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Produced and published by the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
Published July 2008
Published July 2008
Partners
Homosexual men have created various kinds of lives and communities for themselves. While 19th-century subcultures remain largely unexplored, the existence of a molly culture imported from Britain is likely, built upon common sexual and social practices including cross-dressing, gathering places (typically hotels) and a shared argot. What is certain, from court records and the yellow press, is that from the 1860s Melbourne's parks and gardens and lanes provided sites for sexual trysts between men. By the 1930s and 1940s a thriving 'camp scene' existed. Half a dozen pubs and cafés in and around Collins Street harboured camp spaces, including the Australia Hotel, the Manchester Unity Building, and Embank Arcade. Beats - public toilets, laneways, stretches of street - were so much a part of the scene that many had special names: the Lobster Pot (for its bright red colour), the Flowerpot (an underground convenience, topped by a circular garden-bed), Stiffies (at Melbourne General Cemetery).
The earliest known camp club was established in Elizabeth Street in the 1930s. On Saturday and Sunday nights camps would pay to enter, bringing or buying their grog on the sly and changing into drag. Beginning in the late 1950s social organisations with heavily disguised names, such as the Boilers, Checkmates and the Organisers, were formed to provide companionship in an informal atmosphere.
In 1969 the Daughters of Bilitis, Australia's first political organisation of homosexuals, was established, followed by Society Five in 1971. During the next few years, along with Gay Liberation and its offshoots (effeminism and Radicalesbians), these organisations catapulted gay politics into the public sphere. Melbourne, as the focal point for the Sydney-Adelaide activist axis, remained central to national gay politics and brought 500 people, the largest gay rights demonstration of the period, to the City Square on 14 February 1973. In the latter part of the 1970s the Gay Teachers Group and the Homosexual Law Reform Coalition were in the forefront of national reform agitation, producing remarkable pro-gay policy among the teachers' unions and a law reform described as the best in the English-speaking world.
Melbourne's gay community remains vibrant. Beginning with the first exclusively gay disco, Mandate, in Carlisle Street, St Kilda, in 1979, the commercial scene has more recently settled itself into two blocs, centred on Commercial Road, South Yarra, and Collingwood. The Midsumma festival in February and the associated Pride March, which attracts tens of thousands of participants to St Kilda, provide foci for the celebration of an increasingly diverse subculture, captured in the adoption of the umbrella-term 'queer'.