Secret Side of a City//The Age
“…it takes a certain sensitivity - and some imagination - to discern the true nature of a particular story, or to guess what went on at a certain building, or to suspect the ulterior purpose of a public lavatory. ”People see a place differently if they have a particular interest,” he says. ”So you can be walking down Swanston Street in 1950, 1960 or 1970 and see things that other people don’t see at all - or see them but have no idea what they mean. Or you can see them with what might be described as a ‘queer eye’, a gay sensibility.”
Such places might be the vegetarian restaurant in Swanston Street that was once Val’s coffee shop - a much-loved bohemia frequented by artists, theatrical types, activists and camp men and women (as they were then known). Or what is considered Melbourne’s oldest gay pick-up spot, a urinal outside the Queen Victoria Hospital, known as such since the 1860s (it was removed in the 1990s).
Because homosexuality was criminalised for so long in Victoria, it was pushed underground into such places. ”For camp women and men, social disapproval made it difficult for romantic or sexual relationships to emerge in the ordinary ways available to heterosexuals - through family, church, clubs and at work,” Wayne Murdoch writes in Secret Histories.
The walks that Willett conducts range about the CBD and inner suburbs. This year’s walk, as part of the Midsumma festival, will focus on the ’50s, an era when suspicion, oppression and police entrapment of gay men were at their height.
The Midsumma history walk is on January 22. Bookings at midsumma.org.au, alga.org.au
