BARRY: Well the first thing to say is that I loved doing beats, and so effectively, I did it for about thirty years, between 1969 and about 1999, and it was just so exciting. Sort of go out at night, not knowing whether you're going to or how many guys you would hook up with. Of course there were the dangers of being bashed by groups of youths or running into the police.

And beats weren't really something that we chose really, but all of society's forces were against us. We were illegal for a start, criminals. We were looked on by all the religious groups as sinful, moral perverts and the psychiatry profession saw us as sick individuals.

And so this was a culture that we developed ourselves. The normal things like courting and dating and having dinner and so on. These weren't really available to us as social possibilities and so we found our own way. A way of finding people in maybe a secret location so that we didn't have to necessarily out ourselves in public.

BARRY: Early 1969, January 1969, I was 18 years old. I was working for a firm of charted accountants at the time. This was my first month at work, and I went to the big old toilets in the building and there was an amazing piece of graffiti on the wall showing men doing all sorts of things with each other, and I thought, hmm, this is the place to hang around. Because I knew I was gay for sure by then but I hadn't had any adult experiences. And so that was the first time that I actually met a man and had some sort of sexual encounter.   

And once I got a car, which was about three years later, I was able to travel all over the city and all over the suburbs and find all the really popular and famous places. Summer nights, winter nights, didn't matter (LAUGHS). Pouring with rain, still go out. I would just drive to, you know, suburbs that I didn't know. If there was a large park or something like that, then there was a likelihood that that could be a hook up place.

Sometimes I didn't find them in the 1970s. I didn't find out about them until the 1980s. Even when I was told about them I couldn't find the place they were talking about. So it was an adventure. Put it that way. 

And, you know, when I look back on those very early years, it was certainly very much a night-time occupation. I worked in a full-time job till five o'clock. In the afternoon I'd go home just to have something to eat and go out.  And it would be three or four nights a week in that early period, because there was so much happening (LAUGHS). Quite frankly it was exciting. 

BARRY: The places that had big reputations, like Town Hall Station and Central Station, the country platforms, they never felt safe to me, and I didn't like either of those places.

But, in the years when I worked in the city and had an hour for lunch, I would run up from Pitt Street to St James Station. I know again it sounds dreadful, but at five o'clock, I'd go there on the way home from work and maybe spend an hour there.

There were absolutely amazing places, and one of the places quite early on, was South Bondi. There was a public toilet and public toilets were a very likely place for gay sex because if needed to, you could pose a legitimate reason for being there if the cops turned up.

And secondly, men are there and they're likely to have their penis out. So by various means, that would determine whether they were sexually aroused or not.

And I can describe the situation at that South Bondi, and honestly, I know people don't believe some of this, but you walk in there and you couldn't get in. It was jam packed with guys. Not even Saturday night, it could be Wednesday night. Honestly, it was like that.

And there was more than one place like that. You were virtually guaranteed that you'd have some kind of sexual encounter, any night of the week and with someone, you know, very, very attractive and up for it.

You got such a variety of different types of men. You got men who are not really engaged with the gay community as such. They may have identified as straight, they may have identified as bisexual, but they were either unable or unwilling to come out in a general gay community or social setting, but were really up for sex with men in those anonymous, sort of, situations.

We just knew, we instinctively knew that this was going to happen, that this person was sufficiently attracted to you or otherwise. Yeah, I describe it as a kind of magic.