Gay Sydney: A History

GAY

SYDNEY

GARRY WOTHERSPOON, a former academic at the University of Sydney and a former NSW History Fellow, is a leading historian of many aspects of Sydney life. His books include Sydney’s Transport: Studies in Urban History; Being Different: Nine Gay Men Remember; and City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture. His The Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts: A History was published in 2013 to commemorate its 180th anniversary, and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards. He was awarded Australia’s Centenary of Federation medal for his work as an academic, researcher, and human rights activist.

GAY

SYDNEY

A HISTORY

GARRY WOTHERSPOON

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Garry Wotherspoon 2016

First published 2016

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Wotherspoon, Garry – author.

Title: Gay sydney: A history/Garry Wotherspoon.

ISBN:   9781742234830 (paperback)

9781742247687 (ePDF)

9781742242316 (ebook)

Notes: Includes index.

Subjects: Gay men—New South Wales—Sydney—History.

Gay men—New South Wales—Sydney—Social conditions.

Gay men—New South Wales—Sydney—Social life and customs.

Gay men—Legal status, laws etc.—New South Wales.

Dewey Number: 306.766209941

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Vivien Valk

Cover imagesiStock.com

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER 1 ‘I THOUGHT MEN LIKE THAT SHOT THEMSELVES’

Sexuality in a parochial provincial city

CHAPTER 2 … BUT THEY DIDN’T

‘Camp’ life in Sydney before World War II

CHAPTER 3 AN END TO UNKNOWING

The impact of war and the Kinsey Report

CHAPTER 4 THE GREATEST MENACE FACING AUSTRALIA

Sydney’s homosexual worlds and the Cold War

CHAPTER 5 THE PERSONAL BECOMES THE POLITICAL

Social change, the camp world and the advent of gay liberation

CHAPTER 6 THE PEARL IN THE OYSTER

The opening up of Sydney’s gay world

CHAPTER 7 IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES, NEVER THE BEST OF TIMES

HIV/AIDS and Sydney’s responses

CHAPTER 8 INTO THE NEW MILLENNIUM

And a brighter future loomed

CHAPTER 9 JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE?

Sydney’s gay world today

NOTES

INDEX

The Oscar Wilde’s [sic] of Sydney … whose presence is advertised by effeminate style of speech and the adoption of the names of celebrated actresses. A haunt is said to exist in Bourke Street Surry Hills, and that part of College-street from Boomerang-street to Park-street is a parade for them.

Scorpion, Sydney, April 1895

Just as the pearl is the result of disease in the oyster, so homosexuality is the result of dysfunction of the glands of the human body, and like the pearl, the manifestations of homosexuality are not always devoid of beauty.

Robert Storer, Sex in Modern Life, Sydney, 1933

Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight.

Sydney street chant, 1970s

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending … For many in the gay world, this is both a triumph and a threat. It is a triumph because it is what we always dreamed of: a world in which being gay is a nonissue among our families, friends, and neighbors. But it is a threat in the way that all loss is a threat.

Andrew Sullivan, ‘The End of Gay Culture’, New Republic, October 2005

Despite taboos and interdictions, men who desired other men … sometimes in the most inhospitable environments, have found spaces in which to pursue partners in love and lust.

Robert Aldrich, Gay Life Stories, Thames and Hudson, 2012

PREFACE

Parts of this book were first published a quarter of a century ago, as City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture. The world has moved a long way since then.

Things that were simply inconceivable then are now commonplace – same-sex adoptions and fostering, same-sex civil partnerships, openly lesbian or gay people holding public office and being major public figures. City of the Plain ended with the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s. Gay Sydney: A history takes us up to a time when same-sex marriage is legal in over 20 countries around the world, and on the agenda for Australia.

Both books are about Sydney’s men with homosexual desires. The first was written for an academic audience. Its Introduction included long explanations about methodology, sources and their verifications, definitions and similar arcana. Its Conclusion drew the reader’s attention to what this new research had unearthed, and what it meant. But all those explanations seem unnecessary now, given what the average reader knows.

It is however worth discussing the use of certain terms.

When the first book was written, the gay world was seen as a subculture, the acknowledged academic term for what was emerging, a subset of a wider society. Now ‘subculture’ is anachronistic, so here I talk about Sydney’s ‘gay world’ and its ‘gay life’.

‘Gay’ is often used interchangeably with ‘homosexual’ but the words are not necessarily interchangeable. Gay can have a different meaning, depending on who is using the word and in what context. ‘Homosexual’ was first used by German psychologists in the late nineteenth century and introduced into English at the beginning of the twentieth, adding to the existing terminology of ‘sodomites’, ‘urnings’, ‘uranists’ and ‘inverts’. Some medical manuals also used the term ‘homosexualist’. When moralists were talking, they often used the terms ‘perverts’ or ‘degenerates’, and these passed into common usage in the media for most of the twentieth century.

The community had different terms for themselves. ‘Queens’, ‘fairies’ and ‘pansies’ might be used lightly, but the most common term in Australia up until the 1970s was ‘camp’, while the heterosexual world was ‘square’.

‘Gay lib’ brought new terminology, and in Australia ‘gay’ soon replaced ‘camp’. But men who designated themselves as ‘gay’ were making a definitive statement about their identity and how they saw their sexuality. Moreover, ‘gay’ was a term favoured by gay people themselves, as opposed to ‘homosexual’, which was coined and popularised in the context of pathology. Colloquially, gay became a shorthand description to replace homosexual or camp.

The notion of a ‘homosexual identity’ emerged in the late nineteenth century from the particular cultural conditions of the time. Similarly the specific cultural conditions of the post–World War II period led to the creation of a ‘gay identity’. And now we also have a ‘queer’ identity, for those who feel themselves outside of the societal norms in regards to gender or sexuality, thus avoiding the specificity of being ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ or ‘transgender’.

Another point to make is that many people may commit homosexual acts, but this does not make them ‘homosexual’, if these acts are not seen as being part of their lifestyle or identity, as, for example, men who indulge in only occasional homosexual acts, now defined simply as ‘men-who-have-sex-with-men’. In this context, I have used the term ‘homoerotically inclined’ where it seemed appropriate.

To avoid repeating long titles continuously, I have taken the liberty of using the standard abbreviations for Australian history – thus SMH for the Sydney Morning Herald, NSW for New South Wales, NSWYB for New South Wales Year Books, NSWPD for New South Wales Parliamentary Debates and NSWPP for New South Wales Parliamentary Papers; a list of abbreviations used has been included on page xi. Copies of all the interviews referred to in the text are held in the Mitchell Library. They are located in the Garry Wotherspoon Collection: interviews with gay men, 1980–1988 – Call Number MLOH 448.

Any written history reflects selections and omissions, and this work is no exception. There is much more I could have included, but at a certain point I had to distinguish between the minutiae and what is central to a story. Any such omissions, and any errors, are mine alone. I have endeavoured, wherever possible however, to allow the various actors in this story to speak for themselves: hopefully, their voices will have come through, reflecting the times and their concerns.

A special thanks goes to Victoria Chance, whose firm editorial hand and insightful comments have helped make this a better book.

Finally, there is the issue of perspective. I was a participant in many of the events of the late twentieth century, and bring my own set of political values and attitudes to the readings of the people and happenings I document in this book. This account reflects my participation and an ideological framework. And part of my own story is interwoven throughout this history, as I have lived with the changing city since my childhood, and enjoyed its varied offerings.

While this history is but one person’s interpretation of the process, it takes the reader on a journey from a hidden and illegal past to Sydney’s gay world of today.

ABBREVIATIONS

ADB Australian Dictionary of Biography

CT Canberra Times

DM Daily Mirror

DT Daily Telegraph

MT Melbourne Truth

NSWLAVP NSW Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings

NSW PD NSW Parliamentary Debates

NSWPP NSW Parliamentary Papers

NSWYB NSW Year Book

NT National Times

OWN Oxford Weekender News

SMH Sydney Morning Herald

SS Sydney Sun

ST Sydney Truth

YBA Year Book of Australia

CHAPTER 1

‘I THOUGHT MEN LIKE THAT SHOT THEMSELVES’

Sexuality in a parochial provincial city

Imagine a parade of some 15 000 people through the streets of Sydney on a warm summer Saturday night, with tens of thousands more watching. The parade has 52 floats, numerous cars and trucks, sundry other vehicles – and even vaqueros on horseback. From the Town Hall it passes down George Street through the cinema crowds, up Liverpool Street to Oxford Street. Here there are searchlights and spotlights and shops hung with bunting and signs. People are crowded onto balconies and at windows; hundreds more sit on the awnings overhanging the footpaths. There are bands and disco music blares out. The crowds are so dense that all traffic other than the parade grinds to a halt. Yet the parade and the reasons for it are not reported as news by any of the mainstream newspapers or television channels in Sydney. For all the media coverage it receives, it might never have occurred.¹

The Mardi Gras parade in February 1983 was one of the biggest and most colourful peacetime parades that Sydney had ever seen. A columnist in the Melbourne Age later bemoaned the fact that it ‘put Melbourne’s Moomba parade in the shade’.²Certainly nothing in the immediately preceding Festival of Sydney matched it for colour, glamour and excitement.

A commentator described participants dressed as ‘bikies, Darth Vaders, cycle sluts, gladiators, Red Indians, Supremes, Carmen Mirandas, wizards, fairies, ballroom dancers, nuns and altar boys’ and others wearing just enough ‘to keep them out of the Darlinghurst slammer on indecent exposure charges’.³ After wending its way through the city and up Oxford Street, the so-called ‘glitter strip’ that included the majority of Sydney’s commercial gay venues, the parade continued along Flinders Street and Anzac Parade to the AMP Pavilion at the Sydney Showground. One of the biggest parties the city had ever seen followed. Thousands of people queued to get in to the Pavilion.

I have a photo of myself and friends from the 1983 parade. In the aftermath of the party we are sitting in the gutter, probably in the lane that runs between the Flinders Hotel and the Beresford Hotel – a major gathering place for stalwarts who, by sunrise, are just coming down from whatever they have taken and are not yet ready to go home to bed. My friends, from Newcastle, are dressed as Batman and Robin; my boyfriend, now looking much the worse for wear, had gone in a skimpy wedding dress and gauzy veil, wearing sandshoes, easier for dancing. I am wearing a black jockstrap, black boots and a black leather mask. In the photo I am wearing my boyfriend’s wedding veil. We all look exhausted but happy.

Sydney’s Gay Mardi Gras occurred, paradoxically, in a city whose criminal law listed sexual acts between males, or attempts to commit those acts, or any soliciting for those acts, or any procuring for those acts, as crimes.⁴ Despite this, a few months earlier Neville Wran’s state Labor government had passed an amendment to the 1977 Anti-Discrimination Act, making it an offence to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their homosexuality.⁵ There was a clear contradiction between criminal law and anti-discrimination law.

Gay culture was flourishing. A local Gay Guide from the early 1980s shows a veritable plethora of institutions and services available to the city’s gay communities. There were seven newspapers and magazines, several gay political groups (including an Australian Labor Party gay group), many social clubs (either city-wide or locally based), a gay choir, a gay radio collective, eight hotels advertising and providing ‘gay accommodation’, some 15 venues advertising under ‘Bars, hotels and discos’, a legal defence fund, gay bikie clubs, a group of gay divers, gay student and teacher groups, sundry gay church groups (including the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – ‘a cosmic order of gay male nuns’), 20 restaurants and coffee shops advertising as openly gay, and a whole range of services including a safari company, gay electricians, male masseurs, mobile discos, dating services, carpet cleaners, gardeners and ‘Hinge and Bracket’, the camply named Paddington handymen.⁶ All this was openly displayed at a time when homosexual acts between males were illegal.

Those paradoxes, or contradictions – a wall of silence about one of the city’s largest subcultures; massive public displays by a group whose activities were still branded criminal; a government outlawing discrimination against homosexuals while maintaining laws that made their sexual life a criminal offence; a flourishing commercial gay scene and a public activist movement – highlighted the ambiguous situation of male homosexuals in New South Wales in the early 1980s.

Sydney has a long association with homosexuality, despite official approbation. As the first Governor, Arthur Phillip, put it:

There are two crimes that would merit death – murder and sodomy. For either of these crimes I would wish to confine the criminal till an opportunity offered of delivering him as a prisoner to the natives of New Zealand, and let them eat him.⁷

Human desires being what they are, these words had little effect. A few decades later, Chief Justice Sir Francis Forbes admitted at an enquiry in London that Sydney ‘had been called a Sodom in the papers’. And while one witness claimed that ‘the unspeakable vice’ was ‘only confined to the lower class of convicts … among gentlemen convicts it would excite abhorrence’,⁸ the evidence says otherwise. The whole social spectrum was charged and convicted of homosexual acts – ranging from frottage to mutual masturbation to fellatio to anal intercourse – including sailors, public servants, farmers, merchants, various tradesmen, even a ‘sea captain’.

Over the following decades there were many trials for homosexual acts. Most of this hidden history of homosexuality only appears in the court records.⁹ The men convicted were given sentences that varied with the seriousness of the crime.¹⁰ Some cases received newspaper attention, mostly a few lines here and there, but occasionally a case was so sensational it made the headlines. And with Captain Moonlight, the notorious bushranger, the story has another dimension.

The trial of Andrew George Scott, known as Captain Moonlight for his bushranging exploits, received extensive newspaper coverage, and revealed a different aspect of what was considered an ‘unmentionable vice’. When James Nesbit, one of Scott’s gang, was shot and badly wounded as the police closed in on them:

Heedless of the firing, Scott had lifted and carried the injured man into the house, where, as Nesbit lay dying, his leader wept over him like a child, laid his head upon his breast, and kissed him passionately.¹¹

Nesbit died. At the trial, Scott became quite agitated any time his name was mentioned, displaying ‘intense emotion’. Such overt displays of his feelings about Nesbit, and what it implied about their relationship, were considered scandalous. Sydneysiders followed the trial with rapt attention.

Scott was convicted, and sentenced to death. While in Darlinghurst Gaol, he wrote letters to friends, proclaiming his love for Nesbit; spelling it out in one letter, ‘we were one in heart and soul, he died in my arms and I long to join him where there shall be no more parting’.¹²

He also tried to make arrangements for his own burial after his hanging, scheduled for 20 January 1880. He wanted to be buried in the same grave as Nesbit, and their joint tombstone was to tell it all:

This stone covers the remains of two friends

James P. N., Born 27/8/1858

Andrew G. S. Born 8/1/1845

Separated by death 17/11/1879

United by death 20/1/1880.¹³

By the end of the nineteenth century, Sydney’s population was around 400 000. Most lived within five kilometres of the GPO in Martin Place, and the city clearly had a flourishing homosexual life. One newspaper in the mid-1890s, reported on ‘The Oscar Wilde’s [sic] of Sydney’:

The state of things in London as regards this horrible vice is also the condition of affairs in Sydney. It is idle for people to shut their eyes to this fact. It has been planted here by the English exiles. The men who escaped the Cleveland Street prosecution found shelter in Australia, and there are many of them at present in Sydney.¹⁴

The Cleveland Street prosecution refers to the court case after the discovery, in 1889, of a male homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street, in London’s West End with a number of high profile clients. To avoid exposure and prosecution, several clients, including some from Britain’s aristocracy, fled overseas. The article went on to assert that:

Many of the leading hotels and billiard saloons are haunted by these characters, whose presence is advertised by effeminate style of speech, and the adoption of the names of celebrated actresses.¹⁵

In an unlikely twist, Oxford Street figured as a haven for these ‘deviants’ even then. Men seeking safe places for homoerotic contact could go to the Turkish Baths in Liverpool Street near where it met Oxford Street – which even figured in Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex.¹⁶ There was also Charles Wigzell’s Turkish Baths at 143 Oxford Street, open to ‘men only’ on Monday and Thursday afternoons and all day Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. While it was more a middle-class establishment, it also allowed for a bit of cross-class dalliance, by offering ‘cheap baths … for workmen every evening from 5 to 7 pm at 2s [2 shillings] each’.¹⁷

The opening of the new department stores on lower Oxford Street early in the twentieth century provided opportunities for men with homoerotic desires to find jobs near these attractions. One trade journal noted that working in such places was ‘suitable only for effeminates and weaklings’, and undoubtedly many ‘effeminates’ and dandies took the opportunity of seeking work there to meet ‘others like themselves’.¹⁸

There were beats nearby as well. Apart from alluding to night-time activities in the city’s parks, one paper noted ‘that part of College-street from Boomerang-street to Park-street is a parade for them’. And they even had their favourite local pub: a ‘haunt is said to exist in Bourke-street, Surry Hills’.¹⁹

By the early twentieth century attitudes had not changed, but, as one unusual case indicates, homosexuals were still in evidence. During World War I, a woman complained to the police about a house in Carrington Street, by Wynyard Square. She thought that several young women were being held captive in the house, because she never saw them leave the house during the day; they did, however, leave the house at night, always accompanied by several men, who stayed close to them.

A police investigation followed, initially undercover, then followed by a direct police call, on the pretext of confirming who lived there, which was information required for the upcoming conscription referendum in 1917. The police officer, Sergeant Chuck, asked the woman who came to the door for the names of the men who lived there. These were given, but when he asked for the names of the women who lived there, ‘the woman became flustered and refused to supply any’. It was then that:

Chuck realized with a shock that the ‘woman’ was possibly not a woman at all, but a pervert dressed in woman’s clothes, yet looking so much the part of the well-groomed respectable housewife.²⁰

Chuck returned to the police station and told his colleagues what he thought he had encountered:

His story was received at first with incredulity. A house filled entirely with sexual perverts, who were, in every other respect, living normally and honestly, posed a problem without precedent.²¹

After arrests were made and charges laid, the court case brought forth some interesting information about the men’s lifestyle. The six men who lived there were ‘three couples’. The ‘wife’ of the lessee was known as ‘Mother Superior’, and ‘her word was law’ in the house. The police were horrified that these men told their stories ‘without shame’, and talked about their circle of homosexual friends, which included at least one lesbian.²²

It was a very public face to what was still a criminal milieu.

After the war, the League of Nations came into being. Australia’s Prime Minister Billy Hughes joined those assembled at Versailles for the signing of the Peace, and he garnered concessions in certain clauses that were seen to benefit the country. But the period after the end of the war began badly. In Sydney in 1919, the Spanish flu epidemic hit, with disastrous results; almost 40 per cent of Sydney’s population had influenza and more than 4000 people died.

The following decade became known as the ‘Roaring Twenties’, an era often seen as a boom era in Sydney, yet also one of growing unemployment and economic uncertainty. The razor gang wars raged in inner Sydney, as crime bosses battled it out for control of the lucrative sex, drug and illegal gambling industries. And the ‘boom’ ended in October 1929 with the onset of the Great Depression.

A decade of tumult followed as the Depression deepened. But in line with becoming ‘modern’, the Australian Broadcasting Commission was set up in Sydney in 1932, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened the same year, and Australia’s first ‘milk bar’ opened in Martin Place in 1933. The New Guard’s Captain De Groot, a right-wing militiaman, upstaged the Bridge’s opening ceremony when he rode his horse forward and slashed the ribbon about to be cut by Premier Jack Lang. On 25 April 1935 the macabre case of what became known as the ‘Shark Arm murder’ began to unfold, when a captured shark disgorged part of a man’s arm in the Coogee Aquarium swimming pool.

In the period between the great wars, Sydney was a parochial provincial city, an obscure if largish outpost of empire on the opposite side of the globe to those great centres of power that had manipulated the world for centuries. London was six weeks away by steamer, San Francisco two weeks, while few people ventured north to Asia, to those yet unmobilised heirs of the great civilisations there. Aeroplanes that were to reduce our isolation so dramatically were now a reality, but air travel remained the preserve of the wealthy or influential.

Physically the city reflected its Victorian and Edwardian heritage: governments had bequeathed some large ornate public buildings and some fine parks, while the base of the city’s private wealth – commerce – was indicated by the numerous banks and their branches scattered around the city, by the crammed warehouses that flanked the Quay or climbed the hillside from Darling Harbour to the York Street ridge, and by the busy commercial houses that handled the trade of this entrepôt. There were lavish ‘Department Stores’, so up to date in all things – Marcus Clarke’s at Railway Square, Mark Foys’ Italianate extravaganza at the corner of Hyde Park, or David Jones’ simple modern store, overlooking the other end of Hyde Park. In the 1930s came more designs: the streamlined moderne – looking like landlocked liners – in the suburbs overlooking the harbour, and some art deco creations, like the now-lost Rural Bank head office in Martin Place.

Life for Sydneysiders – as for most Australians – was not easy in this period, and rapidly deteriorated once the Depression hit. Australia’s system of social services, once the envy of workers elsewhere in the industrial world, had fallen far behind developments in Europe. People struggled against inflation and falling real wages as their lives were affected by new technologies. Radio and cinema began to have a major impact – the former as the main disseminator of news, the latter as an increasingly common form of popular entertainment. New electrical appliances began to ease the lot of housewives – if they could afford them.

There were two contrasting developments in Sydney in this period: a spread of suburbia on the outer fringes of the city, as thousands sought space and serenity on their quarter acre blocks; and an increasing concentration of people in inner suburbs close to the central business district, or near the harbour and the eastern suburbs beaches – in fashionable new blocks of ‘flats’. Large numbers of Sydney’s male homosexual population would eventually concentrate here, and also in the boarding houses of Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.

Sydney in the interwar period was ranked among the 15 largest cities in the world in population but it lacked the internationalism it has today, and which it also had in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed for anyone used to the sophistication and social life of Europe or America, that sense of being at the centre of things, Sydney was quaintly parochial. Perhaps the last word on the subject should be left to Willie Somerset Maugham, the author, who visited Sydney en route to Singapore from Honolulu in 1921. Maugham travelled with his attractive young American lover, Gerald Haxton, whom he had met in France during the war. He found the city both ‘surprising and amusing’. Sydney, he thought, was

the Mecca of the decrepit author. The last one they saw was Robert Louis Stevenson and they still speak of him. When I arrived, with nothing more than a brass band and a steam roller to herald my coming, I was received with the most gratifying enthusiasm.²³

But it wasn’t only in its morphology that Sydney remained solidly Victorian. It was reflected in attitudes and social mores, which were of course in turn partly a reflection of the attitudes and mores of the country as a whole. Many writers have commented on the prevalence in Australia of Victorian attitudes until well into the twentieth century, noting in particular the conservatism, the conformity, the provincialism. As one writer commented, there was a

rigid obsession with appearances and prohibitions, order and authority … Middle-class men would be bothering about the propriety of whether or not to take off a coat, to loosen a tie, to smoke a cigarette – a pipe was more respectable – or in public, to risk wearing a soft collar to afternoon tea …²⁴

The twin pillars supporting this crushing conventionality were religion and the law. In all developed societies, the written law largely sets the limits to what can or cannot be done by individuals, although it is a truism that in most societies some laws are flouted, even quite flagrantly. But in such a convention-bound conservative society, the laws were often adhered to, or at least paid lip service, and social pressures to conform provided additional control.

Australian laws still derived in many areas directly from English law. Existing English law became the new colony’s law with the Anglo-European invasion of 1788. As one expert on Australia’s constitutional law has more poetically put it, as soon as ‘the original settlers had reached the colony, their invisible and inescapable cargo of English law fell from their shoulders and attached itself to the soil on which they stood’.²⁵ English law and legal precedent continued to play an important role in Australian law until late in the twentieth century.²⁶ So Australian law relating to homosexuality was overwhelmingly influenced by English law.

Occasional amendments to the laws relating to male homosexuality in NSW over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries drew varied public responses. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1883 formally removed the death penalty, and the last man to be executed for sodomy in Sydney was possibly Thomas Parry, hanged in 1839. The 1883 Act followed nearly 20 years of discussion and ten formal attempts to amend and consolidate laws relating to sexual activity between males, prompted by an increase in the number of convictions of men for crimes relating to sexual behaviour other than buggery. Then, in 1900, NSW Parliament enacted the Crimes Act, consolidating existing legislation. Part III of the Act included the provision that ‘Whosoever commits the abominable crime of buggery, or bestiality, with mankind, or with any animal, shall be liable to penal servitude for 14 years.’There was little public comment about these changes to, or consolidations of, existing laws: homosexuality was still not a fit topic for discussion. And amendments in 1924 were seen as an acceptable movement away from the draconian penalties (for many crimes) of previous eras.²⁷

The law provided the legal framework within which male homosexuals lived out their ‘illegal’ lives. And it often dealt harshly with ‘camp’ people it encountered, who were involved in ‘deviant sex’.

Despite the separation of church and state, ecclesiastical influences on the law have been great. The legal constraints on homosexuality were originally taken from ecclesiastical law, and reflected the attitudes of the Christian churches to homosexuality. And for the Christian churches, sex and sexuality have always been a ‘problematic’ area.

Much of our law, particularly that part which relates to ‘morality’, is a direct derivative of past church law relating to ‘sin’. Thus in the 1920s, divorce law was more focused on the churches’ view that ‘marriage is an indissoluble union’ rather than the realities of the breakdown of a relationship, and the consequent need to solve problems of conflict, loss of a sense of worth and access to children.

Conventional, moralistic, agonisingly respectable: this was the Australian society of the interwar period. Such a society was hardly likely to question itself, to encourage change, or deal with divisive issues in an imaginative, sensible way. The period is laden with examples of this predominantly dull, conformist society failing to confront an increasing array of social problems.

A major example is of course the Depression, when those at the lower end of the social scale bore the brunt of the convulsions of the capitalist system, because this was the conventional economic orthodoxy – an orthodoxy that forced far less in the way of sacrifice onto the politicians, the captains of industry or the wealthy businessmen, who had ‘managed’ the economy into its current crisis. Indeed, on 11 June 1932, Premier Lang was sacked by Governor Sir Philip Game for ‘breaches of the law’, relating to the government’s unacceptable economic policies, in particular the cancellation of interest payments on government borrowings to overseas bondholders and financiers, which included British banks. But it was obvious even prior to the Depression, from the years immediately after World War I when unemployment was growing, that great changes were to be wrought in Australia’s social fabric, at least, if what was happening in Europe, or in Asia – for example China – was any example. Yet the issues that the churches grappled with were often little related to social justice or equality. Morality – or rather immorality, in its many manifestations – was their priority.

A minority of church members were concerned with the impact of the Depression and there were some unexpected perspectives. The Catholic Worker, a new publication of the 1930s wrote in its first editorial:

Communism is NOT our great adversary. The exalted position of Public Enemy No. 1 is reserved for Capitalism, not because it is a system which is intrinsically more evil than Communism – they are both equally false, and equally fatal to human personality – but because today it dominates the world. Capitalism – that is the enemy! … How is it possible for us, as Catholics, to have the slightest sympathy for a system which