Gay Australian Takes Complaint to U.N. Panel--and Wins : Tasmania: Condemnation of state’s sodomy laws stirs fierce debate. Island rebuffs committee’s call for change.

On Christmas Day, 1991, Nick Toonen, a 29-year-old homosexual who lives on Australia’s remote island of Tasmania, filed an unusual complaint with the United Nations.

Toonen wrote to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva that Tasmania’s 80-year-old laws banning “intercourse against nature” constituted a threat to his life and liberty, violated his privacy and led to constant vilification and threats of physical violence.

To the surprise of many Australians and the consternation of others, the U.N. commission announced in March that it agreed with Toonen. It called on Tasmania, one of Australia’s six states, to repeal its sodomy laws.

But the Tasmanian government has defiantly refused to change the laws. The dispute has led the Australian federal government to draw up legislation overriding the state’s laws, prompted an economic boycott of the island by outraged groups and embarrassed many Australians, whose country has a reputation for tolerance toward gay men and lesbians.

After all, Australia was one of the first countries in the world to allow homosexuals to join the military. It allows its ambassadors abroad to live in openly homosexual relationships and even has, in Sydney’s state of New South Wales, an “anti-vilification” law that makes it a criminal offense to make a derogatory remark about gay people.

Australia’s five other states repealed their sodomy laws more than a decade ago. The country now has gay hotels, gay resorts, even gay grocery stores. When Australia’s state television company broadcast Sydney’s gay and lesbian Mardi Gras parade in prime time on a Sunday night earlier this year, it recorded the highest ratings ever received by the network.

But Australians are just as suspicious of their federal commonwealth government in Canberra as Americans are of Washington. Criminal laws in Australia are the exclusive domain of state parliaments, and there is no constitutional provision for federal review except in rare cases involving conflicts with foreign powers.

The government of Tasmania, which initially defended the laws as a public health measure, is increasingly portraying the dispute as a states’ rights issue, which has far more popular appeal. “I want to see the states unite to stop the commonwealth government from abusing its external affairs powers,” Tasmanian Premier Ray Groom announced during a recent visit to Sydney.

The debate over Tasmania’s sodomy laws has also stirred up painful memories of Australia’s turbulent past. Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land and its inhabitants as “demons,” was established as Britain’s overseas prison colony, an antipodean Devil’s Island. As long ago as 1843, according to the historian Robert Hughes, author of “The Fatal Shore,” an account of early Australia, settlers on the island tried to halt the transportation of convicts from England, citing fears of rampant homosexuality among the prisoners.

“There was a feeling among middle-class settlers that Tasmania was permanently stained by this unnatural vice. It’s the descendants of those settlers who dominate the state parliament today,” said Rodney Croome, one of the founders of Tasmania’s Gay Law Reform Group, who until recently was Toonen’s lover. It was Croome’s idea to bring the case before the United Nations after efforts to repeal the laws twice failed to pass the state parliament.

Because of Tasmania’s history and remoteness, many urban Australians are tempted to dismiss it as a land of rednecks. But it is in fact quite diverse, divided by an invisible line that seems to separate the more conservative farm belt of the north from the more cosmopolitan south, which includes Hobart.

It is a strikingly beautiful land of 480,000 where the hottest political issue, after the question of gay law reform, is whether shops should be allowed to remain open on Saturday afternoons, which is now prohibited by law. There is a law still on the books making it a criminal offense for a man to dress up in women’s clothes after nightfall.

In recent years, the police in Tasmania have appeared reluctant to prosecute homosexuals; indeed, Croome and three others have turned themselves in to the police in hopes of provoking a court case. Official statistics show 46 criminal convictions for sodomy involving both men and women since 1976, with punishment ranging from a fine to 2 1/2 years in prison.

Toonen, who has never been charged under the disputed laws, said in an interview that the question of prosecution is irrelevant to the harm the laws do. “Whenever the issue comes up in areas such as service, the response is always, ‘It’s against the law.’ This places a stigma on all gay and lesbian people,” he said. “The law has an effect on the way you feel about yourself.”

Toonen, who runs a voluntary agency in Hobart, said he agreed to file the complaint because he had grown up in Tasmania and was committed to remaining on the island. In the past, most gay men and lesbians left for Sydney, a gay mecca much like San Francisco, as soon as they could, he said.

“The big issue is transformation of attitudes in Tasmania,” Croome added. “There wouldn’t be such an obsessive debate unless the issue touched something very deep in what it means to be Tasmanian. Society is very deeply polarized.”

Leading the campaign to preserve the laws is the island’s attorney general, Ron Cornish, a former police officer. Cornish said the laws have not been changed because they reflect the will of the majority.

“We believe that sodomy should remain a criminal offense and remain on the statute books,” Cornish said. “The No. 1 reason is that we believe that through the practice of sodomy there is a high transmission of sexual diseases, the most serious of which is AIDS.” The infection rate for HIV, the AIDS virus, is much lower in Tasmania than in the rest of Australia, he added.

The U.N. decision has caused an angry backlash among conservative voters who support the sodomy laws, forming groups with names like Homophobic Activists Liberation Organization. “Can the U.N. prevent God’s wrath falling on those who reintroduce the practice of Babylon?” a reader wrote to the Mercury, Tasmania’s leading newspaper.

Richard Gibbs, leader of an anti-homosexual group called TAS-Alert, said his 1,500 members fear that homosexuals would use legalization to proselytize in public schools. “We’re alarmed at the deviation from justice and democracy and total disregard of the will of the Tasmanian and the Australian people,” he said.

The caldron of controversy was stirred in late July when a Sydney chef named Peter Urmson organized a boycott of food produced in Tasmania, the island’s main export, in an effort to force the government’s hand. The Buy Right campaign signed up 300 businesses and received support from as far away as Europe to boycott Tasmanian apples, cheese and its distinctive Cascade beer.

“This boycott will stay in place until that legislation is completely overturned,” Urmson said, adding that about 40% of those participating are heterosexual. “We want to show Ron Cornish he doesn’t have the people of Australia behind him.”

The boycott has propelled the issue into a fierce debate in Australia, with some opponents of the state’s laws saying they are nonetheless going out of their way to buy Tasmanian. “As grotesque as the criminal sections are, however--and this is a king-sized however--one must deplore the arrogance and meretriciousness of the effort by homosexuals to have them rescinded,” columnist Frank Devine wrote in the newspaper the Australian.

Russell Paterson, a cheese producer in northern Tasmania and head of the island’s Food and Beverage Assn., reported in early August that the boycott had no measurable effect. “Inevitably you have innocent people hurt. It’s dividing the community--for every person who says he is not going to buy Tasmanian, there is someone else who says he is.”

The dispute over gay law reform has even divided the Tasmanian government. Sue Napier, an assistant minister of youth and women’s affairs, asked for a conscience vote--in which members can vote outside party discipline--in the state parliament because she opposed the ruling Liberal Party’s opposition to reform. But she lost.

“I would like to see the law changed. By decriminalizing, it doesn’t mean you encourage or condone homosexuality,” Napier said in a telephone interview. “But I knew that the party’s policy was not to reform when I stood for election.”

Michael Lester, a respected political columnist for the Mercury, argued that the Liberal Party, which despite the name is Australia’s conservative political movement, took a tough line on the laws because it depends heavily for support on the so-called Bible Belt in the north of the state.

He said the Liberals were concerned with intrusions made by the National Party, which represents the far right wing and until recently never had much support in the state.

“It is blatant political hypocrisy,” said John White, a member of the state parliament and the opposition Labor Party’s spokesman on legal matters. “For the government to say we’re a Christian-based society which believes in the Bible and refuse to accept what Christ said about tolerance and forgiveness is just unacceptable.”

Michael Lavarch, the Australian federal attorney general, said he would present legislation to Parliament in Canberra this month to override the Tasmanian laws. He said the federal government can act in this case because of its treaty obligations with the United Nations.

The controversy could easily end with a political standoff, with the police unable to prosecute anyone because the law has been overridden by the federal government but with the sodomy laws still on the books.

For their part, Toonen and Croome said they want to retreat a little from the huge public attention that has been brought to bear since the U.N. decision. While they won a public victory, their relationship came to an end, Toonen noted.

“Whatever happens, we’ve broken the back of the whole issue,” Toonen said. “It has become an embarrassment to a country which prides itself on its human rights position.”