The media exploited Beau Lamarre-Condon’s homosexuality when reporting on the murder of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird
and why reporting on the murder of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird as a "crime of passion" glosses over a long history of cops and homophobia and mardi gras
An image ricochets across my eyes: Constable Beau Lamarre-Condon at the Mardi Gras parade, surrounded by the colours of our people and dressed head to toe in the navy shades of his. This week, police charged him with killing two gay men, Luke Davies and Jesse Baird, may they Rest in Pride. They allege he used his police-issued .40 Glock semi-automatic pistol to murder them and then disposed of their bodies.
It took mere hours for media to exploit Lamarre-Condon’s homosexuality, a petty means to deflect from the material issue of his being a cop. The SMH ran a photo of the victims, who were partners, torn apart by a photo of their (alleged) murderer. The ABC did the same but trumped this with a push notification of “two gay men allegedly killed by one of their own”, an utterance poisoned by the suggestion that the double homicide was an act of intra-community violence.
The NSW Police Commissioner, Karen Webb, went one step further and labelled it a “crime of passion”, a spur-of-the-moment whim without further context. Never mind that 76 NSW cops were charged with 336 domestic violence charges in the last four years, with at least a dozen of these being serial offenders. Webb backtracked on the comment shortly before the NSW Police Force decided that Lamarre-Condon premeditated Jesse’s murder.
A close friend of Jesse’s revealed that contrary to police reports, Jesse and Lamarre-Condon never dated. In a presser, the Deputy Commissioner stated that their “relationship… did not end well”, but a leaked text message confirms that the (alleged) killer cop had unrequited feelings that made Jesse uncomfortable, and that he asked Lamarre-Condon not to contact him.
It’s easy for fools to call a double homicide “a love triangle gone wrong”, a frame usually applied to dead women to minimise mens’ violence against them. It’s just as undemanding to claim it as an example of “gay on gay violence” to paraphrase the anti-Black dog whistle.
Last I checked you don’t get handed a gun if you come out - if the Constable wasn’t a cop both of his (alleged) victims would likely be alive.
The way that journos and editors create discrete events affecting one or more individuals (for the purposes of daily news media consumption) transforms the systemic into the personal. Context collapses and news re-interprets long cycles of events as isolated incidents. So it is that an institution with a well-documented history of violence that trained, shaped, and armed an (alleged) murderer can deny its guilt.
NSW cops are no strangers to escaping blame, of course. The organisation refused to investigate anti-gay hate crimes, suspicious deaths, and unsolved murders from 1970 up to (at least) 2010. In one case, they failed to spell the victim’s name correctly in their records. Instead, they were indifferent, negligent, dismissive and hostile to dozens of victims and their families over 40 years.
Worse still, they are directly implicated in committing hate crimes. The 2016 SBS documentary Deep Water provided first-hand accounts about a gang of plain-clothes cops (a so-called “hoodlum patrol”) raiding a beat and bashing a gay man so badly that he spent six days in hospital. An eye witness provided testimony to senior police at the time, who did nothing. By the cops’ own admission, around 20 gay men were bashed every day in Gadigal/ Sydney for four decades.
More recently, NSWPF stonewalled the 18-month inquiry into the spate of hate murders by delaying the production of documents, losing crucial evidence, belatedly requesting extensions, and refusing to admit to the anti-Queer attitudes still held by cops. In December, the head of the inquiry, Justice John Sackar, called the police “adversarial’ and “defensive”.
Despite all this, the cops insist on marching their way down Oxford Street. Pulling out would be too much an admission of responsibility, implicating the force, its culture, history, and practices. Webb told media it would be a “travesty” if police didn’t march. I would’ve thought the travesty was that one of her officers (allegedly) murdered two people, but I’d hate to obstruct a photo op.
When Mardi Gras uninvited NSWPF from marching it seemed that the board was populated by vertebrates, but they quickly folded after the involvement of the Police Minister (the NSW Government sponsors the organisation). Webb dismissed queer critics with the bizarre Taylor Swift reference that “There will always be haters, haters like to hate”. There’s a glacial circle in Hell for the cop who pitched that one.
As I was drafting this essay, Webb “apologised” [sic] for the Force’s handling of the historical hate crimes, a vulgar attempt at media manipulation that exploited dozens of dead Queers to distract from two more. Naturally, she did not mention the ones they committed. This is an unserious apology, a hot stream of piss in our faces with an authoritative voice telling us that it’s rain.
No cops at mardi gras
According to independent legal observers, when Nazis stormed the Victorian Parliament last year, Victoria Police facilitated their demonstration, giving them space to throw sieg heil salutes and to display hate speech. Instead, the cops focused their attentions (read: grabs, punches, horses and pepper spray) more or less entirely on peaceful trans protestors and their supporters.
This is normal cop behaviour and predictable to anyone involved in direct action. More interesting was the involvement of the LGBITQ+ Liaison Officers, who were present and aware of the dangerous context of the anti-trans Nazi rally. Not only did they fail to protect community from (I think it bears emphasising) literal Nazis, but they were powerless to stop their mates bashing queers.
On its website, VicPol boasts of its 450 LLOs. They omit that there is one, maybe two, full-time LLOs out of 22,000 employees. The other 448 are regular officers who get an hour or so of training and then perform their LLO duties (which consist of providing ‘expert advice’ to victims and ‘recommendations on the policing needs of LGBTIQA+ people’ to VicPol) on top of their everyday ones.
In this Midsumma Pride March just gone, young Queer activists peacefully disrupted the cop contingent. They wore masks and costumes and brought paint to pour on themselves, marrying the Queer arts of theatre and protest. Upset by the exercise of these legal and moral rights to assembly, expression and protest, the cops tore banners, pushed, shoved, punched and choked queer people all the way down Fitzroy Street.
Only metres away from (and in some cases immediately next to) the affray were the LLOs, marching to display their Pride [sic] in having sold their souls to power. They smiled at the crowd and waved plastic flags as their associates wrapped their armoured fingers around Queers’ throats. As if the LLO’s indifference was not evil enough, the most wicked truth, largely ignored, is that this violence was for them.
Clad in body armour, the VicPol anti-riot unit went poofter bashing not merely for the thrill of it, as with the hoodlum patrols, but to clear the way for the LLOs to march undisturbed by the voices of those they subjugate for a salary. For coppers to beat queers is expected; that has been the nature of our relationship for as long as police have existed. But for people who superficially share an experience of the world with us to watch idly while it happens is unpardonable.
The irony of a “queer cop”
There is no such thing as a queer cop. It is a contradiction of terms, as with anti-choice feminist or anti-racist Zionist. Some officers may happen to be homos, bisexual and so on, but this is not saying much. Nobody is born a cop - they are acculturated and at some point, they choose it, and in choosing it, they sever any claim to queerness and community.
After all, how could a Queer be so ignorant of power? How could they take up arms against their own and watch their comrades brutalise their people, to say nothing of everybody else? The answer is simple: they could not.
I wonder if fag cops know our history - their being cops, I suspect not.
I have to assume that they are unaware that Adelaide was the first state or territory to decriminalise homosexuality in 1975 - not due to any latent progressivism but because three vice squad officers murdered a law lecturer by the name of George Duncan. These cops beat Duncan until cruisers at the nearby beat heard his bones break and then threw him into the River Torrens where he drowned.
In a final insult, when local TV news arrived late and missed the police retrieving Duncan’s cold, rigid body from the Torrens, the cops tossed him back in the river for the benefit of the cameraman. Detectives from Scotland Yard concluded that the vice squad officers had thrown Duncan into the river but lacked evidence. Nobody was ever convicted, and the case remains open.
People are quick to say that cops have apologised for this or that. It’s true, VicPol apologised for the 1994 raid on Tasty where they detained, stripped, and cavity-searched hundreds of queer patrons for seven hours, a mere 20 years after the fact. Likewise, NSWPF apologised to the ‘78ers whom they systemically arrested and bashed by the dozens in 2016, a full 38 years later.
In practice, cops only ever use this dubious contrition as a smokescreen. Commissioners and Police Ministers talk of “historical” tensions to downplay their ongoing violence against us, which is continued by the media. This is pure spin. There are not pages enough to relate the cruelty, the bruises of friends beaten by cops, the scars of comrades assaulted at rallies, the assaults on revellers under the pretext of drug searches.
On the down low, people in certain community organisations still monitor police raids on beats, which continue to this day. After many years of death by committee, VicPol recently updated its internal beats policy. Only a few pages long, it does not recommend that cops exercise discretion but cheerfully lists the many laws they can use to prosecute cruisers.
Though, what’s my word against a multi-billion dollar paramilitary organisation. If I sound too much like an angry queer, that’s fine. You don’t need to take my word; you can take theirs. The Victorian Human Rights Commission reviewed VicPol’s internal culture and, in 2019, published a 66-page report. The report documented attitudes still held by police, such as:
• ’I would have taken you out the back and flogged you back in my day’
• ’We took people like you out the back of the station and beat you with a hose’
• ’They [gays] should be taken out the back of the station and shot in the head’
• ’All gays should be gassed in the chamber like the Nazis’
To paraphrase the report: cops continue to engage in homophobia, make violent comments as above, sexually harass and discriminate against the fags and dykes among their ranks. VicPol’s internal culture reveals that LLOs are a symptom, not a solution. They exist because cops are still so hostile to queers that we cannot safely interact with them except through these middlemen, whom I pity.
A boot is a boot
I can not help but recall Sasha Soldatow’s 1983 potboiler “What is this gay community shit?” which, among much else, critically analyses the foundation of Mardi Gras. Towards the end of the pamphlet, he writes:
“The second Mardi Gras was a complete sell-out. There was no point in chanting ‘Get your laws off our bodies’ when there was not a cop in sight. There was no need for cops—the organisers had seen to it to provide marshals who, well, behaved like cops. And "Stop police attacks on gays, women and Blacks" became rather hollow when, during the chant a marshal came up and physically shoved you back into line. You began to wonder who was attacking who.”
I was not surprised to hear reports (corroborated by eyewitnesses) of Midsumma staff assaulting protestors in lockstep with the cops. We have seen this all before: the bourgeois faggots who care only about their dicks, the ethical vacancy of representation politics, the sacrifice of non-normative subjects at the altar of assimilation.
Our knowledge of the true nature of police and policing invites us to look outward and extend our hands to others who are similarly oppressed so that we might share a common purpose. To quote Dr Lilla Watson, a Gangulu artist and activist: “If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
In the days immediately before Midsumma Carnival this year, VicPol attacked anti-genocide demonstrators (including queer activists) at the Webb Dock. The protestors were preventing an Israeli ship from docking and loading up cargo to supply the genocidal apartheid state.
The cops responded to this disobedience by acting in the service of capital and, ultimately, genocide: they dragged a person out of their wheelchair, unlawfully used pepper spray, and attacked medics and legal observers. One day they were cracking skulls, and the next they were at Carnival. And then they were cracking skulls again.
In my mind, superimposed over the image of Lamarre-Condon, is the scene of Constable Leon Mixios’ assault on Jamie Reed at the 2013 Mardi Gras parade. During the incident, the Constable grabbed Reed by the throat and slammed him into the asphalt with a wet thump.
As Reed lay sobbing on the ground, Mixios pressed his boot into his back. He did this, he said later, because Reed was bleeding and he “didn’t want to be contaminated”. Mixios’ superiors put him on office duty while they carried out an investigation which took a full three years.
When it was found that he had used “unreasonable force” (a well-mannered legal metaphor for police violence), he appealed and then, during the appeal, resigned. The cops accepted his resignation and withdrew the finding, the effect of which is that nobody was held accountable for violence, which even the cops conceded was wrong.
When a cop steps on our back one day and someone else’s the next, it’s the same boot. And it doesn’t matter if the cop is a homo - either it’s his boot or he will stand by and watch his accomplices do it. What’s the difference? A boot is a boot, no matter who’s wearing it. This is all a long way of saying that all cops are bastards, even the gay ones.
Further Reading:
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Hiero Badge is a proud non-binary fag living on stolen Wurundjeri land who writes things, mostly essays and a few poems. They haven’t written anything in a bit because the world is kind of fucked (free Palestine). Send love/hate mail on the one owned by the apartheid billionaire or on the one owned by the ivy league billionaire.
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This article is part of The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project, partially funded by Meta and The Walkley Foundation, an online newsletter publication edited and written by editor and journalist Patrick Lenton, and platforming a roster of brilliant freelance LGBTQIA+ journalists who report on LGBTQIA+ representation and coverage in mainstream media, providing investigation, context, mythbusting and debunking, in the form of articles and social media first reporting. To continue supporting queer-led independent media, please subscribe!
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Thank you so much for this. I signed up for the horrors of the Bachelor and am proudly staying for the horrors of the real world.
A great article. Too many head nods as I read it.