As part of an ongoing interest in profiling international sexuality scholars on the website, and keeping up to date with issues and debates emerging in different parts of the world, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Dennis Altman.

Dennis Altman is a writer and academic who first came to attention with the publication of his book Homosexual: Oppression & Liberation in 1971. This book, which has often been compared to Greer’s Female Eunuch and Singer’s Animal Liberation was the first serious analysis to emerge from the gay liberation movement, and was published in eight countries, with a readership which continues today.

Since then Altman has written eleven books, exploring sexuality, politics and their inter-relationship in Australia, the United States and now globally. These include The Homosexualization of America; AIDS and the New Puritanism; Rehearsals for Change, a novel (The Comfort of Men) and memoirs (Defying Gravity). His book, Global Sex (Chicago U.P, 2001), has been translated into five languages, including Spanish, Turkish and Korean. More recently he published Gore Vidal’s America (Polity) and Fifty First State? [Scribe].

Altman teaches politics at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, and is well known as a commentator and reviewer on the ABC and Australian newspapers. He was President of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific (2001-5), and has been invited to lecture on AIDS and sexuality in countries across the world, including periods as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and New York University. In 2005 he was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard, and is a member of the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society and the Board of Oxfam Australia. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2008.

Below is a copy of the transcript from our interview which explored Altman's work over the last four decades in the fields of politics and sexuality studies.

It’s been about 38 years since you published your first book, “Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation”. What do you see as some of the major successes of, and transformations in, the gay and lesbian liberation movement during that time?

Well, the gay liberation movement as such no longer exists, and it no longer exists I guess because it has essentially been successful. I think one of the fascinating things, if you look back at the movements of the late 60s and early 70s, is that in some ways one could argue that the gay liberation movement has been the most successful. The quite extraordinary shift in attitudes towards homosexuality, at least in Western countries, clearly not in other parts of the world, has meant that the tenor of debate has shifted. This is a country that 30 years ago still treated homosexual behaviour as a crime for which people could be sent to jail, at least in theory, even if that rarely happened. Now even conservatives are saying ‘we support total equality for people on the basis of their sexuality’. And that represents an extraordinary cultural and political shift.

Some people argue that the granting of full citizenship rights to gay and lesbian people, such as rights to legal marriage, will mark the true end of the liberation movement, but it’s hard to imagine victimisation and discrimination ending so quickly. Do you see any sort of future for the gay and lesbian liberation movement?

I think that there are all sorts of persistent problems around stigma and non-acceptance and I am certainly not denying that. But if we’re looking, for instance, at Australia, Western Europe and Canada, but not the United States, I think that it would be difficult to argue that discrimination and oppression on the basis of homosexuality is anything like the extent to which it exists on the basis of some other criteria. People are much more disadvantaged in Australia if they’re indigenous than if they’re homosexual. But of course there are ongoing problems and ongoing issues. There are things that political movements probably don’t rally people around because there isn’t the same sense of a major perceived injustice.

For some people the issue of same-sex marriage is the great remaining symbol. But I think there has emerged in Australia over the last decade fairly strong political support for some sort of recognition of equality in the material issues around same-sex partnerships, that is changing things like laws on superannuation, rights of partners for social security, for hospital visits, for all the things that are constantly being talked about. This suggests to me that at an official level the battles are largely won, but there are certainly remaining issues at a cultural level, and there are huge issues for people who grow up in particular ethnic communities. Perhaps there will be a development of new movements that are specifically linked to those experiences, but I think that’s rather different to the sense of needing a full social transformation that gay liberation represents.

You’re referring to the gay liberation movement in, for instance, Australia. What about in non-Western countries?

I think people in the West tend to be very unaware of the extent to which some of the most interesting developments in asserting homosexual equality have occurred in, say, Latin America. But certainly across the Islamic world and in most of Africa, and many parts of Asia, there are huge problems. There are huge cultural barriers to the acceptance of homosexuality and there is often a very nasty scapegoating going on where homosexuality gets linked in with those aspects of westernisation and liberalism that religious and political leaders dislike. We’ve seen that in a number of countries in Africa, we’ve seen it in our part of the world, in Malaysia and Singapore. It’s interesting of course that there are still countries that were part of the British empire that, despite their anti-colonial rhetoric, aren’t willing to repeal the British laws outlawing homosexuality. That’s a very big issue at the moment in India and Malaysia, in Singapore, and certainly in the Caribbean where there is some extremely nasty and quite often violent homophobia.

You are often described in popular and academic circles as both a university scholar and a gay rights activist. Could you tell me about the relationship between these two activities for you? How do you negotiate scholarship with political engagement, on both a theoretical and practical level?

I’ve always hated being described as an activist, and indeed, I don’t think I’ve been a very good activist. I think that my involvement in most of these issues has come through taking part in public debate both as an academic and writer, and then through working in a number of institutions. By institutions I mean community organisations and more recently groups like the AIDS Society for Asia and the Pacific, and the International AIDS Society. But in the end I’d say that the most significant contribution that I would have made is through writing and that there are three or four books that have made some sort of impact over a long period of time, going from ‘Homosexual’ in the early 70s through to ‘Global Sex’ in 2001. And certainly on a personal level I think I get the biggest buzz out of suddenly finding that something I wrote is being used in a course somewhere or is being translated. I discovered by total accident the other day that ‘Homosexual’ had been published in Greek. It was obviously a ripped off copy because nobody ever gave them copyright and I suspect that it would be very hard to find a copy of it. But you know, there is something really nice about feeling that somewhere out there people living in Greece have presumably read stuff I wrote. I am aware that ‘Global Sex’ has been translated into four or five languages and that means that there’s a way in which my ideas have an ongoing impact, which I think is more important for me than what I might do as an activist.

But you know you’re right. There is a tension here, and I think that it’s much easier for people of my age than it is for younger academics. One of the great issues in academia is that as Australia follows the pattern of becoming more and more professionalised, the expectations of publication become much narrower. People have to publish in what are decreed as “A journals”, that is certain peer-reviewed journals, which by and large nobody reads. It is much more difficult to have the sort of career that somebody like me, or some of my colleagues, have had, which allowed us to combine intellectual work reaching a larger community with a successful academic career. I’d note that Robert Manne and I are part of the last generation of professors without PhDs.

In relation to your writing, I’ve noticed that you position yourself a lot within the text. Being an anthropologist, I’m quite interested in reflexivity and positionality. I’m wondering, how has your textual approach been interpreted by other political scientists and sociologists?

I think I’ve very rarely written anything that would be regarded by the guardians of political science as relevant or as real political science, which is a term luckily we don’t use here in the LaTrobe discipline of politics. This is partly for the reason you indicate, namely as soon as one is dealing with issues of human behaviour and particularly issues of power, which is often what politics is about, you have to position yourself. I don’t think you can stand outside. And clearly when I’ve been writing about sexuality and sexual politics, it would be deeply dishonest of me to stand outside. I guess in some ways I’ve always been an amateur anthropologist who sort of does fieldwork and then retrospectively I can say, I went to the sauna because it was fieldwork. Now this is crap. I just went to the sauna, but perhaps the difference between me and lots of the other guys there is that I might then go back and reflect on it, and bring it into my writing, and think about how what I’ve experienced and seen relates to the literature.

I am also very conscious of serendipity and I think that there’s something people often forget: that what we write is often a product of opportunities that come up that can’t be foreseen and that can’t be planned. I couldn’t possibly have foreseen the consequences of living in the United States, which I did in the early 80s. This was the time when AIDS really began, and the AIDS movement and the huge panoply of issues around AIDS came into the world. I didn’t go to the United States for that reason, but because I was there I got caught up in it and I was asked to write a book about it and I’ve written a lot about AIDS ever since. Now, a different life choice would have meant that an awful lot of what I’d written wouldn’t have been written. And I think that there’s a dishonesty in the attempt to write ‘objective social science’, where people pretend that somehow they have an infinite choice of subjects and they choose their subjects without any regard to their own autobiography.

One thing I always encourage graduate students to do is to actually think through why they’re going to spend three years working on a particular topic. Even if they don’t put that in the thesis, because examiners may not always want to hear it, I think it’s really important for someone to understand themselves, what draws them to something, what makes that issue one they want to investigate rather than the infinite number of other things they could be looking at.

You’ve mentioned your work on HIV/AIDS and I know you’ve published quite a lot of work on HIV/AIDS. Could you talk a little about some of the work you have done outside of academia?

Again, I think this is partly serendipity. I was in the United States when the epidemic began, or at least when it was recognised and named. I had an agent who was friendly with an editor at Doubleday, and they said we’d like you to write a book, ‘AIDS in the Mind of America’ or in the Australian/British edition, ‘AIDS in the New Puritanism’. I then came back to Australia. I knew the then health minister, Neal Blewett, so I got involved in advisory committees. Simultaneously, when I came to Melbourne in 1985 I got involved in the Victorian AIDS Council and I’d say for the first five years of living in Melbourne, VAC was an enormously important part of my social and personal life as well as a major political commitment. And then, because I already had a strong interest in the international, and through the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations, I got more and more involved in international community level AIDS organisations. I was part of the original team of the International Council of AIDS Services Organisations, and I was involved, with Professor John Dwyer from UNSW, in setting up the AIDS Society for Asia and the Pacific. Then in time I became the president of the AIDS Society for Asia and the Pacific. It was through that connection that I was nominated to go on the governing council of the International AIDS Society.

I have ended up in a somewhat uncomfortable position in which I now remain a member of the governing council, both of the International AIDS Society and of the AIDS Society for Asia and the Pacific, but I have very little contact with grassroots AIDS activities in Australia. And I regret that. I think it’s unfortunate. On the other hand, both because I’m not a medico and because I’ve had this long background connection with community politics, I still have a somewhat different view of the world to the great majority of people who are my colleagues in the International AIDS Society. But sometimes I feel that I’m cast in the role of filling in all the gaps, so I’m simultaneously the community person, the homosexual, and the social scientist.

You’ve also done a lot of work in the last decade on globalisation and sexuality. For instance, in “Global Sex” you argue that a global gay identity predominantly rooted in the West has to a large extent homogenised gay identity throughout the world. Some have argued that these cultural flows are indicative of Western imperialism and should be resisted by non-Western peoples. What is your position on this?

That is, of course, a huge debate and I have some sympathy with the position you mention. I’ve always found it bizarre that there are many countries in the world that celebrate Stonewall and Christopher Street. I think it was in Lisbon, I discovered they were having a Christopher Street parade and I thought, how does someone 20 years old in Portugal, in 2000, relate to Christopher Street and Stonewall? But I’ve always been very careful to point out that it is actually people in non-Western countries who are making those connections. I’m not imposing them on them. I’m noticing them, I’m observing them, I’m talking to many people, and often I’m arguing with them.

A number of years ago I had a long discussion with friends of mine in the Japanese gay group OCCUR who wanted to translate a lot of American and a couple of other Western gay writers into Japanese. I said – why are you spending time and money on that? What you should be doing is writing about your experiences, and about the Japanese experiences, history and movements around homosexuality. So I find myself often in situations where I am actually arguing against what I am describing. Now of course it’s true that everywhere there are many versions of homosexuality and it shouldn’t simply be posited as Western versus non-Western. There are large numbers of women and men in Australia who don’t buy into the mainstream view of lesbian and gay identity. Equally, there are many people in non-Western countries who very clearly identify with it and are building political movements based on those identities.

We have to be very careful to avoid an oversimplification which somehow assumes that all the world is going to become an extension of West Hollywood. But we also have to avoid a cultural theme park view of the world that suggests that the way in which gender and sexuality are organised in pre-industrial societies is going to persist, even as those societies undergo massive economic and social change.

To finish up, could you tell us a little about what you’re working on at the moment? What can we expect from you in the next few years?

I’ve been thinking more and more, at a local level, about the ongoing impact of the 60s, or perhaps the early 70s in Australia. As you get older, you tend to think an awful lot about generations and about what’s changed and what hasn’t changed. How does one separate one’s own life from the larger social changes? So I’m playing around with a book that’s going to explore the things we thought were possible in the period of radical social movements in the 60s and early 70s. I want to ask about the relevance of those political shifts at a period when the triumph of neoliberal capitalism finally seems a real question again. I’m fascinated by the fact that we are currently living in a period in which people are being forced by the economic downturn, and by environmental disintegration, to ask big questions of the sort which I think went off the agenda almost totally, from the late 70s through to early this century. We had that whole period of belief in unlimited growth, neoliberalism, and India and China becoming replicas of the United States, in which the world was all going to be living in this massive, successful market economy. I don’t think people believe that any more, and I’m fascinated by how far the questions that we asked as young radicals might be relevant today.

The other thing I’m interested in is the increasing push to medicalise HIV prevention, and the constant search for what is called ‘prevention science’, which I see, and perhaps I’m being too conspiratorial, as an attempt to downplay and push out of the discussion the enormously significant role of community building, peer education and empowerment. I think this is the big debate that needs to be going on in the AIDS world.