Peering Through: Sharing Decades of Queer Experiences

By Andrew Crooks

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buon-Cattivi Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780995366176

Book preview

The Parkestone Foundation Inc.

Proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Parkestone Foundation Inc.

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.

Additional donations and further information about the Parkestone Foundation Inc.’s work can be found at www.parkestonetrust.org

Peering Through

Published by the Buon-Cattivi Press, 2018

Adelaide, Australia

ISBN (PAPERBACK) 978-0-9953661-8-3

ISBN (EBOOK) 978-0-9953661-7-6

Book design and cover illustration

by Andrew Crooks

Peering Through

Sharing Decades of Queer Experiences

Edited by Dr Alex Dunkin and Greg Fell

Buon-Cattivi Press

Adelaide, Australia

Foreword

Australia’s queer history is a complex one. Over the decades identities within the queer community have risen and fallen. Their history can be traced along with the major social and cultural events occurring at the time. Several internationally recognised moments, such as the South Australian decriminalisation of homosexuality, marked major changes in the lives of the LGBTIQ community.

In other cases, such large changes in the legal rights of the LGBTIQ community passed over some who identify as part of the community as they continued to strive for the best in theirs and their family lives. The level of interaction with different moments in Australia’s queer history provides an interesting tapestry to be collated.

There are lifetimes of experiences hidden out there in the LGBTIQ world. In particular, the elders of the community have held a wealth of knowledge based upon their time growing and thriving in a world designed to attack and sometimes persecute them just for being who they are. Each experience is unique, layered in individual complexities that arrive from living a full life.

Unfortunately the passing of time and the inevitable are causing some of these experiences to fade, in some cases leaving our world when the elder does. Peering Through is just one small step that is seeking to prevent the invaluable lessons from our community from being lost. The stories collected are a beautiful variety of life goals achieved, struggles overcome, and loses recognised. Through this project the stories are released into the world where a new set of voices can be added to the permanent records.

Peering Through

Sharing Decades of Queer Experiences

Contents

1899

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

Post

Endnotes

Index by Name

Disclaimer

Some names have been changed.

1899

The Beginning of Australian Anti-LGBTIQ Laws.

Australia’s history in its negative attitude toward LGBTIQ people extends over a hundred years. Like many colonies that preceded it, the country inherited British laws that parliament may later alter or repeal.¹ One such alteration to laws include the penalty for sodomy conviction reduced from execution to life in prison, via Queensland’s Criminal Code Act 1899 that came into force 1st January 1901.² However, the term hangover is apt here, as this change occurred decades after Britain itself had removed the death penalty for sodomy. The Act was passed by the Queensland Government prior to federation, and so it was not binding upon all Australian colonies (later states and territories), which did not move to the lesser penalty.³

Sex between consenting male adults continued to be crimes in some Australian states up until 1997. Female same-sex sex acts were never illegal under British or Australian law, often because people publicly denied that it ever happened.

1940s

Post War Times

The great wars created major disturbances on Australian social, cultural, and political situations. Families were torn apart, laws focussed on the war efforts and the repercussions were felt across the nation. Many LGBTIQ service men and women served in silence and even upon their return to Australia they were not welcomed to be open in the Returned Service League. During their service romantic liaisons did occur and as one serviceman stated ‘we might as well be happy while we’ve the chance’.⁴

The history of the Peering Through Queer Elders begins during and after this period.

Hugh

There are two strands to my story. One about guilt, agonising and desperate soul-destroying guilt, eventually leading to self-acceptance. The other is the light on the hill (which for me was the 1975 decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia).

I was born in 1936 and grew up in Sydney. Sydney for other people is the land of the Mardi Gras and gay permissiveness. For me it was the land of aunts. Everywhere I turned I’d always see an aunt, and so it was extremely respectable and very restrictive. I was also bought up strict Presbyterian, that means no sex outside marriage and a lot of other little restrictions. Dancing was frowned on. Swearing was not on. You could drink, but only if you were a responsible adult. However, thanks to my mother’s warm nature and cultured background, and the enthusiasm of my siblings, I remember an enormous amount of fun and laughter through an atmosphere that often threatened to be too strained.

I was very, very active in the church. I was in the choir—I just happened to be born with a good singing voice, I taught in the Sunday school and I led the Fellowship. In other words it was a social centre for me, very much so, and that was quite a problem, to find something to replace that later on, because when you’re involved to that extent it’s actually very supportive and you’re very loath to let go.

Michael

I was born in 1943 and grew up in a small country town in the lower-north of SA. My parents were the first of three generations of early settlers to seek employment beyond farming. My father’s family had immigrated from Silesia in 1848, my mother’s from Scotland in 1854. Both sides were largely unsuccessful financially, often farming on marginal land and subject to the vagaries of the weather and rural economics.

In the aftermath of the Depression my father undertook a fitter and turner apprenticeship and remained employed in the same manufacturing firm for forty-six years. Because his employment was deemed a ‘reserve occupation’ during World War II, he was denied enlistment in the RAAF. My mother trained as a nurse in a country hospital.

David H

I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne around Dandenong, which is about twenty five kilometres out of Melbourne, something like that, very suburban. I have no wish to ever go back there thank you very much. We’re talking starting from 1948 when we migrated here. I was a three-year-old and my parents came from the suburbs of metropolitan London, and I remember my mother complaining that the biscuits were made out of sawdust and the transport was terrible—it was a red rattler railway carriage. I have never forgotten: in the main street of Dandenong there used to be date palms down the centre and she couldn’t get over the fact (coming from London) that there was a woman who literally took horse and jig down the main street who would go to the Dandenong market on Wednesday, so that blew her mind. When you think about it, yes, it would be confronting so there we go.

I think I had the odd friend here and there. I didn’t try to make it very easy to make friends. I don’t do large groups very well. I’m quite good talking one-to-one and I like that. Walking into the party situation I really find difficult and I do not have the sports gene in any way shape or form and so that is also something that sets you apart and different. My one sporting achievement is being forced to play cricket in secondary school, while I remember this quite well, standing on the edges probably thinking about the book I was reading and the ball comes flying up and they all yell out to me ‘drop it, drop it’ and I actually caught it. That was my only achievement. I had some friends, quite often they were misfits in their own way if you want put it that way but not very many of them, just the odd one here and there.

The way I look at that is I’ve done an awful lot of work on myself and I see it is peeling back the layers of an onion (if you like) or the lotus opening up before you get to the jewel in the centre, it’s been a lot of work. I had a very poor self-image, particularly to do with my sexuality and also just me generally, and I think it came from my family and my upbringing and I had to work on that to get where I’d got to now. It’s been a big task.

I don’t ever remember being told homosexuality is wrong or anything like that and part of the problem was having two parents who were both English, born in 1915, who were in their own ways repressed, and they lived through the Depression. My father was a very introverted man, my mother was much more outgoing. Their marriage—because of the differences in the personality—became hard work for both of them and I think my mother had a lot of anger because she ended up having to do everything, paying the bills, organising the schooling, all that stuff because my father was a bit of a ‘Peter Pan’ in his own way. He’d been bashed by the nuns, for example, for writing with his left hand and forced to use his right hand. He loathed the nuns after that. He had lost his father in the First World War when he was about one-year-old so he didn’t really have the experience of being fathered, so how was he to know what to do and lucky him he had this cuckoo nest (me) who loved reading books and playing classical piano. He was a plumber basically so we couldn’t meet on any level very easily at all and I remember him saying to me once ‘why you want to read all them books?’ Later on when I went to my mother and I said I want to study classical music, it was something along the lines of ‘all those composers were crazy why would you want to do that?’ and even when I actually came out to her and we had the conversation it always referred back to her. I was an extension of her (and we’re talking not a small child at this point) and I remember the conversation was ‘I don’t think you are (gay)’. So it was like a game to her with some reality that was important to me and she would say ‘oh no, that’s not right’ so I was never heard ticked, it was always crossed, you see what I mean.

That really didn’t help and because of their era they weren’t at all open about sexual things at all, no matter what the sexual thing was. So to have something as way out as being a ‘poofter’ was ‘oh my god what happened, what did we do?’. So that was the background that I grew up in and I had to do a lot of repairing and all that stuff. My sister took a different line. She rebelled, which I did not do. I tended to internalise it all, which is much harder actually. So as I said over the years that I had to peel those layers back that I put up to protect myself because it couldn’t really get through to either of them.

Well, for who influenced me, going on from what I said I think in a negative way it was my parents. I mean I love them but I can remember separating myself from my father quite distinctly when he lost his temper with me one day and I thought—I actually remember thinking—‘you will never hurt me again’ and I just put a wall up. I got on generally well with my mother. She had a big influence on me and she’d been very musical through her early life and gone to theatre and opera and stuff in London, and she actually got me learning piano which I obviously still play which was very important. As far as parents go, she was the one that I got on better with in a sense so I’d probably say her in a lot of ways. As I sort of came to late adolescence, early twenties I think I was just starting on my voyage and it’s taken a long time and I don’t really remember anyone being there in a mentoring sense.

Mahamati

My story is probably a little bit different to the ordinary. My father was totally blind and had been blind since a small child. He had meningitis, so I grew up with a father that was different. He was quite remarkable as I look back on it. He worked at a sheltered workshop that the Royal Institute for the Blind did making mattings. He was also a musician and he played in lots of bands, dance bands and orchestras, which is how he met my mother in a small town—Rendelsham in South Australia. During the war years teams of blind musicians used to go out and entertain the country people and they’d be billeted at different people’s homes and that’s how he met my mother. She lived a fairly isolated life in a small, small town in the South East of South Australia and she only went to school until grade seven and I’m not sure what she did in those years before she met my father. I guess it seemed quite exciting to her. They did a lot of touring around and travelling around South Australia and Victoria and when they got married she used to travel with the band, with the orchestras at different times.

They eventually settled in Prospect. My grandfather also lived with us, after my grandmother died. With him from Rendelsham he brought about six to eight kangaroos he used to tame and breed, for what purpose I don’t know but he used to do these corny picture postcards of kangaroos playing cricket and send them all over the world. Anyway, some of the kangaroos got shipped off to the zoo but others lived with us and that was another different thing in the neighbourhood.

But, probably the biggest part of my childhood was that I had polio. I was one of the first kids infected in the epidemic of 1948-9, so I spent a lot of my childhood in hospital and in rehabilitation. I was infected when I was three and I didn’t get home until I was seven and a half so it was quite a lot of childhood away from home and in those days institutions were fairly daunting, parents visited less.

So I came home and I was still on this frame which is sort of this big thing that sits you in the living room and I did correspondence lessons for grade one and two, my mother taught me. I didn’t actually go to school until I was probably in grade three. This was all happening in suburban Prospect, which was interesting in lots of ways. I have written a fair bit about it at different times in my life and because my father had gone to school at what’s called Townsend House here, which was an institution for blind and