Flappers and Felons: Rethinking the Criminal Law and Homosex in Interwar Australia, 1920–1939

In late 1930, Sydney’s scurrilous Arrow newspaper published an extraordinary expose on the city’s sexual underworld. At an imposing, old-fashioned and roomy house in the western suburbs, a group of sixty ‘male flappers’ had gathered for one of the city’s premier queer soirees: crowning the ‘Queen of the “Kamp Kult”’. An undercover journalist had infiltrated this reportedly annual event by ‘devious means’ and two days before Christmas his eyewitness account on ‘Organised Male Depravity’ hit the front page.1 And organized it was. The article described in astonishing detail the gendered rituals of contemporary Australian subcultures and the ways that men made meaning of their same-sex lives and lifestyles. Steeped in pageantry and spectacle, this queer coronation brought together ‘royalty’ and spectators from across the nation as vows were taken and hymns sung. An officiating ‘Bishop’ presided over the celebrations, taking his cues from a sacred book embossed with a resplendent letter ‘K’.