FOR OUR FIRST overseas trip in a decade, my husband and I turned our eyes towards Japan, which by October 2025 was on the brink of the broadest LGBTIQA+ reforms in the country’s history. Our travel plans were fairly advanced when new hard-right prime minister Sanae Takaichi sold-out LGBTIQA+ rights in a swift move that left her country the only G7 nation that does not recognise same-sex marriage.

So we settled on a short trip to New Zealand instead, the country that had welcomed us with enthusiasm in 2008 for our civil union, something Australia was unwilling to provide until the marriage laws were amended here ten years later. This time, Richard and I planned a week in the North Island, including a visit to Napier, one of the world’s best-preserved Art Deco cities.

We flew into Auckland for the weekend, then went to collect our pre-booked rental car in the CBD on Monday morning, looking forward to a night at a spa on the way to the North Island’s east coast.

The queue at Europcar’s Shortland Street branch was long, so Richard joined the end while I sat outside with our bags. The reason for the delays was clear: staff were upselling like it was going out of style, bamboozling several parties with upgrades.

Once it was our turn, I heard the young woman behind the desk (as bright and helpful as a Disney Princess) ask where Richard’s partner was. So I stepped forward just in time to witness ugly homophobia drain all traces of princess away.

Old Enemy

Across days to come we would replay the moment over and over searching for another way to explain the sudden shift in attitude. Was it because I’d been so keen to speed the already overblown process by requesting no upgrades be offered to us? Could it have been due to me putting my hand up when I did so, to interrupt the performative drama of her upselling?

Whatever, the impact was unarguable: within minutes we were given the ultimate downgrade … out the door with no rental car as the princess’s lame excuses about Richard’s ‘unreadable’ debit card echoed through a room full of customers.

But this was Auckland, a major city on a weekday morning, so I immediately started calling other car-hire companies. Yet no dice. We’d have to wait at least two days for a vehicle.

Ironically, one of the reasons was Auckland Pride being in full swing. Perhaps one local princess was a bit over so many queens in town? It reminded me of our brush with homophobia in Sydney during Mardi Gras a decade ago, and the need to pivot fast.

Our carefully planned itinerary was on the brink of collapse, so I channeled my inner Nineties backpacker and found a bus service to Napier departing in forty minutes. As we set off on foot for the coach station, my head buzzed with the possibility that we’d be unable to salvage hotel bookings and find new ones, but part of me delighted in the dodge.

In hindsight I recognise that was a coping mechanism to shield us from the return of a very old enemy, one we thought we’d seen the back of years ago.

The 7-hour coach trip across the North Island left us with plenty of time to pursue avenues of complaint via Europcar’s Australia/NZ customer care. Napier is serviced by Hawke’s Bay airport, which has a Europcar desk, so the company could simply honour our longstanding booking by arranging a car for us to collect anytime during our 5-day stay in the region.

As the rural landscape swept by from the top floor of a double-decker bus, our planned day trips to wineries and out-of-the-way swimming spots was starting to feel like it was back in our grasp.

Rising Above

The trouble with homophobia in a customer service setting has always been that it’s usually delivered with just enough plausible deniability to go unchallenged. Europcar’s defence – that our debit card was unable to be read – sounded credible and put the blame on us. The trouble with that excuse was that we’d offered to pay by several other means, all rebuffed as we were bundled out.

Long ago, I’d been forced to go to great lengths to explain homophobic treatment after my late partner’s sudden death. I knew all too well how defensive companies and organisations get when confronted with customers calling out their staff for playing by their own rules.

I also knew how difficult this type of homophobia is to explain to others. A whole world of victim blaming awaits because many find it impossible to imagine that the recipient of the discrimination didn’t do something to cause it.

So it wasn’t really a surprise to find that denial was Europcar’s knee-jerk response, because their Disney Princess lied to them.

Consequently, no rental car was offered to us in Hawke’s Bay. Complicating matters, we both came down with the flu. We’ll never know if it was due to sitting on an air-conditioned coach for a whole day, but walking around beautiful Napier became a bit of a slog with body aches, coughs and sniffles. Our amazing accommodation was our haven, as were the friends who swooped in and drove us to their tranquil home further south, where they regaled us with shocking holiday homophobia stories of their own, never once assuming that we’d brought this untenable situation on ourselves.

We were two married, middle-aged queer couples making the best of a bad situation, laughing about how it’s still necessary to be cautious about where we spend our hard-earned pink dollars. Instead of supporting a problematic New Zealand tourism economy in which individuals feel like they can impose their homophobia at will, in the company of like-minded friends we had the kind of holiday experience that money cannot buy.

Rising above, it’s what our generation has always done.

But during the last thirty minutes of our flight home from Wellington we encountered something it was hard to surmount, even at cruising altitude. After two hours of faultless service from an air steward, Richard and I both witnessed her face sour when she offered us a basket of sweets and realised we were holding hands. On our way off the plane, she farewelled every other passenger while silently giving us the stony glare of a gorgon.

Denial of Service

Queerphobia is unarguably on the rise. Some would say it never really went away, particularly considering a new generation of radicalised youth committing targeted attacks against gay men despite the widely publicised Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ+ Hate Crimes.

Many in the LGBTIQA+ community called on the Albanese Government to include anti-queer hate in a recent overhaul of Australia’s hate-speech laws in the wake of the Bondi Massacre, but the reform was limited to racial hatred.

Yet it turned out that Europcar’s Australia/NZ customer care team were forced to connect the dots during our holiday, after an Australian-Israeli couple was left without a hire car at Melbourne Airport days after our Auckland incident. News of the company’s failure had made it all the way to Israel, where a commentator put this type of incident into words I could finally understand: denial of service.

It’s as old as the Nazis and usually delivered with moral disclaimers, nonsensical justifications and a callous lack of care. But now that we were armed with vocabulary that Europcar’s Australia/NZ customer care team could have no doubt about, I wrote to them again.

The response was swift:

“Please accept our sincere apology for the inconvenience this has caused.” – Europcar Australia and New Zealand Customer Services

A Bit Prickly

Being an author and journalist, I’m a man of words, so it was a delight to receive news on the drive home that my latest novel Dirt Trap would be reviewed in the Newtown Review of Books this week by none other than Karen Chisholm of AustCrimeFiction.

When I took a look, one paragraph seemed to underscore what ‘inconvenience’ really does to same-sex attracted people:

“He’s also not afraid to make his central character a tricky individual. Readers may struggle to warm to James Brandt, although those prepared to reflect a little will see ample reasons for him being stressed, complicated, confused, and occasionally grating. It makes sense that a man who has experienced so much rejection early in life, and homophobia and the possibility that difference is potentially life-threatening, would be a bit prickly. It wouldn’t make sense to have it any other way, and it’s not just a brave move, it’s speaking truth to the facts.” – Karen Chisholm

Dirt Trap and its prequel Tank Water are not auto-fiction, although like many emerging authors I based aspects of my protagonist on my own life. I’ve often spoken about how James Brandt is a better version of me: a more skilled journalist and a more empathetic member of his community and his family.

But this week I learned the major similarity between me and James: we’re both prickly when we witness or experience homophobia. In fact he’s probably a bit more strident than me, because I sense that he would have stood his ground inside Europcar’s Auckland CBD office and caused a real stink.

It’s uncanny how life sometimes explains why you write fiction at all, simply because it has a way of allowing us to articulate the unsayable.