Party like it’s 1958
| Party like it’s 1958 |
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IMAGE: Laurie Collinson: Jewish, Communist, a homosexual and a poet - one of Australia’s first known gay activists. Gay High Court judge, gay newsreader, lesbian sports star? Sure, why not? Gays on TV? Men kissing men and women kissing women in movies? Absolutely normal. Robert Mugabe and the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney hate homos? Not as much as homos hate them. We take gay and lesbian politics so much for granted nowadays that often we hardly notice it’s happening. Even so, it’s worth stopping for a moment and thinking about what we have, and what we have achieved, in the 40 years since the first openly homosexual people appeared in our newspapers: decriminalisation of male homosexual acts (laws which date back to the 16th century and the reign of Henry VIII). Laws which make it an offence to discriminate against lesbians, gay men and transgender people. Custody rights for lesbian mums and dads. Openly gay people in the armed forces. The right to bring our partners into the country. How on earth did we get here? Next year marks 40 years since the struggle for gay rights started in Australia; but a good starting point for any discussion on this subject is another date altogether, an entire decade earlier. 1958 was not a great year for homosexuals. In fact, it was the worst year ever in terms of the number of men arrested and convicted for ‘unnatural offences’. Truth newspaper reported in lurid detail on the shocking goings-on in certain clubs and cafes, and even private homes, where people of that type gathered. It reported, too, on the suicide of a respectable Melbourne man who was unwilling to allow himself to be dragged through the courts to prison. That same year, an anonymous correspondent wrote to the International Committee for Sexual Equality, reflecting gloomily on how the narrow-minded in Sydney were making life hard for people like him. In this climate, raising your head and asking for fairness for homosexuals seems like – and was – a dangerous thing to do. But Laurie Collinson decided to try anyway. Laurie is an interesting figure (or rather, was: he died in London in 1984): Jewish, Communist, a homosexual and a poet; he seemed to be just asking for trouble in the square world of 1950s Melbourne. Nonetheless, he decided that the time was right to do something for his people. His first step was to write to London, where a homosexual law reform society had been established the year prior, inspired by the British government’s Wolfenden Report, which after three years of painstaking research had recommended in 1957 that sexual acts between consenting adults in private ought to be legal. Even if those consenting adults were two men. Hopes were high in Britain; but they were also high around the world, anywhere Britain’s laws were in place. Laurie wrote to London, and London wrote back. They sent copies of their pamphlets. They offered advice: find yourself some respectable citizens to front for your organisation. Lobby quietly behind the scenes. Wait for Britain’s reform to succeed and surely Australia would not be far behind. Laurie started work, jotting down a list of worthies, and some points for an agenda, and then - nothing. In the thin file in his papers in the National Library, there is no sign that anything else happened. We have no idea what happened, except that nothing came of his efforts. Quite when he stopped, and why, is unclear. But there was no group; nor would there be anytime before he finally gave up on Australia and went off to England to be a writer. Laurie was an experienced organiser. He had started a literary magazine – ‘a journal for youth’ as it rather grandly declared itself – while still at school in Brisbane in the late 1940s, and soon afterwards became a member of the Communist Party. He helped run a bookshop and an artistic and literary circle, he acted and he wrote; but he was up against one thing that no amount of activity could defeat: the political climate was all wrong. In Britain, a series of sex scandals had occupied the front pages of the newspapers (and many more pages besides) since the early 1950s. That’s why the Wolfenden Committee had been set up. Then came its Report, and the pressure on Parliament to act.
None of this happened in Australia. The press (with the exception of Truth) would not touch sex scandals. The politicians weren’t interested. Even the clergy felt no need to warn against the ‘unnatural vice’, such was its invisibility. The Left was just as bad. Laurie was a good Party member, but he kept his sexuality well-hidden.
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Dr Graham Willett looks back to a less enlightened age, and the first flowering of Australian gay liberation.
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