1964: Keeping Sexual Deviants Cowed
January 23, 2021
By AHNZ
Today in history, 23 January, 1964, six teenagers killed a man and left his body in Hagley Park, Christchurch. All the kids (15-17yo) were junior tradesmen: A butcher, spray painter, baker, telegrapher, builder, labourer. There was no question whether they’d beaten the man, they admitted it. All were tried together for manslaughter. All were acquitted.
Working class Honour Culture men like this of all time periods go to lengths to posture and signal their masculinity. A fairly concrete way to do so is to signal what out-group they most certainly don’t identify with by attacking it physically. So, that Thursday night, the boys beat a homosexual to death in the park. “Gaybashing” was almost a popular sport in the 1950s and 60s so these early Baby Boomers were performing what many considered a social duty. Keeping sexual deviants cowed and on the run was considered desirable because, while such people were breaking the law we could not expect the police to catch them all could we? Bashing would do. The victim was not supposed to die but Allan Aberhart did.
Aberhart was indeed a sexual deviant. The Government always achieves the opposite of what it sets out to do and its explicit policy was to repress the ‘pathology’ of homosexuality. Up to a decade after the killing homosexuals were still being sent to our prisons for expressing their gender and this was only taken off the books in 1986. Until 1941 the penalty was flogging or whipping. As a direct result, the gay world was driven to the fringes and made weird, risky, and dangerous despite the fact that homosexuality exists in all cultures and always has. Instead of having a normal, healthy, safe social environment the homosexuals of Aberhart’s era hid in the proverbial closet. The State’s stigmatisation was a self-fulfilling prophesy because it created the deviant danger to society it claimed to be defending against. Aberhart was, indeed, “cruising” for promiscuous encounters with other gay men in Christchurch public toilets which made him the ‘lawful’ prey of the Boomer kids who ended his life.
Boomers are an especially self-entitled generation with a great shortage of empathy for others. Aberhart, as part of the Silent Generation, was a more sensitive and creative type. He was a draper who could help you with your curtains and fabrics and sewing materials and understand colour matching. Thus, Allen was everything the butchers, builders, and bakers out hunting for gay men to bash disowned about themselves and sought to crush. When they caught him in the act of “cruising” and in turn were sexually propositioned it was never going to end without violence.
Aberhart had been having a rough time leading up to his death. He still lived in his family territory of Marlborough where his German ancestors had settled in 1842. In a fairly short space of time his old grandad had died followed by his father. Then, he was arrested for indecent assault and sent to prison for which I assume he lost his manager’s job. Rebounding from all this loss, Aberhart went out looking for a hit of delinquency and suffered a fatal hit of another kind instead.
The world has improved a great deal since these HC Boomers and Deviant Homosexuals clashed with each other in the past. Both of them are abominations that mark our culture to this day as living history passing on bad habits and bad practises (eg violent, eg predatory) to people alive today even though the Statist programs that created them have finally been put to rest.
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Image ref. SCOTT HAMMOND/STUFF; Marlborough Express
Image ref. Hagley Park; AHNZ Archives
Image ref. Tour vehicle in Botanic Gardens, Christchurch Star Archive (1970); Canterbury Stories
11 thoughts on "1964: Keeping Sexual Deviants Cowed"
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Biased crap at it’s worst.
Go on?
Good article about a dreadful crime but to label a whole generation as self entitled and lacking empathy is ignorant. This is the generation that protested the Vietnam war, apartheid, women’s rights etc. There is good and bad in all generations and always will be.
Thanks for your comment. To take one of your proofs, what was empathetic and supportive-to-others about the apartheid protest? I don’t want to be left ignorant.
To protest the oppression of a whole sector of a society based on the colour of their skin is surely expressing empathy and support. It was not all about a bunch of rugby players going to play a few games!
“To protest the oppression of a whole sector of a society based on the colour of their skin is surely expressing empathy and support.”
I don’t believe so. Where’s the empathy for the South Africans who created their own homeland and wished to keep it? That’s unheard of; Has no pulse at all. Empathy as a virtue does not play favours and support just one group while dehumanising another. The Boomers picked a faction after their own preferences (rugby or anti-aphartied) rather than stop to connect/feel/understand or sympathise with both parties.
There was no brokering of peace or mutual understanding ever contemplated, hence the bombings and invasions and bashings and glass….
Do you think the Vietnam War protests were any different or more of the same lack of empathy toward the opposing view? I’ve been searching high and searching low for Boomer empathy but can’t see it here either.
“Boomers picked a faction after their own preferences (rugby or anti-aphartied) rather than stop to connect/feel/understand or sympathise with both parties.”
Are you for real? You are seriously advancing a Trumpist “there are good people on both sides” perspective on Apartheid? And you are criticising the anti-Apartheid movement not “stop(ping) to connect/feel/understand or sympathise with” those who were enforcing the Apartheid regime on black South Africans? What the hell form of anarchism do you subscribe to? That is just so whack!
Combine this with your response to my comment about homophobia being about sexuality, not gender, and you show yourself as an immature political illiterate who is incapable of learning from other people’s comments.
“… homosexuals were still being sent to our prisons for expressing their gender”. No, they were being sent to prison for expressing their sexuality.
You’re not disagreeing only specifying how I am legally correct. Sexual expression is a form of gender expression after all.
But I didn’t just want a statement that was legally correct but also one that emphasised the criminalisation of morals.
Okay Doomer.
David,
“Are you for real? You are seriously advancing a Trumpist “there are good people on both sides” perspective on Apartheid?”
What I wrote is that there are people to empathise with on both sides and the Boomers failed at that. Surely you can conceive of this if not partake of it?
“And you are criticising the anti-Apartheid movement [for not empathising with] those who were enforcing the Apartheid regime on black South Africans? What the hell form of anarchism do you subscribe to? That is just so whack!”
My old Peace Studies tutor can generate a better argument than ‘wack’.
“..you show yourself as an immature political illiterate who is incapable of learning from other people’s comments.”
Calling me a wack Trumpist political illiterate with a learning disabiilty and expecting me to be convinced of your point of view was a mistake. You’re not in a faculty meeting. What else can you show me besides name-calling?