In this December edition of the First Mardi Gras Inc. Newsletter, we have:
- Karl Zlotkowski on Out of the Bars! and onto the Bridge!
- Barry Charles and Garry Wotherspoon on the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes
- Photos from Christmas at Kinselas
- Diane Minnis on the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras AGM
- Michael Fenaughty on Queer Literacy for Young Adults in the Bush
- Robert French on ACT’s Naming of Lex Watson Circuit
- First Mardi Gras Inc. contribution to NSW Council for Civil Liberties statement on Jailing of Peaceful Climate Activists
- How to buy CAMP: Australia’s pioneer homosexual activists by Robyn Kennedy and Robyn Plaister and early bird tickets for the CAMP play at the Seymour Centre
- Rebbell Barnes and Bill Ashton on How to get your 78ers and CAMP badges
- Calendar of Events.
The next First Mardi Gras Inc. General Meeting is at 4pm, Saturday 14 January 2023, by Zoom.
Diane Minnis
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By now all 78ers should have heard from the SGLMG 78ers Committee that a 78er contingent will join the WorldPride 2023 Harbour Bridge walk on 5 March 2023. The final arrangements for this event are still coming together, but we can now confirm that the 78ers will meet at 0630 AM outside North Sydney Station, ready to join the opening smoking ceremony and then lead off across the Bridge at 0700.
78ers will not need to join the public ballot for tickets to join the Bridge Walk – places have already been reserved. The SGLMG 78ers Committee will contact 78ers early in the New Year to confirm their plans, and will liaise with Sydney WorldPride to organise ticketing.
Please be aware that the walk is approximately 4.5 km, with some significant grades – all the way from North Sydney Station to the Domain. If you’d like to join but feel you might need assistance, or would like to borrow a wheelchair (and/or someone to push it) please let us know now.
All this is in addition to planning for the 2023 Mardi Gras Parade, which will take place on Oxford Street one week earlier. 78ers have already been asked to signal their intention of joining the 78ers group in the parade – if you have not yet responded please do so as soon as possible.
The parade will start from Liverpool Street, as it did in 2019. Mardi Gras are well advanced in planning access arrangements and ticketing, and 78ers have been allocated one of the largest groups in the parade. This year we will be featuring placards celebrating key events from the campaigns of 1973, in line with our ongoing ’50 Years of Visibility’ theme, along with many of our favourite signs and slogans from previous years.
2023 is the 45th anniversary of 1978 - Onto the Streets!
Karl Zlotkowski
78er and First Mardi Gras Inc. Committee Secretary
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Two 78ers, Barry Charles and Garry Wotherspoon, have given evidence to the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes. The Commission is investigating unsolved suspected hate crime deaths of LGBTIQ people (or people who were presumed to be LGBTIQ) in NSW between 1970 and 2010.
The Commission was set up earlier this year, on the recommendation of State Parliament’s Legislative Council Standing Committee on Social Issues, which had highlighted the fact that so many cases remain unsolved from the 88 deaths or suspected deaths of these men or trans* women, and which were potentially motivated by gay hate bias. Of particular interest for the Commission are the police responses to these cases over the decades.
The push for this Inquiry was, in many ways, set in motion by ACON’s report, In Pursuit of Truth and Justice (2018), which in turn led to the Legislative Council’s own investigation and Report (tabled in Parliament in May 2021) that found that the NSW Police Force failed in its responsibility to properly investigate historical hate crimes. The Report also found that victims carry enduring physical, mental and emotional trauma as a result of their experiences.
A team of independent barristers, solicitors and investigators has spent the last five months combing through more than a hundred thousand documents, drawn from 40 years of police files, coronial files, and other sources in relation to LGBTIQ hate-related deaths.
The Commission started its first public hearing on 21 November 2022 and is continuing through December. Barry and Garry told the Commission of their own experiences, of growing up in a world hostile to homosexuals, their ‘coming out’ and developing their sense of ‘identity’, and of their own experiences with beats.
It is important that the Commission hear stories like those of Barry’s and Garry’s. The wider Australian society knows so little about the ‘gay world’ and how our lives have been lived differently from theirs, especially in the past, when all elements of influence in society (the law, religion and the medical profession) were prejudiced against ‘dissident sexualities’.
For gay men, their emotional and sexual lives were illegal. As Barry notes. “We were viewed as very serious criminals, worse than bank robbers. Sodomy (or Buggery as it was called) was liable to 14 years in prison.”
Garry felt it was important that the Commission knew how far back the antagonistic actions of the police to our communities had been, documented going well back into the early years of the twentieth century: “not only did they harass gay women and men whenever they could, but they also acted as agents provocateurs with gay men, inciting them to commit acts they could be arrested for. And since inciting anyone to commit a homosexual act was illegal, they themselves were breaking the law, to get us to break the law”.
Over the course of the Inquiry, there will be both public and private hearings at which various witnesses will give evidence and provide information. Other contributions have come from activists from later years. Dr Gary Cox and Bruce Grant for instance from GLRL and the Anti-Violence Project 1988-1990s. Carole Ruthchild also Co-Convenor of GLRL described in her submission “the invisibility of anti-lesbian violence” and the success of the Off Our Backs survey and report in highlighting and remedying that.
The next session of the Commission began on 5 December 2022.
On that day lawyers for the Police Commissioner tried to block evidence and investigation into Task Force Parabel (see First Mardi Gras Inc. statement below). The Commissioner John Sackar rejected completely this attempt to prevent him from a proper examination describing it as “offensive”.
Assistant Commissioner Anthony Crandell, who headed Parabel, was then questioned over four days and the inadequacies and attempted cover-up of police actions during the period were revealed.
All sessions are live streamed and previous days can be viewed at The Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crimes (nsw.gov.au).
The Commission is appealing for the public to come forward with any information they may have into unsolved deaths over that period, which may have been LGBTIQ hate crimes. Families and friends of persons who have died because of LGBTIQ hate crimes in particular are encouraged to contact the Inquiry.
Any person who has information relevant to a person who is suspected to have been murdered in NSW in the period between 1970 and 2010 for reason of their sexual or gender identity (or presumed sexual or gender identity) should contact the Inquiry. Information can be provided anonymously and confidentially.
You may contact the Inquiry by:
The Commission is likely to bring down its findings in May 2023.
It is important that acknowledging past wrongs by those who failed to protect and deliver justice to the state’s citizens is a necessary step towards healing. The Commission of Inquiry is a big step in that direction.
Garry Wotherspoon and Barry Charles
78ers and First Mardi Gras Inc. Members
78ers Reject Police position at Crimes Inquiry (Statement issued 6 December 2022)
78ers, veterans of Sydney’s first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1978, have today condemned the position adopted by NSW police in hearings of the Special Commission inquiring into historical LGBTQI hate crimes. Police have objected to aspects of the Inquiry relating to their own Strike Force Parabel Review and further, have claimed that the burden of responding to the Commission’s requests for information has put a strain on their workforce and financial resources.
First Mardi Gras Inc., as an association representing 78ers, is particularly concerned that the NSW Police position is indicative of a continuing resistance to transparency of police operations, and an insensitivity within the force towards issues of profound importance to the LGBTQI community.
When the then Police Commissioner Mick Fuller apologised to 78ers and the LGBTQI community for the behaviour of police in 1978 there was genuine hope that a cultural change might be underway. That was in 2018, and since then the community has seen little evidence that this change runs deep.
Eight months after the 2022 Mardi Gras parade there has been no explanation for the treatment of Barbara Karpinski – a 78er – who was ejected from the reserved 78er viewing area. Although a personal apology was issued, there has been no clarification of who ordered this treatment and on what authority, or what actions have been taken to ensure it does not happen again.
First Mardi Gras calls on the Board of Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras to review the inclusion of an official Police entry in the 2023 Mardi Gras parade and to take clear steps to ensure that the terms of its own Accord with NSW Police require police to demonstrate sensitivity and transparency in their dealings with the LGBTQI community.
First Mardi Gras Inc.
A community association for 78ers
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The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras AGM on 26 November was an arduous event, particularly for those of us online. The sound quality was poor and the chair, same chap as last year, was not really skilled enough to manage a factious meeting.
But the real problem was the lack of democracy.
Pride in Protest (PiP) motions on notice were taken as questions and responded to dismissively by the (thankfully) outgoing Co-Chair and Board member Jesse Matheson. Other motions on notice were spoken to, no further speakers called for, and no votes taken.
Mardi Gras mainstays like Liz Dodds and Kathy Sant objected to the PiP motions not being put. They were unlikely to be in agreement with PiP, but objected to this undemocratic action.
I’m not sure if there was a vote to accept the Treasurer’s report and there was not a Returning Officer’s report, let alone a vote to accept it. It was good that voting was reopened during the meeting, but the online system should have been able to give a result before the end of the AGM.
Towards the end of the meeting, Liz Dodds pointed out that, as a charity registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission, SGLMG had to maintain standards of transparency and accountability to their members. And they clearly did not at this AGM.
During the meeting, SGLMG CEO Albert Kruger reported on Sydney WorldPride 2023 (SWP) and the Human Rights Conference. As you will see on one of the slides above, SWPs Arts curatorial priorities include 10% elders. This would not seem to apply to the Human Rights Conference which rejected the workshop application made by First Mardi Gras Inc.
The fact that Sydney’s bid for WorldPride was based on the 2023 celebrations of the 45th anniversary of the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and 50th anniversary of the first national Gay Pride Week has been ignored.
Our workshop, Fifty years of Activism and International Solidarity, would have discussed the impacts of these events and the advances in human rights and legal reforms that they led to for our communities. All three of our presenters were involved in the campaigns around the first Mardi Gras, 45 years ago, and the upsurge of activism that followed. Two of our presenters took part in Gay Pride Week, 50 years ago. So much for your curatorial priorities to include 10% elders Sydney WorldPride!
Diane Minnis
78er and First Mardi Gras Inc. Co-Chair
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During 2021 I was contemplating what I could do to improve the lives of LGBTIQ young people in Murtoa, a town of 900 people in the northwest of Victoria where I live.
I’ve loved books and libraries from an early age. Books gave me access to all sorts of worlds beyond the restrictive heteronormative boundaries of my previous homes in Jerilderie and Crookwell.
So, I hit upon the idea of donating a collection of LGBTIQ books suitable for a young adult readership to the Murtoa College Library.
Murtoa College is a P-12 school and I contacted their Librarian, Jenny Reading. Jenny informed me that the existing LGBTIQ collection was modest, and that the College would love to have more LGBTIQ books.
I then contacted The Bookshop, Darlinghurst, and staff members Noel and Graeme did a wonderful job of putting together a list of recommendations, ordering the books, and sending them to Jenny.
When the collection of 50 books arrived at the College there was great excitement amongst the LGBTIQ students and the Murtoa College LGBTIQ Collection has become an excellent and widely used resource for LGBTIQ students. And as a number of graduating students took their favourite books with them, I’m in the midst of refreshing the Collection.
I’ve also decided to expand the reach of this project: Horsham Secondary College has accepted my offer of a collection and is currently selecting the titles for it. I’m particularly excited about this as the College has over 1,000 students and therefore the books will reach a large audience.
I’ve always loved books and libraries. And now I’m having a tangible impact on them and the lives of LGBTIQ young people in the bush through this important work.
Michael Fenaughty
78er and First Mardi Gras Inc. Member
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The ACT Place Names Authority approached Lex Watson’s sister, Wendy Dundas, and I for our reaction to their proposal to name a street in Lex’s honour. Wendy approved and I corrected their draft citation. We recently received the following confirmation:
On behalf of the ACT Place Names Advisory Committee, I am pleased to confirm the approval of the public place name Lex Watson Circuit in the ACT division (suburb) of Denman Prospect.
The new place name commemorates Mr Lex Watson AM for his contributions as a gay rights activist for people living with AIDS and HIV and to homosexual law reform.
The public place names approved at this time commemorate the nomenclature theme Activism and Reform.
I was chuffed and Lex’s family were delighted at this tribute!
Robert French
78er and First Mardi Gras Inc. Member
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Over 220 organisations representing millions of members across the country have united to condemn the recent 15-month jail sentence for climate activist Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco and to express concern about increasing repression, including the recent introduction of new anti-protest laws in multiple states.
On 2 December, Violet, from Fireproof Australia, was sentenced to 15 months in custody with a non-parole period of 8 months. Her appeal for bail was heard on 13th December. A solidarity action took place outside Downing Centre Court.
We reject the claim from Premier Perrottet that protest should not inconvenience people and are concerned about the message this sends in a democracy. Peaceful but disruptive protests have won many of the rights we take for granted today, including the 8-hour day, voting rights, end to conscription, and to enjoy the forests and precious places we defended. Australia is a signatory to conventions protecting our right to freedom of movement, association, peaceful assembly, and political speech which the government must respect, and we must defend.
We welcome the support from the UN and international human rights organisations, including the recent statement from Clement Voule, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Association and Peaceful Assembly who expressed “I am alarmed at NSW court's prison term against climate protester Deanna Coco and refusal to grant bail until a March 2023 appeal hearing. Peaceful protesters should never be criminalised or imprisoned.”
Violet was charged with several offences, including disrupting vehicles, failing to comply with police direction and resisting or hindering police. The charges arose from her action blocking one lane of traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge for approximately 25 minutes.
First Mardi Gras Inc. – a community association for 78ers said: If these laws were in place in 1978, we would have all ended up in gaol. As it was many of us did. Under the provisions of the NSW Summary Offences Act police were able to shut down protests, to judge whether a person's behaviour was offensive or not, and to entrap gay men with contrived homosexual advances. At the time there were over 100 convictions every year for sexual assault of a male person in NSW. Many ended with gaol terms of up to 14 years and others accepted court-directed homosexual aversion therapy. Radical social movements changed everything. They didn't have liability insurance or permission from the state.
From statement by NSW Council for Civil Liberties
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In 1972, the body of a murdered lecturer floats in the River Torrens, a young woman escapes a lobotomy to ‘cure’ her sexuality, and a single mum struggles to find her place in a society which brands her as ‘abnormal’.
CAMP, a new play by Elias Jamieson Brown (Green Park) chronicles the birth of Australia's fierce gay and lesbian rights movement; the struggles, successes, and legacy of early Pride activists who risked family, careers, and imprisonment to achieve social change in Australia.
Associate Producer: Robyn Kennedy. More info: CAMP | Siren Theatre Co
EARLY BIRD TICKET OFFER: Purchase discount tickets now until December 23, 2022, by quoting CAMPSWP2023 at the checkout. Tickets available from SEYMOUR CENTRE
MAKE A FULLY TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION TO PRODUCTION COSTS THROUGH Artist Project: Camp - a new play by Elias Jamieson Brown (australianculturalfund.org.au).
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78er badges are $5 each and postage is $3.09 (total $8.09). Postage is still $3.09 for up to five badges. To order badges, email your name, postal address and the number of badges required to info@78ers.org.au. Then make your payment by funds transfer. You can also post a cheque
CAMP badges are $3.50 each plus $3.00 packaging and postage. To order, contact Robyn Kennedy. Please include your name, address and number of badges requested. Banking details for direct deposit will be provided.
Rebbell Barnes and Bill Ashton
78ers and First Mardi Gras Inc. Committee Members
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Calendar of Events
- First Mardi Gras Inc. General Meeting – 4pm, Saturday 14 January 2023, by Zoom
- First Mardi Gras Inc. Pre Mardi Gras Lunch – 12pm, Sunday 5 February 2023, Terminus Hotel, Pyrmont, downstairs room, RSVP: info@78ers.org.au
- The Coming Back Out Salon – 2-6pm, Saturday 18 February 2023, Sydney Town Hall, https://moshtix.com.au/.../the-coming-back-out-salon/143631
- Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Fair Day – 10am-9pm, Sunday 19 February 2023
- First Mardi Gras Inc. 78ers 45th Anniversary Cocktail Party – 6.30-9.30pm, Thursday 23 February 2023, tickets available in January
- Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade – Saturday 25 February 2023
- Sydney WorldPride Human Rights Conference – Wednesday to Friday 2-4 March 2023, https://sydneyworldpride.com/
- Pride History Group Conference Reception – 6.30-9pm, Friday 3 March 2023, Pride History Conference — PRIDE HISTORY GROUP
- Pride History Group Conference – 9am-5.30pm, Saturday 4 March 2023, Marrickville Library Pavilion, Pride History Conference — PRIDE HISTORY GROUP
- Sydney WorldPride Harbour Bridge March – Sunday 5 March 2023
- Wagga Wagga Mardi Gras Parade and After Party – Saturday 11 March 2023, Wagga Mardi Gras | The biggest party Wagga's ever seen!
- Tropical Fruits (Lismore) Easter Party – April TBC 2023, Events - Tropical Fruits
- Broken Heel Festival, Broken Hill – September TBC 2023
- Sapphire Coast Pride, Bega Valley, www.Facebook.com/groups/sapphirecoastpride
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