"It Is One of Those Things That Nobody Can Explain": Medicine, Homosexuality, and the Australian Criminal Courts during World War II

At about eleven o'clock on a Friday night in late August 1943, Detective Raetz and Constable Clifford were patrolling the streets of Rockhampton, a port town in the state of Queensland in northeast Australia, when they heard two male voices echo from a darkened lane. Their suspicions aroused, one of the officers flashed his torch in the direction of the conversation, catching a glimpse of twenty-three-year-old Walter D. and sixteen-year-old John K. in a compromising position.¹ The officers rushed to the scene as the man and youth attempted quickly to rearrange their clothes. After speaking with the suspects, the officers arrested the two on a charge of gross indecency, and both were convicted three months later. In his submissions to the bench, Walter's defense counsel, Mr. Murray, asked the court for leniency in light of his client's previous good behavior. "His character is all right," Justice Brennan responded, "but what about this disease?" "It is one of those things that nobody can explain," Murray responded.²

The judge's realization that Walter's behavior might be rationalized medically and the barrister's suggestion that no one could explain it or, by implication, treat it raise pertinent questions about the intersection of Australian medical knowledge and the courts in the 1940s. Part of the problem is the coexistence of two allied but competing scientific disciplines, that is, the forensic and the psychological sciences, and the different techniques each used to identify and understand male homosexuality. Their divergent practices and the knowledge they created speak more widely to overlapping models of sexual desire in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Across these years, forensic scientists continued to ascertain the commission of physical penetration for the courts, reading the male body for signs of passivity, as they had done at least since the nineteenth century. Their corporeal detection, however, paid little regard to etiology or management. This was the province of psychiatrists: specialists who were trained to identify and treat men with a deviant object choice, to borrow from Freud, but who struggled to reconcile acquired and innate forms of sexual desire and practice with older notions of gender inversion. The fractured modeling and composite theories layered over decades past meant that many psychological experts found it difficult to proffer with any authority an immutable taxonomy or diagnosis of what homosexuality actually was, even if their forensic colleagues could ascertain that the act itself had taken place.

This problem was not uniquely Australian. Antipodeans had long been extracting and applying influential models and techniques coming out of Europe and the United States, and the difficulties encountered by local specialists were exemplary of knowledge and practices elsewhere. The derivative nature of their thinking, then, actually presents a relatively straightforward, even naive, account of the complex methods emerging from the northern hemisphere without being fundamentally different. As a specific case study, wartime Queensland allows us to dissect the relationship between the law and medical discourse with specific reference to the transnational formation of scientific knowledge and institutional practice—the exchange between British medical thinking and American psychiatry, on the one hand, and Australian exceptionalism, on the other. The state's 1944 Committee of Inquiry Regarding Sexual Offences is one site where a number of competing scientific ideas were articulated and contested in the context of World War II; the documents and discussion generated here act as point of encounter and exchange between very different conventions and technologies. This evidence allows us to track the knowledge formation of homosexuality— and its relationship to criminality and medical science—with precision and a level of detail that is unusual.

The following discussion is based on 151 criminal charges of male-to-male sex that came before the Queensland Supreme Court between 1939 and 1948. The extant case files, which are rich and detailed, suggest how international discourses might have been mapped onto strategies and techniques employed in the Australian clinic and courtroom. The argument also draws on newspaper coverage and the...