This morning, I received a phone call from Arts Law Australia. I’d contacted them, thinking it might be sensible to have an expert eye cast over my current writing project, given the subject matter. That subject being underage male rent boys in Piccadilly Circus in the early 1970s.
Australian “child abuse material” legislation is draconian by design. It is drafted to leave not a single loophole. So, underage male sex workers? Ouch. That’s the sort of territory where the far right and far left, the religious, the LGBT, and sections of feminism could all, for their own reasons, briefly lock arms and call for your execution.
Honestly, you do begin to wonder why you bother.
The book is in two parts. The first is the story itself — already filtered, pared back, and edited down from what could have been a full-length novel into a 17,000-word novelette. Something an average reader could get through in a few hours. All the most dangerous material, all the sections that point fingers at particular subcultures, removed. No one named. Any detail that could possibly lead to identification altered or excised.
The second part is neurological: current research on trauma, grooming, and long-term effects. Material that could actually be useful — especially for survivors, parents, educators, and mental health workers. I expect nothing from this project other than the satisfaction that it might help a small number of people who genuinely need the information.
And yet.
I think of a 17-year-old gay boy who left his home in a wealthy Sydney suburb, went to the city, and two weeks later jumped from the roof of a hotel. I think of 14-year-old Jason Swift — I can name him because there was extensive media coverage — raped and murdered by six men and dumped in a field outside London. I think of similar cases here in Australia: a 16-year-old homeless boy drawn into prostitution, later found dead beside a Sydney canal.
An American journalist once showed video footage of an interview he conducted with a 17-year-old rent boy in Houston. The boy described accepting a drink from a client, blacking out, and waking up suspended in handcuffs while the man waited with a whip. A week after that interview, the journalist said, the boy’s mutilated body was found dumped in a park.
I could go on. But it’s already clear that anyone who dares to look seriously at the victimisation of males — especially underage males — runs into a brick wall.
My impression from the call this morning was that assistance was being refused, politely, with plausible deniability carefully preserved. I’ve been here before. Others researching the Piccadilly Circus scene of the 1970s have told me the same thing: Freedom of Information requests denied, files sealed, silence maintained.
We know there was a cover-up. A well-known London pimp was under investigation. He threatened to release his client list to the media and was shot outside his front door. Le Monde later reported on a young man who effectively triggered a #MeTooGay moment in France; two weeks later he was found hanged in his student dormitory. The investigation was “inconclusive”. Whether murdered or pressured into suicide, the result was the same.
So what does one do with a book like this?
I told the person this morning they could close the case. There are other jurisdictions. In many of them I could reverse a lot of the editing and spell things out in plain English — for boys naïve enough to chase quick money and thrills, for parents, for educators, and for social and mental health workers who don’t feel the need to normalise what is, quite plainly, abuse.
And then there’s today’s other news.
The Bondi shooting was a tragedy clearly designed to drive a wedge between communities. And yet it failed. It failed because a 43-year-old Muslim father of two, Ahmed al-Ahmed, intervened and saved lives. Jewish lives. His courage blew a hole clean through the hate project.
Sometimes, against all expectations, decency still turns up and refuses the script.
I suppose that’s the uncomfortable position this book now occupies as well.