40 years out: Reflections on not being in the closet - a personal account

Abstract

When I came to write the text of this presentation, I found I was having difficulty. I'd offered a brief abstract of what I thought I was going to write about, but I wasn't certain there was much significance. Forty years of being out. It seemed so slight, so inconsequential. So I thought I’d better start at the beginning. Let's start in 1970, when I was in Year 10 and 16 years old, a country kid. I finished Year 12 in 1972 and moved to Sydney. I knew there was something happening there. The case of Peter Bonsall-Boone had been on TV, even in the country. In February 1973, I set out to find Gay Liberation - not the philosophy, which was vaguely coalescing inside my head, but the organisation. I'd heard about Gay Liberation because of its recent demonstrations and the resulting hullabaloo in the press. It was a demonstrable part of the light of change beginning to shine across Australia since the election of Gough Whitlam just two months before in December 1972. Gay Liberation had broken away from the more conservative CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution), which focused on law reform, to advocate more radical public activism.