about it, because I was relatively old,” laughs John. But he had his brushes with the scene. For a period of time in his 20s, he had a close friendship with a lady who he’d go on platonic dates with. One night, they went to a play at Allan Hall together. On the return route home, John popped into the public toilets on Frederick Street – and someone propositioned him there straight away: “I was so frightened I ran out!”
But outside of public toilets, there weren’t many places for gay men to meet each other. Woof! was born five years ago and has since become somewhat of an epicentre of queer life in modern-day Ōtepoti, adorned with proudly displayed rainbow flags, potted plants, and eclectic lamp shades just a couple of blocks away from John’s studio. In John’s memory, the only other ‘gay bar’ was Club 65 on Bond Street. Before the place was gentrified and turned into apartments, John and his friends would take a bottle of booze to the dingy, concrete basement, and dance. “And for a while, that was sort of the centre,” says John. “It was exciting and fun.”
Artistic Expression
Art has been John’s outlet for self-expression. “I've had to come and express myself in my work,” says John. Specialising in male nudes, John will often use soft and bright colours to depict form, an intentional decision in contrast to the stereotypical New Zealand male, many of whose height of flamboyance includes a Hawaiian shirt on Crate Day or the bright colours of their Super Rugby team jersey. He has also learned the stories of other gay men who model for him – a highlight in his work, and something he says he intends to write a book about someday.
“One of the funny things [I’ve noticed is that] the first drawing session, they will either tell you everything about themselves or they tell you nothing at all,” notes John. Take for example one model Sam, now an Auckland-based lawyer, who cheerily told John his entire life story: he was about to have his first child with his husband. John went home after the session (which occurred on his birthday, no less) and said to his partner, “Do you know what young people think these days? What they aspire to? They're going to get married and have children.” It had never occurred to the older couple, who had lived through the decriminalisation of homosexuality, with the legalisation of marriage only coming 27 years later with the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Act in 2013.
“Sam was going to get married and he was going to have babies, and the only way we would have thought we could have babies was to marry a woman,” says John. “There are gay men who love babies – they're just natural fathers who have done that and have been happy on that side of their life, bringing up children [...] Those options are there and I think it's fantastic.” Sam and his husband’s baby is coming in July.
From Apathetic to Political
As John gets older, his resilience in his identity has only strengthened. He described his younger self as very “apolitical”, never taking part in any protests and only really engaging with the rainbow community through his art and in helping Moray Gallery to organise gay and lesbian exhibitions and in the community centre.
But in the last few years, as the Western world has been taken over by, in John’s words, “bullies” and the “worst kind of men” – not only in Trump’s America, but in our own backyard with a recent NZ First member’s bill prompting Dunedin’s largest trans rights rally – John has shed his apathetic attitude. “I think I have found a new political voice, and I feel that it's important that we stand up and say this is who we are, we contribute as much as anybody else. We're a minority of course, but there's no reason why we can't get on with our lives and not be persecuted in any way [...] And I think that in America a lot of people are trying to roll back gay rights. They're talking about doing things about marriage. They're certainly picking on the trans community. You know, we've got to stand up and say, ‘No, we're not going back. No.’”
Interviewing John was a privilege. His gentleness, his honesty, and the quiet force behind his words stayed with me long after I left his studio. In sharing his story, he offered more than just a window into the past – he reminded me of how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.
Now more than ever, we need to stand up – for ourselves, for each other, and for those who never got the chance to. The rights we have were hard-won, and they remain under threat. Being passive is not an option. We must educate ourselves, honour the histories that shaped us, and confront the systems that still try to keep us quiet. Most importantly, we need to be proud; proud of who we are, of the communities that hold us, and of the beauty we continue to create in defiance and in joy. We owe that pride to the generations who fought to get us here, and to those still yet to come so they might grow up loving without fear.
Thank you, John, for your art, your voice, and your courage. You reminded me that being visible is powerful, and that being ourselves is political.