‘You had to find a secret place’: Growing up gay in a violent Sydney shadow world – Sydney Morning Herald

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He said interactions with police were “very common” and “you just had to live with it because that was the law”. The first Mardi Gras, in June 1978, was a “terrible experience”, with police arresting the driver of the truck leading the parade. Charles himself was chased by “a female police officer with a truncheon”.

Charles recounted matter-of-factly a string of homophobic attacks in Sydney in which he was either victim or witness, including around a popular beat in Alexandria Park, a “location of interest” to the inquiry. In one instance in the 1980s, he was hit by a group of “maybe five” teens with lengths of PVC drain pipe. He required stitches after a separate attack in 1988 by a youth who called him a “faggot”.

He rarely told police about the incidents, he said, because “you couldn’t expect help”.

Brent Mackie, director of policy, strategy and research at ACON, formerly the AIDS Council of NSW, told the inquiry about his own experience of being punched in the head in Oxford Street on New Year’s Eve, 1988, and described a feeling of “inevitability” about such an attack. He did not report the assault to police.

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“There was just a feeling; you wouldn’t go to police necessarily,” Mackie said.

A draft ACON report dated November 1993 and titled Beats, Police, Homophobia and HIV: Illuminating the ‘Shadowy World of Gay Beats’ was tendered at the inquiry.

It drew on a series of interviews with beat outreach workers, beat users and others between August 1992 and April 1993. It contained reports of “unnecessary policing” at beats – including instances in Albury, Penrith and St Marys – in which police allegedly outed men to their families or employers by telling them they had been “apprehended at a beat” or that “they were gay”.

Mackie said that “it was quite shocking and devastating for the people involved”.

Mackie said he remembered ACON staff saying that “it was often the case that you could get support at a high level from the police, certainly that became stronger as we worked more with police, but specific police … at the station level may take things into their own hands or have a different attitude”.

“That was really, really difficult,” he said. “Obviously things changed over time but in those early days it was very challenging.”

Retired former teacher and potter Les Peterkin, 88, gave evidence about going to see a psychiatrist in his early 20s as he came under pressure from his family to get married. The psychiatrist was very supportive, he said, and explained that homosexuality was not an illness.

He narrowly avoided being charged by police in 1956 with soliciting sex in a public place after being entrapped by a young male officer at a public toilet in North Sydney. “Gripped with fear and worry”, he told police his father was a serving sergeant at Chatswood police station and the charges went no further.

The inquiry continues.

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