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Queensland's Criminal Justice System and Homosexuality, 1860–1954

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Clive Moore  and
Bryan Jamison
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Extract

Contemporary Queensland has a flourishing GLBTIQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) scene which, although still suffering from discrimination in a society that is premised around a heterosexual norm, is a far cry from the years before 1990 when male homosexuality was a criminal offence. The queer generation has largely moved beyond binaries in gender and sexuality, and at dance parties there is a blending of cultures that knows few of the old boundaries. These new freedoms to express sexuality mean that relationships develop more easily with less fear of opprobrium. Classified advertisements in newspapers and on the internet, sex-on-premises venues and cybersex are all available to facilitate physical desires and as ways of meeting a possible future partner. Yet if one were to survey young gay men today, how many would know that between 1900 and 1990 a sodomy conviction could carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years with hard labour? Or that engaging in ‘gross indecency’ in public or private (usually oral sex or masturbation) could receive three years with hard labour? How many would know that the death penalty for sodomy was removed in 1865 or that between that year and 1899 the sentence for anal intercourse was 10 years to life imprisonment?

Type
Research Article
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 14 , Issue 2: ‘Volume 14 - Issue 02 - Special Issue: Queer Queensland - July 2007’ Editors: Yorick Smaal and Belinda McKay , July 2007 , pp. 3 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

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References

Notes

1 An Act to Consolidate and Amend the Statute Law of Queensland Relating to Offences Against the Person, 29 Vic. No. 11 [1865]; An Act to Establish a Code of Criminal Law of 1899, 63 Vic. No. 9.Google Scholar

2 Moore, Clive, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 284.Google Scholar

3 Offences Against the Person Act 1861, 24/25 Vic. 100 cl. 61. Minor forms of homosexuality were regarded as a statutory offence under 24/25 Vic. C 100, cl. 62.Google Scholar

4 Only five Queensland cases were found from 1860 to 1865 under the old legislation. Two were for sodomy of a male, one for sodomy of a woman, and two for attempted sodomy of males. Only two sentences are extant, two years with hard labour and a death sentence for sodomy of the woman, which was commuted, the length of the eventual sentence unknown.Google Scholar

5 An Act to Consolidate and Amend the Statute Law of Queensland Relating to Offences Against the Person. Google Scholar

6 For the charge of carnal knowledge to be successful, penetration had to be proven.Google Scholar

7 This was the ‘Outrage on Decency,’ Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, relating to protection of women and girls, and the suppression of brothels.Google Scholar

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9 See Queensland's Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1891, 55 Vic. No. 24 [1891] and Criminal Code Act of 1899, Clause 211. The Labouchere amendment took even longer to be adopted in other Australian jurisdictions — for instance, not until 1919 in the State of Victoria. Adam Carr, ‘Policing the “Abominable Crime” in Nineteenth Century Victoria’, in David L. Phillips and Graham Willett (eds), Australia's Homosexual Histories: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives V (Sydney and Melbourne: Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research and the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, 2000), 38–39.Google Scholar

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13 Willett, Graham, ‘And the Last Shall be First: Law Reform in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania’, in Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 219–38; Clive Moore, ‘Gay Liberation, Law Reform and HIV/AIDS, 1970s–1980s’, in Sunshine and Rainbows, 161–89.Google Scholar

14 A more extensive version of this paper has been published: see Clive Moore and Bryan Jamison, ‘Making the Modern Australian Homosexual Male: Queensland's Criminal Justice System and Homosexual Offences, 1860–1954’, Crime, History & Societies 11(1) (2007): 27–54.Google Scholar

15 Twenty-seven per cent were found not guilty and in 3 per cent of cases we could not establish a verdict.Google Scholar

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