Gay Sydney

A History

Garry Wotherspoon

• Publisher: NewSouth
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781742242316
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: Social Sciences

Garry Wotherspoon's Gay Sydney: A History is an updated version of his 1991 classic, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture, written in the midst of the AIDS crisis. In this vivid book Wotherspoon traces the shifts that have occurred since then, including majority support for marriage equality and anti-discrimination legislation. He also ponders the parallel evaporation of a distinctly gay sensibility and the disappearance of once-packed gay bars that have now become cafes and gyms. This book also tells the story of gay Sydney across a century, looking at secret, underground gay life, the never-ending debates about sex in society and the role of social movements in the '60 and '70s in effecting social change.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 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