Sunday Arts Magazine

2 May 2022

David Gould – Under the Radar

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Under the radar: Male homosexual lives in post-Second World War Australia

Oral and written history in Australia has been recorded mainly from a heteronormative perspective and has largely ignored the lived experience of LGBTI people. Yet, it is in examining the lives of ‘the other’ that society can fully understand its own breadth of experience and practice and learn to reassess its past in order to inform its future. By researching the lives of homosexual men from 1946 to 1959 the study aimed to make a contribution to understanding a significant but largely unknown part of Australian history. It examined how homosexual men survived the challenges they faced and how they accommodated their homosexual desire. Data was gathered through interviews with 27homosexual men who were at least 16 years old in 1946. It used narrative analysis of life stories to construct a picture of what life was like for the participants and sought to understand how they‘ made sense’ of their lives at the time, the impact institutions had on those lives, and how they survived an era that was hostile to homosexuals. A sense of urgency informed the research because it was a pathway to knowledge and insight about Australian history that if not recorded would soon be lost forever due to the advanced ages of those who lived through this period. (Since the research was undertaken a number of the interviewees have sadly passed away).