‘The whole world is becoming rightwing and anti-gay’: William Yang on 60 years of capturing LGBTQ+ life

As a young adult, William Yang discovered that his family’s story was actually a murder mystery. His uncle, William Fang Yuen, was killed by an employee on the family’s farm in far north Queensland in 1922, but his mother refused to tell him the full story. In 1990, he travelled to Innisfail in search of the truth.

One aunt told Yang that his uncle and the worker had got into a fight over a gambling debt, and the worker had stabbed him to death with a spear. A cousin said a gang was involved. A local woman, who had been a child at the time, remembered it as a card game gone wrong.

Desperate for concrete evidence, Yang visited the local courthouse, where he was presented with a dusty box of documents. Inside, there were papers caked in his uncle’s blood.

“He was holding these when he died,” the sprightly 82-year-old recently told a rapt crowd at TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria, his photograph of the stained sheets of paper glowing on the screen behind him.

It turns out there was no spear, no mafia, no game of poker. Piecing together the records, it seems Yang’s uncle had accused his employee of fiddling the farm’s accounts. They had an argument and Yang’s uncle was shot dead. The man was brought to trial, then acquitted in a decision that many believe was racist: Yang’s uncle was Chinese and his employee was white. “This verdict upset the Chinese at the time,” Yang told his audience. “They thought it was a great miscarriage of justice.”

Yang’s account of his family’s story is part of TarraWarra’s exhibition Inside the Mirage, which features several artists whose work explores the diaspora experience in Australia. Seven of Yang’s trademark annotated photographs tell the story of his uncle’s death and how it traumatised his mother, who was 16 when it happened and raised Yang and his siblings to be “more Australian than the Australians.” On the final photo, of a transcript of the evidence that his mother gave during the trial, Yang has written: “I feel the legacy of this murder came down to me in that, while I was growing up, my ethnicity was suppressed.”

Yang now devotes most of his time to untangling the past. He has taken between 500,000 and 1 million photographs since the late 1960s, when he first moved to Sydney. It was there that Yang came out as gay in his late 20s and became a documentarian of the city’s LGBTQ+ community, photographing individuals and events through the debauchery of the 1970s, the horror of the HIV/Aids crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, the growing acceptance and subsequent journey to gay marriage in 2017.

Alongside these are photos documenting how Yang came to embrace his Chinese heritage – he says he “came out as Chinese” in his mid 30s – as well as his portraits of Australian cultural luminaries such as the writers Patrick White and Barbara Blackman; artists such as Brett Whiteley and Max Dupain; and actors like Cate Blanchett and Sam Neill.

The State Library of New South Wales has acquired about 50,000 of Yang’s negatives from the 1970s and is now negotiating with the photographer over his images from the 1980s and 1990s, which he is busy digitising. “So many photographers leave their negatives in a dusty, unsorted pile,” Yang says. “I’m digitising the negatives to give the photos a chance of life.”

Yang still occasionally photographs events and is working on a book of nudes titled The Male Body, but spends most days organising his archive. The process has given him new insights into his own work. “Looking back, I think the strongest element in my collection is the gay events,” he says. “People used to tell me, ‘I wouldn’t worry about that gay stuff. It’s so marginalised. You’ll come to your senses and start photographing the real world.’ But it’s in the margins where I think the value of the work is.”

Some of his favourite photos were taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Ken’s Karate Klub, a gay sauna in Sydney, where a drag queen invited him to capture the shows she put on beside the pool. “Now I couldn’t take a camera into a sauna,” he says. “I’d be run out the place!”

Another memorable event was a party where the hosts wheeled out a young man on a table, decorated like a cake. “You could eat the cream off him,” says Yang, grinning cheekily. “I don’t think people would do that nowadays … Social media has changed everything.”

Back then, Yang says, people were not only happy to be photographed; they were hungry for it. “One of the revelations I had in the seventies was that the gay community had been invisible for thousands of years, and now there was a chance to be visible. That was generally seized on.”

Increased visibility helped change the public perception of the LGBTQ+ community, which helped earn greater legal rights. When Yang was last profiled by the Guardian, in 2016, he worried “that the times are more conservative now.” A year later, the result of the gay marriage plebiscite allayed his fears. “That was a huge victory,” Yang says now. “It was a cultural shift [proving] we had majority approval.”

Today, Yang is once again concerned about politics. “I see that the whole world is becoming rightwing and anti-gay,” he says. Although politicians like Pauline Hanson are seeing their popularity rising, Yang says, on balance, “we’re extremely lucky that we live in Australia and have free expression.”

At one point in his monologue at TarraWarra, Yang shared an old worry he once had, that he might not “fulfil his destiny” of becoming a photographer. His final slide featured a portrait of Yang painted by Kean Onn See, which was nominated for this year’s Archibald prize. In the painting, Yang sits in his archive, dwarfed by boxes full of his photographs documenting personal and societal change. The painting was displayed on banners around Sydney, putting Yang and his life’s work in the spotlight.

“Remember when I felt I had not fulfilled my destiny?” Yang asked the crowd at the end of his talk. “Well, now I feel I have. At times I’ve struggled … But by and large, I feel I’ve done it. It’s a good feeling to be satisfied.”

• Inside the Mirage is showing at TarraWarra Museum of Art until 1 November