OPINION: Let’s Stand Up To NSW Police’s New Iterations Of Oppression Of LGBTQIA+ & Marginalised Groups

“STOP POLICE ATTACKS! ON GAYS! WOMEN! AND BLACKS!” — the popular chant of the 78ers, heard at the many protest rallies and street marches for gay and lesbian rights in Sydney between June and December 1978, still echoes powerfully today. It has resonance.

It is now nearly fifty years on from the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, when 78ers, refusing to run away and hide, as queers had done for centuries, stood up with our allies in a battle near the El Alamein fountain in Kings Cross and resisted NSW police brutality.

We fought for the right to live and love freely without threats of blackmail, intimidation and violence. Violence at the hands of police officers at that time in the 1970’s was a constant part of our lives.  NSW Police saw as its mission the policing of the morals of the population.  

Fiona Kelly McGregor’s new novel The Trap, published this year, provides valuable insights into the long history of NSW governments using the police to surveil, curtail and quash the sexual lives of people. If you were same-sex attracted the government – with the powerful support then, of religious leaders – was determined that happiness was not an option for you,  

The novel is set in wartime Sydney over the summer of 1942-43 and explores the devastating power of police to shape queer lives in Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo and Kings Cross at that time. Based on thorough historical research, she recreates the raids on queer nightclubs that were frequent then, and provides deep insights into the psychology of dominant masculinist male (and female) police officers obsessively concerned with the sexual lives of queers and sex workers. 

It seems that a coalescing of puritan religious values and warrior models of policing serve authoritarian-leaning governments well, as they attempt win over populations in a show that they are strong in a time of dislocation, conflict and war. That was true for Sydney in 1942, and it is true now.

Last Saturday night’s police raids in inner Sydney, like those in June this year, were made under the pretext of tackling the trade in illicit drugs.

The blatant display of force and reports of large numbers of innocent people sniffed, assaulted and misidentified by police dogs – many subjected to demeaning strip searches – suggests that operations such as this move far beyond any genuine exercise of acceptable police visibility designed to deter crime. Rather, what we see today is the execution of intimidatory policies designed to instil fear.

It needs to be pointed out that these are police raids on nightclubs and hotels in entertainment precincts in inner Sydney that do not cater to young queers alone. I noticed a wonderfully mixed crowd when I was on the dancefloor at the Colombian Hotel on Oxford Street last Saturday night. Thankfully, I left before the raids commenced after midnight.

Nightlife in a global city like Sydney attracts a broad spectrum of people. I believe we in the queer community need to resist being singled-out, scapegoated and identified as a community of drug users and peddlers. This is the kind of misinformation that plays into homophobic tropes and needs to be called out.

There is no need for us to play the victim here, as it can only be counter-productive for our LGBTIQ communities. All communities and sub- cultures suffer when fear and intimidation are tactics used to dehumanise particular groups.

Earlier this year, I spoke publicly with a warning that an increasingly militarised police force is dangerous. The large-scale, military-like operation of NSW Police to break up an angry but peaceful protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to the city shocked me.

The gratuitous police brutality on February 9 brought back vivid memories of June 24, 1978. On both nights, 48 years apart, peaceful protestors were traumatised and many badly injured and hospitalised. 

It is of great concern that NSW police officers are armed now more than ever, and that their firearms training takes up more time perhaps than any other focus of their training. 

Family members and partners grieving the loss of loved ones shot, tasered or smothered to death by NSW police officers have told me that the presence of weapons can serve to escalate and destabilise encounters. They call for a rethinking of the basic role, mission, mindset and culture of policing in NSW.

As someone who grew up in the era of gay liberation in the 1960s-1970s, struggling to deal with a hostile homophobic world, I can understand calls today by new generations of young queer activists who challenge new iterations of oppression of sexual and marginalised minorities.

Across generations and building coalitions again with gays, women, blacks, trans and others, we need to consolidate our hard-won freedoms, including the right to peaceful protest and the right to live our social lives without the interference and intrusion of the state. 

Mark Gillespie is a social anthropologist and 78er.