Marriage equality has enjoyed wide public support for more than a decade and the postal survey,Rugg says,“was a shameful,callous political manoeuvre that cost lives,broke families,saw communities divide themselves in two and gave a national platform to an underbelly of homophobia and transphobia”. It was a disgrace,Rugg says,and was the result of the government’s inability to do its job and legislate. Then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull,who backed the Yes vote,said at the time the postal ballot was the way to deliver on the government’s election promise.
If you have seen a GetUp advertisement,chances are that Rugg made it. She was doing her master’s degree in broadcast journalism and working for the Blue Knot Foundation when she saw a job for GetUp posted on Twitter in 2013. It was a one day a week position where Rugg had to call regular donors whose credit card had expired and ask for updated banking details. The team was small – a dozen people under then national director Sam McLean – and when a federal election was called in 2013,Rugg offered to take charge of the videos,social media and television advertisements.
As the only queer person in a campaigning role at GetUp,Rugg was chosen to take the lead on the marriage equality campaign. She had not initially supported marriage equality,thinking marriage was an outdated and naff concept,but achieving equality became her “north star” after she attended a wedding when same-sex marriage was briefly legalised in Canberra in 2013.
The campaign took its toll on the LGBTQI community broadly – and on Rugg the political proved particularly personal. It infiltrated every part of her life. During the campaign,she would wake with her heart racing and chest tight,her hands shook with exhaustion and she suffered insomnia. There were plenty of crisis moments Rugg had to deal with,including when the postal ballots were sent out earlier than expected,when Tony Abbott was head-butted by a man reported to be wearing a Vote Yes badge and when the glitter bombs she organised to be sent to MPs resulted in a chemical weapons scare.
When she received her own ballot in the post,Rugg writes that “it felt like every moment of homophobia I’d experienced in the past decade and every bad word I’d heard about LGBTQI people was inside that envelope,bristling to get out”. She tacked the envelope to her wall and burst into tears – a friend had to post back the ballot for her.
[The bullying] could fill pages and pages. It was humiliating,cruel and perverse.
Sally Rugg
As one of the public faces of the campaign,Rugg says she heard every form of vile abuse from online trolls (and she copped her fair share of attacks in the media as well). And while we live in a world where sadly,and wrongly,it’s no surprise that someone in Rugg’s position is subject to abuse,the shock is that she copped it from her own team as well.
Rugg,in her book,details the bullying and harassment she experienced from members of the marriage equality campaign,outside of GetUp:“It could fill pages and pages. It was humiliating,cruel and perverse. Several times,it almost broke me... I have never,ever,been spoken to the way male marriage equality campaigners spoke to me in my years working with them.”
Sexism was,Rugg says,a broad problem. Gay men,she says,dominated the campaign at the expense of women,non-binary and trans people.
Rugg tells me she is nervous about the release of the book – she doesn’t want to be seen as a traitor or to do damage to the LGBTQI community. She doesn’t name her specific harassers or go into significant detail because she says it wasn’t worth risking her career for.
“I still feel really nervous about writing that and how it will land because it is still this thing... putting it on the public record,even in the super vaseline-lensed,broad brush strokes way,there’s still a part of me that feels like I am betraying the cause or betraying the greater good or centring myself or airing my dirty laundry. All this stuff that tells people to be quiet,” Rugg says.
“On the inverse,when I have spoken to particularly women and non-binary people about this,not all but most are grateful because they can’t say anything.”
While some of her activist colleagues believe that “no one wants to see how the sausage is made”,Rugg is open about the sophistication of the marriage equality campaign. GetUp,Rugg says,is often represented as being made up of fringe lefties,but her book details the world-class skill and strategy that helped lead to 7.8 million,or 61.6 per cent,yes votes in the postal ballot.
In the past year and a half,Rugg has found a new type of activism working at change.org. Members of the public are able to use the platform to start online petitions,and Rugg and her team select a handful to work with in order to improve the effectiveness of their campaign. The people who start petitions,Rugg says,overwhelmingly tend to be mothers grieving for their children or people who have survived terrible injustice and have exhausted all other avenues of achieving justice.
Rugg also remains a strong activist presence in the media. She received praise for her eloquent response (and side-eye stare ) during her debut appearance on the panel of ABC’sQ&A in June.
An audience member questioned whether rugby player Israel Folau’s comments about queer people were “actually attempting to help people,to help them repent,so as to be saved,and therefore avoid hell?” and were therefore “a brave act of love”.
“How do they make me feel? They make me feel sick. They make me feel tired,” Rugg responded,later walking off the studio set to find she had become a meme having been captured on camera giving a meaningful side-eye stare (which she later dubbed as “judging in lesbian”).
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“I think that sort of discussion was legitimised by having a postal survey where opponents of LGBTQI rights and equality were given legitimacy and 50 per cent air time. I had prepared for a question – I thought it might be about free speech,or about religious freedom – I didn’t think it would be a conceptual question about whether gay people are going to hell but that is the discourse that is now normalised,” Rugg says.
“It doesn’t surprise me but it still alarms and makes me despair. I don’t think it’s OK to have an esoteric discussion about whether gay people are going to hell.”
It was such homophobia that made Rugg feel like she had a disease when she was driving along Perth’s Sterling Highway,aged 19 or 20,and realised she was gay. She felt in crisis;she didn’t know any gay people and Alex from the television soap operaThe O.C. was the only queer person she had seen in popular culture.
“All of a sudden it was like,‘this is what it is,this is what’s wrong with you.’ It felt like discovering I had cancer. I had been hooking up with girls for years and had crushes on girls but I hadn’t allowed myself to think it was real. It felt like intense denial. It felt all of a sudden like I had this thing inside me that I didn’t want and I couldn’t control and it was going to change my life forever and I didn’t choose to have it,” Rugg says.
“It was really scary. I’ve always felt like I was an ambitious person and a hard-working person and I thought that the things I had wanted for my life wouldn’t be possible. Up until then I had felt like the world was a big oyster for me and then suddenly realising that the world was hostile and my whole life was going to be much harder was really awful and frightening.”
I don’t know that people are ready to accept their public representatives have pasts and bad haircuts.
Rugg
Rugg grew up in Fremantle,Western Australia. Her father,a computer salesman,and her mother,a music teacher,split up when she was 10 after an unhappy marriage. She lived with her mother and two younger sisters,and describes a childhood where money was in short supply. They wore second-hand clothes,going to op shops and cutting the surf brands off clothes and then stitching them onto their own outfits. It was as a girl that Rugg had her first taste of community and people power. The state government had plans to build a bypass – but it would not bypass Rugg’s school,White Gum Valley Primary was set for destruction. Rugg attended demonstrations;White Gum Valley Primary was saved (she also tentatively admits a march against the construction of a Bunnings “which I think is wild now because Bunnings is my favourite place”). The experience proved formative.
Rugg’s father,who had struggled with alcohol and his mental health,took his own life when she was 21. “Part of this is growing up,but it allowed me to see things to exist with multiplicity of truths. It is true he wasn’t a great father,it’s also true he loved me very much. It’s true that he couldn’t imagine a future for himself,he couldn’t imagine staying alive,but what is also true is he was incredibly sick and let down by the system,” she says. “It’s less about what his death taught me and more about what his life taught me. I think it is about how people are not inherently good or bad.”
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Intelligent,charismatic,a public persona and a skilled networker and campaigner – surely there’s a political run ahead of Sally Rugg? Rugg feels she can be more effective as a changemaker in her current role. She says,emphatically,she would only run for politics when the public and political parties are ready to embrace a candidate who has grown up on the internet.
“For people my age,30,my entire life is online. It’s not that I have anything to be ashamed of. It’s just that I don’t know that people are ready to accept their public representatives have pasts and bad haircuts.”
Sally Rugg’s How Powerful We Are is published by Hachette at $32.99.