A “Glimpse through an Interstice Caught”: Fictional Portrayals of Male Homosexual Life in Twentieth-Century Sydney

Extract

Sydney is probably best known nowadays for its annual gay and lesbian mardi gras parade, beamed worldwide to millions of TV and Internet viewers, marking it as one of the iconic gay cities of the contemporary world. And while Sydney also had a reputation from its earliest convict-colony days as a city with high levels of homosexual activity—one early chief justice damned it as a “Sodom” in the South Pacific (UK, Parliament, 18 Apr. 1837, 518; question 505)—only in the last two or three decades have Sydney's homosexual or gay subcultures openly flourished and, perhaps grudgingly, been accepted. Indeed, from its earliest days until some years after World War II, Australia was in the grip of Victorian moralistic attitudes, only finally broken by the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and the social movements from the 1970s.