How Australia Hid the Existence of a Gay Prison from History
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Cooma is small town in the south east province of New South Wales in Australia. It is home to the world’s only prison that beginning in 1957 operated as specifically for detaining men convicted of homosexual offenses.
It is the subject of journalist Patrick Abbod’s latest Audible podcast The Greatest Menace: Inside the Gay Prison Experiment.
Reopened in 1957 with the specific purpose of incarcerating men for “homosexual offenses,” it was also said to be used as a human testing ground with the ultimate goal of eradicating homosexuality from society.
Cooma’s jail is believed to have been the only known homosexual prison in the world, according to a new podcast.
According to the BBC, until now, even some prison staff say they didn’t know the real reason gay prisoners were segregated there.
Les Strzelecki, 66, started as a custodial services officer at the prison in 1979, and later set up the Corrective Services Museum in Cooma. He believed inmates were sent there for their own safety. “Cooma was a protective institution. We’d red stamp homosexual prisoners with ‘N/A’: non-association with mainstream prisons,” he tells the BBC. “They were at risk of violence at bigger prisons like Long Bay [in Sydney].”
It’s also why prisoners were in single cells, he said. “You wouldn’t bunk two in together… that was one of our biggest problems – keeping an eye on them,” says Mr New, now 94.
Historical documents suggest New South Wales (NSW) Justice Minister Reg Downing took credit for establishing the prison. He reportedly expressed “pride” at his pet project, telling the Sydney Morning Herald in 1957: “Nowhere in Europe or America did I find any prisons where homosexuals were separated from other prisoners.”
A 1958 press statement from Mr. Downing names Cooma prison as “the only penal institution in the world, so far as is known, devoted specifically to the detention of homosexual offenders”.
Prisoners at Cooma were incarcerated for being gay, or crimes related to being gay; homosexuality wasn’t decriminalized in NSW until 1984.
“New clauses included ‘soliciting’ – a man could be arrested for simply chatting up another man,” historian Garry Wotherspoon tells the BBC. “These legislative changes were very wide-ranging in their assault on the civil liberties of men thought to have homoerotic desires.”
The crime of buggery carried a 14-year sentence. Attempted buggery carried five years, and in a harsher crackdown, a clause was added stating “with or without the consent of such person.”
“Discovering what some of those men went through in the process of being trapped and charged, it’s horrifying. It really is,” Abboud told News.au.com earlier this year. “Their lives were destroyed, and they’re still reeling from it.”
What prisoners experienced in the Cooma facility was chilling. But at the heart of The Greatest Menace remains a mystery. “They established a prison specifically to incarcerate gay men, specifically to incarcerate homosexuals and they had an intention behind that,” Abboud said. “We uncovered the intention. And then what came of that intention? And that’s the part that really niggles at me the whole time. Where’s the report? Where’s the findings of what happened? My instinct is that they didn’t want it to be widely known.”
“Whatever they did, either they didn’t discover what they wanted to, and they wanted to bury it because it didn’t turn out how they wanted to, or there’s something kind of explosive that they didn’t want to get out,” he continued.
What is known, and is revealed through Abboud’s interviews and recreations of actual court transcripts, is the history of persecution that gay men faced. Abboud told News.au.com in February, “When you unpack and sort of understand the time, and what was going on, it’s really sad.”
