The Origins of Gay Media

in Australia 1969-78

By Bill Calder

Chapter 1 – Activist Press

John Ware, right started Australia’s gay rights movement with his lover Michael Cass and Christabel Poll, centre (The Australian, 19 September 1970)

The whiskey inspired resolve of 30-year-old John Ware and 32-year-old Christabel Poll, after reading reports of The Stonewall riot commemoration, did not evaporate with their hangovers the following day. They proceeded to gather like-minded friends and start an organisation challenging current social attitudes towards homosexuality. For Ware it was the medical profession, in particular, he wanted to challenge:

I did it partly as a result of a psych[ology] course I was doing at the time. I don’t know if you know psychologists, especially academic psychologists, as I have… they’re pretty screwed up. Yet they were saying I was sick and psychologically disturbed because I was gay and they were promoting aversion therapy. I wouldn’t support that.[18]

The aims of the pair were initially modest, to form “a society of half a dozen people who would meet once a month or so” and send letters to the editor challenging

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statements that were being made, “a sort of book club” really. [19] A crucial strategy they adopted was coming out openly as gay by signing their names to letters and a fascinated media was soon knocking on their door to interview real homosexuals. In September 1970, theAustralian published a major feature article, titled Couples, based on Janet Hawley’s interview with Ware, Cass and Poll. It included contact details for the newly formed organisation, that they had named Campaign Against Moral Persecution, with its “playful acronym CAMP”. A flood of letters and a well attended public meeting soon followed and before long CAMP had 1500 members nationally.[20]

Many of those joining the organisation were influenced by the ideas for political change of the time and with such a rich vein of ideas pouring into the new organisation the initial thought that CAMP would simply be a book club soon gave way to more enthusiastic plans for “a complete restructuring of the homosexual’s place in modern society”.[21] Women’s Liberation and New Left ideology influenced the discussion over what gay liberationist strategies to adopt. Women’s liberation saw sexuality as a means used by men – and heterosexual men, in particular – to oppress women and gays. [22] New Left ideology explained sexual oppression in terms of capitalism’s need for one class (heterosexual males in this case) to exploit and oppress another (women and gays). One particular strategy developed by gay liberation in the United States – and already so effectively implemented by Ware and Poll – was this notion of urging gay people to come out publicly as gay.

At one extreme of the activist thinking was the belief that a socialist revolution was needed before gay liberation could be achieved. This revolution, it was imagined, would wash away the by-products of capitalism including the objectifying of people’s bodies to turn them into commodities, as represented by pornography, prostitution and youth worship. Also to perish would be the “exploitative” gay bars selling drinks at inflated prices to lonely disenfranchised people.[23] Lex Watson says gay activism “grew essentially out of the political left, and quickly acquired a following among uni

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students and others who had had little contact with the gay scene in the Cross and the expanding Oxford Street area”.[24] Dennis Altman concurs, saying the “early gay liberation movement defined itself as anticapitalist, arguing that only with the overthrow of capitalism could we find genuine sexual liberation”.[25]

One of the earliest actions of CAMP was to produce Camp Ink, and the first edition appeared in November 1970, even before CAMP held its public meeting. As Gary Wotherspoon documents, there were mainstream publishing houses in 1970 that refused to mention homosexuality, even refusing to accept paid advertising from CAMP. Others delighted in running stories outlining sordid details of tragic or criminal homosexual activity, and even the tolerant approach that came from some media, often argued in essence that homosexuals were victims afflicted by a disability.[26] Camp Ink was specifically published as a forum for ideas from a gay perspective “to counter public ignorance about homosexuality”.[27]

Articles in Camp Ink were initially written by the editors, Ware and Poll, or reprinted from gay publications in the United States, until other active members within CAMP started writing more local copy. In the first issue ofCamp Ink Ware launched his campaign against psychology, labelling it “potentially the most dangerous weapon mankind has yet developed [bringing about] apartheid, the faceless affluent American, and the mentally castrated homosexual.”[28] It was the start of a free flow of ideas, and in subsequent issues articles were written debating topics ranging from promiscuity, male prostitution and religion, to discussion about law reform, transvestites and the role of beats. These discussions allowed readers to imagine their own sense of gay identity and sense of community based on shared oppression and struggle.

The first Camp Ink was sixteen A4 pages, selling for 20 cents with a black and white illustration on the cover that implied aversion therapy was akin to sawing off a man’s penis. In an editorial titled ‘What’s in it for me?’ Ware and Poll issued a rallying call for people to become actively involved in CAMP:

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A few of the homosexuals who have written to us asking for details of CAMP INC have written back and said they do not want to join because they could see NOTHING IN IT FOR THEM … Have they not stopped to wonder why a homosexual, talking about homosexuality, attracted so much publicity? … Why is it so newsworthy? Why is it necessary for those who claim there is nothing in it for them to send us letters without a return address or to insist that if we contact them we do it in a plain, sealed envelope … The answer is simple. Homosexuality is not tolerated in our society. A homosexual, to exist in this society, must in most dealings with the wider world pretend to be heterosexual … The overall aim of CAMP INC is to bring about a situation where homosexuals can enjoy good jobs and security in those jobs, equal treatment under the law, and the right to serve our country without fear of exposure and contempt … Will those who claim there is NOTHING IN IT FOR THEM, have us believe that they already enjoy these rights? Their secretive actions surely give the lie to this … Homosexuals deserve to live as well as other Australians with allegedly more conventional sex lives. It is time we went after these things.[29].

In addition to their desire for social change Camp Ink’s editors were sensitive to the broader range of aspirations among their readers and acknowledged the desire of readers to make contact with each other. They introduced personal classifieds in recognition that one of Camp Ink’s roles was also “to alleviate the desperate sence [sic] of isolation that many of our members have voiced”.[30] With time, other columns that reflected these broader aspirations were introduced into Camp Ink, such as book reviews, a humour column and information on CAMP’s organised social events.

Promotion of these social events in Camp Ink became entwined in the publication’s need for funding, as Ware said at the time: “Social functions raise money, not very much but at least enough to allow us to pay the rent and excess printing costs.”[31] Camp Ink was funded through membership fees and its survival depended on the financial support it received from CAMP. The magazine faced a constant battle to

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have the cover price included as part of the annual CAMP membership fee of $4.70 ($1.70 concession). This barely covered the estimated $3.84 cost of the magazine per person and money was needed for activities such as organising discussion groups, attending conferences and setting up club rooms.[32] By the start of 1973 there was a national fund drive to raise $2000, at least in part due to the costs involved in producing Camp Ink.[33]

The primary focus for the editors though remained the debate of ideas to encourage a change of attitude in both the readers and the broader society. To this end, much space and effort was devoted to the letters pages that Ware considered “terribly important” and if not enough were received, the editors would write them.

… we used to get an awful lot of good letters but never enough to fill enough pages to encourage people to write into us … so we always had to write them. We got some good ones, and we wrote some good ones too.[34]

Camp Ink was mailed to members of CAMP and sent to key opinion makers in the media, government and public domain in an effort to draw their attention to gay issues.[35] Five hundred copies were printed of the first issue, rising to 5000 copies 12 months later, according to its Queensland editor, Paul Lucas.[36] Some selling of the magazine took place on the streets, primarily as a political coming out action and a few bookshops offered them for sale. Angus & Robertson bookshop displayed one issue of Camp Ink in its shop window, featuring the front cover words: “We’ve come out of our closets to wish you a Merry Christmas” accompanied by photographs of 35 CAMP members. One of those who had been photographed worked in the next building and the cover was seen by his work colleagues, a consequence that resulted very literally in his coming out.[37]

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The Christmas 1971 issue of Camp Ink featured the act of coming out in public

In its initial days, Ware and Poll were the faces and driving force behind both CAMP and the magazine Camp Ink. In 1971 Ware gave up studying at university to be a full-time, though unpaid worker for the organisation.[38] His management style though was to oppose organisational structure for CAMP, eschewing formalities and refusing to

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go by titles such as president, a view shared by Poll. Reflecting on the first public meeting for CAMP, Ware says:

We consciously upset a lot of people too because Chris and I were determined not to wear any fancy clothes. Any ties or anything. We didn’t want the notion of formality. Someone had organized us a church hall and they put up this top table. Soon as we saw that Chris grabbed a flagon of wine and said: ‘OK, let’s sit up there. We’re going to drink booze in front of them’.[39]

Other members in the organisation started to argue that Ware had become a “de facto leader surrounded by an informal clique of activist friends”[40] and agitated for a structured organisation with defined roles for office-bearers. They had their way in April 1972 when an executive was elected with Sue Wills and Lex Watson elected the first co-presidents of CAMP. In response Ware retreated from direct involvement in the organisation, though continued to edit Camp Ink. Poll also remained listed as editor, though her name is consistently misspelt in the Camp Ink credits box, presumably reflecting “a lack of involvement on her part”.[41] In retrospect Ware concedes his leadership style was “dictatorial disguised as some sort of democracy” and claims he was actually “quite happy to hand it all over to anyone [competent] who’d grab it”.[42]

With members joining CAMP from around Australia, it wasn’t long before local branches were established in all the major cities and even on some university campuses. Camp Ink was the only structural link between the different branches and Ware saw it as a national unifying force. He anticipated that articles would be written by members from all the branches and was disappointed when most articles from outside Sydney only covered local social events. The local state branches though were often quite independent in style and activist priority. In May 1971 Melbourne changed its name to Society Five and in early 1973 the Adelaide branch came under fire from Sydney for including articles by non-homosexuals and anti-homosexuals in a booklet Homosexuality in South Australia. Later that year, it was Perth’s turn to cop fire for

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electing a president who was not able to come out publicly.[43] From 1972 the state branches progressively started producing their own newsletters to communicate local information about meetings, events and political actions.[44]

In January 1972 Gay Liberation splits from CAMP (Camp Ink, February 1972)

A more direct challenge to CAMP came in January 1972 at a Sexual Liberation Forum in Sydney where Dennis Altman (pictured above, far right) announced the formation of a separate group, Gay Liberation. Many of the break away group’s leading members had been part of an informal grouping within Sydney CAMP that pushed a strategy of “greater consciousness-raising” among members. The trigger for the split was a dispute over allocation of money from a fundraising dance. Once established in Sydney, Gay Liberation soon formed around the country.[45] Its Sydney branch produced a newsletter until 1974 and the Melbourne branch produced one issue of Melbourne Gay Liberation’s Gay Rays in December 1972.[46]

In the mid 1970s other organisations formed that were separate from CAMP, with their own newsletters, such as the Gay Teachers and Students Group Newsletter in Melbourne and campus based Gaysocs. This period also saw the formation of two gay Christian groups: Acceptance for Catholics and the broadly inclusive Metropolitan Community Church. State branches of both these organisations started publishing

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newsletters from 1974.[47] In 1976 Melbourne’s community radio station 3CR began broadcasting a weekly gay and lesbian program.

In addition to geographic and political strategy divergence, there always lurked a simmering ideological conflict within the gay activist movement, between the sexual libertines who wanted to free sexuality’s “instinctual, libidinal power” and the feminists who saw this power associated with “male domination of women through sexual subordination.”[48] This fundamental difference of viewpoint, often along gender lines, affected discussions of many issues including casual sex, pornography, prostitution and age of consent. Lesbians reacted also to sexism from gay men and many lesbian activists chose to direct energy towards the feminist movement. Yet it was not always an easy choice as they often faced anti-lesbian attitudes within the women’s movement. Out-shouted and out-numbered in gay activist circles and seen by some in the women’s movement as tarnishing that movement’s reputation, some turned to separate lesbian organising, a phenomena that surprising even predates CAMP.

As early as 1969, two Melbourne lesbians, Marion Paull and Claudia Pearce started a Melbourne chapter of the American group Daughters of Bilitis and immediately produced a group newsletter, thereby claiming for it the mantle of first gay or lesbian identified media published in Australia. Focussing on “information, education and outreach” the group’s organisers enlisted “prominent (heterosexual) humanist and liberal” Beatrice Faust as their spokesperson. Women under the age of 21 could not join and heterosexually married women needed their husband’s written consent. When the American group adopted a more militant and publicly open stance, the Melbourne group rejected such radicalism and split from their American parent group, yet adopted oddly a less closeted name, Australasian Lesbian Movement for both the group and its newsletter, which continued until 1972.[49]

A number of primarily social lesbian newsletters were published briefly after this, but an important development in lesbian politics occurred when Jenny Pausacker and a

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group of her friends returned in 1973 from London with the radical feminist critique that men were the problem and this provided additional impetus for lesbians to organise separately. They formed the group Radicalesbians and in July that year held a national conference in Sorrento[50].

    Liz Ross at a 1970s anti-abortion rally in Canberra. She later started Lesbian Newsletter     (Liz Ross private collection)

It was into this environment that Sydney born Liz Ross became involved in lesbian politics. After finishing university in Canberra, she undertook further study for a library diploma, gaining a job at the national library. Continuing her studies in 1972 she undertook a course, Women and Society, at the Council for Adult Education, meeting members of Women’s Liberation who inspired her to join the organisation. She soon became a volunteer and helped produce the Women’s Liberation newsletter, a task she maintained until moving to Melbourne in 1975.

Ross joined Women’s Liberation in Melbourne and pushed successfully for the organisation to start a lesbian newsletter. She became a key member of the collective

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that produced Lesbian Newsletter, and it appeared later in the year as a four page gestetnered insert within Women’s Liberation Newsletter:

The purpose initially was that lesbians in Women’s Liberation (and some more generally) wanted more information about what was going on about issues that they were concerned about … So there was that need plus there was a feeling Women’s Liberation Newsletter wasn’t covering lesbian issues adequately.[51]

After two issues as an insert, Lesbian Newsletter was produced as a stand-alone publication, a decision Ross says may have “let [Women’s Liberation] off the hook a bit” but it also reflected a broader mood.

There was a more generalised push to have lesbian only organisations. There was a certain level of splitting off from gay liberation because of an irritation … that’s the wrong word, an anger with sexism amongst gay men and there was also a political shift with lesbian separatism getting more of a hearing and there were lesbian only groups developing.[52]

Lesbian Newsletter was largely subscriber based, produced every two months with a limited print run, partly due to the labour intensive means of production by manual typewriters and a gestetner machine, as Ross explains:

You typed up on these flimsy sheets [with] a waxed back sheet and an almost tissue paper front cover [that] you fed it in to the typewriter around the rollers … When you made a mistake you had to use this particular liquid to paint over your mistake, wait for it to dry and then type over …. You then took off the back cover and draped it around an ink drum which was on this machine that stood a couple of feet high or a metre high and you had a handle on the side of the drum that you turned around and you fed paper in … It was all very wet, getting the sheet onto the drum without wrinkles was just a nightmare, you’d often tear the paper or it would get inked up too much. … You had to hand turn so the number of copies you could make were in the hundreds rather than

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in the thousands … then you’d staple them together … very limited in what you could do visually … very labour intensive.[53]

Despite low overheads, commercial viability was a recurring problem. In 1978 Lesbian Newsletter had just over 100 subscribers but to cover costs really needed at least 200.[54] In 1983 it changed its name to Lesbian News and continued publishing until 1990.

Throughout each stage of political divergence, Camp Ink was published monthly until it drifted out to a two monthly schedule during 1973. Ware resigned as editor at the end of that year, perhaps he’d had enough after nearly four years with no pay. The magazine lapsed for some months and was not published until a new executive revived it the following year, describing it “a vital part of our movement”.[55] Noreen Clark and Peter Parkes were appointed co-editors in August 1974 and remained in the role until April the next year when an “Editorial Collective” was put in charge.  From August 1974 Camp Ink was published quarterly until March 1977 when it stopped at issue number 40.

While not always in tune with the aspirations of the majority, the activists were the spark that ignited moves towards social change. Through Camp Ink they provided a forum for readers to imagine a gay identity and gay community. Through personal classifieds and publicising the group’s social events they offered opportunities for individuals to connect with each other. The key elements they offered for forming gay identity and community were largely connected to a vision of fighting together against shared oppression. It was the activists who had sown the seed of rebellion and pride – in large part through their magazines and newsletters – that would grow wildly beyond all expectation, if not quite to the script they imagined. We need to look beyond Camp Ink and the dozens of activist newsletters that were spawned in its wake, and study the magazines that emerged to represent other aspirations within the gay and lesbian community – the porn mags and community newspapers – aspirations more attuned to satisfying individual sexual desire, the search for love and a safe

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place to socialise; aspirations that were satisfied, as it turns out, more by capitalist market forces, than the achievement of socialist revolution.

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 [18] Davis, “20 Years Out”, p. 48.

[19] Ibid, p. 48.

[20] Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, pp. 33-4.

[21]Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture, p.169.

[22] Freedman, ed., Intimate Matters, a History of Sexuality in America, pp. 308-25.

[23] Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present(London: Quartet Books, 1990), p. 193.

[24] Lex Watson “Judge Not Though”, Green Park Observer, 19 April 1983, p. 22.

[25] Altman, The Homosexualization of America: The Americanization of the Homosexual, p. 218.

[26] Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture. Also John Ware, “Twelve Months Past”,Camp Ink, September 1971, p. 4.

[27] “W(h)ither Camp Inc?”, Camp Ink, November 1970, p. 7.

[28] John Ware, “Rat-psychology and the homosexual”, Camp Ink, November 1970, p. 4.

[29] Editorial, “What’s in It for Me?” Camp Ink, November 1970, p. 2. The letters ‘INC’ were sometimes added to the end of CAMP as a flourish because the founders of the organisation liked the sound of it.

[30] “W(h)ither Camp Inc?” Camp Ink, November 1970, p. 7.

[31] John Ware, “Twelve Months Past”, Camp Ink, September 1971, pp. 4-5.

[32] David Williamson, “Sex Appeal in the financial report”, Camp Ink, February 1971, p. 13.

[33] “Give to the Camp Ink Fund Drive”, Camp Ink, Vol 3 No 2, p. 3.

[34] Davis, “20 Years Out.”, unpublished material from original interview.

[35] Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, p.79.

[36] Paul Lucas “Editorial”, Camp Ink, November 1971, p. 2.

[37] Davis, “20 Years Out.”, unpublished material from original interview.

[38] Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia. p. 43, citing “Homosexuals v. Intolerance”, Newcastle Morning Herald, 27 May 1971.

[39] Davis, “20 Years Out”, p. 49.

[40] Wills, “Politics of Sexual Liberation”, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1981, p. 96

[41] Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, p. 272, footnote 48.

[42] Davis, “20 Years Out.”, unpublished material from original interview.

[43] Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, pp. 51-2.

[44] Graham Carbery, “Periodicals List,” ed. Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (2010 – ver 1).

[45] Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture, p. 176. Also Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, pp. 60-1.

[46] Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, p. 80.

[47] Carbery, “Periodicals List.”

[48] Mathews, “Reflections on Gay and Lesbian Activism”, p. 25.

[49] Graham Willett & Liz Ross, “The Daughters of Bilitis: In Our Lifetime,” in Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne, eds. Graham Willett, Wayne Murdoch & Daniel Marshall (Melbourne: Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, 2011), p. 97.

[50] Willett, Living out Loud – a History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, pp. 65-9.

[51] Interview with Liz Ross.

[52] ibid.

[53] ibid.

[54] “Editorial”, Lesbian Newsletter, October 1978, p. 2.

[55] “Editorial”, Camp Ink, August 1974, p. 2.