Flaws in the Social Fabric: Homosexuals in Sydney

Abstract

Homosexuality and homosexuals, male and female, have always been part of the fabric of human communities. This applied as much to Sydney in the 1880s as it does to Sydney in the 1980s. But, some claim, they have never been as visible, as individuals and as an issue, as they are today. Whether this claim is true or not, something happened in the late 1960s in Sydney that had not occurred before: the arrival of the gay movement, the beginning of the organised articulation of the political and social demands of homosexuals. This book is both an account of that development and an examination of aspects of the public reaction to it. Flaws in the Social Fabric grew out of research undertaken by the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board. That study assembled a vast mass of data which Denise Thompson has reworked to present a fascinating picture of the relationship between a hitherto-suppressed minority and its host community.