Dark side of the rainbow: Drugged, shocked and jailed for being gay

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.There were no rainbow flags or glittering Mardi Gras parades awaiting Terry Goulden outside Sutherland police station in 1965 when his ashen-faced mother came to bail him out. The naive 20-year-old had been arrested for an unfulfilled act of “indecency” with a man who turned out to be a young, undercover police officer.

Along with fines and prison, many suffered the ignominy of court-endorsed “treatments” – from electric shock and potent drugs to brain surgery – to “cure” their homosexuality, much of it now considered medical quackery.Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council Penny Sharpe said: “A formal apology for those who suffered at the hands of those laws recognises the harm done to many and acknowledges that they were wrong.

“Looking back, it really was ridiculous … there was no bloody victim! The other guy was just as into it as I was,” he says of his New Year’s Eve encounter with a handsome young Scotsman. The pair were in a parked car on a secluded fire trail in the Royal National Park when they were interrupted by a ranger tapping on the window.

“It was absolute quackery … thank God I had the presence of mind to stop taking that poison ... If I had continued down that path, I might not have had this wonderful life.“That’s the really upsetting thing to me now; how many people had their potential destroyed, were permanently damaged psychologically or physically because they were forced to go against their nature?”

“I was a street worker, but I was mostly arrested for dressing up as a girl, which was how I lived 24/7, and for ‘consorting’ with others like me. The cops would see us and arrest us. I lied about my age, I was 15 when they sent me to Long Bay Gaol ... twice,” Grant says. Local activists, including Robert French and the late Lex Watson, spent years campaigning. A gay embassy was set up in 1983 outside then-premier Neville Wran’s home in Woollahra to prod him into action.

Their generation’s reality was a world of court-endorsed “aversion therapies”, including electric shock treatment where voltage was deliberately pulsated through patients’ bodies – including their genitals – while being shown images of naked men.They were also given nausea-inducing drugs, and some underwent brain surgery under the auspices of notorious psychiatrist Dr Harry Bailey, who made headlines for the controversial “deep sleep” therapy he practised on 1,127 patients between 1963 and 1979.

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