In 1958, the NSW government announced a committee of inquiry into the "cause and treatment of homosexuality". "They'd use hunky policemen to entrap gay men by enticing them to have sex, usually in public toilets," Mr Wotherspoon claims. Attempted buggery carried five years, and in a harsher crackdown, a clause was added stating "with or without the consent of such person".īoth Mr Wotherspoon and the podcast cite evidence of police acting as "agents provocateurs" to incite men to commit homosexual acts. The crime of buggery carried a 14-year sentence. "These legislative changes were very wide-ranging in their assault on the civil liberties of men thought to have homoerotic desires." "New clauses included 'soliciting' - a man could be arrested for simply chatting up another man," historian Garry Wotherspoon tells the BBC. They followed pressure from the state's police commissioner, Colin Delaney, who, according to the then attorney general, felt "that remedial legislation an urgent necessity to combat the evil".
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New draconian state laws in 1955 had cracked down on homosexuality. Prisoners at Cooma were incarcerated for being gay, or crimes related to being gay homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in NSW until 1984. He reportedly expressed "pride" at his pet project, telling the Sydney Morning Herald in 1957: "Nowhere in Europe or America did I find any prisons where homosexuals were separated from other prisoners."Ī 1958 press statement from Mr Downing names Cooma prison as "the only penal institution in the world, so far as is known, devoted specifically to the detention of homosexual offenders". Historical documents suggest New South Wales (NSW) Justice Minister Reg Downing took credit for establishing the prison.
"You wouldn't bunk two in together… that was one of our biggest problems - keeping an eye on them," says Mr New, now 94. It's also why prisoners were in single cells, he said.
He understood these as attempts to convert them: "They were trying to get them on the 'right' track… They reckoned they could cure them."
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He told Audible's podcast series The Greatest Menace that psychologists and psychiatrists were "coming in all the time" after the jail reopened in 1957. "īut another former employee, Cliff New, claims it was for less compassionate reasons.
"They were at risk of violence at bigger prisons like Long Bay. We'd red stamp homosexual prisoners with 'N/A': non-association with mainstream prisons," he tells the BBC. He believed inmates were sent there for their own safety. Les Strzelecki, 66, started as a custodial services officer at the prison in 1979, and later set up the Corrective Services Museum in Cooma. Until now, even some prison staff say they didn't know the real reason gay prisoners were segregated there. Not only was it reopened in 1957 with the specific purpose of incarcerating men for "homosexual offences", it was also said to be used as a human testing ground with the ultimate goal of eradicating homosexuality from society.Ĭooma's jail is believed to have been the only known homosexual prison in the world, according to a new podcast. Set in one of the coldest and windiest small towns in Australia, Cooma prison holds a dark secret.