WHEN ANZ chief economist Saul Eslake presented The Future of Tasmania, a speech to a business lunch in Hobart last year, he identified “talent, tolerance and technology” as key social and economic stimulants for encouraging population and investment growth.

Within Eslake’s presentation (Click here for Eslake analyses) lay a radical view of how a community’s cultural broad-mindedness is perceived by outsiders nowadays. Eslake’s paper analysed what attracts the creative classes of scientists, engineers, designers, actors, novelists, cultural figures and researchers as well as knowledge-intensive professions such as financial services, business management and high-tech experts to commit to developing new enterprises in places like Tasmania.

In studies of comparable smaller US cities, the visibility of gay males has become an established statement of “non-standard people welcome here” for precisely this kind of investor and entrepreneur.

“Tasmania’s progressive same-sex legislation is fantastic in recognising gay life needs and for symbolising the island’s liberalisation from its reputation as a cultural backwater,” say long-term gay couple Garry Dorrington and Ian Cox, owners of Rockerfellers Restaurant.

“But at our age, we’re probably not going to adopt an infant,” they confess.

After 20 years in business in Tasmania, these outgoing entrepreneurs have a string of innovative business successes behind them. Yet when they opened Rockerfellers above Knopwoods Hotel at Salamanca Place 15 years ago, things were very different for gays in Hobart. In their first months of operation, they realised their business had turned a cultural corner when Cox threw out a straight guy for making anti-gay remarks. As entrepreneurs, they realised they could set their own standards.

“When we first opened many gays couldn’t get work anywhere other than in the service industry,” Cox remembers, but in the intervening years local gays have graduated from their underground outsider status to become doctors, lawyers, bankers and accountants among other mainstream professions.

“There’s no need for gays to live in a ghetto in today’s world,” his partner Garry Dorrington says firmly.

“Yes it is great to support gay-friendly businesses but one of the opportunities for homosexuals living in Tasmania is for integrating more cohesively into mainstream culture,” he says.

What about young Tasmanian gays?

“Yes and no,” says Sydney-born antique dealer Warwick Oakman. “Assimilation is also a way of disappearing gay identity and it’s a middle class thing after all.” Oakman says he still likes to be asked if he’s gay because it’s a way of acknowledging his identity.

“Otherwise, I’m as queer as a ghost,” he says.

Elsewhere, gays are often the urban pioneers regenerating neighbourhoods such as Sydney’s Darlinghurst, where new lifestyle businesses helped create human safety zones for artists, film makers and musicians among other creative outsiders, in turn attracting low, middle and high income residents back to inner city living.

Hobart may be too small for this pattern to be fully realised, Oakman believes, which leaves many gays feeling less comfortable here than elsewhere.

A lot of gay couples are in semi-retirement, buying old homes and gently nursing them back to health.

“That’s great for my business,” says Oakman, yet he feels this may be more of a generational trend.

“What about young Tasmanian gays?” he asks.

According to Oakman and others, gay bashings have increased lately, although most are unreported.

“Yes if you’re a young gay guy or you look gay, you have to be careful on Salamanca Place at 2am on a Friday night,” says Dorrington.

In reality, the whole area needs increased security and policing. Indeed the problem of drunken louts verbally or physically abusing gays may have as much to do with the way young Tasmanian males are inexperienced in how accepted homosexuality is in larger cities, as well as youth binge-drinking patterns.

Is this what’s driving the 20-35 year old gays away from Tasmania?

“Not really.” says Cox. “You have to leave home to become yourself fully as an adult. It’s not fair to blame Tasmania for anti-gay backwardness any more. It’s always going to be harder to come out in your own home town.”

Meanwhile, what many describe as the “gay entrepreneurial gene” is more likely to emerge in individuals who are determined, innovative and prepared to work damned hard.

Tasmanian lifestyle-orientated small businesses aren’t always driven by these qualities, causing unnecessary failures among the kinds of enterprises we’d expect to flourish here.

Come out all over again

Dorrington is adamant: “You cannot expect to lead a stress-free life if you’re serious about making proper money anywhere in the world, so it’s an illusion that it would be somehow easier in Tasmania.”

Oakman comes from a background of AIDS awareness activism — good grounding, he says, for living with society’s contradictory relationship with homosexuality.

He’s an entrepreneurial success story. After arriving in Tasmania four years ago with no prospects and less than $1000, his business now sells
antiques all over the world. Yet when he got here, he had to re-invent himself and “come out all over again”.

“Many people pay lip service to a range of socially progressive issues but they’re not very worldly,” he says. “I’ve had to stop using very gay words like ‘fizz’ or ‘trizzy’ to describe the objects I sell and there’s always that feeling that, like John Howard, they’d prefer their children not to grow up gay.”

“Even so, Oakman lives in hope of a gay sauna opening here.

However, he’s concerned that the safe sex message isn’t necessarily hitting home among gay and straight young people in Tasmania.

The island needs to breed its tolerance gene from the cradle onwards, he believes, adamant that another generation won’t suffer the depths of despair about gay sexuality that drove several teenage friends to commit suicide.

“The history of Tasmania’s same-sex legislation should be discussed openly in classrooms, it’s a part of the island’s progressive humanist identity, affecting everyone, not just us gays,” he says.

“Let’s face it, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting that chemistry!”

Arts writer Jane Rankin-Reid is a columnist with the Sunday Tasmanian. This article first appeared in The Mercury on Saturday, May 31, 2003.