It has been a big year for Australian film director Maya Newell. Her doco Gayby Baby examined the lives of four children aged 11 or 12 raised by gay parents, premiering at the Hot Docs festival in Canada before pinballing its way around the world’s film festivals. In August it landed on the cover of the Daily Telegraph in a sensational news splash and a spell of mostly manufactured outrage.
Newell, 27, sits in a Sydney cafe, the city around her winding down for the holiday season. Was there a silver lining to be found in the media coverage so rarely dedicated to an arthouse documentary?
“I can’t tell you the amount of people who were calling us or meeting us or commenting and going ‘great publicity for the film – you must be so happy’ and in actual fact during that week it was really horrible,” Newell says.
She says one should consider the national conversation that took place – “with some really horrendous things being said” – from the perspective of any child growing up in a same-sex family.
“We had messages from parents with kids who had never been bullied before and were being treated really terribly at school because you’ve got some of the leaders of our country saying that their families are not welcome inside the school gates,” Newell says.
“In saying that I think we learned that some things need to get ugly for change, or there is value in stirring things up.”
Five years have passed since the inception of the film, made with producer Charlotte Mars, a period when the marriage equality debate was at fever pitch. “So the film has taken a good portion of our 20s, which is quite lovely, but when you look back to being 22: two young women who had never made a film before – we’ve learned a lot and also grown a lot.”
Remarks such as then Australian Liberal frontbencher Joe Hockey’s “we’ve got to aspire to give our children the very best circumstances and that is a mother and a father” were common. Lost in the anti-gay political rhetoric were the voices of the children, says Newell, who has two lesbian mothers.
“People were talking about us as if we were hypothetical: like, ‘if we let those people marry, maybe they’ll have kids and would that be OK?’ Well actually, we’ve been around for generations.”
Raised in the “gay-friendly bubble” of Sydney’s inner-west, Newell says she was “more likely to brag about having gay parents than be bullied at school”.
“I probably had more issues with racism than I have with bigotry in this country.”
But rocketing housing prices and gentrification has meant claiming a spot in that bubble has become a “privilege of the rich”, Newell says. The film strove to capture the diversity of LGBT family lives, best personified by Ebony’s family, who live in the more affordable western Sydney suburb of Northmead.
Newell has met her donor father twice, a family friend living in Japan, but otherwise they have a limited relationship. “He’s really lovely, but it’s not like a dad. He’s a really generous, wonderful man who helped us make a family.”
Does she have a Japanese identity? “Yes, because the world sees me as that, the exterior. Often people will come over and talk to me about how much they like sushi, and I’m like ‘OK’.” One of her mothers, Liz Newell, grew up in Japan until she was five (her grandfather was an anthropologist), and through her the family has maintained a cultural connection.
Film-making is a difficult industry to crack. Newell and Mars’s relative lack of experience forced them to think outside the box to raise revenue. In 2012 they turned to crowdfunding, and after mentoring by an organisation called Fan-dependent Films, successfully raised $100,000. Newell says this caught the attention of traditional film agencies and led to further funding.
They were also pushed along by stunts like an appearance on the ABC’s political panel show Q&A. Visibly branded clothing are not allowed on the live show, but just before the cameras cut to Newell’s audience question she and Mars ripped off their coats revealing T-shirts emblazoned with the URL of their crowdfunding campaign. “I think we made $20,000 that night because [host] Tony Jones kept coming back to us.”
Breaking the rules – or at least convention – has become part and parcel for the scrappy young film-makers. Take their decision to offer some of the film’s first screenings to schools for Wear it Purple Day.
“Anyone who has experience in the film industry would go ‘you shouldn’t give it up pretty much for free to students before you’ve actually put it into a cinema’. Well actually, we want to do something with the kids because it’s about kids,” she says.
It would prove a critical turning point for the film. On 26 August, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran a front-page story: “Gay class uproar: parents outraged as Sydney school swaps lessons for PC movie session.” It featured film stills of then 11-year-old Gus and claimed parents at Burwood girls high school were “angry” that a screening of the film would take place during school hours and a parental “backlash” was brewing.
(The education department later said no parents had complained).
Later that day, New South Wales education minister Adrian Piccoli directed the school to move the screening of Gayby Baby to outside school hours.
Newell had not been contacted by the journalists for comment. When the story broke, the film-maker’s first thought was of the children featured in the film, and immediately contacted the families.
“We were really worried, but to be honest I think it was actually the kids that gave us the courage to continue through that week. Gus just saw the paper and was like, ‘sweet, I’m on the front cover’.”
A comment piece by Piers Akerman directly addressed the film’s now 16-year-old Ebony: “You are not in a ‘normal’ family, no matter how many LGBTIQ-friendly docos you may be forced to watch by politically-driven school principals.”
Ebony responded by telling Buzzfeed Australia: “My mum’s an ex-goth, with piercings and tattoos. And Ange I think at some point was a wrestler. We fall asleep to Korn and Slipknot in the car on trips to Canberra. We don’t have normal parents. But they’re not normal because they are who they are – not because they’re lesbians.”
The film had some high-profile supporters. Participation in the Good Pitch film funding program had connected the film-makers to community organisations and philanthropists and led to early parliamentary and private screenings. “When this story broke it wasn’t Charlotte and I sitting there being like ‘the film’s good’. It was actually Tim Wilson, the human rights commissioner, it was [senator] Penny Wong – it was quite a lot of MPs or public opinion writers who had actually seen the film who wrote individual articles and sort of fought that battle for us.”
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews and his wife had taken their children to watch the film. “They loved it and so did we. But apparently the NSW government thinks it’s all too confusing and distressing a subject for high school students,” the premier said on Facebook. He labelled the apparent controversy over the film “cruel rubbish”. Over a dozen schools across Victoria planned to show the film. Newell is now busy putting together a Gayby Baby school action toolkit, which will be available in February.
The media tends to amplify rightwing voices, Newell says, whereas the majority of society sits “somewhere in the middle”. “We never see where those people are at or what they’re questioning, but I think that’s where you have the potential to move people or make them see something a bit differently,” she says.
A friend of Newell’s took her mother “kicking and screaming” to a screening of the film. “She was quite conservative but not really defiantly so, like ‘I hate gay families’ – just a bit ignorant,” Newell says. “She sat there and she watched it and she just really loved the kids and came out and was like, ‘you know what? It’s fine. Parenting is parenting’.”
But for Newell the moments with most impact came when screening the film to “rainbow families” – “watching kids, teenagers and adults that have been raised in LGBT families seeing their families on the big screen for the first time”.
Newell says the film’s featured families were “part of the editing process” – watching cuts as they were made and getting involved in discussions about what should go and stay in the film. “What we created was something that everyone was really proud of. So when they saw it for the first time at Sydney film festival on the big screen, the kids bounded up to the front for the Q&A.”
Newell has kept in close contact with all four children from the film. Ebony recently rocked electric pink hair at her year 10 formal and is in the gifted and talented program at her high school. She wants to become a book publisher and completed work experience at Allen & Unwin, something Newell helped set up. “She’s really driven and determined and in some ways I think the life that she has led or some of the challenges has made her a more resilient young woman.”
Gus is “not wrestling any more”, says Newell, but has his first job as an Aikido teacher. Graham is reading and these days his family feels more comfortable and settled in Fiji. The AFL-mad Matt has his first girlfriend. “He’s like the sporty, popular boy at school and his girlfriend is totally the popular girl at his school,” she says. All four teenagers will walk with the film-makers at next year’s Mardi Gras parade.
Newell says she will be busy working on a few different projects in 2016, “which are quite nice to be creating again but probably a bit early to talk about”.
Burwood girls high, Newell’s alma mater, never did go ahead with the film screening, but she spoke there on Wear It Purple Day. “Half the school was painted purple,” she says. Students were dressed in purple and had baked 1,800 purple cupcakes. The school’s prefects condemned media coverage that contributed to the screening being stopped in a statement posted to Facebook. “We consider ourselves leaders in the push for equality and acceptance – for all people,” they wrote.
The episode has been a lesson not just in politics and media for the students, but for Australia that we should listen to the voices of young people, Newell says. “Often we assume young people aren’t influential or have been brainwashed or are just these push arounds – they don’t actually have a voice. Our film is about actually listening to kids and going, well actually they have something to say.
“The Burwood high girls were like ‘fuck you, we’re 15-year-old students and we want to watch the film. Let us do it’.”
- Gayby Baby is available on DVD from 13 January and will screen on SBS and Foxtel in February
