Discomforting politics: 1970s activism and the spectre of sex in public

In both scholarly histories and public memory, the 1970s are understood as the decade in which gays and lesbians ‘came out’ in Australian social, political and cultural life. After the stultifying heterosexism and homophobia of postwar Australia began to loosen their grip in the later 1960s, a visible and increasingly confident social movement directed towards the ‘liberation’ of some dissident sexualities and practices from legal prohibition and social and legal prejudice took shape.2 The activists who propelled these transformations were not alone; the 1970s were a decade in which the forces of sexual, women’s and gay liberation interacted to remake norms of intimate life, not least through public discussion of ideas and practices once seen as either private or shameful. These respective political vocabularies all shared an assumption that the uneven but potent privatisation of sexual and intimate life maintained