Queer Aotearoa - Sunday Magazine
Funny guy Eli Matthewson presents sobering queer history series
Eli Matthewson considers himself lucky. As a radio host he had felt free to be his whole self, giving listeners a front row seat into his social life, private life, relationship stuff – pretty much everything was on the table. After all, that’s the lot of a commercial radio presenter – bare all for the audience.
So he felt for Mike Puru, his predecessor on the same station seven years earlier, when he came out on air following an intense period of hiding his sexuality from the public.
Puru’s story is one of many shared in Queer Aotearoa: We’ve Always Been Here, presented by Matthewson. The new six-part series takes a look back at pivotal moments in our queer history and the resilience of the LGBTQIA+ community in the face of much discrimination.
Through TVNZ’s archival footage and a broad range of personal stories, the series gives insights into how queer people have been represented over the past 75 years, including a damning look at how the media perpetuated stereotypes – transphobic questions by reporters at the time the late Georgina Beyer was voted in as mayor of Carterton District in 1995 will make any journalist hang their head in collective shame.
Puru’s story in particular was incredible to hear, says Matthewson.
“I did the same radio show he did but years later. I only worked on radio for a year but you have to dig up all aspects of your personal life. You are talking so much, you want to share everything, so the idea of hiding such a huge part of yourself is wild!”
Matthewson says he feels like he lived through a bit of that, though. When he was first doing comedy panel shows there was a bit of ‘OK, Eli, you can do one or two gay jokes but don’t make the whole show gay’.
“I think they wouldn’t put two queer people on the same episode, but this last season of 7 Days, Chris Parker and I were on multiple episodes together. No one cares anymore. That idea that there can be one gay person who can make two gay jokes then try and fit in with the boys, I feel that’s history.”
Dissecting important milestones, including homosexual law reform, the HIV/Aids crisis and the 2022 ban on conversion therapy, Queer Aotearoa is told through a distinctly millennial lens, says Matthewson, 36, a millennial himself.
Growing up, the only gay person he thought he knew was the one looking back at him in the mirror, he says. As a Christian boy living in conservative Ōtautahi Christchurch, he endured schoolyard bullying.
“I had known one out gay person and you saw them become treated as ‘the gay person in the room’. When I moved to Auckland, moved into a new space, met heaps of queer people, I realised it wasn’t going to box me in completely. It was the best.”
Millennials had to come out, had to have a label, he says, recalling his own coming out at age 21. Ten years later, Matthewson’s father, Peter, would come out to him – a revelation that would form part of his 2021 show Daddy Short Legs that earned him the Fred Award honouring the best show at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival.
Peter says his son was the first person in the family he told of his sexuality.
“I have to say, it was important. I knew he would be very accepting. In some ways I’d call it a really special moment.”
It’s different for Gen Z, where the idea of coming out is more of a foreign concept because people are “just doing whatever they want to do”, Matthewson says.
“But we have only got to that place because of the people who were brave enough to come out before us… The slow push to open the doors, you know?”
In some ways, we’ve come far, he says. Where once the idea of seeing a gay kiss on screen was a story in itself, now you can go on Netflix and there’s a whole section of LGBTQIA+ shows to watch.
“A gay kiss or marriage on screen isn’t a story anymore.”
Nevertheless, there’s still such a long way to go, particularly with the trans community, says Matthewson. He was particularly struck by a comment made in one episode by co-executive producer Shaneel Lal, who said Georgina Beyer would not have gotten into Parliament if that election was happening today.
The anti-trans sentiment is much worse than it was back then, says Matthewson.
“Trans people are probably more visible on screen, employed in a bigger variety of jobs, but the hate is just wild. I think we’ve got a lot to still do.”
In one episode, Beyer is shown coming face-to-face with that hate five years after winning the Wairarapa electorate for Labour in 1999 becoming the world’s first transgender MP, as she confronts Destiny Church followers at Parliament during their 2004 Enough is Enough demonstration against civil union legislation.
“I remember that protest,” says Matthewson, who would have been 16 at the time.
“It’s amazing to watch that footage. Georgina is so articulate. She just ruins their whole argument. It’s interesting watching that and then seeing what [Destiny Church] have been up to recently.”
Despite having a pretty decent knowledge of much of Aotearoa’s queer history, Matthewson was still shocked by just how recent some of our legislation against discriminatory laws is – the 1986 Homosexual Law Reform Act was passed just two years before he was born.
The fact that the Conversion Practices Prohibition Act only passed in 2022 was “terrifying”, he says.
Matthewson, who has forged a career as a stand-up alongside his work writing and acting for TV, was 9 when he wrote his first comic material.
He did a few minutes of stand-up for a school gig roasting the Spice Girls. The next year three people plagiarised his speech, a sure sign he was onto something.
He wasn’t a full extrovert, he says. Not one to show off.
“I was more likely to write a play, then cast myself as the lead.”
He grew up watching shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway? and was a fan of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s The Humourbeasts. What Now? presenter Shavaughn Ruakere was his idol.
“This was an unruly era of children’s television where the presenters would do the craziest stuff. I was on the tail end of Jason [Gunn] and Thingee. Jason was always doing different accents and singing and I grew up thinking that it would be so cool to be on a show like that.”
He was frequenting the Court Theatre’s Scared Scriptless late night improv shows from the age of 14 or 15 with his mates. Every other week they would try and wrestle one of their mums to drive them to that show which wouldn’t even start till 11pm.
He ended up being part of the show himself for a few years before he moved up north.
Matthewson graduated from drama school in Tāmaki Makaurau in 2013. That same year he was nominated for a Billy T Award, having been enticed into the world of stand-up by fellow comedian James Roque, who convinced him to do five-minute spots at the Classic Comedy Club.
He was part of the cohort who created Snort, an improv troupe which included Aotearoa’s usual suspects on the comedy scene, think Rose Matafeo, Laura Daniel, Kura Forrester, Nic Sampson, Chris Parker.
An ubiquitous face on our screens for years both writing and performing in shows like Funny Girls, Golden Boy, a stint on Shorty, Matthewson was also the first to be part of a same sex couple to enter Dancing with the Stars in 2022.
He’s done a new stand-up hour every year outside the Covid years, a political bent shaping his material these days.
“Certainly in the last two or three years I feel like my stuff has gotten more political. I’m drawn to talking about more difficult topics.”
Workwise, he’s flat stick. No time for much else, he says, apart from writing a novel, going to a pub quiz and playing in a gay tennis league with his partner, Samuel Clack.
He’s recently cracked the overarm serve. Even got the certificate to prove it.
This latest gig presenting Queer Aotearoa was a privilege, he says.
He’s glad that these stories have been captured, that these parts of our queer history won’t be lost.
The series gives a sense of how far we have come as a nation in terms of the pursuit of equality for all. In the United States at the moment Trump is reportedly poised to ban trans people from the military. It feels like a groundswell of anti-queer sentiment going on there, he says.
“I value the Kiwi attitude – it’s the one good part of the tall poppy syndrome. When people do something like that, we’re just like, ‘hey, simmer down’.”
WATCH: Queer Aotearoa: We’ve Always Been Here on TVNZ+ from February 1.
- Sunday Magazine
