The Gay Gang murders : illegitimate victims, disposable bodies

Abstract

This thesis undertakes a discourse analysis of the mainstream and gay media, legal and popular narratives pertaining to a set of gay bashings, murders and disappearances of gay men from the Bondi-Tamarama region in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, during the 1980s and early 1990s. With the exception of one murder, these events - dubbed the 'gay gang murders' - were not properly investigated until more than a decade had passed when a detective noted a number of similarities between the cases. A task force named 'Operation Taradale' was established to examine links between the suspicious deaths - originally dismissed as suicides, accidents or one-off attacks - and Sydney gay hate gangs which existed at the time. Following this investigation a Coronial Inquest was staged and numerous findings and recommendations proposed. A number of key institutions, namely, the law, the judiciary and the media, failed to respond appropriately to these crimes at the time they were committed. This suggested to me that the victims were not held in very high regard by wider social bodies nor were their losses publicly acknowledged. Yet, by the turn of the 21st Century, this situation had shifted dramatically with the New South Wales Police Service and the New South Wales State Coroner's Court investigating these crimes and mainstream and gay media sites providing regular and serious coverage. As a case study of a series of gay hate- crimes, which charts three decades of social and institutional changes, this thesis operates as an example of how gay victims of violent crimes are discursively constructed and institutionally recognized within Australian culture. The shifts in institutional responses and public consciousness towards the victims of the 'gay gang murders' can also be applied, on a more general level and in varying degrees, to other Australian victims of anti-gay violence. Thus, by bringing this particular set of events to prominence, I exemplify wider social trends involving the status and position of gay men in Australian culture from the 1980s to the current day, 2009. This analysis demonstrates how discursive knowledges - the law and the media - and cultural understandings of sexuality and masculinity produce different ways to read and make sense of these crimes.