CAMP's queer child: a biography of Australia's first gay counselling service, Phone-A-Friend (1972 - 1983)

On 13 April 1973, Australia’s first gay counselling service was born and named ‘Phone-A-Friend’. Throughout the 1970s, the service operated as a subgroup of the gay rights organisation, ‘Campaign Against Moral Persecution’ or ‘CAMP’. To date, there is no substantive history of Phone-A-Friend. Rather, Phone-A-Friend has received brief mention in histories of CAMP and gay activism more broadly. In these histories, Phone-A-Friend’s meanings have been foreclosed by our field’s implicit attachments to notions of ‘real politics’, as inherited from activists who opposed or left Phone-A-Friend at some point in the 1970s. According to the organising distinctions we have inherited from these activists, Phone-A-Friend has not warranted further historical consideration as anything more than a ‘welfare’ service.

This thesis is a biography of Phone-A-Friend, reappraising the service’s extensive records held at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. However, these records have not lent themselves to a traditional biography of the service. Rather, the records left by Phone-A-Friend suggest uncertainty and improvisation throughout the service's life, as the service navigated burgeoning ways of theorising homosexual identities and politics. Accordingly, this thesis is a queer biography of a service in permanent flux. It specifically engages Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of the queer child and ‘growing sideways’ to account for the unexpected ways that Phone-A-Friend navigated the 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, this thesis reveals the unique historical insights we might gain by re-turning to archival material outside of the organising distinctions we have used to frame histories of gay activism in 1970s and 1980s Australia.