Crime
Getting Away With Murder
Duncan McNab
Penguin, $34.99
It's a hard thought, but Fred Nile might have been right back in 1991 when he drew a link between the "provocation" of the Mardi Gras and the epidemic of gay-bashings that are this well-made, upsetting book's subject: victim-blaming aside, it is still true that the more out and proud gays become, the easier it is to target them.
Then there was the continuing conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia, and the fact that the AIDS epidemic had elicited further hatred towards gay men, and the conformism enforced by traditional masculinity; not to mention the fact that sexually confused men will sometimes turn their confusions to violence: some of Duncan McNab's cases aren't only hate crimes but sex crimes, including rape, carried out by self-loathing gay men against their peers.
But another factor was that the people who carried out so many of these attacks did so knowing that the police weren't very concerned about crimes against gays, and some appear to have thought they actually had the police's blessing.
Nor was it simply a matter of connivance and what seems to have amounted to passive-aggressive ineptitude from the investigating detectives. One man witnessed a savage bashing in Sydney's Moore Park and took down the licence plate of the perpetrators' vehicle, which then turned out to be an unmarked police car. Slaps on the wrist may have been issued but not much else. Another gay-bashing cop was quietly allowed to resign rather than face legal sanction.
Some of the names here will be familiar from inquiries and media attention triggered by conscientious work from retired policeman Stephen Page and lobbying from Steve Johnson, whose brother Scott, an American mathematician whose 1988 death was recorded as a suicide despite many suspicious circumstances – the NSW police continue to deny they may have mishandled the case – or Ross Warren, the newsreader who went missing in 1989 and has never been found, or John Russell, another alleged suicide whose death was finally recorded as a murder in 2005.
At first glance, on the other hand, the murder of gay identity Ludwig Gertsch may not seem relevant to the theme. This noirish tale of forged wills and kept boys – James M. Cain comes to Oxford Street – looks not to have been fuelled by hate, but rather those gender-neutral perennials lust and greed. But in the end the slack handling of the case by the police was just another demonstration of how little value they put on gay lives.