These are all around where I live. It's ironic that eastern Sydney, being one of the most gay friendly cities in the world, would be the focus of so many unsolved gay hate bashings and killings. Unfortunately it was because the cops were homophobes and looked the other way. Now they're looking back into those crimes to see if they can solve them as the murderers and thugs involved haven't seen justice for what they did.
It also shows I think the struggle of Sydney's gays in past years to get to where things are now.
The horror they must have felt in their final moments would have been close to unimaginable, but for the dozens of men attacked and killed late at night at beachside cliff-tops and secluded parks across Sydney from the 1970s to the early 1990s, justice may be edging nearer for the loved ones they left behind as police and the local community slowly front up to the reality of an epidemic of gay-hate killings.
As NSW Police this week confirmed for the first time it was widening a review into the mysterious disappearances and deaths of a number of gay men across the state, the family of American maths genius Scott Johnson – now widely believed to have been the victim of a fatal gay-hate attack near Manly Beach in December 1988 – told the Star Observer many of the suspected crimes would have been solved if homophobic attitudes had not been so prevalent in the police force in decades past.
“It is a sad likelihood that police then knew or guessed what was going on but turned a blind eye because of their own prejudice, or because these victims had no voice,” Johnson’s sister Rebecca Johnson Arledge said. “Imagine if the victims had been almost any other group – 80 or 90 women, or children, or even blue-collar workers who were attacked and killed every few weeks. The public outcry would have been deafening; the police would not have rested.” more
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