Ken Davis was born in country NSW but came to Sydney at 2 years. His parents were at opposite ends of the political divide, and Ken recalls he always had access to political debate and banned literature when he was growing up. Ken became involved in school and university students’ rights movements: gay liberation, environment and anarchist groups and made regular visits into the city to soak up youth counterculture.
Enjoying the ‘fertile and messy’ nature of politics, Ken went on to a career in the Labor Party. When he was evicted from the Party in 1979, he took up a role with the Union. At this time AIDS was emerging among clients and in the workplace. He discusses the fear and discrimination around this.
Ken became a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a political satire movement which also supported women going for abortion, and conducted rituals, blessings etc. He liked the street theatre practice involved.
Gay social venues grew rapidly from around the 1979, especially Oxford Street after the first Mardi Gras March in 1978. Ken reflects on this and the subsequent Mardi Gras and its impacts. Ken has continued his activism, including lobbying for gay equal rights.
I think through the gay movement in general there’d been a sense of using satire and camp and irony and creative expression to deal with a lot of problems and so we had the Gay Liberation Choir from 1980, I think, which not like the choir now did a lot of political and a lot of satirical things but also started to sing about HIV and from ’81 the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence which brought an orientation to safe sex from the sisters in San Francisco in 1983.
So the Sisters initially was partly a way of combating the advances by the Christian Right which in Australia came to be the Festival of Light and the Call to Australia and Christian Democrats led by Fred Nile after he’d got rid of all the other leaders. But it was also very much about morale in, not just the gay community but the, I don’t know, progressive community in Sydney. So the Sisters were doing something that was satirical but also had a lot of resonance for a lot of people.
So the nuns would go down and stand there with ridiculous placards like “Every sperm is sacred. Two million killed in wet dream nightmare”. But Fabian’d then say to the Brothers “You’re really attractive and why don’t you come home with me and you can feel under my habit”, like just whisper all this sort of sexual stuff to the Brothers and they’d go completely nuts and run away. But also people were doing house blessings, namings of children, blessing unions, all sorts of like rituals for people’s lives in their homes or whatever.
I was like in the first group of novices with some people important people and I never left.
