“In spite of the law, Sydney is quickly becoming for gays the San Francisco of the Southern Hemisphere. Now this may be a subject that you feel you or your children would be best to avoid. If so, please switch off now. If not, here is our report from Sydney, the Golden City for Gays”

Reporter Jack Pizzey’s introduction to this ABC TV documentary very neatly summed up the situation in Sydney in 1982. Still illegal and ‘controversial’ but growing in strength and visibility in spite of it.

It’s an extraordinary timepiece for a number of reasons. For one thing it provides a range of statistics to paint a picture of the Sydney LGBT experience. For example, “three gay newspapers and a calendar with 63 fixtures this year for gay men and lesbians, nine gay hotels, eight gay discos, 14 gay restaurants…” and “About 145 homosexuals are prosecuted in NSW each year and 20 go to prison: the majority of them for between two and five years.”

For another, it demonstrates the level of political activity that under-pinned this increasing visibility. There’s the Gay Liberation Quire, lesbian band Stray Dags, radio station ‘Gaywaves’ (“There are gay records played for gay listeners on a gay radio station”), Gay Freedom Day marchers and activists campaigning against the homophobic stance of Labor MP John Acquilina

But, perhaps more importantly, is the fact that it was broadcast just over a month before the first diagnosis of AIDS in Australia. A few months later and it would have been a completely different documentary.

In consequence, I found it quite hard to watch. It was, in effect, a snapshot of a community fighting for its rights in complete ignorance of the nightmare that was about to unfold.

The documentary includes a scene that was already controversial at the time – men using a well known Sydney ‘beat’. Acknowledging that men actually had sex with each other in public toilets was racy enough; when they then followed it with an interview with one such man, it must have caused outrage – especially when he suggested, “we should claim those places as sacred sites”.

Six months later, such material would have been exploited mercilessly by the moral entrepreneurs keen to score points at our expense.

The overall tone of the documentary is intelligent and supportive – even if there are some rather ‘creaky’ moments. For example, keen to challenge the view that homosexuality does not occur elsewhere in nature, the producers include some footage of a male spider trying to mate with a Black Widow spider. The accompanying commentary was, “Is the urge that has driven apparently respectable men to disgrace in public lavatories more or less unnatural than the urge that makes a spider risk death in a lethal embrace.”

Those rare comic instances aside, this was and remains an important documentary on LGBT life in Sydney in the early 80’s.

1982 was also the year of my first visit to Australia. If nothing else, “Sydney, becoming the San Francisco of the Southern Hemisphere” explains exactly why I subsequently spent nearly four and a half years trying to migrate there!

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