Walkley award winning Arab-Australian journalist Patrick Abboud was at a protest rally in the US when someone told him that Australia was home to the world’s only gay prison. Over the next few years, Abboud would chase this claim, a pursuit that took him from the government houses of Sydney, to London, and all the way back to a small prison in Cooma reserved only for gay men throughout the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.
In The Greatest Menace, an Audible Original podcast, Abboud uncovers gruesome cover-ups of entrapment by NSW police, institutionalised experimentation on LGBTIQ prisoners, and a painful part of Australia’s queer history that has gone mostly unacknowledged until now. As a gay man himself, the investigation was a uniquely personal one that changed Abboud’s perspective of his own experiences of shame, homophobia and Pride.
WorldPride is dazzling Sydney’s streets with rainbow corporate sponsored floats, events and gigs, and it’s easy to forget that Pride in this country wasn’t always a party. For many of our queer elders, the real celebration will come when they no longer hold criminal records for being who they are.
I spoke with Patrick on what it was like for him to hear some of these harrowing, yet awe-inspiring stories of survival and what led him to uncover the world’s only gay prison.
— Content warning: this interview includes discussion of police brutality, homophobia and transphobia. —
Junkee: Congratulations on The Greatest Menace. It’s such a feat of investigation, of investigation. I’m curious because obviously a massive part of this was talking to older queer people, older gay men, about their untold history and their untold stories. I was wondering if you could speak to why that’s important to you and why it’s important to like us as a wider community?
Patrick Abboud: It’s a great question. I think for a lot of people, Mardi Gras is 1978. You know, for people outside of the queer community, people, even from people within our queer community — Mardi Gras sort of starts in 1978 [with the 78ers], which is factually correct. You know, 1978 was a riot, which became what Mardi Gras is now.
But not so many people know that the fight for equality started much, much earlier, like way back to the fifties, where the story of The Greatest Menace and what we now believe is the only gay prison in the world, which was in a tiny little town in New South Wales and that was 1957. I suppose it’s really hard to go back in time. People tend to yawn when you use the word ‘history’.
So I actually avoided that quite a lot. Simon, my co co-producer who made The Greatest Menace with me, [and I], we were very conscious of that because it’s sad to me that people don’t want to know about the past, but the thing is, how can we go forward if we don’t really understand where the fight for equality actually began? And speaking to a lot of elders from that time, they feel the same. Many of the people I spoke to in the process, over a few years of investigating the gay prison story, a lot of them are frustrated that most people see Mardi Gras and think that that was the kind of pinnacle moment where gay rights became a thing — not true! In fact, if you rewind even further, it started much earlier.
So part of talking to a lot of those elders was about educating myself. I didn’t know before I started looking into the story of the gay prison, how far back the fight for equality actually went. I mean, if you really want to go right back to the 1700s, you know, that’s a whole other story. But really it was, we sort of touched on this in the series, it was actually a group of heterosexual people that started the fight for gay rights, you know? Elizabeth Ried and a whole bunch of other incredible people because gay people couldn’t – it was illegal. So speaking to the elders really educated me, really showed me what I’d missed in terms of queer history pre-1978. Also, I heard from them that some of the frustrations that they feel themselves, feeling like some of their pasts have been erased, which is really unfortunate that some of them felt that way.
So [there] was even more of an impetus to push more with this story and to keep going with it because not only were we uncovering this horrific, horrible thing that happened in the past and these unjust laws that were being enforced, and of course, this government inquiry [which was] trying to eradicate homosexuality off the face of the earth. [That] was a government sanctioned thing that was all incredibly disturbing and it was difficult [to cover], but it was also something I just couldn’t let go of. It’s a story I had to pursue … While I was investigating what happened: why the gay prison was set up, who set it up, what happened inside the prison – all of the things that make up the eight episodes now nine episodes of The Greatest Menace podcast — it was incredible. But the other thing that I really took from it was these great lessons that I was learning along the way from our elders who very rarely speak, you know? People who were in their eighties, some almost early nineties. So it was incredible to be able to meet so many people who had some firsthand experience and firsthand knowledge of what actually happened pre-1978.
A lot of those stories are very difficult — both difficult to hear and difficult for the elders to finally tell them. I’m curious how you took care of yourself in this process, because you encountered not only people with horrible traumatic stories that are directly connected to your identity as a gay man, but also you encountered some pretty frightening people in the course of this investigation. How’d you stop yourself from becoming too frightened or overwhelmed or intimidated?
Yeah, good question. It doesn’t get asked enough. It’s a great question. It’s a trickier one to answer. So by nature, I am quite fearless and incredibly curious, so I will always keep going. I think if you have this sort of innate quality that you want to find out more, and the thing that’s constantly circling my mind is why or why not? The two things that never leave my mind, no matter what the story. So yeah, I mean, even talking to you now, it’s sort of bringing back some of the emotion I felt sitting with some of the subjects, no names mentioned in the series that you’ll hear. It’s pretty confronting when people are sitting in front of you basically telling you that you’re scum and telling you that gay people shouldn’t exist.
I think it’s just over [the] years — more than a decade of doing this — you sort of develop a bit of a thick skin. And often the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is to be an aerobic listener. You know, to really listen to what someone’s saying, no matter how hard it is, no matter how difficult or even how derogatory they may be. No matter how bad that is, you really gotta force yourself and, and try to learn tactics and ways to just sit and listen and absorb that. And it sounds terrible, but a lot of the time those people will end up sort of hanging themselves, if you like. They will end up catching themselves out [with their words]. You often don’t really need to react or to say much if you let them keep going for long enough.
Of course, there comes a limit and you hear that in many interviews in the podcast, when there’s some really inflammatory language that starts to get thrown around and some really kind of hurtful insults, of course you’re gonna stop it then. You’re not gonna sit there and let somebody insult you. But what I’m saying is: often bigotry and bigots and people that are pedalling that stuff will just wind themselves into a corner that they can’t really back out of. If you have done your research really well, and if you have great questions to ask and if you, you know, can refute pretty much everything they’re saying to you with some really good solid fact to back you up, then inevitably they’re gonna back themselves into a corner. So how I take care of myself is I process a lot of that stuff. I take some time.
I worked on The Greatest Menace for over three years, so it’s a long time to make a doco series, possibly the longest time I’ve spent on anything. Actually, it is in fact the longest time I’ve spent on anything. And I think that’s what it takes because [of] the level of nuance in the story, the detail, the level of investigative work that’s required.. it’s insane and I’m pretty obsessive. You have to give yourself time to process. I also have a really beautiful family. I have a gorgeous son. I have an amazing extended family and an incredibly supportive partner. So it’s all those things, you need to take the sort of time out and process what you’ve heard, if it does affect you. Sometimes you don’t realise it affects you until much later.
It’s funny timing that we’re doing this interview. I’m about to do a panel on the importance of looking after mental health in our industry in a few weeks. And I had to answer some questions just this morning about why it is important that we have those conversations really publicly. And I think now more so than ever, the conversation around mental health is really not taboo anymore, which is fantastic. 10 years ago, I probably wouldn’t be able to sit here and tell you what I’ve just told you that it does get tough, it does hit home and it’s really personal.
I’m a gay man, I’m sitting in front of someone telling me that I’m rubbish and that gay people shouldn’t exist. It’s a lot. It is really a lot. But as long as you see that for what it is and you put it up against what you’re uncovering and trying to, you know, really correct some gross injustices of our past, that’s the thing that I focus on because that’s what drives me to keep going.
So you develop a thick skin over time and it sort of falls off you. If it does stick, then the best thing that I could say to anyone is talk about it. You’ve gotta talk to someone about it because it’s the only way you process. And so when I say I process it, that’s what I do. I talk about it, I talk about it with my partner, with people close to me so whatever I feel gets outta my head so it doesn’t settle and enter my heart. Cause that’s when it gets dangerous, when it hits your heart, then you know, it can really hold you back.
In the course of the podcast, you spoke to her about your experiences [following this story] and her experience of you, which resonated a lot with me as someone who also comes from an Lebanese immigrant family. How did that feel for you to sort of unpack those experiences with your mum?
I have never involved my family in anything that I’ve done. I’ve always kept a very healthy distance because my coming out experience was very difficult for my family and for me. And we’ve arrived at a place now where we’re in a really good place and Simon, my co-producer and I researched, wrote and produced a series together. It was a really genuine collaboration and we had this really robust process of I would write the personal stuff out and he would write it back in and then we would argue about it in the most productive, healthy way. And it was a really fantastic working relationship. I consider him one of my dearest friends now. So it’s really hard to do that stuff. It’s very difficult to get personal, but there were so many connections to the story that were just beyond serendipitous. It was too coincidental basically to not make the connection.
So it was a real honour, firstly, to have my mom there and to be able to go to her throughout the process of investigation. And I called her every few days, you know, for a long, long time. It’s almost like she was my executive producer. I’d report back to her and tell her what was going on and you know, you’d understand this as children of Lebanese parents, my mum knew that I was in the town where her relatives were, where our family relatives were. So she was sort of worried the whole time about what are people gonna say and what questions am I gonna get asked? And that’s just a thing, you know, it’s a cultural thing, I suppose.
I knew that was playing on my mum’s mind, so I sort of caught her to reassure her that it’s okay, I’m not telling them too much. It’s not because she’s ashamed, she’s come so far. My mum is the most incredible person on the planet, full stop. I really think she’s the most incredible person I have ever known and will ever know. She’s really extraordinary in terms of her own journey and where she’s come to with me being gay. It just gave me a different perspective. Talking to my mum and having my mum pose questions to me about what I was discovering along the way gave me a whole different insight, inside of a different generation, inside of someone who was a migrant, inside of someone who had never known a gay person till she found out her own son was gay.
So it was really insightful more than anything. My mum’s very smart and she had really great things to say to me. And, you know, we had sort of robust conversations on the phone about what I was discovering or what I would do with it. Her biggest concern was always like, you know, ‘don’t do anything dangerous and what’s gonna happen to you? Are you okay?’ It’s consistent. It’s always just, ‘don’t do anything that’s gonna have an adverse effect on you’. Forget about the story, think about you. That’s all, she’s a mother, you know? It was having my mum’s perspective that helped me or enabled me to go with that personal story to include it. And it’s not something I’ve done before, but I think it was warranted in this series. And Simon really convinced me of that because of the connections to the story and because of the fact that she was able to give this sort of alternative perspective that no one else really could because of our unique personal relationship as mother and son and more so as an Arab mother, you know, and a gay Arab son.
One of your goals is to get NSW police to pardon these men and to issue an apology. How are you going with that process? How are you feeling about this, especially in relation to Pride and what’s happening now with cops being part of Mardis Gras events?
The NSW police and I have had a long relationship. I’ve done many interviews with many representatives [of the NSW police, including] the commissioner in the past [and the] assistant commissioner. The NSW police have apologised for wrongdoings to our community in 2016 and 2018. That has to be acknowledged. But I’ve interviewed Tony Condell on the parade broadcast — I was hosting the Mardi Gras broadcast on SBS. The thing is though, the use of entrapment is something that has never been acknowledged. And it’s really important [that this acknowledgement happens] for a lot of the men that I spoke to who were entrapped by the Vice Squad – [the squad that was] out on the streets, entrapping gay men and arresting them – many of whom ended up in Cooma prison, the gay prison featured in the podcast.
For a lot of those men when I spoke to them, it’s like this dark cloud that kind of hangs over their lives because they have a criminal record. Going through your entire existence with a criminal record for essentially having consensual gay sex is incredibly unjust in my mind. And the laws of the time were unjust. And I think that the NSW police and the NSW Government – we also went to many government institutions — essentially have not acknowledged [that] entrapment. And that’s the point I’m trying to make here. I think that they’re sort of dancing around that and they won’t acknowledge it because it also means that they have to acknowledge that the laws at the time were unjust. So it sort of sets off this ricochet of events that they may be opening Pandora’s box [which] they don’t really wanna open.
But the reality is, for a lot of those people, a lot of those men specifically who were arrested and entrapped, it doesn’t go away. People lost their jobs. Their whole lives were destroyed. In this bonus episode, David, who actually wrote to me after the series came out, was a former inmate. I had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people write to me. It was out of control. And so basically for the year following the release of the series, I was continuing the investigation with Simon, my co-producer, because people kept writing to me and I couldn’t let it go. So one of those people was David. And of course I was quite sceptical in the beginning because I was like, ‘Why would a former inmate write to me wanting to tell their story?’
But this is a man who’s lived his entire life with this horrible burden. And essentially he lived like a fugitive for years because when he was arrested and thrown in prison … he did nine months of [a 12-month] sentence. It destroyed his whole life. He basically changed his identity, changed his name, took off, ran away from Australia, and lived on the run for many, many, many years until he landed in the US. And the process that I went through interviewing him over many months was… it makes me emotional thinking about it was incredibly moving because I realise that journalism and what we do is, for me, it’s all about impact, right? It’s all about making an impact on just one person’s life and hopefully through that many, many, many other lives.
To be able to experience that in real time, changing someone’s life is extraordinary. So going through the process of trying to remove that burden from David’s past was really lengthy in terms of, you know, going through the [expunction] process and trying to get his criminal record erased is a long process. You gotta listen to the episode to find out what happens and how we sort of go through that process but it’s worth the pay-off I promise. But being part of that journey with him was something I will never ever forget. And it just makes me even more impassioned to lobby the NSW Police and the government to acknowledge these horrible injustices of the past because we can’t really go forward. It’s crazy.
WorldPride just happened. I’m so involved in WorldPride events and activities and it’s amazing. I feel like we’re so lucky to have this huge gay Christmas basically, this queer celebration of love. It’s incredible, especially after the fight for same-sex marriage and banning conversion therapy across the nation. So there’s so much progress. It’s really inspiring. But I don’t think we can really have a clear future or the next generation can really be out and proud and stand tall as queer people, if we don’t acknowledge these wrongs of the past because there’s generations above us who paved the way, who are still in pain and government institutions acknowledging those injustices removes that pain. If that pain falls away, then the next generation comes through even stronger, even louder, even queerer. So, that’s the point. It’s not a historic story. It’s not the past, it’s the present. We are that present. We are living the remnants of those who fought for the freedoms that we have today.
So we can’t ignore that and I think we are ignoring it by the New South Wales police and government organisations are ignoring this. And that is something I will continue to fight for, to be acknowledged because I have the voices of all these men in my head. I carry … their experiences in my heart and I value that. Think about what happened in 1978 and the stories, some of the ’78ers tell [of] the physical violence, the abuse and I’ve interviewed many of the ’78ers. So there’s something in acknowledgement and apology that allows people to move on. And I know from going through this one experience with this one man, that it’s worth the fight to make that happen because it is really life changing.
In the wake of The Greatest Menace and its success, what are you most proud of about what you’ve achieved?
I think I’m most proud of the fact that Simon and I were able to persevere with a story that was really difficult to tell. I’m proud of both of us for not giving up. It’s a lot when you’re independent. We weren’t working with a broadcaster, we both left our full-time jobs with a broadcaster for many reasons, one of which was to pursue this story because we’d been sitting on it for quite some time and we knew that it required this level of commitment. And then when it was commissioned by Audible, we were lucky enough to be given the time to do it.
What I’m really most proud of is all of the people that stepped up and spoke out, because I think that takes a lot, it takes a lot to wind back your own life. Like Jackie for example, Jackie’s in episode seven of the series, she’s had such an incredible life which was also sadly marred by her experience of being in the gay prison before she came out and transitioned and is now living happily, very happily, as a trans woman. I feel really proud of Jackie. I feel really proud of David. I feel really proud of so many other people that we spoke to and we couldn’t include everyone in the series. But I think it just takes so much to step forward and share a personal experience no matter what that is.
So I’m really proud of all of the people that gave us time and were willing to share things that they’ve never shared before. So many people that told stories that they’ve never told before and they open this sort of part of their lives again that they probably thought they’d never have to open again. That takes a lot. And they’ve done that as a service to everyone else to the rest of the world and the rest of the queer community too, to really understand what happened at the time.
Think about Fabian [who features in the podcast]. He’s such an extraordinary man and has been through hell, and his life would be very different if he didn’t go through some of those experiences that he went through. He was bashed, he’s been through conversion therapy — really awful things for him to go back into that time and his life as well and to share that, I’m really proud of him because it shows this kind of inner strength.
I think that’s the one thing I love about our queer community broadly. That when shit gets real, we are there. There’s always someone there to catch you. And that’s something I think is really intrinsic to our queer community around the world. It’s like no matter what your difference is, we show up for each other. And I’ve always had that; somebody in the community has had my back and I’ve always made sure I’ve got my friends back. So I’ve got the community’s back. It’s kind of what keeps me going, I suppose, doing this. And I’m proud of the fact that we unearthed a story that talks to where we’re at today. You know, it explains why this feeling of shame is so pervasive for so many queer people universally, and particularly in Australia.
The day that we released the podcast — the 15th of February last year — was about the same day that the Religious Discrimination Bill was being debated in parliament. It’s crazy. In 2017 Corey Bernardi was comparing gay sex to bestiality. So it’s not that historical when you think about things like that. So I’m proud of the fact that we’ve been able to know this incredible story and give people a platform to share experiences that they have been carrying for so long. That helps in some way, I hope, to erase some of that shame because that shame is still so pervasive. The discrimination is pervasive in the halls of power and the shame is equally as pervasive for people who went through those horrible experiences for gay people. So I’m proud of the fact that we’ve done something that hopefully goes some way to removing some of that shame for people when they listen to it and empowering them to be whoever they wanna be, whoever they need to be.
The Greatest Menace is available to listen to for free on Audible now. Catch it here.