ABSTRACT
On 7 August 1994, Victoria Police raided a gay nightclub in the centre of Melbourne, falsely imprisoning and strip-searching more than 400 patrons in the early hours of the morning. The raid prompted a mass civil suit against police, which made the Tasty nightclub notorious—the raid is often referred to as ‘Melbourne’s Stonewall’. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the Tasty nightclub raid, illustrating how queer lives and spaces continued to be aggressively policed following homosexual law reform. The chapter complicates conventional discourses of the Tasty raid by exploring how the politics of homonormativity impact upon conceptions of victimhood. As it traces the contours of a lesbian and gay politics of respectability that plays out in public discourse through the troubling terms of ‘ordinariness’ and innocence, the chapter finds that popular responses to the Tasty raid reflect many of the emergent changes in sexual citizenship claims. The case is broadly significant not only for its scale and visibility, but also because it provides insights into the conditions in which police legitimacy may be undermined and queer subjects may achieve the status of worthy or ‘ideal’ victims in a heteronormative context.
