The Australian national postal service is currently busier than usual: it
is in the middle of delivering ballots for the Australian Marriage Law
Survey to the postboxes of sixteen million eligible voters. On each form
is a single question: “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex
couples to marry?” Recipients are instructed to tick Yes or No and mail
back the form by the November 7th deadline. Though sending things by
mail is often considered a dying mode of communication, it’s the method
that the conservative Australian government chose, amid much
controversy, to carry out this nonbinding, voluntary opinion poll, the
results of which will be used to justify the government’s decision
whether to hold a parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage later this
year.
“The only thing worse than a postal survey on same-sex marriage is not
winning it,” Ian Thorpe, the retired Australian swimming legend and an
ambassador for the campaign for marriage equality, said recently, on a
walk through Sydney’s trendy inner-city neighborhood of Darlinghurst. He
wore tight jeans, a leather jacket, and sunglasses, which provided no
camouflage from passersby, who kept stopping to shake his hand. “It is a
solution from another century. Some people say it’s because the No side
knew a postal survey would favor older voters,” he added. “But it’s what
we’ve been dealt, and at the moment it’s the clearest way for us to have
marriage equality happen.” Thorpe, who is thirty-four, has been a household
name in Australia since he was fourteen, when he became the youngest
swimmer ever selected for the men’s national team. He went on to win
five Olympic gold medals.
The narrow street was lined with art galleries and residential terraces,
many displaying rainbow flags; we passed a salon called Love Is in the
Hair. Darlinghurst, where Thorpe’s partner, the model Ryan Channing,
lives, is “the epicenter of the L.G.B.T.I.Q. community in Sydney,
possibly the whole country,” Thorpe told me. He came out publicly in
2014, but he’s a notoriously private person; in the past, he has kept
his relationship with Channing out of the spotlight. Yet he approached
the Equality Campaign about becoming an ambassador—it’s something he
felt was worth enduring additional public scrutiny.
The campaign’s first push was to encourage all eligible Australians to
enroll. In normal Australian elections, voting is compulsory. “We’re not
used to it being voluntary,” Thorpe said, taking a seat at an outdoor
table at his favorite local café. “We really had to think about how to
activate our base, things that people deal with in U.S. politics. There
is plenty of time to respond to the survey, but there was almost no time
to enroll people, which was kind of sneaky.”
He and Channing filmed an ad for the campaign in which, in a nice role
reversal, Channing gets in the pool while Thorpe sits poolside, fully
clothed, and bets his partner that he can update his electoral-roll
details on his smartphone faster than Channing can swim a hundred
metres. (A shoulder replacement two years ago means that Thorpe can no
longer swim, “except to catch a wave.”) “Ryan thought he was a better
swimmer than he was,” Thorpe said, chuckling. “He kept fluffing his line
at the end, so he was exhausted.” The line? “Every Australian should
have the right to take the plunge with the person they love.” The
campaign appeared to work: the Australian Electoral Commission announced
there’d been a dramatic uptick in new enrollments, nearly a hundred
thousand, before the roll closed. A large proportion was reportedly
young voters, the most likely to vote Yes—and the least likely to be
familiar with the postal service.
“One of the things our Yes campaign had to ask ourselves is, Is it
demeaning to millennials to explain to them what a postbox is?” Thorpe
said. “And, it turns out, yes, it is.” (The campaign had toyed with the
idea of making a spoof video demonstrating how to seal and post an
envelope.) As if on cue, a hipster with a bushy beard and very blue eyes
stopped by our table, holding two sealed postal-survey envelopes, and
asked if he could get a photo with Thorpe before he mailed them.
Thorpe lives in the suburb of Rose Bay, in eastern Sydney, which happens
to be in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s electorate. “I ran into
Malcolm—quite literally, on a Sunday morning—a couple of weeks ago,”
Thorpe said. “His wife spotted me. I said hello, shook the P.M.’s hand.”
Turnbull is a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage but has had to
appease the far-right members of his coalition government. Originally,
he’d proposed a plebiscite, a compulsory vote to gauge public opinion.
But the Senate had rejected that plan, which had not been popular with
marriage-equality advocates like Thorpe, either—they find it insulting
and frustrating to have the question posed to the general public when
Parliament already has the power to legalize same-sex marriage without a
constitutional amendment, such as the one needed in Ireland.
Once the plebiscite plan was chucked, the nation was left with
Turnbull’s Plan B, the postal survey. This option was immediately
challenged as unconstitutional by equality advocates, but the challenges
were overturned. Turnbull has promised, if Yes prevails, to facilitate a
“free” vote, or “conscience” vote, in Parliament on same-sex marriage by
Christmas. Conscience votes are reserved for issues of moral and social
significance, such as euthanasia or human cloning; in such votes, M.P.s
are not bound to vote along party lines, as they normally are.
“Repeated polling over the past decade has shown that two-thirds of this
country already supports same-sex marriage,” Thorpe said, after ordering
a piccolo. Still, he was concerned that the survey would give
anti-equality partisans the opportunity to broadcast messages of
intolerance. Reports of homophobic bullying have been widespread. “It
has felt, to be honest, for me and for many other people, as if we are
back in high school,” he said. Many Sydneysiders were scandalized when a small plane wrote “VOTE NO” repeatedly in the
sky on an otherwise perfect spring weekend. (Some wondered whether it was
the same plane that had written “TRUMP” all over the Sydney sky on the
U.S. President’s Inauguration Day.) “It felt like graffiti,” Thorpe
said. “Nobody owns the sky. It shouldn’t have been up there.” He
described news reports of dumped blank ballots, or forms sent to
outdated addresses. Voters have been warned not to take selfies holding
completed surveys—each one includes a personalized barcode—or to include
any foreign objects in the envelope. (Some Yes voters had planned to put
glitter in their envelopes—a way of participating in the survey but
signalling that they did so under duress.)
One of the messages of the Yes campaign is that it’s fundamentally
Australian to give everybody a fair go, in life as in sport. That’s why
Thorpe believes it’s his responsibility as a sporting icon to stick to
his values, just as N.F.L players across America did last weekend by taking the knee during the singing of the national anthem. “Sport has
this symbolic power, a purity,” he said. “We have almost all our
national sporting organizations supporting the Yes campaign
publicly—Cricket, Rugby, Rugby League, A.F.L., Soccer, they’ve all come
on board.”
A black S.U.V. full of twentysomethings slowed down as it passed the
café. “Thorpedo!” they called, fists raised in salute. Thorpe smiled
back. I asked him whether marriage with Channing was in the cards, but
he wouldn’t say: “I’ve told everyone I’ll be happy to answer that
question when I have the right to get married.”