“There wasn’t ... a social scene or a way of meeting people. You had to find a secret place. With all those forces of society against you,and not being able to come out to your families or that type of thing;and yet we still had that urge to engage with each other and find each other.”
Charles thought of beats – public places where gay men could connect,congregate and have sex – as showing the “indomitable spirit” of gay men,he told a NSW inquiry into hate crimes against lesbian,gay,bisexual,transgender,intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people on Tuesday.
He was proud to wear the tongue-in-cheek moniker of “beat queen”:someone who “used beats regularly and was very immersed in gay social life”.
The NSW inquiry,a world-first,has called a string of witnesses to help illuminate the “social,legal and cultural factors affecting the LGBTIQ community” in the 40 years from 1970 to 2010 before it trains its sights on a series of suspected hate crimes.
There wasn’t ... a social scene or a way of meeting people. You had to find a secret place.
Barry Charles,founding member of UNSW’s Gay Liberation movement.
Headed by Supreme Court Justice John Sackar,the inquiry willexplore dozens of deaths in NSW during that time after every known unsolved homicide from those years was reviewed – totalling more than 700 cases.
Until 1984,homosexual sex was a crime in NSW punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment. Homosexuality was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1972. And “it was regarded as sinful by all religious groups”,Charles said.