Opposition can lead to silence. Reluctance to talk about ‘inter-racial’ relationships on Cape York Peninsula is not as absolute as the lack of comment on same-sex relationships. According to Alberto Manguel the desire to remain unlabelled (and uncensored) is an attempt to protect the limitless possibilities of human expression. Writing about the distinctions of homosexual and heterosexual, Manguel argues: ‘our sexual affinities need only declare allegiance and define themselves under duress’.^[62]

Perhaps the failure of language is not entirely related to demands for a forced declaration, but indicates a cultural poverty resulting from a ‘modern’ suppression of the language of non-heterosexual love. In a world ‘without’ women, the many single men living and working together on Cape York Peninsula suggest different domestic relationships to traditional gender roles, whether they were homosexual or not.^[63] Writing of the masculine environment of colonial Queensland, Clive Moore suggests that male-to-male sex was highly probable but also talks of a culture of mateship as non-sexual romantic friendship.^[64]

A Gugu-Yalanji myth, recorded by Ursula McConnel at Bloomfield, tells how Gidja the moon makes a woman out of a younger man.^[65] McConnel’s interpretation of the story relates it to the Eve myth of Genesis, comparing a world without women to one defined by their presence.^[66] Nicola Henningham uses this myth as a theme in her discussion of male/female relations. The story also possesses other images, including homosexuality. Gidja, who was often in trouble for having wrongful sex — with close relations for example — is punished for ‘making’ the young man into a woman. The story has no active feminine principle and the child born from the union dies, showing the marriage to be infertile. I am not claiming this is the ‘right’ reading but suggesting possibilities inherent in the details of this version of the myth.

Family pressures to marry and produce offspring have plagued homosexual men throughout history. As Jon Simon describes it: ‘gay friendship is the proliferation of new forms of relations between people beyond those currently sanctioned, namely marriage and the family’.^[67] Waiu Whap, whose family were from Badu, taught and lived at Injinoo and Thursday Island. Waiu’s arranged marriage left her in much the same situation as if she had remained single: ‘He not really like a man, he a sissy. When I was at Thursday Island, he leave me with my people … When they want us to live together again, he run away from me … If I knew I should find another man.’^[68] It was unfortunate for Waiu that her husband felt it necessary (probably due to his own family) to go through with their marriage although he had no desire to be with a woman.