Couple 'overwhelmed' by NSW Premier's apology for laws criminalising homosexual acts

The apology, delivered in Parliament on behalf of the NSW government on June 6, marks the 40^th anniversary of homosexual acts being decriminalised in New South Wales.

Mr Goulden was overwhelmed with emotion, as didn't just grow up with those laws in place - he was arrested because of them.

He's 78 years old today, but still remembers realising he was gay when he hit puberty, and the way life was back then.

"The first three years of my adolescence were in the 1950s, and let me tell you: the 1950s in Australia are something that should never be repeated anywhere, on any planet in the universe," he told the Gazette.

"Everything was just so closed up, people didn't talk about anything. It was a very sort of macho era."

His father died when he was seven, and his mother raised him as a single parent. He quickly learned the need to put up a cover to mask who he was.

"Basically what you learnt to do was hide. You'd spend most of your effort hiding the fact that you're gay, that you're interested in your own sex not the opposite," Mr Goulden said.

As he got older he started having encounters with men. One day, with a free afternoon for New Years Eve, Mr Goulden met a man at a "local beat" who said he knew somewhere they could go.

In the midst of being intimate, the two men were caught by police. Mr Goulden lost his job with the public service when the case went to court.

"That's fairly standard. My luck kicked in, I suppose, because my solicitor... immediately sent me off to this psychiatrist, who wrote a glowing recommendation that I was a prime candidate for conversion to heterosexuality," he said.

Mr Goulden was put on a good behaviour bond and was ordered to continue seeing the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist attributed his homosexuality to an overprotective mother and absent father.

He was prescribed pills to prevent him from being physically intimate. He flushed them down the toilet.

"[The psychiatrist] put me on those bloody awful pills that stop you from being able to do anything physically, sort of a chemical castration. But they don't do a thing for your mind," he said.

Years went by, and Mr Goulden had a few boyfriends before meeting John in 1969. They've been together ever since.

The pair were part of the first Australian Mardi Gras in 1978. They moved to Wentworth Falls together in 2001, and finally married in 2018.

"I said to John afterwards 'I think our family and friends were more enthusiastic than we were'. Because as far as we're concerned, we've been married for 55 years," Mr Goulden said.

To this day the couple are still affected by the history of laws and attitudes against gay people in Australia.

"It's still fairly awkward for us to be affectionate in public... because you've hidden it for so long, it's really hard to break that conditioning. And of course when you had to hide it, there was definitely a damn good reason why," Mr Goulden said.

So to sit in parliament hearing strong language against the laws from the lawmakers themselves, and hearing the people who worked to change those laws acknowledged, was an overwhelming experience.

"I felt quite emotional over that as well. You don't realise until you sort of get to the end of it, you're retired, just how much emotion and energy it took out of you to be constantly battling that political fight," he said.

In the speech, the premier said: "We are truly sorry. We're sorry for every person convicted under legislation that should never have existed.

"These cruel laws could have been written in a single sentence across 22 words in the Crimes Act. But the real story of the legislation was written through the lives of the people that were targeted."

Mr Goulden said he considered the speeches from Chris Minns and (in the Upper House) Penny Sharpe "excellent", and that it's one more step towards achieving "absolute, full equality".