OPINION
One of the last times I saw Georgina Beyer was in 2019 at the launch of Peter Wells’ final book, Hello Darkness, a bare week before his death.
We sat companionably together in an otherwise deserted courtyard outside an AUT lecture theatre and waved as Wells, frail with a blanket over his knees, was pushed past us in a wheelchair.
They had been long-term friends and he had directed her to an award-nominated performance in the taboo-breaking 1986 TV film, Jewel’s Darl.
“It’s just like waving at the Queen,” she called to him, recalling flag-waving children at a monarch’s drive-by. He returned our salute with appropriate regality.
Now she, too, has followed him into that final darkness.
Beyer was one of the few New Zealand politicians to have achieved some measure of global recognition.
She had been a sex-worker, a cabaret performer, a movie actress, the mayor of rural Carterton, before being elected the world’s first transgendered Member of Parliament, an event that made international news.
For her maiden speech, she spoke off the cuff, as always.
The Office of the Speaker usually requests a first-timer’s notes prior to delivery. Beyer informed them that they would have to wait because she didn’t know what she was going to say.
Her speech, however, was memorable, containing the now-famous sentence: “This is the stallion that became a gelding and then a mare, and now I seem to have found myself to be a member, Mr Speaker”.
It would be one of many quotable quotes in a long public life.
Beyer was a true orator. It seemed to be in her blood.
I can remember listening once as she delivered a speech to a packed audience.
She had no notes, spoke vividly for an hour, before concluding with a rounded flourish.
Later in her post-Parliamentary life, she would be the keynote speaker or participant in many high-profile conferences or debates, including at the Oxford Union and Cambridge University in 2018 - no mean feat for someone who left school at 15.
But Beyer was never quite the child of the streets that was presumed, based upon stereotypes.
She was of mingled European and Maori descent (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Raukawa and Ngāti Porou) and her parent’s relationship foundered before she was a year old.
Her mother’s second marriage was to Colin Beyer, who would go on to become a successful legal partner and consultant with Simpson Grierson.
She had boarded at the exclusive Wellesley College in Wellington before she moved to Papatoetoe with her mother, in the wake of a second divorce.
Beyer had already become aware of her essential difference from others, even if she had no words for it.
From a very young age she would wear her mother’s clothes, replacing them carefully in the wardrobe.
By mid-adolescence she abandoned school for a job, before leaving home permanently.
Beyer returned to Wellington but was too young for drama school.
A crucial moment occurred when she visited Carmen’s Balcony, a cabaret staffed by transgendered performers. “I began to see that I would be able to make a transition to being Georgina after I had been taken to The Balcony,” she told interviewer Gareth Watkin in 2013.
“[I] saw all these queens who were on stage, and it was a major revelation … They weren’t just fun drags, they were serious-looking women. They looked fantastic.”
I first met Georgina when she was still George, at the Royal Oak’s New Tavern Bar, Wellington’s major gay venue of the period. I recall her alert eyes, her intelligence, and neat gestures.
It was an era when homosexuality was illegal, where the police dog squad came through New Tavern most Saturday nights, and the leading officer stood intimidatingly in front of every single patron without exception until they met his eyes.
Yet the gay, lesbian, and transgendered culture of that era was vital.
It was in the process of defining itself against an oppressive heterosexual world and refusing to hide. It was in this world that George became Georgina.
Beyer had also come to realise that it wasn’t only her parent’s punishments for her “effeminacy” that she would endure - violence and brutality could occur on the streets.
There were other social restraints surrounding her, constraining who she was, who she could be, and the futures that were open to her.
“I was always thinking no human being should have to live like this,” she told RNZ in 2021.
“Why can’t I live a conventional life when it comes to work, when it comes to being integrated into society … And I began thinking what is the purpose of making social burdens out of people who mean no harm to anyone else, who do no harm to anyone else — and where is my right to be a positive participant in our society?”
This realisation would govern her subsequent career and form the basis of her political philosophy.
“Because of my transitioning at that time and the lack of social compassion,” she told me in 2018, “it forced you to live in this ‘twilight world’, among ‘people of the streets’, if you like. There was an odd bond because we were all enduring the same sort of social exclusion.
“I guess I got a bit more forceful and assured about who and what I am — and nothing was going to alter my path to achieve what I needed to achieve in becoming a woman.”
But there was also life to be lived as she transitioned genders. Reluctantly, she became a casual sex worker to provide an income when required.
Another frightening violent attack during the time she lived in Australia, fuelling more righteous anger. Returning to New Zealand she began working as a performer in Bloomer’s, the long-running show at Alfie’s, Auckland’s most-popular “gay-friendly” nightclub. She also listed herself with an agent.
Her role in Wells’ film Jewel’s Darl, where she played a transexual whose best friend is a transvestite, earned her a Best Actress Nomination in the Film and Television Awards.
It was a breakthrough TV drama focusing on the quiet intimate moments of a relationship and Jewel’s belief in staying strong against other people’s mockery. When the Bloomer’s show broke up after eight years, Beyer moved to Carterton, eventually standing for a position on the small rural council.
Her success led to a tilt at the mayoralty, which she gained.
In 1999, she won the Wairarapa seat in Parliament, decisively defeating broadcaster Paul Henry by 3033 votes.
Beyer was a forceful Parliamentary speaker, but she had already discovered she preferred practical electorate work and considered leaving after one term.
The blow-back from the electorate, as she described it to me, was swift: “Look, girly, we didn’t put you in there to give it up after one term. You are just a bit nervy at the start”.
She gave her vocal support to the Civil Union and Prostitution Reform Acts — “I have had experience in the sex industry — and I am the only member of this Parliament to have had it,” she sternly told the House.
Beyer’s views would later differ from the Government on the Seabed and Foreshore Bill, and this would be one of the many factors that led to her resignation in 2007.
Three years later, she was struggling financially.
Bewilderingly to many, no post-Parliamentary positions came her way, unlike many politicians of lesser abilities. There was also the relentless progress of a debilitating recently diagnosed kidney disease.
She’d had a transplant in 2017, but it failed, leaving her again with an exhausting routine of dialysis.
The bookshelves in her Wellington flat gave some idea of who she was: Monty Soutar’s Nga Tama Toa: C Company 28 (Māori) Battalion 1938-1945, Helen Clark’s Inside Stories, Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers, Crossing the Floor: The Story of Tariana Turia, and Andrew Reynold’s The Children of Harvey Milk: How LGBTQ Politicians Changed the World, published by Oxford University Press, which included many references to her.
There could be no doubt that Beyer’s fierce opposition to what she perceived as social wrongs and the people she saw as embodying them — like the so-called Destiny Church “Bishop” Brian Tamaki — would be influential. Her appearances on Dancing with the Stars, The Masked Singer, or in current affairs interviews were a constant public reminder of her essential message.
She never took much interest in the fractious culture wars which have recently split the queer communities, happily referring to herself as a “tranny”.
While she never had a long-time partner, she had a tight circle of close friends, who were with her at the end.
It is too soon to say how Aotearoa New Zealand will ultimately view Beyer, but there can be no doubt that her bravery, her anger, and sometimes her sheer bloody-mindedness — along with her deep sense of selfless social awareness — helped create a more inclusive nation.
She was a courageous wahine toa with a generous spirit. When she performed on stage, in recent years it was frequently to Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All and the song expressed something essential about her.
I decided long ago
Never to walk in anyone’s shadows
If I fail, if I succeed
At least I’ll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can’t take away my dignity.
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