Peering Through

Sharing Decades of Queer Experiences

Andrew Crooks, Alex Dunkin, Greg Fell

• Publisher: Buon-Cattivi Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780995366176
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

Our queer elders have a history full of personal struggles, joys, tragedies and daily routines.

Peering Through shares their truly unique tales in an anthology set amongst the backdrop of criminalisation, religious interventions and eventual general social acceptance in Australia.

Proceeds from the book’s sale will support the Parkestone Foundation Inc.

Peering Through: Sharing Decades of Queer Experience recollects the everyday lives of LGBTIQ elders. Their knowledge and stories cover decades of unique challenges, triumphs, tragedy, and daily routines. These stories provide detailed insight into the paths queer people took when governments, medical systems, and many other institutions followed policies that sought to harm or even erase the existence of LGBTIQ people.

The structure of the anthology intertwines the unique personal stories chronologically alongside major queer historical events to highlight how these moments influenced our elders’ lives.

Proceeds from the sale of the book will go to The Parkestone Foundation Inc (www.parkestonefoundation.org). “The Parkestone Foundation was initially constituted as an Association in 1982 following a generous bequest by an Adelaide gay man, Peter Nation which enabled the establishment of a Trust Fund. The Foundation is managed by a committee of honorary Trustees who ensure that the Trust Fund is used for its intended purpose which is to support LGBTIQA+ community projects consistent with its objectives. Since its inception, the Foundation has allocated over $40, 000 to support community projects in South Australia.”

1970s

LGBTIQ Campaign Groups Formed and Organised

In the early 1970s an array of LGBTIQ support, protest and advocacy groups spawned following the Stonewall riots. The LGBTIQ community became more organised and visible over this period, particularly in urban areas. Protesting and lobbying increased the recognition of LGBTIQ rights and resulted in a range of changes, such as legislative reform decriminalising homosexual sex acts and the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illnesses. Prominent openly LGBTIQ people began to win positions as public officials, including the likes of Harvey Milk in 1977.

Queer groups began to form in major Australian cities from the 1970s. Whilst a number of these focussed on community support, the Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) was the first to focus on political activism. CAMP was first established in Sydney in July 1970, released its first publication in November 1970, and held its first public meeting in February 1971.⁸ The organisation had 2000 members within a year, and formed branches on university campuses in Sydney and Adelaide. These groups confronted media misinformation surrounding homosexuality and issues of sexuality, and in the process established an informal LGBTIQ network around Australia.

CAMP coordinated their first political protest in October 1971 during a Liberal Party pre-selection where Jim Cameron, right-wing politician stood against Tom Hughes, who was the Liberal government’s federal Attorney-General at the time and in favour of limited legislative reforms on homosexuality. The group then decided to demonstrate outside Liberal Party headquarters.

Dr Duncan’s Death⁹

The murder of Adelaide University law lecturer Dr George Duncan by elite South Australian police vice officers became a flash point that helped drive through the legislation that would decriminalise homosexuality in the state. Dr Duncan was at a well-known beat by the Torrens River on 10^th May 1972 when he was set upon and thrown into the river where he subsequently drowned. The murder made national headlines, and while details of those responsible are well publicised, there wasn’t sufficient evidence for conviction and a trial was never held.

Following the murder, South Australian Premier Don Dunstan, a gay man himself, began strengthening the push for legislation to decriminalise homosexuality, which would eventually lead South Australia to become the first Australian state to do so and for the law to come into event in 1975.

AMA Removes Homosexuality from List of Illnesses and Disorders

Prior to 1973 the American Psychiatric Association (APA), as perhaps the most influential authority on mental health, classified homosexuality as a psychological disorder, which was reflected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), and condoned aversion therapy as a viable treatment. This position attracted the attention of gay activists, who protested numerous APA conferences. Alongside protests, activists presented the APA with decades of research and data on human sexual behaviour by Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, and organised for Dr John E. Fryer, a gay man and psychiatrist member of the APA, to publicly address the organisation in 1972. He spoke anonymously from behind a wig, face mask and voice distorter due to the very real risk to his career, and told the APA that their profession considered him to have a sexual deviation and was prejudiced against gay people. The APA voted to no longer classify homosexuality as a psychological disorder in December 1973, which was reflected in subsequent printings of the DSM-II. They were preceded by the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry, who declared the same in October 1973. Other peak medical bodies followed suit,¹⁰ along with the World Health Organisation, who eventually removed homosexuality as a disorder in the ninth edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9) published in 1992.

South Australia Passed a National First

Legislation to decriminalise consensual sex between adult men was first introduced in the South Australian parliament as a private member’s bill by Murray Hill in 1972 following the death of Dr George Duncan. The bill was eventually passed in 1975 after several failed attempts.

Following the decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia, the state became an extradition option for states that prosecuted homosexual sex acts. One infamous case involved a gay male couple in Victoria who were raided in their own home and subsequently convicted under anti-homosexuality laws. In sentencing they were offered the option of imprisonment or deportation to South Australia. The couple chose the latter.¹¹

The First Sydney Mardi Gras

24^th June 1978 saw in the first Sydney Mardi Gras that was a march as part of international Gay Solidarity Celebrations. The events were in support of events and rights campaign that extended from the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The initial, peaceful and colourful celebrations quickly turned when New South Wales police confiscated the lead float and arrested the driver.¹² What began as a few hundred people heading up Oxford Street to read telegrams of support tipped over 1,500 following the police intervention. Over fifty people were later arrested, many beaten in police cells. A lot of the charges where eventually dropped but not after the local newspapers outed the names and employment of many involved. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras continues today as the largest event of its kind in Australia. The original marchers are now referred to as the 78’ers.

Mahamati

I identify as lesbian. I had experiences with girls when I was quite young and a part of the neighbourhood kids and I’m not sure how or what that was. I quickly got the message that this wasn’t supposed to be okay and that most people aim for boyfriends. I think I’m a bisexual lesbian or that sort of label because I got married when I was very young. I was eighteen (in 1964) and I was in love. I met David at a youth club. My parents weren’t church goers but I sought it out because that’s where the youth clubs were and that’s where the activity was and that’s where the dances were. These were things I wanted to be involved with and I met David at a mutual Anglican church, St Mary’s in Halifax Street in the city, and both our youth groups were there doing whatever good works it was that youth clubs do.

I think I was only sixteen when we met. I think I really wanted to get away from home, that was a big driver (for marriage). I wanted more freedom and more independence. I believe I was genuinely in love with David. I know we were divorced for longer than we were married. We were married nineteen years. We’re still on quite good terms and in terms of our kids and parenting. He was still in teachers training college when I met him. Then he was teaching. We got married in 1964 and very shortly after the things we were involved with at St Mary’s children’s home evolved quite quickly. This sort of feeds into the social justice things, or whatever you’d like to call it, that I’ve grown up with. We used to do a lot with the children there, we’d take them away for weekends. David’s parents had a hobby farm up in Clare. it wasn’t called a hobby farm then but that’s what it was. So we’d often take kids away for the weekend and two of the girls from the children’s home were flower girls at our wedding. One of them, Barbara, we adopted in the end.

At first we fostered her. It was the time when a lot of the social welfare laws were changing thanks to Don Dunstan and there was some new law that if the parents were subpoenaed and didn’t come to court then the court had the right to make the decision about the child’s future. We were advised by the child welfare department at the time that if we wanted to adopt her we should consider doing that but I had to wait until I was twenty-one because there wasn’t a natural age gap. We would have had to have her at thirteen for there to be a natural age gap and I was horrified that people could think that I had her at thirteen and hidden her away.

We had Barb, we were living in Adelaide, David was teaching at North Adelaide School and he was an extraordinary teacher and at that time a lot of kids came from post-war migration and if they were older and didn’t speak English they were put back into grade seven so we would have Italian and Greek boys who were fourteen in grade six, grade seven. He used to do a lot with them, he used to run a surf board thing down at the beach and kids would all come down on the weekend and things you would never do with teaching now. He had a flat in North Adelaide before we were married and all the kids would come around and be playing darts and things you would never do in terms of duty of care or worry about as a teacher, piling fifteen kids into the Volkswagen to get to football.

Travis

This is the stuff that seems quite straightforward that’s really difficult to answer, but my upbringing was I think really unremarkable, two parents, a brother and a sister, nice grandparents, no horrible events, no nasty people. I went to a state primary school in the 1960s and that was fine. We lived in England for eighteen months in London when I was ten or eleven and then I went to a private high school. Under zoning I would have gone to the local state technical high school, where the academic standard was probably not what I was capable of and I probably wouldn’t have been academically stretched, and I wouldn’t have made it to university from the local high school. I would have wound up a tradesman, probably then a lot richer than I am now. I had no say in it (schooling). I assumed I was going to the local high school and a friend who was going to the private school and said, ‘you’re going there too’ and I said, ‘no that wouldn’t be true’ but turned out to be true, selected not on the basis of the status or cost or religion but on the basis of it’s a more convenient bus route and on the other side of town.

Friends? Did I have friends? I’m just thinking back on primary school: nothing really. I got on well with the other kids, however I was a bit isolated because I preferred academics and reading to playing sports and that was a bit isolating. I tended to get along better with the girls but had fun friendships with local children up the street. I don’t recall anyone being particularly close but I got on with most people. I was in an all-boys high school and did fall in love a few times, which was not reciprocated, so they got called friendships. I had a good friend at school who I wasn’t attracted to, and he was just a really nice, interesting, intelligent person.

I was academic. I was in the top five of the school throughout the five high school years. The outstanding top boy by some margin—the brightest, most academically achieving boy in the place—was gay. and I never knew until I met him years and years later. Not knowing about him in school brings me a complete sense of lost opportunity. I wasn’t attracted to him and I wouldn’t have gone there, but we would have made a great team and we would have had a lot of fun subverting the dominant ideology in a homophobic Christian school, where this bright boy had a boyfriend at one stage. The boyfriend mysteriously disappeared from the school and was never heard of again. The teachers actively worked on keeping them separate in the schoolyard and then the following year the other boy didn’t come back to the school. So jumping back, this is what I found out years later and it enhanced my image of the school as being primarily concerned with its own image and its care for its students was, in my view, minimal. There was one teacher in particular onto whom I think I loved to project this fatherly caring supportive image and he was out-and-out homophobic, and I think he would have made my life hell.

The school had a scout trip and it had military cadets at the school itself. From the second year of high school you had to be in one or the other, so that was 1972 to 75. That was the deal, there was scouts and cadets. I presumed it was about discipline and skill learning more than going camping. Of course the scouts had the gay reputation, definitely in the 70s. It wasn’t so much about the leaders abusing the kids, it was about the kids having sex with each other, and this was reputed to happen in the scouts. Now, I did not have a sexual experience with anyone at school or in the Scouts, and if anyone had made any moves on me I missed it. And although I wanted to, I certainly didn’t make any moves on anyone else, so there was no action in the scouts for me. But I found out later from this other boy that in the cadets, it was a different story. That’s where all the action was happening.

I will relate to you an episode that happened in the scouts. I seriously can’t remember if this was a scout thing or just a school thing and it does stick in my mind about what happened and what didn’t. There was a particular teacher who was a scout leader and he was probably in his late 50s maybe 60s when I was at school, and he had a reputation among the boys for liking to touch up the boys. I was in a small group conducted by this teacher doing first aid training, so we were learning how to stop bleeding and put on bandages, nothing as advanced as CPR. I would have been about fourteen perhaps and we were in this group and somebody puts a bandage on my knee, and this teacher inspected the bandage by rubbing his face up my leg and I remember thinking that’s weird. I didn’t particularly enjoy it but it wasn’t particularly disgusted or frightened or horrified by it. I just found it weird and it was consistent with what I heard about this teacher. It simply did not occur to me to discuss this with anyone, and really it wasn’t like what we hear about abuse from teachers, like we are seeing now. It’s not particularly that was I was frightened or embarrassed or didn’t think I would be believed or anything like that. I didn’t tell any of the other boys because everybody knew it wasn’t really any different from anything I heard and I don’t think it occurred to any of us to tell other teachers or the principal or parents. I don’t think we assumed they knew and I can’t recall what I thought. Possibly part of it was the teacher was a nice guy, it was odd but it wasn’t particularly offensive or frightening, and I think probably we all liked him and we wouldn’t have wanted to get him into trouble. But there was no formal agreement, never ‘we’re going to look after him’, it was all unspoken and what goes beyond that is speculation.

All the nice, charismatic, in some way fatherly type teachers I wound up with a really low opinion of. When I was more senior in the school I wanted to be formally accredited as a scout leader, and one teacher who was also a scout leader blocked it. He didn’t say why but I think he was onto my sexuality. He showed me a letter that was written to another teacher cancelling his accreditation as a scout leader. He just showed it to me, and I wondered what is he getting at? Through other sources I think that teacher was found in the sack with one of the kids, and so as seemed to be the response to such situations in those days the kid got moved on to another school pretty fast. I think he was the one person who was onto my sexuality. Ultimately he wasn’t supportive at all. He was way more concerned about the systems, the integrity of the church, and didn’t care about individuals, was my impression. In the end he left to go into the priesthood and then this military type scout leader took over and he couldn’t see what all the fuss had been about so he just pushed through my accreditation as scout leader. I think I did well there and I didn’t fiddle with any kids.

I think my Aunt, she is probably the one who more than anyone else gave me subtle messages that you can do what you want to do, you can be what want to be, be the best of yourself. So she was probably a major influence, and when I eventually came out in my thirties, she was the one who didn’t bat an eyelid: ‘good, glad we got that out of the way’. She was a dancer, so even in the 60s perhaps met the occasional gay. She died a couple of years ago of Alzheimer’s, which was terribly, terribly sad. My grandmother, my dad’s mother, was a pretty powerful influence on me as well. She is probably responsible for my disciplined approach to finances and some of my hoarding tendencies. That’s what happens with depression kids. It’s taken me a long time to get around to ‘that’s not working properly anymore, replace it. I don’t need that anymore get rid of it. I’m not using that throw it out’. I suspect she was onto me as well.

Hugh

So, I came back to Sydney in 1972 for my holidays, staying with my mother. My parents had been divorced by this stage. I went to a show, a musical, with her and my sister and her new husband, who was a doctor. Musicals are often so corny and sentimental, but one scene really got to me. It was about people being parted and I just couldn’t stop crying. It was totally unlike me, I mean, you won’t believe it after my outburst a minute ago over Keith’s death in Perth, but it was very, very unusual for me.

The next morning, over the marmalade, my mother said to me, ‘Is there something you want to tell me that I should know?’ and so the whole story came out. Then she said, ‘I’m your mother so I suspected something like this, but I always hoped that you would marry a woman.’ (these are her very words) ‘I’d hoped that you would marry a woman who was not much interested in sex’.

I couldn’t believe she could be as cruel and as ruthless as that, to both me and the woman. She had in fact encouraged a couple of possible liaisons like that, one when I was teaching in the country. So later she said, ‘I’m going to send you to a psychiatrist. Pat’s husband, John, has recommended somebody’. Thank God! John had recently graduated, so he knew a lot of other guys who had recently graduated and the one he recommended was in Sydney at the Royal North Shore hospital. He was enlightened enough to say to me words similar to what Bob Brown’s psychiatrist said to him, ‘The only thing you have to do is to accept yourself’.

This was at a time when some of the old school of psychiatrists were still using shock treatment and still saying that gays could be cured and that it was a mental illness and so I was terrified that all this would happen to me, but none of it did. It was so wonderful to hear. It was like freedom.

Anyway, I went back to Tasmania, and just before I left Sydney my sister-in-law said to me, ‘I see the gays in South Australia have taken over the government,’ (because Don Dunstan came to power in 1970) ‘and they’re doing a good job.’

I thought, ‘I want to go there.’

Philip

Easily the biggest influence about what I should do with my life would have been my grandparents. My grandfather had a business and he was interested in the share market, and that flowed over to my grandmother after he died. She had to take responsibility for investments and I learnt about that from her. Because I knew right from that early age how important money was and it how can totally screw up people’s brains if things go wrong financially, like it happened to my parents, by being guarantors for my brother. She was perhaps the strongest influence to show me how money works and how you can ma...