The First Gay NZ Novel Was Banned. Now It’s Back

EDITORIAL | ISSUE ELEVEN | MAHIMAHI / SEX

Written by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Editor

In 1959, a New Zealand writer published a novel about gay love. Two years later, that novel was banned in New Zealand for being indecent.

Now, 67 years after its original publication, A Way of Love is being republished, and its story is an important piece of Aotearoa’s queer literary history.

Written by James Courage (1903–1963), A Way of Love was first published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1959. The National Library of New Zealand describes it as “the first gay novel written by a New Zealander”. Lurid Editions, an independent publisher dedicated to rediscovering overlooked queer books from the twentieth-century archive, is releasing the first new edition of the novel on 24 September 2026. The edition includes a new introduction by writer and critic Peter Parker and an afterword, “James Courage: An Expatriate Writer”, by University of Otago Gender Studies professor Chris Brickell.

Courage’s own life was divided between Aotearoa and Britain. He grew up on his family’s sheep station near Amberley in North Canterbury and attended Christ’s College in Christchurch before leaving New Zealand for England at 18 to study at Oxford. Although he spent almost all of his adult life in Britain, Canterbury and Christchurch repeatedly appeared in his fiction. He only returned to New Zealand once for an extended visit, from 1933 to 1935, after which he never came back.

Courage was writing about homosexuality at a time when being gay could have serious legal and social consequences. In Britain, sex between men remained criminalised, while homosexuality was also heavily medicalised. Courage himself experienced periods of guilt and anxiety about his sexuality alongside a conviction that homosexuality was natural. His diaries record both these contradictions and his desire to write honestly about gay life.

That honesty came at a cost.

Before A Way of Love could be published, Courage was required to alter the manuscript substantially. Earlier versions contained more direct erotic material, as well as a different ending. Even after publication, the novel attracted hostile reviews from critics who often treated homosexuality itself as the problem rather than engaging seriously with the book as literature. Courage wrote in his diary on the day of publication that he felt as though he had thrown himself, “as a homosexual, on the hostile mercy of the world”.

In New Zealand, that hostility soon went beyond the review pages.

In 1961, A Way of Love was banned in New Zealand on grounds of indecency. The book had come to the attention of police after they seized a private collection of thirteen books described by officials as “pornographic, indecent and near-indecent”. The novel was subsequently judged indecent because it appeared to place “undue emphasis upon matters of sex”. Customs advised that action could be taken if it was imported or displayed, and libraries and booksellers withdrew it.

The timing is significant. The ban came during a period when New Zealand was beginning to debate the criminalisation of homosexuality. The same year the novel was published, Attorney-General Rex Mason unsuccessfully attempted to reduce criminal penalties for some homosexual acts. The Crimes Act 1961 later removed the possibility of life imprisonment for sodomy, but sex between men remained criminalised until homosexual law reform in 1986. Courage died in 1963 – 23 years before that reform.

Yet perhaps the most interesting part of A Way of Love’s history is what happened when people actually read it.

Courage received letters from readers in Britain, Europe and New Zealand. Some told him the novel had become a source of comfort. One reader described it as a “friend” and a “leaning post in times of stress”. Others revealed what Courage called “agonies of loneliness”. For Courage, these responses demonstrated that writing honestly about your own experience could create recognition in someone else. In 1962, a New Zealand reader told him that A Way of Love had given them a “wider & more tolerant attitude” towards homosexuality than hours of lecturing and explaining ever could.

But Courage’s place in New Zealand’s queer literary history remained complicated. When Peter Wells and Rex Pilgrim published Best Mates: Gay Writing in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1997, they identified A Way of Love as the country’s first gay novel and called it a “breakthrough novel”. But Courage’s sister and literary executor refused permission for his work to be reproduced, arguing that he had not publicly identified himself as homosexual. The editors instead printed his name above a symbolic blank page – turning his absence into part of the anthology itself.

The 2026 republication is more than a new printing of an old book. It is part of a continuing effort to recover queer writing that was censored, suppressed or, sadly, forgotten.

That recovery feels particularly important now. In recent years, book bans have resurged in countries around the world, with books about LGBTQ+ lives and identities frequently targeted. Within that broader resurgence, trans people and stories about trans lives have become a particular political flashpoint.

At a time when trans people are increasingly being used as political scapegoats, looking back at the books, writers and queer lives that were once censored reminds us that this history is not ancient. Courage died in 1963. Homosexuality remained criminalised in Aotearoa until 1986. The 1960s can feel like another world, but when you actually stop and count the years, they really weren’t that long ago.

Reading A Way of Love now means facing a part of our history in which queer people were treated as dangerous, indecent or in need of fixing – and asking what we can learn from it. Because if we forget how recently those attitudes were considered normal, it’s easy to pretend they could never return.

Want to read it for yourself? A Way of Love is available from Lurid Editions www.lurideditions.com from 24 September 2026.