Homophobia as Party Politics: The Construction of the 'Homosexual Deviant' in Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland

In 1987, years of frustration with Queensland's sexually repressive culture compelled a homosexual man named Cliff Williams to write to the national gay magazine OutRage. Williams outlined a number of the difficulties he faced being gay in Queensland and ended his letter with the exclamation, ‘To hell with homophobic Queensland!’ This exclamation captures many of the tensions in Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s. While these decades were a time of immense political change for gay and lesbian Australians, Queensland's political culture was particularly resistant to the gay and lesbian rights movement.