A lifetime wait for change

News that Canberra is poised to amend laws that discriminate against same-sex couples was met with widespread celebration this week. But for many elderly gays, the announcement, although welcome, comes too late to make much difference.

FOR 50 years Richard James suppressed his natural self and tried hard to act straight. Then he abandoned his double life. His 35-year marriage ended. He was consumed with guilt. He hadn't been honest with others, nor himself. But he had grown up in a time when being honest about his sexuality could have had grave consequences. A time when sex between men was illegal.

One day, back in the 1970s before he came out, he had been arrested for "loitering with intent". Or, in his own words, "cruising". But he was lucky. "I had a friend who was a solicitor and he got me through it very quietly and I was put on a good behaviour bond for a year," he says.

James is now 77, and being gay in Australia is a vastly different reality. But even for those born since sex between men was decriminalised at different times throughout the country (in Victoria it was 1981), discrimination has remained a fact of life — and a matter of law.

High Court judge Michael Kirby this week used his own personal relationship to highlight discrimination still faced by same-sex couples. ABC radio's AM program reported him as telling a forum in Sydney, Ageing Disgracefully: "If I were to die, (my partner) would get nothing … although he's been with me for 39 years — whereas if he were a wife or husband or if he were a de facto partner, he would have a full judicial pension, which is not small bickies."

 A lifetime wait for change
The Age, Australia