“You had to be very careful, act butch until you found the ones like you,” he said.Ī veteran of World War Two, the Australian soldier said he had been held in a POW camp in Greece and then in Germany. He told the magazine that when his friends joined up, he joined up too.
While his account can't be verified today, many of the details in his story are corroborated by other sources. “There were thousands of ex-servicemen who were camp, I think I went through 300 of them myself,” he told the magazine, a copy of which is preserved by the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives. “As an RSL member, ex-POW and serviceman – I apparently have news for you,” the unnamed man told Outrage magazine in 1988. Less well known - but far more revealing - was the angry rejoinder delivered by a fellow veteran. “I don’t know where all these gays and poofters have come from,” he was later famously quoted as saying, “I don’t remember a single one from World War Two.” “Not even there,” came the response, according to City Rhythm.ĭays earlier Ruxton had told broadcaster Derryn Hinch that if his son was queer he would shoot him, the magazine reported. There was a suggestion that the group instead lay the wreath at a tree near the shrine.
