Sydney Chalmers Allen was the medical offi cer at New Plymouth Prison during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, at a time when the institution was largely set aside for men convicted of having sex with boys and other men. This article examines Allens'approach to the sexual lives of the men under his care. Allen admired the work of well-known English doctor Havelock Ellis, and he put a selection of Elliss'ideas to work at New Plymouth. The article works through some of the philosophical similarities and differences between the two men, and explores how Elliss'ideas were taken up and adapted in New Zealand. The article brings together biography, medical practice, and penological trends in the wider history of homosexuality, and it shows the significance of Allens'work at a time when the segregation of homosexual offenders was rare in the international context.

‘I was always a very timid boy. This was after I was bullied at Mt Albert Grammar. But I have to thank the bullies because I became a writer, which enabled me to say on paper what I couldn’t say out loud’. The late Peter Wells, instigator of New Zealand’s samesame but different literary festival, wrote about the existential benefits of being a writer in the festival’s inaugural programme in 2016. The festival has run every year since then. This article draws from festival programmes and interviews with key organisers in order to explore the emancipatory potentials of samesame but different in particular and literary festivals in general. Their value lies in showcasing cultural and literary diversity, affording space for discussion and debate, and fostering new talent alongside more established writers. As such, literary festivals have an important role to play in queer community building and LGBTIQ+ politics.

The term “Dad Bod” first emerged in a 2015 article by college student Pearson and initially described a young male physique that balances fat and muscle and also connotes a relaxed lifestyle involving ample amounts of beer and pizza. The term has since gained in popularity and entered the household lexicon, often in relation to early-middle-aged men. Using Scott’s theory of “performative regulation” and digital articles from men’s health and fitness magazines, blogs, and other popular media outlets, this article examines connections between the Dad Bod and female sexual desire, health, well-being, men’s body positivity, and masculinity. The Dad Bod speaks to profound tensions in neoliberal society which men navigate in a range of ways by ignoring, resisting, and/or embodying this identity.

The terrain of debate over lesbian and gay rights in New Zealand changed markedly between 1993 and 2013. This article compares parliamentary and public discussion of the 1993 amendments to the Human Rights Act, about which very little has been written, and the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill of 2013, to track a range of ideological stances and discursive positions over a 20-year period. Those sceptical about lesbian and gay rights fashioned a changing set of discursive frames that spoke to HIV/AIDS and then the trope of “political correctness”: their arguments, which draw upon a range of international influences, fractured and became more complex as time went on. There has been a shift towards a politics of love since the start of the new millennium, and a rapidly increasing acceptance of the lives of gay and lesbian New Zealanders.

The intersections between sexuality, medicine and the law have interested scholars for several decades now, and the medical profession and the state have played an important role in the regulation of sexuality since the 19th century. These intersections have attracted sustained attention in the last few years as media, parliamentarians, faith-based organisations and activists have debated marriage equality, religious “ freedom ” , gender diversity and conversion practices. This special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies pays close attention to the ways state power and the power of medicine have regu-lated sexuality and shaped its politics since the 1930s, in Australian and wider transna-tional contexts. The articles in this special issue do not, however, suggest an oppositional relationship between an active regulatory apparatus and passive recipients of centralised control. Instead, their authors address how sexual citizens have also contested and ulti-mately helped to shift dominant relations of power when they examine issues of identity, the state, medicalisation, and community and public media. Conversely, individuals and groups have constructed new identities within contexts that initially seem totalising. This special issue emerged from a niche multidisciplinary conference convened in 2018 at the University of Newcastle. The organisers framed the event as both an oppor-tunity for attendees to engage with a diverse suite of disciplinary perspectives and a com-munity-based conference that welcomed input from interested groups and organisations. One of the invited keynote speakers was Michelle Lancey, founder of the Newcastle chapter of PFLAG, an organisation dedicated to supporting families and friends of rainbow people. Michelle had for many years been deeply involved in the campaign for marriage equality, and she was formally recognised in 2018 for her advocacy. A panel discussion organised by the student-run University of Newcastle Queer Collective further broadened the conference ’ s conversation on queer lives and practices in non-metropolitan spaces. Michael Kirby, former Justice of the High Court of Australia, gave his unique perspective on marriage equality in a public lecture. This special issue follows on from the conference, showcasing a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds. Our contributors o ff er insights from history, journalism, historical sociology and gender studies. Their scholarship highlights a set of critical issues from

"Noah Riseman and Shirleene Robinson discuss queer lives and politics in the Australian military." History Australia, 18(4), pp. 902–903

Reviewed by: Mettray: A History of France's Most Venerated Carceral Institution by Stephen A. Toth Chris Brickell Mettray: A History of France's Most Venerated Carceral Institution. By Stephen A. Toth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. xii + 280 pp. Cloth $43.95, e-book $21.99. mettray Agricultural Colony, in the village of the same name, opened in 1840 as an initiative of Parisian magistrate Frédéric Demetz. This was a time of widespread concern about urbanization, especially its impact on poor youths who came to live on the streets, and Demetz wanted to "rescue" these boys and turn them from vagabonds into disciplined and industrious citizens. Demetz possessed "a deep and abiding Rousseauian faith in the restorative power of agricultural labor" (31). He saw a way forward in work, religiosity, and routine, and he rejected the corporal punishment and degradation of adult prisons. Set up as a kind of commune, Mettray consisted of ten cottages, each housing forty youths (colons) under the control of a father figure (the chef de famille) and his deputy (sous chef). These overseers provided rigorous guidance tempered by kindness. During the day, colons worked outdoors and took lessons in agronomy and animal husbandry. The complex was surrounded by hedges rather than walls in order to provide the appearance of freedom. Mettray's regime appealed to colons' sense of honor, and staff attempted to inculcate the idea that presence in the colony was a privilege and escape would be both dishonorable and a sign of cowardice. They aimed to create obedient subjects in the manner of soldiers who would take orders without complaint, although Demetz added panoptical elements for good measure. A highly visible bell tower had a guard stationed in it, and staff shaved colons' heads so those in the nearby village could recognize any escapees. Stephen A. Toth carefully examines memoranda, discipline logs, and inmate files in order to tease out life in the colony as well as the philosophy and policy that lay behind it. This sometimes required reading between the lines in order to recover the perspectives of the young men who were sent there. Toth revisits Michel Foucault's work on discipline and punishment, but he places greater emphasis on inmates' agency. The colony was not, Toth argues, only about shaping subjectivity through various forms of regulation. He points out that inmates exercised degrees of self-determination in spite of the colony's tough formal rules and an architecture that maximized surveillance. They [End Page 163] smoked, swore, stole from the kitchens, sang obscene songs, feigned illness or insanity, tattooed themselves, had sex with one another, and beat each other up. In 1911, a group even planned to rise up and kill two guards along with Mettray's director. They took knives from the butchery and sharpened broomstick handles to use as weapons, but their plot was foiled when staff found out and called in the gendarmerie. La Maison Paternelle was separate from the rest of the colony, a larger and more forbidding building than the cottages that housed mostly working-class youths. In this bizarre form of scholarly solitary confinement, the intelligent but errant sons of middle-class parents spent twenty-three hours each day in their cells and received frequent visits from professors who taught them mathematics, history, and languages. They had no contact with the other boys and enjoyed only a single daily hour of exercise in the garden. The deep unpleasantness of this regime of social isolation came to public attention when, in 1909, a young inhabitant of La Maison—admitted after an unrequited passion for a cancan dancer caused him to become morose—hung himself in his room. Such tales of misery and cruelty were a far cry from the Rousseauian ideals that saw Mettray established in the first place. These stories, along with chronic staff shortages and worries that the colony had become a dumping ground for the most incorrigible of youths, caused it to close in 1937. Mettray provides a valuable contribution to wider histories of imprisonment, adolescence, and masculinity. Toth offers a fascinating and detailed examination of a well-known institution that influenced penological practice in other parts of the...

New Zealand's Parliament legislated for marriage equality in 2013, over four and a half years ahead of the passage of similar legislation in Australia. Civil unions came into being in New Zealand in 2005 but had only been enacted at a state and territory level in Australia, often with a different name. How might we account for these divergences? This article offers a comparative account of the Australian and New Zealand situation in order to explain the different trajectories. It marks out some important political, legal, and constitutional contextual issues, personalities, and practices that shaped the ways in which the movement for marriage equality was enabled, resisted, and had an impact on people who wanted to marry.

This chapter examines the development of queer youth cultures in New Zealand in the decades before 1950. It explores broad social patterns, international and local influences, and the intricacies of young people's own experiences. By examining life stories and important societal changes, the chapter asks how meaning was negotiated at the level of the individual. The intimate opportunities available in the early years of colonisation grew alongside the processes of urbanisation, and although modern gay and lesbian identities solidified after the Second World War, their prehistory is full of ambiguous relationships and intimate possibilities. Young people's stories reveal that the intimate present is built to a considerable degree upon the past.

Psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy played an important role in attempts to regulate and rehabilitate New Zealand men imprisoned for sodomy and indecent assault between 1910 and 1960. Little attention has, so far, been paid to the specific psychological 'treatment' of such incarcerated men in the international context, but New Zealand's archives offer-up much valuable detail. This article adopts a Foucauldian approach and explores shifting epistemic beliefs alongside the specific practices of key medical officials, and it considers how prisoners' subjectivities were shaped in the process. Attempts to displace homoerotic desire gradually gave way to the articulation of same-sex sexuality. New possibilities emerged: when the psychologising of homosexuality in prisons opened the door to self-expression it showed an affinity with the organised resistance of the 1970s.

Is same-sex marriage a recent outcome of concerted political action, or does it have a much longer history? This article critically examines the historical tensions and complexities around same-sex marriage by focusing on the New Zealand context. It argues that same-sex marriage is not simply a matter of legal provisions, but also reflects shared customs and incipient forms of politics that took hold before the era of marriage equality and have since been further transformed. By offering an overview of the New Zealand situation between the mid-19th century and the present day, this article examines the cultural and political complexities of same-sex marriage in order to tease out the intricate intersections between historical continuities and social change.