Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian Stories from a Social Revolution

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Over recent decades, Australia has undergone a quiet but remarkable revolution. For much of its history, intimate relationships between those of the same sex were hidden, criminalised, classified and stigmatised. Today, gay men and lesbians are increasingly recognised as full and equal citizens. Countless television shows feature gay and lesbian characters, newspapers carry columns about marriage equality, and many same-sex couples nonchalantly show affection in the city and country alike. Traditionally gay precincts such as Sydney’s Oxford Street and Melbourne’s Commercial Road are on the decline as gay consumers feel less of a need for predominantly homosexual spaces. Changing social attitudes towards homosexuality are reflected in polls. In a 1967 survey, only 22 per cent of Australians supported the legalisation of homosexual acts. In 2014 a Crosby Textor poll found an overwhelming 72 per cent of Australians supported the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Clearly, something extraordinary is happening: a social revolution perhaps without parallel in Australian history. But what have been the experiences of the men and women at the heart of this change? What have gay and lesbian lives been like as broader social attitudes have undergone such an evolution? How has change been experienced by those from different generations? These were some of the questions we hoped to answer when we embarked on recording the lives of sixty gay and lesbian Australians from around the country, in collaboration with the National Library of Australia. We wanted to understand how the past was remembered today, and how different or similar the experiences of young lesbians and gay men are to those of previous generations.

Our primary interest was in what social change has been like for ‘ordinary’ Australian gay men and lesbians – not public figures or activists, but those who have lived workaday lives. These ordinary men and women may participate sporadically and peripherally in campaigns for social change, but they don’t take on leadership roles. This does not mean that they don’t play a role in social change, but that they do so through their personal relationships and the ebb and flow of everyday life, rather than through organised activism. We suspected – and confirmed – that the quiet revolution has been carried out within the lounge rooms of suburban Australia, at beachside barbecues, and in country towns as much as through public demonstrations, media coverage and in gay ‘ghettos’ such as Oxford Street.

But how to get to these stories of everyday, ordinary lesbian and gay lives? We decided that the most evocative way was to speak directly and intimately with the women and men most affected by the revolution in social attitudes. In the course of interviewing them, our research team, lugging a recorder in a bulky black briefcase, crisscrossed Australia, determined to cover as much terrain as possible: from coastal Denmark in the south of Western Australia, to Darwin in the Northern Territory. We visited Dodges Ferry in Tasmania before heading to Magnetic Island, off the coast of Townsville. Wherever we went, we were greeted with warmth and generosity, drank many cups of tea and coffee, and heard compelling and often very moving stories of ordinary Australians living through remarkable times. The oldest person we interviewed was born in 1921 and the youngest was born seventy-one years later, in 1992.

As we travelled, we saw social shifts in Australia play out in sometimes unexpected ways. We watched marriage equality campaigners being warmly greeted by shoppers in a Rockhampton shopping centre. We saw two elderly men, clearly a couple, holding hands as they walked through the main street of a small New South Wales country town. We saw federal politicians spend six hours debating whether there should be a parliamentary free vote on marriage equality and ultimately decide against this. We also heard accounts of homophobic abuse and violence, of family rejection and very real struggles with suicidal thoughts. And as we finished writing this book in early 2016, we watched in dismay a concerted effort by the Christian Right to undermine the wellbeing of LGBTI students in schools. The pace and impact of the quiet revolution is uneven.

Debate is ongoing in the gay and lesbian community about the costs and benefits of integrating with the mainstream. There are those who lament the loss of a certain radicalism. Others enthusiastically welcome the assimilation of gay men and lesbians into mainstream culture and agitate hard for everyday rights like marriage. While no gain is without losses, we suspected – and our interviews confirmed – that the increased capacity of homosexual Australians to live ‘ordinary’ lives with the same possibilities as heterosexual Australians was a positive development.

In 1986 Garry Wotherspoon published a classic collection of gay men’s life stories under the title Being Different. In 2016 we feel that many lives are no longer so different – they are becoming ordinary. This question of ordinariness – and the way it allows individuals to live full, happy, rich lives – is what we set out to explore and capture in Gay & Lesbian, Then & Now.

From the extensive cohort interviewed, we selected thirteen individuals. While they cannot represent the entire experience of gay and lesbian Australians, we believe their stories reveal some of the significant shifts that have taken place in ordinary lives over the past eighty years. We deliberately sought to include people from a range of social and racial backgrounds, and those who grew up or have lived in rural locations. The interviews touched on issues as diverse as ethnicity and gender, personal temperament, family dynamics, class, religion, sex and intimacy.

While there is overlap between the different generations, we have broadly divided the book into three sections that we think represent significantly different life experiences. In Part I we explore the lives of Merv and Nola, who were born in 1933 and 1944 respectively and came of age well before the gay liberation movement and feminist movement of the 1970s. Those born between the early 1920s and 1945 are often described as ‘The Lucky Generation’ or ‘The Builders’, and sometimes as ‘The Silent Generation’. We did not think these names representative of gay and lesbian experience, so we settled on another descriptor: ‘The Veterans’. In Part II, ‘The Baby Boomers and Generation X’, we meet three women and two men who reached maturity in the 1970s or ’80s and were significantly affected by feminism and gay liberation. In Part III, ‘The Millennials’, we consider the life stories of four younger men and women whose sense of identity has been forged at a time when gay and lesbian people have never been more visible, although a distinct physical gay and lesbian culture appears to be on the wane even as it migrates online. And in the conclusion, we meet Alex, a young woman in Melbourne living a full, contented and relatively ordinary life as a lesbian.

Taken together, these thirteen lives reveal a remarkable eight decades of change and point the way, we hope, to a more equal, transformative future.

PART I

The Veterans

Merv and Nola, the Veterans we meet in this section, came of age during the 1950s and ’60s, when acts of male homosexuality were a criminal offence across the country. While female homosexuality was not subject to the same legislation, lesbians still had to wrestle with medical intervention and religious condemnation, contend with social prejudice, and struggle against invisibility. Although it might appear that very little altered in these years for those who felt same-sex desire, subtle changes were afoot, the full repercussions of which would be felt in subsequent decades. In the meantime, women and men of the 1950s and ’60s who were attracted to the same sex attempted to fashion lives for themselves in ways that were creative and profound, deftly negotiating and challenging the bigotry that permeated society and their lives.

For most of the 1950s, homosexual men and women did not define themselves as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’. Some men described themselves as ‘camp’; others reclaimed the pejorative term ‘poofters’. Women attracted to other women were described as ‘inverts’, ‘saphists’ or even ‘tribades’. ‘Lesbian’ did not emerge as the dominant term until the late 1960s. It was not until the 1970s that the word ‘gay’ supplanted the terms ‘camp’ and ‘poofter’ in common parlance.

While the general public may have heard very little about homosexuality in the 1950s, authorities around the world were increasingly classifying and policing it and presenting it as a medical disorder. As historian Yorick Smaal has pointed out, the Second World War, with its rapid influx of US soldiers into Australia, allowed many men – both in the military and on the home front, to act on their desires for other men. In 1948 the first US Kinsey Report, which argued that more than a third of men had ‘some homosexual experience’, drew attention to the diversity of human sexuality. In 1957 the Wolfenden Report was published in Britain, recommending ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’. The recommendations eventually led to the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised sodomy in England and Wales.

In Australia in the 1950s, there was little talk of reform and authorities aggressively policed homosexuality. Men who used public spaces and beats for sex were the subject of harsh punishment, and police entrapment was not uncommon. Graham Willett notes, ‘it is clear that across Australia in the early 1950s, the police had started to see homosexuality as a major problem’, with an escalating rate of criminal convictions for male-to-male sexual acts.

Meanwhile, female homosexuality, as historian Rebecca Jennings has argued, ‘remained almost entirely absent from cultural discourse in mid-twentieth century Australia’, and this silence made it difficult for many women to articulate their desire.

The first and second editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952 and 1968, included homosexuality as a mental illness. Women and men alike could be subjected to psychiatric interventions and medical attempts to ‘treat’ their ‘illness’. In October 1966, under the headline ‘New Hope for Deviates’, the Sydney Morning Herald described the form this type of medical intervention could take. Homosexual patients undergoing aversion therapy at the Prince Henry Hospital, Little Bay, were subjected to nausea-inducing injections and electroshock therapy.

Despite this apparently bleak landscape for gay men and lesbians in the 1950s and ’60s, historians have cautioned against viewing the era too pessimistically. While there was a pervasive culture of punishment, oppression and intervention, there was also an underground ‘gay world’ in the major cities, which provided opportunities for friendship, sex and intimate relationships. Willett and others, including Ruth Ford, have argued that official attempts to classify homosexual men and women and deal with the ‘problem’ of homosexuality may have provided an impetus for these men and women to organise and socialise, laying the groundwork for political activism in subsequent decades. Certainly by the late 1960s, a more visible gay world was evolving in Sydney.

An organised political gay movement did not fully emerge in Australia until the 1970s, but its antecedents were gradually forming internationally. The Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, became one of the first US gay rights organisations. Five years later, the Daughters of Bilitis formed in San Francisco as the first lesbian civil and political rights organisation in the United States. After these tentative beginnings, the spontaneous riots that broke out in June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City served as a public expression of a new, visible and increasingly angry movement organised around a politicised demand for gay rights. In Australia, attempts to organise were cautious. Australia’s first gay organisation, the Homosexual Law Reform Society of the Australian Capital Territory (Canberra), formed in 1969. But such was the public stigma surrounding homosexuality, the spokespeople for this organisation were heterosexual.

Decriminalisation of male-to-male sex acts was at the crux of debates surrounding homosexuality in Australia at the end of the 1960s. During the 1970s the fight for decriminalisation picked up pace, but it was not fully resolved until the 1990s. For homosexual Australians, the 1950s and ’60s were complex decades. Legal sanctions, medical intervention and social disapproval, coupled with a dearth of cultural representation, could make life very difficult. But this did not stop men and women like Merv and Nola pursuing their same-sex desires, sometimes in unlikely places.

1

Merv

‘YOU HAD TO KEEP IT ALL VERY PRIVATE’

During one of our interviews, Charlie, a 24-year-old lesbian, expressed her concern and sorrow for lesbians and gays who had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s and the struggle they had experienced ‘trying to live their lives normally’. Now, Charlie doesn’t have an especially deep knowledge of lesbian and gay history – and really, why should she? – but she does grasp the rough divide between life before and after the gay rights movement. Today, it is popularly imagined that gay and lesbian life before 1970 was marked by secrecy and subterfuge, discrimination and the ever-present threat of exposure. To a fair extent, this is true. But it is not the only story that can be told about lesbian and gay life before the hirsute activists of Gay Liberation hit the streets. In this chapter and the next, through the eyes of Merv and Nola, we explore how two ‘ordinary’ individuals with what were then deemed ‘unordinary’ sexual desires navigated the postwar decades. Their stories defy a simple depiction of the 1950s and ’60s as uniformly repressive decades. Merv’s life offers us insight into how some men in the ’50s and ’60s managed to create a homosexual life that reaped considerable, if careful and discreet, pleasure.

Becoming a ‘poofter’

Merv was born in 1933 and grew up on the semi-rural northern fringe of Brisbane. Today his childhood stamping ground has become the solidly middle-class suburb of Wavell Heights, a marked transformation from the open fields and creeks that Merv remembers from the 1930s. ‘When we moved up there, we would look out over the side of the verandah and there was just bushland. Miles away there was another light at night. Look a bit further around somewhere, there was another light.’ To get to school Merv would cut through ‘a huge, big bushland area’. After the Second World War the bush sprouted housing commission estates and the area became, essentially, a social housing suburb. Merv had long gone by the time Wavell Heights morphed once more, into a middle-class suburb.

Merv’s parents were long-time Brisbane residents. His father was a commercial hardware salesperson, ‘travelling around … taking orders from house builders and [commercial] builders’. He was, recalls Merv crisply, ‘a very heavy drinker and a very heavy smoker’. Merv’s mother worked from home on a piecemeal basis making dresses for local women, particularly wedding dresses. She was ‘a very, very good dressmaker’. Merv was the eldest of three sons. He was born in September 1933; his parents had married in February of that year. Merv, with a tinge of sarcasm in his voice, explains: ‘So I was a premature baby, as they say.’

Merv never really got along with his father, not least because his father declared that Merv was not his son. Merv remains mystified by this declaration, because the physical similarity between the two men was evident: ‘So he was certainly my father.’ We wonder if perhaps Merv’s father resented the imperative of his marriage and visited that dissatisfaction upon his ‘prematurely’ born son, Merv, but it’s impossible to know. Whatever the case, Merv is quite sure that his father favoured his younger brothers.

Merv’s mother was more present in his life, and he recalls a childhood that was fairly typical of Anglo-Australian children in the 1930s: ‘She was always home when we got home from school. If we were ten minutes late … Where have you been? What have you been doing? We had to be home at the right time and go up the road and do messages. Go to the shop and get a few things and what have you, and then go out and play. Then come back inside for dinner, and we’d probably listen to the radio for a half an hour after dinner and do our homework. Then off to bed, and off to school.’

In many of our interviews it takes a while for the conversation to turn to sexuality. Interviewees often linger on memories of childhood and family origins before we inch towards a discussion of sexuality. Merv, however, is quick off the mark. In the opening minutes of the interview he recounts his first memories of same-sex desires and activities. Perhaps this points towards the centrality of male homosexuality in eighty-year-old Merv’s recollections of his life.

He begins his personal history of same-sex desire with a memory of walking home from Nundah Primary School with ‘all the boys’. ‘We would go down to Kedron Brook and jump in the creek and go for a swim. We’d be naked. We’d take our clothes off and jump in the creek. Quite often there were two or three of us, [and we] would get together in the water and play together, rub our bodies together … I always realised I liked the company of other boys, and I liked doing what I was doing with the boys.’ This first story sets up themes that reverberate throughout Merv’s interview: his strong preference for the company of males and his uncomplicated enthusiasm for the erotic possibilities of male bodies. Merv recalls, almost with an air of bemusement, the physical shyness of one boy in the group: ‘There was one that I always remember. When he took his clothes off and started to run across to jump in the river, he put his hands across his privates and wouldn’t let anybody else see them.’ Similarly, Merv recounts, perhaps with a touch of annoyance, the changes that puberty wrought for some of the boys: ‘By the time we started to get towards puberty age, a few of the girls decided they wanted to start walking home with us. So we ended up split into groups. A mixed group and [a] boys-only group. I stuck with the boys-only group. I wasn’t interested in the girls.’

War engulfed much of the world while Merv was at primary school, and Brisbane was by no means untouched. The city hosted up to 80,000 American military and civilian personnel at the height of the war, and this affected the sexual practices of local women and men. Queensland historian Clive Moore notes that the troops ‘provoked sexual liberation and excess. Never before or since has Brisbane seen so much sexual activity from so many fit young men with no thought for the future.’ Still a boy, Merv found himself on the edges of this sexual activity. An American army base was built on bushland close to where Merv lived and which he passed walking to and from school. ‘The American soldiers were in behind the fence. They would come over to the fence and see us boys, and ask us to go down the road and buy them a drink or a chocolate or something like that … When we came back with it, they would either offer us threepence, or a ride in the tank. Well, most of us usually took the ride in the tank – we preferred that. I did get in the tank a couple of times, and once or twice one or two of them touched me.’

Today we would view these incidents, which occurred when Merv was twelve or thirteen, as sexual abuse and irrevocably inappropriate – with good reason, given the psychological damage that results from child abuse. So the casualness of Merv’s recounting might be unnerving to contemporary observers. However, without excusing the behaviour of the servicemen, and uncomfortable as it may be, we need to remain mindful of how Merv experienced these sexual approaches and how he remembers them: ‘No, I didn’t know what it was all about. I wasn’t looking for it, but when somebody touched me I enjoyed it. I liked it.’

Perhaps Merv’s uncomplicated remembering of the American servicemen is aided by the fact that he hit puberty at a relatively early age and was already enthusiastically playing with other boys sexually, without having a label for what he was doing. Merv remembers fondly the first time he ejaculated, under the tutelage of a boy a couple of years older than him. ‘We were out walking around one afternoon and we walked into the foundations of a new house being built. I wanted a pee, so I dropped my pants and had a pee. He leaned over my shoulder and looked. Oh, he said, You’ve got hairs around your dick. He was apparently a bit of a slow developer too. He didn’t have hairs around him at that stage. He put his hand around and felt me. He said, Oh, you could shoot. I said What are you talking about? I haven’t got a gun. He wanked me off. I thought, Oh, that was nice. I love that. He and I played around quite often together after that.’

In recounting memories of peer sex-play and exhibitionism, Merv recalls that some boys wanted no part of the experimentation, in contrast to his own joyful enthusiasm for male bodies. ‘There were a couple of other boys who … wouldn’t drop their pants in front of anybody. They would not show anybody what they had in their pants. They weren’t interested in touching anybody else, where[as] I enjoyed it. When somebody touched me, I enjoyed it. If I touched other people, I enjoyed doing that too.’ In his early teens, this sex-play included male cousins from his extended family who met up when they holidayed at their grandparents’ house by the beach in Redcliffe. Rugby tackles and wrestling merged into physical horseplay that morphed into touching each other up. ‘We used to touch each other and play around together. Yes, just because we liked it. We enjoyed doing it.’

Later, Merv discovered that one of his cousins ‘apparently was gay’. At the time, however, Merv had no vocabulary for the activities he enjoyed so much. In fact, he admits, he did not realise ‘in those days’ what he was doing ‘was sexual, really’. Nor did he have any inkling of what homosexuality was, so it did not feature in his understanding of himself. When we ask Merv if he read, heard or saw anything that might have helped him label his erotic desires during his early to mid teens, he gives a relatively unadorned answer. ‘Not really, no. I didn’t know why I felt that way. It was just – to me, I suppose, it was just natural, but I didn’t know why I felt that way and I wasn’t interested in girls.’ Merv does not seem to have been greatly troubled by the direction in which his desires travelled. He knew he was not interested in girls, but what he felt still felt natural. Indeed, the intense pleasure Merv experienced from same-sex play seems to have enabled him to understand these sexual experiences as natural. How could something that felt so good be wrong?

Historian of homosexuality Garry Wotherspoon has described the 1940s in Australia as ‘an end to unknowing’. By this, he means that the expert knowledge of homosexuality – which had been gathering pace in the West from the early twentieth century – began to seep into popular discourse. Unfortunately for same-sex-attracted individuals, in the postwar period this knowledge cast homosexuals as deviants and wilful perverts who needed to be policed, incarcerated and/or medically managed. A New South Wales police commissioner during the 1950s memorably described homosexuality as ‘the greatest social menace in Australia’. American historian of sexuality Marcia Gallo noted ‘the nearly unanimous belief at mid-twentieth century – enshrined in science and promoted by the news media – that same-sex sexuality was pathological’.

Growing up in the 1930s and ’40s in provincial Brisbane, the son of working-class parents, Merv appears to have been blissfully oblivious of these gathering storm clouds. For Merv, in his formative years, not knowing how homosexuality was understood may well have been to his advantage. Not that we should idealise this period in Merv’s sexual life as simply years of idyllic ignorance. Even without an intellectual understanding of homosexuality, Merv soon intuited that he needed to be careful expressing his sexual desires. Of his youthful cavorting with his cousins, Merv remembers: ‘We’d never let our parents see us doing it, though. If they saw us touching each other like that, we would really get a good kick up the backsides. We were really abused and told to stop that. You’re not supposed to do that. Stop it. So we kept it away from them.’ Nor did Merv ever discuss what he felt about other boys with anyone: ‘I don’t think I did, no.’

Merv’s schooldays came to an end after he completed his junior year, the equivalent of Year 10. ‘If you wanted to get an apprenticeship or a trade or something or other, you had to go through to junior … So I went through to an apprenticeship.’ Merv’s first job turned out to be a storeman position. Determined to get a trade, Merv lasted six weeks before landing an apprenticeship with a large stationery manufacturer. Not uncommonly for the postwar era, Merv remained in this trade and with the same employer – first in Brisbane and then in Sydney – for the rest of his working life. ‘We were manufacturing things like exercise books for schools and notepads, and those little desk calendars. Things like that … We also manufactured envelopes too, I moved through to that area and learnt how to do those. I went right through the whole factory, really.’ His description of his working life probably echoes the sentiments of many a salaried tradesman in the postwar decades. ‘I enjoyed it. I didn’t mind it. Alright, I didn’t want to get up and go to work every morning either, but I mean I didn’t mind it either.’ Freed from homework, on weekends during the warmer months Merv and some of his former school friends would cycle to a bayside town for the day to swim. ‘There were no lifesavers that I can remember in those days. There was the big swimming pool down at Sandgate, which is where we used to go quite often. Sandgate was really known as Mudgate when we were kids, which it still is, I think.’

With his apprentice salary Merv gained a measure of independence, although – like most young men and women