Abstract
On a Friday night in late August 1943 Constable Clifford and Detective-Constable Wilhelm Raetz were on duty in Rockhampton, a coastal port town halfway up Queensland’s coast. They were patrolling the beat on foot, keeping a lookout for wartime mischief and misbehaviour as they walked through the streets. Just before 11pm, as they made their way down an unlit laneway, Raetz heard two male voices echo in the night air. He immediately flashed his torch in the direction of the conversation — the timing and location suggested something was amiss. The light revealed a 23-year-old single labourer, William, and a 16-year-old youth in ‘certain attitudes’ in the grounds of the nearby Salvation Army Citadel.1 The police rushed to the scene as the man and adolescent fumbled to rearrange their clothes. When they arrived at the Citadel, ‘Raetz asked the accused [William] how long the practice had been going on. The accused asked “Why?” and Raetz replied he had asked the question because he had seen the accused committing an unnatural offence’.2 The officers arrested the suspects soon after.
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Notes
William appears as Walter in my published account of this affair appearing in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, although his name has been changed here to avoid confusion: Yorick Smaal, ‘“It is One of Those Things That Nobody Can Explain”: Medicine, Homosexuality and the Australian Criminal Courts during World War II’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 22, 3 (2013), 501–524.
Estelle Freedman, ‘“Uncontrolled Desires”: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath’, Journal of American History, 74, 1 (1987), 83–106;
Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 80–90.
Home Office, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department and the Secretary of State for Scotland by Command of Her Majesty September 1957 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1968), 11.
J. L. Moir, ‘Some Medical Aspects of Crime and of the Criminal Law and the Need for Chairs of Criminology at Our Universities and for Consultation Centres in Our Towns’, Medico-Legal and Criminological Review, VIII, II (April 1940), 121.
Bulletin (Sydney), 10 November 1927, 5. This article had wide ambit, unlike material circulated in medical journals. In her history of the Bulletin, Patricia Rolfe estimates that the paper’s circulation figures at the end of the 1920s was somewhere around 55,000 for a national population of approximately 6,500,000. Based on this figure alone (which is inflated if we take children into account), almost one in every 120 people were potentially exposed to these ideas. The number was likely to be much higher if we consider a consumption rate of more than one person to each paper. Patricia Rolfe, The Journalistic Javelin: An Illustrated History of the Bulletin (Sydney: Wildcat, 1979), 259.
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), 51–54.
Anon., ‘Homosexuality’, 175–6. On mixed modelling also see Josephine Hinrichsen, ‘The Importance of a Knowledge of Sexual Habits in the Diagnosis and Control of Venereal Diseases, With Special Reference to Homosexual Behaviour’, Urological and Cutaneous Review, 48 (1944), 478;
F. G. MacDonald, ‘The Problem of the Homosexual with Venereal Disease’, British Journal of Venereal Diseases, 25 (1949), 13; The Times (London), 8 July 1937, 8; Moir, ‘Some Medical Aspects of Crime’, 121.
Chris Brickell, ‘Sex Instruction and the Construction of Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920–1965’, Sex Education, 5, 2 (2005), 119–36.
Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 2004), 58.
Edmund Bergler, ‘The Myth of a New National Disease: Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report’, Psychiatric Quarterly, 22 (January 1948): 73; NARA, RG52, Records of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Entry 15-B, Headquarters Records Correspondence Files, 1842–1951, Box 148, General Correspondence 1942–46, Clements. C. Fry MD and Edna G. Rostow, ‘Reflections on Some Aspects of Homosexuality as it Relates to the Military’, 17.
Gary Allan Foster, ‘Male Rape and the Government of Bodies: An Unnatural History of the Present’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 2005), 192.
Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); On Europe see Robb, Strangers, 57.
Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales 1880–1940 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988), 38–41, 55, 68–69, 84;
Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 8, 27–29, 64–69.
Sydney Smith, Forensic Medicine: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners (London: J. A. Churchill, 1943), 313;
Keith Simpson, Forensic Medicine (London: Edward Arnold, 1947), 189;
Sydney Smith, Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, 9th ed., vol. 2 (London: J. A. Churchill, 1934), 275;
Sydney Smith, Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, 10th ed., vol. 2 (London: J. A. Churchill, 1948), 213.
Although assessments of ‘mental age’ (that is, intelligence) are also evident in American studies; Lewis H. Loeser, ‘The Sexual Psychopath in the Military Service’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 102 (1945), 94.
Charles Anderson, ‘On Certain Conscious and Unconscious Homosexual Responses to Warfare’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 20, 1, part 1 (1944), 173.
Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 81–84.
On Dr Storer see Wayne Murdoch, ‘Dr Storer’, in Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne, eds Graham Willett, Wayne Murdoch and Daniel Marshall (Melbourne: ALGA, 2011), 49–51.
William A. Isdale, ‘The Rise of Psychiatry and its Establishment in Queensland’, Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal, XIV, 12 (1992), 501.
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Smaal, Y. (2015). Disoriented Doctors. In: Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-36514-9_7
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