Dark side of the rainbow: Drugged, shocked and jailed for being gay

There were no rainbow flags or glittering Mardi Gras parades awaiting Terry Goulden outside Sutherland police station in 1965 when his ashen-faced mother came to bail him out. The naive 20-year-old had been arrested for an unfulfilled act of “indecency” with a man who turned out to be a young, undercover police officer.

Today, Goulden, who is now 78, says next month’s 40th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in NSW presents the perfect opportunity for the government – via Premier Chris Minns – to finally say sorry.

Between the 1950s and early 1980s, thousands of men like Goulden found themselves on the wrong side of the law in NSW, with crimes ranging from “inciting” an “indecent” act with another male to “abominable buggery”, carrying fines and prison sentences ranging from a few months to 14 years.

Following questions from the Herald about a potential apology, on Friday, NSW Premier Chris Minns said the government recognised the “trauma” and “persecution” people of diverse sexualities continue to endure because of old laws. He also said a formal apology would be delivered in parliament to coincide with the anniversary.

“I know that to many, this apology will not remedy discrimination of the past, but I hope that it brings some semblance of closure to those who were unfairly targeted by laws of the day that criminalised gay and lesbian people for being who they are,” Minns said.

Along with fines and prison, many suffered the ignominy of court-endorsed “treatments” – from electric shock and potent drugs to brain surgery – to “cure” their homosexuality, much of it now considered medical quackery.

Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council Penny Sharpe said: “A formal apology for those who suffered at the hands of those laws recognises the harm done to many and acknowledges that they were wrong.”

State criminal records data is only readily available from 1994 onwards. While exact numbers are not clear, according to a 1976 report from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, NSW courts recorded hundreds – and up to a thousand – homosexual convictions a year.

Entrapment tactics

Despite it being 60 years ago, Goulden can instantly recall the incident in the dunes of Wanda Beach. He says he was “lured” by a handsome young man in tight bathers. The man invited Goulden to “touch it,” only to arrest him when he did.

“It was absolutely entrapment,” he says. Goulden was a first-time offender who was deeply ashamed by the encounter, but he avoided conviction, instead getting a warning. Six months later, on New Year’s Eve, he would not be so lucky.

Sitting in his cosy Blue Mountains home today, sipping coffee and cradling his prize-winning cats as the rain pours outside, Goulden’s tone becomes more sombre about what he now calls his criminal “badge of honour”.

“Looking back, it really was ridiculous … there was no bloody victim! The other guy was just as into it as I was,” he says of his New Year’s Eve encounter with a handsome young Scotsman. The pair were in a parked car on a secluded fire trail in the Royal National Park when they were interrupted by a ranger tapping on the window.

According to police records, when the ranger asked the young men, who were “naked from the waist down”, what they were doing, an indignant Goulden fired back “isn’t that obvious!”

“The frustrating thing is we never actually got to really do anything ... Suddenly, we were being hauled to Sutherland police station, interrogated by policemen, charged and convicted of indecent assault,” he says.

Before facing the magistrate, Goulden’s solicitor advised him to seek “treatment” from prominent Lane Cove psychiatrist William Rowe, who revealed in the Australian Medical Journal in 1967 that he had treated 300 homosexuals in Sydney, to “cure” his homosexuality.

It was a common legal tactic at the time used by gay men to avoid incarceration, although Goulden says it often came with its own unforeseen “punishment”.

“He wrote a ridiculous report and prescribed a course of chemical castration drugs which stopped me from being able to ‘perform’, but it did nothing to quell my libido. I knew it was all nonsense; I’d known I was homosexual since I was a little boy after discovering the term in a sex education book,” Goulden says.

“It was absolute quackery … thank God I had the presence of mind to stop taking that poison ... If I had continued down that path, I might not have had this wonderful life.

“That’s the really upsetting thing to me now; how many people had their potential destroyed, were permanently damaged psychologically or physically because they were forced to go against their nature?”

John Greenway, a spritely 90-year-old whom Goulden married five years ago after a 50-year relationship, refills our coffee and says the time to “heal these old wounds” is fast running out: “None of us are getting any younger.”

Goulden counts himself as one of the “lucky ones”. He enjoyed a distinguished career in the mental health, human rights and counselling spheres, even though his record prevented him from getting at least “one senior appointment” to a prominent public office some years ago.

Across the Tasman in Hokitika, a small town in the West Coast region of New Zealand’s South Island, trans woman Jacquie Grant says her experiences at the hands of NSW Police and the legal system as a teenager on the streets of Kings Cross remain bitter memories.

“It took me 40 years to go back to Sydney ... it was a bastard of a place. Not all of us trans girls were treated as celebrities like Carlotta,” says Grant, who changed her name and turned her life around after arriving in New Zealand in 1964, where she found a “more lenient attitude to trans people”.

Grant, who now runs a sock factory, was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of her fostering work caring for 72 children in between running a zoo, a dairy farm, working as a merchant sailor, becoming a local councillor and working for nine years as a lay judge on the NZ Human Rights Review Tribunal.

“I was a street worker, but I was mostly arrested for dressing up as a girl, which was how I lived 24/7, and for ‘consorting’ with others like me. The cops would see us and arrest us. I lied about my age, I was 15 when they sent me to Long Bay Gaol ... twice,” Grant says.

“I was stripped in front of the other inmates … bashed and humiliated by the cops. It was only when my grandparents told them my real age they put me in a boys’ home, which frankly was worse. I see myself as a political prisoner from that era, we were the victims of a conservative agenda, our basic human rights were not just ignored, they were completely violated by the state.”

On June 8, 1984, a year after the first death attributed to HIV in Australia amid growing mainstream hysteria around the virus, homosexuality was finally decriminalised in NSW – four years behind Victoria and nine years after South Australia became the first state to do so.

It had been a long time coming, the seeds of reform planted in September 1957 by The Wolfenden Report released in Britain, which recommended homosexual law reform.

Local activists, including Robert French and the late Lex Watson, spent years campaigning. A gay embassy was set up in 1983 outside then-premier Neville Wran’s home in Woollahra to prod him into action.

In May 1984, Wran launched a Private Member’s Bill to decriminalise consensual gay sex, a month after being loudly jeered at the Council for Civil Liberties 21st-anniversary dinner for his failure to pass homosexual law reform.

Apology too late for Bonsall-Boone

For 85-year-old Peter de Waal, a “meaningful apology” on the 40th anniversary of gay decriminalisation was “just as important” for his generation as it was for future ones to show “how far we have come”.

His partner, Peter Bonsall-Boone, died a decade ago. For most of his life, Bonsall-Boone lived with a criminal conviction for having consensual sex in a public toilet as a 19-year-old in 1957. According to de Waal, it was “a source of much unhappiness”.

“His family rejected him, and the seminary booted him out. Peter was the most moral person I know, the fact his record stopped him from becoming a justice of the peace or sitting on a jury were really significant things for him,” de Waal said.

“History has a habit of repeating itself; apologising for these silly laws is a timely reminder of how bad things were not so long ago.”

Their generation’s reality was a world of court-endorsed “aversion therapies”, including electric shock treatment where voltage was deliberately pulsated through patients’ bodies – including their genitals – while being shown images of naked men.

They were also given nausea-inducing drugs, and some underwent brain surgery under the auspices of notorious psychiatrist Dr Harry Bailey, who made headlines for the controversial “deep sleep” therapy he practised on 1,127 patients between 1963 and 1979.

Bailey’s patients were kept in a comatose state for days or weeks by massive doses of barbiturates, laying naked on beds and fed through tubes; they would be administered convulsive electrical shock treatment while in a coma.

Bailey’s methods developed at the Chelmsford Private Hospital in Pennant Hills have been linked with dozens of deaths and patients who subsequently committed suicide.

In 1973, according to an article in CAMP Ink, Bailey, who later took his own life, estimated that 15 per cent of his patients undergoing “psychosurgery” were homosexual.

While there were no such overt laws criminalising lesbian relationships, social conditioning saw many women “volunteer” for similar “cures”.

Arrests and convictions resulted in humiliating public “outings”, instant job dismissals, being shunned from society and rejected by family.

The queer community lived with the constant reality of police harassment, entrapment and a law that carried a 14-year jail sentence for having consensual sexual intercourse – “abominable buggery” – in their own beds.

NSW Police Commissioner Colin Delaney described homosexuality in the 1950s as the “greatest menace” facing society. Vice squads with handsome young officers patrolled places where gay men gathered on the fringe of society, from backroom bars to public toilets.

In 1951, with Delaney’s support, Attorney-General Reg Downing moved an amendment to ensure that “buggery” remained a criminal act in NSW “with or without the consent of the person”, removing a previously existing legal loophole of consent.

Soon after Cooma Prison was reopened, its one-inmate-per-cell design chosen to house the growing numbers of homosexual criminals. In 1958, Downing announced an inquiry into the “causes and treatment of homosexuality”, appointing William Trethowan, professor of psychiatry at Sydney University, to head the committee.

“The government considers that the problem must be attacked with vigour ... The first and perhaps the most important step is to obtain a scientific evaluation of the problem and its possible solution,” Downing said, the Cooma prisoners providing a readily available study sample.

Known as the Trethowan Report and carried out over five years, its findings were never publicly released, and mystery surrounds its current whereabouts. Podcaster Patrick Abboud spent three years unsuccessfully searching for it in the 2022 series, The Greatest Menace.

In 2014, the NSW government amended the Criminal Records Act and cleared the way for historic homosexual criminal convictions, where the sexual activity was consensual and above the age of consent, to be extinguished by applying to the secretary of the Department of Communities and Justice.

However, after nearly a decade and despite potentially thousands of convictions, including those of the deceased, being eligible for expungement, only 28 successful applications have been made under the scheme.

Terry Goulden says others may feel like him and “simply could not be bothered”. He questions, “Why should we have to apply to have it done? I think it should just be automatic from the government, a gesture to show how wrong it was in the first place.”

There are no plans to change the current system, however. Government sources agreed it could be streamlined but stressed that the existing process ensured each successful application was legally qualified rather than offering a blanket pardon.

Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown suspects the scheme has not been promoted widely enough and is too dependent on often poorly maintained analogue records.

“People don’t want to revisit that shame. We are talking about a generation of people for which this still carries stigma. Not all of them identify as what we now call gay,” Brown said.

“A formal yet heartfelt apology from the NSW government should be given and accompanied by action to remove remaining legal discrimination so that all people and families are treated equally ... We still have some of the worst laws in the country for LGBTIQ+ people.”

On the eve of the 2022 Sydney Gay Pride festival, former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet reportedly “resisted” pressure to apologise.

Former NSW Police commissioner Mick Fuller did offer an apology in 2018 for police treatment of protestors arrested in 1978, the precursor to Sydney’s Mardi Gras, two years after a similar apology to the protestors from the NSW Parliament and The Sydney Morning Herald, which published names and addresses of those appearing before court, resulting in further discrimination.

NSW Premier Chris Minns is following in the footsteps of former Victorian premier Dan Andrews, who, in 2018, apologised to the thousands of Victorians impacted by the state’s homosexual crime laws before decriminalisation in 1980. South Australian premier Jay Weatherill made a similar apology in 2016.

“We criminalised homosexual thoughts and deeds,” Andrews said.

“We validated homophobic words and acts. And we set the tone for a society that ruthlessly punished the different — with a short sentence in prison and a life sentence of shame.”

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