This article contains references to violence, sexual assault, homophobia and transphobia.
Garry Wotherspoon has been assaulted three times - an experience he described as “typical” for gay men in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
“The first was at a gay dance in the 1970s. The other two times were in the 80s and 90s on [Sydney's] Oxford Street by groups of punks,” Mr Wotherspoon told SBS News.
“These things just happened ... suddenly, you’re set upon.
“Some night you’d hear a knock on the door, a friend would come because they've been bashed up somewhere at Oxford Street or they’d be taken to hospital.”
From the 1970s to 2010s, hundreds of LGBTIQ+ people were documented to have disappeared in ‘suspicious’ circumstances or were known to have been killed.
Many of the assaults were brutal, including stabbings, strangulation, bludgeoning, shooting, sexual assaults and frenzied attacks, .
To investigate these hate crimes, New South Wales will set up a judicial inquiry looking into grave injustices suffered by the LGBTIQ+ community between 1970 and 2010.
Mr Wotherspoon’s friend Yuri, a Sydney university lecturer, is one of those who went missing during this time.
He hopes the inquiry will bring justice to victims and their families and shed light on what occurred.
“The initial police investigations were so poor that they wrote a lot of them off as either suicide or accidental death or someone just disappeared,” said Mr Wotherspoon.
“There was a cultural attitude for so many, many years that homosexuals were perverts, a threat to society.”
‘An inquiry with teeth’
For the past decade, organisations like ACON, along with lawyers, advocates, victim-survivors and their families, have been pushing for a judicial inquiry into these crimes.
The judicial inquiry follows the recommendation of an upper house parliamentary committee report tabled in May.
The social issues committee inquiry, which began in 2018, heard testimonies regarding suspected hate crimes against 88 men between 1970 and 2010, with 23 of the cases still unsolved.
Chief executive of ACON, Nicolas Parkhill, said he was “absolutely overjoyed” that the inquiry would take place.
“It pervades a feeling of hope that there will be justice delivered and new information that will be brought to light as well. That's going to be critically important,” Mr Parkhill told SBS News.
He said the judicial nature of the inquiry means it’ll have a legal framework and the “teeth” to compel witnesses to give evidence.
“We know that there are people out there who know what's happened in many of these hate crimes, and haven't come forward for fear of persecution or reprimand or even association,” he said.
“We want that uncovered.”
Last month, a memorial dedicated to victims and survivors of LGBTQ hate and violence was installed at Marks Park in Bondi.
The Bondi Memorial for victims and survivors of LGBTQ hate and violence. Source: ACON
The memorial, entitled ‘Rise’, was designed by John Nicholson of United Art Projects and established by ACON and Waverley Council.
“It's a symbol of the importance of diversity and inclusion ... So that these horrendous crimes will never be forgotten, and never repeated,” Mr Parkhill said.
The push for a judicial inquiry in other states
NSW’s judicial inquiry into hate crimes against the LGBTIQ+ community is the first of its kind in Australia.
Nicholas Stewart lead the campaign for the judicial inquiry into gay hate crimes in NSW and has long been petitioning for a similar inquiry in Victoria.
A partner at LGBT law firm Dowson Turco Lawyers, Mr Stewart has represented many survivors of hate crimes, including Alan Rosendale.
Mr Rosendale was beaten unconscious by a group of between four and six men in 1989 in Sydney’s Surry Hills but no one was ever charged in relation to the crime.
Mr Stewart hopes that through a judicial inquiry, information about who was behind this attack will be revealed.
But he said a similar judicial inquiry is needed in Victoria.
“It’s mass murder. Hunting us down and throwing us off cliffs, beating us to death in toilets, strangling us in our homes,” said Mr Stewart.
“The stories are gruesome and it’s happened in NSW, in Victoria … in every jurisdiction.. on a mass scale.”
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