SA’s queer milestone reminds us that the work is never done
This year marks 50 years since South Australia decriminalised male homosexuality. CityMag spoke to activists of the time about the milestone and how it intertwines with our arts community.
When the Adelaide Fringe began in 1960, homosexuality was essentially illegal in South Australia, as it was in many parts of the world.
At this time, the law specifically criminalised performing homosexual acts and decreed that if you were caught in an act of homosexuality, you would be arrested, with penalties of up to three years for gross indecency, and 10 years for the crime of ‘buggery’.
This remained the case until 1975 when Don Dunstan’s Labor government became the first in the English-speaking world to remove such discriminatory legislation against homosexuality and also introduced an age of consent (regardless of sexuality).
The change was brought about by a private member’s bill introduced by then-Attorney General Peter Duncan, but it had taken three attempts to finally get across the line.
Queer activist and historian Will Sergeant OAM tells CityMag the change was “ground-breaking” after years of activism, that included failed attempts at decriminalisation.
He remembers sitting in the parliament gallery with a group of gay liberationists when a 1973 attempt was lost by one vote cast by Liberal and Country League politician Sir Lyell McEwin.
“I remember the kind of devastation, the feeling, ‘Oh bugger’, you know that one vote and down it went,” Will says.
Prior to the decriminalisation bill passing, Liberal Legislative Councillor Murray Hill brought in a private members bill that offered a defence of homosexual acts if they were performed in private, with the curtains drawn.
Adelaide held it’s first Gay Pride Week in 1973. This picture: State Library SA.
State Greens MLC Robert Simms tells CityMag that looking back at parliamentary transcripts, the language in the debate about gay law reform was “quite dramatic”. That was brought to the fore when Labor MLC Ian Hunter read extracts in November last year, from parliamentary debates from 1972 to 1975, recorded in Hansard, that describes gay men as “sick, corrupted or corrupting, perverted and sought to ‘spread’ their homosexuality’”.
Will remembers the “furore” among conservatives outside and within the gay community at the idea of having gay perspectives shared in schools.
“At the ‘73 attempt of law reform, one of the gay liberationists said to the press…we should be able to go into schools and talk to Year 12 students that being gay is quite natural and part of life,” Will says.
He explains that there was a fear it would give ammunition to the opposition and “frighten the horses” if they thought liberationists wanted to “convert young children to being gay”.
“I tell you that story because in 2023, when I got OAM for services to the rainbow community in South Australia, the first letter of congratulations I got was from the principal of my old school Pulteney Grammar who said ‘you’re always welcome to come to visit the school to talk to students, and we have a pride group at school supporting students’,” Will says.
“So that just shows a real change in 50 years.”
Will’s activism began when he joined the Adelaide Gay Liberation Front in 1972 after his sister Suzie brought home one of their flyers from university.
“It really changed my life,” Will says of the first meeting he attended.
“Although I was a very flamboyant young man, I was very repressed about my sexuality until I turned 21 and then almost overnight, I thought, ‘be what you are: you’re a gay man, get on with it!’ So, I realised that it was down by the city bridge that gay men would meet.
“But then, of course, on the 10th of May 1972 (university law lecturer)George Duncan was thrown into the River Torrens and drowned, and he was a homosexual.
“It all came out in the press, and I thought, ‘Well, perhaps that’s not the safest way to go about meeting someone’.”
Will, who also performs as alter-ego Dr Gertrude Glossip, has led walking tours around Karrawirra Parri/River Torrens and other parts of the city to remember both the good and bad times in SA’s rainbow history.
He created Gertrude in 1993 as a “totally fanciful” leader of a history walk hosted by the Uranian Society of SA, a cultural forum for gay men.
Dr Gertrude Glossip at Feast Festival. Glossip is the name, gossip is the game.
“It was a couple of years later we thought if we create her as a doctor, that would sort of give her more cred, Dr Gertrude Glossip,” Will says.
“Then we thought of creative PhDs and hence a PhD in formal drapery from Curtin University with the motto, ‘decorate while you educate’.
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“That’s always been part of our thing, make history entertaining and living, not dull and boring.”
Will says Gertrude celebrates “the pantomime dame”.
“Gertrude is not a drag queen, she looks sort of like a Dowager diva, like your favourite great aunt, which gives her a different sort of character.”
Gertrude led a gay history walk at the inaugural Feast Festival in 1997 and has hosted events at the History Festival and Adelaide Fringe.
Though the Adelaide Fringe began at a time when the legislation discriminated against gay men, the Fringe’s founder, Frank Ford, was an out gay man, who went on to start the Adelaide Cabaret Festival as well.
“Within the theatre world there’s greater acceptance,” Will says.
Cabaret performer Millicent ‘Mim’ Sarre jokes she “came out” by putting on a Fringe show called Bisexual Intellectuals at last year’s Adelaide Fringe.
Millicent Sarre, Jemma Allen and Rosie Russell are Bisexual Intellectuals. Find them at Gluttony.
“I reflect a lot on the fact that I live in this queer utopia that former generations have only dreamed of,” she says.
“As a queer person, I can exist as I am without fear of persecution or vilification and can be so joyful in that as well.
“The caveat to that is I have a lot of straight-passing privilege and can be a bit of a chameleon when I need to be for my own safety and that isn’t true for a lot of queer people, but the fact that we live in this relatively progressive society where queerness is quite normalised is beautiful and a testament to activists of generations passed.”
As the decriminalisation legislation celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2025, Mim says it’s important to draw attention to milestones such as these.
It reminds her that “queer liberation isn’t finished”.
“I worry that in some ways, culturally and politically, South Australia hasn’t necessarily continued to be this progressive beacon, as it was with some of these huge milestones,” she says.
In 2020, South Australia became the last state to repeal the “gay panic” defence – a legal defence used by a heterosexual person charged with a violent crime against an LGBTQIA+ person who could claim it was justified because they were responding to an unwanted sexual advance.
Mim says although 50 years feels significant, it’s a “sobering realisation” that homosexual acts were illegal in her parents’ lifetime.
“I think that that puts things in quite a stark perspective to not only go ‘wow, look how far we’ve come’, but also look how close we are to that bygone era where not only was it unsafe to be yourself, it was literally illegal,” Mim says.
“It forces us to realise that we could go backwards very quickly, and that to be continually showing up for these progressive causes, whether it is for women, whether it is for queer people, whether it is for people with disabilities or Indigenous peoples, that the work isn’t done and we have to keep going.”
This article first appeared in The Festivals Edition of CityMag.
