Being gay was still illegal in New South Wales back then, with the police response being both unfair and extremely brutal. However it did start a conversation in the public sphere as many of the public were quite horrified of the violence the police used. Indeed Peter Murphy was bashed by the police at Darlinghurst police station to near death.
But it didn't end there. Fairfax news published the names of those arrested by the police that night. It resulted in people losing their jobs and suicides.
BTW police homophobia didn't end with the 1979 Mardi Gras, but continued well into the 80's and 90's unchecked, even taking part in bashings at gay Sydney beats, and resulting in 88 gay deaths in the late 80's and early 90's that were never properly investigated and today have now had to be reopened. Gays were flung over Bondi cliffs by teenage gangs and the police didn't care, didn't investigate, and blamed the gays as the "deserved it". Many of those killers would still be alive today, unpunished for their crimes. The homophobia is being addressed ongoingly, but it was just the other recent year that western Sydney police were brought in to police the Mardi Gras, resulting in police violence against Mardi Gras attendees. One was clobbered by 5 police just for crossing the road at the wrong time.
I've put a short clip from Peter Murphy describing his police bashing in 1978 first off. The following YouTube videos are the 1998 documentary in full, uploaded years ago on a little known YouTube account.
Yes that's a pain to go through each one like that watching on the PC, but technology has come quite a way in the last 20 years. You can download the YouTube videos to your hard drive using this site https://y2mate.com/ Simply copy the YouTube URL and past it into where it says "paste link here". After a few seconds the download options will come up underneath. Click on download to the right and it will put the video to your download folder.
Once you have them all downloaded, put them in a folder and transfer to your external hard drive that either plugs in to your TV or the media player you have plugged in to your TV. You'll have to rename the start of the files with different numbers or they'll be out of order, starting from 1-7 not 8-14, also as they're not HD you'll also have to name each file as the name isn't transferred when it downloads. Then individual files should play concurrently going to the next one as each finishes by itself. And there you go, relax and watch the whole movie on the telly :)
YouTube downloads very quick BTW.
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