Past events at Knox Grammar
Part of the Imitation Game takes place in the school that Alan Turing attended. There is no mention of gay teachers but it is very likely there was at least one.
In the first week of March 2015 the Australian Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse heard evidence from ex-students and teachers of Knox Grammar, a private, Presbyterian Church affiliated, boys' school in Sydney.
The Child Sex Abuse Royal Commission has been running for many months, previously looking at orphanages and other childcare institutions. This is the first elite private school investigated.
Knox Grammar is in easy walking distance from Normanhurst Boys' High, the State school I attended. A number of my friends and acquaintances were educated at Knox. Interestingly the head of the Royal Commission, The Honourable Justice Peter McClellan, is an 'old boy' of my school. Both schools have a number of notable alumni.
The Royal Commission has heard from men who believe that they have suffered lifelong disability as a result of the activities of paedophile teachers at Knox and their failure to achieve their life goals is due to this childhood abuse.
It seems that during Headmaster Dr Ian Paterson's time at Knox at least one openly gay teacher gathered around him certain 'special boys', several of whom have now come forward to recount how they were groomed as sex objects with graphic recollections of sex in a darkroom and of another being shown pornography featuring bestiality, preliminary to explicit demands of a similar nature.
Homosexuality was still illegal at the time that Petersen became headmaster at Knox. But times were changing and decriminalisation would occur five years later. He is now is accused of 'turning a blind eye' to gay goings on.
Of course a man can be gay without being a paedophile but in a boys' school there is a fine line, depending on the age of consent or adulthood. Until the Age of Majority Act 1974 boys were not legally adults until twenty-one, long after leaving high school. But the age of consent for heterosexual intercourse was sixteen. A number of these things changed during Paterson's tenure, that began in 1969.
As alluded to above, at my old school, Normanhurst Boys' High there was a prominent gay teacher who had a similar coterie of 'special boys'. Some of these were 'Library Prefects' and others acted in his little supplementary plays to the main event each year: usually toga-clad scenes from Coriolanus or Julius Cesar.
After one such play my brother, who is not gay, and several other students involved in producing that year's play decided to 'crash' the teacher's home, to discover a fellow student in flagrante - wearing a hurriedly thrown-on dressing gown.
At least one other teacher was thought to be gay by the boys. On what grounds I don't know. Presumably our Headmaster, Tom Pearson, was as guilty then of 'turning a blind eye' as Paterson was a decade later.
But this was nothing unusual at the time. Around 1984 a close friend bought a unit in Stanmore from a gay teacher at prestigious boys' school nearby. She met both the previous occupants and declared them 'very nice'. The teacher's partner had been a boy at the school.
In the case of Knox, thirty year old recollections have been accepted as evidence and the more salacious claims have been repeated by the media in Australia and even Internationally.
In Australia reliable surveys have found that 2.5% of Australian men are committed homosexuals or bisexual. This equates to twenty to thirty boys in a large school. Further, school teaching, like the priesthood , is a profession that seems to be attract gay men.
So to the headmasters of large boys' schools, gay boys and gay teachers were and are are a fact of life.
Ian Paterson, once widely held to be an excellent headmaster, has now been held responsible by witnesses and Council to the Royal Commission for not putting a stop to gay teachers abusing the students.
Paterson's reputation is now in tatters.
Teachers collecting little groups of 'special' students is nothing new and in some eyes this is the hallmark of a good teacher.
In the early 1970's a movie: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie explored similar issues between a teacher and her students. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie made Maggie Smith a star. The purpose of the original book by Murial Spark was to show how a teacher could destroy the future lives of her 'special students'. But I was absolutely amazed to find how many saw Maggie Smiths' interpretation of the character to be 'inspirational'. Later, Robin Williams reprised a similar but less sinister teacher as John Keating in the movie: Dead Poets Society.
In the period from the mid 1950's until decriminalisation, there was a great deal of pressure on liberally minded people to 'turn a blind eye' to gay goings on, because the alternative was to call in the police, with the accompanying hew and cry, and to see an otherwise excellent teacher dragged off to jail as a sodomite. The gay boys involved would very likely have acquired police records that would deny them many future career choices.
As I have indicated elsewhere at the time I took a very dim view of all these goings on and I certainly thought that gay boys and men were people to steer clear of. It took me years to have a normal relationship with men I knew to be gay and to my shame I once cut a good friend completely after he 'came out'.
As a result I was quite capable of avoiding the attentions of our most 'out there' gay teacher, even from my first day in the high school library when I was invited, with a little flounce, to: "Come this way I have a lovely book for you to have a look at."
It makes me wonder about the naivety of boys who were drawn in. And given the extreme sanctions that could apply, the degree to which the teachers involved believed themselves to be taking a risk that the boy they were seducing would complain.
But then we all know of men who have risked everything when motivated by sexual desire. This is often a theme in fictions like The Bonfire of the Vanities but it often happens in real life, as in the case of a 'real life' affair between a colleague and his personal assistant that destroyed his career.
Again there is often a fine line. Many successful marriages have their genesis in such initially unequal power/work relationships including, apparently, the gay couple who previously owned my friend's unit.
I'm concerned that we are asked to take it as given that high-school-age children or personal assistants are always entirely innocent and are always the victims of unequal relationships. I seem to remember a prominent female Queensland politician who was discovered to have had an affair with a student when she was a teacher.
My own children were beginning to make their own life choices during high school, including one of my youngest daughter's friends who was already declaring himself gay long before any of them had their first adult relationship.
Ian Paterson seems to have been singled out from among many headmasters who were trying to do their best for all concerned, navigating a social and legal minefield in a time of rapidly changing values.