Outrageous! The forgotten history of queer representation on Australian television

“Tonight, Australian television loses its virginity.” That was the titillating tagline for Number 96, the ground-breaking soap opera set in a Paddington apartment block that would become one of Australia’s most eyebrow-raising shows during its five-and-a-half-year run from March 13, 1972. 

Queer screen historian and filmmaker Andrew Mercado will never forget the first time he saw a promo for the show that would pioneer queer representation in an unforgettable fashion (and we’re not just talking about those bold patterns so favoured during the ‘70s).

We were so far ahead of the pack

“I distinctly remember Dorrie Evans [the gossip queen played by Pat McDonald] looking up at the ceiling and saying to her husband Herb [Ron Shand], ‘Those boys up there are having a party and I’m not gonna let them’,” he recalls. “The boys she was referring to are a gay couple. Which is ironic, because from the moment I saw that clip, I was instantly transfixed, without even knowing what it was about.”

Those noisy gay neighbours were series heartthrob Don Finlayson, a successful lawyer portrayed by Joe Hasham, and his first of several onscreen boyfriends, photographer and bisexual man Bruce (Paul Weingott). It’s safe to say that Mercado knows all about them, and Number 96, now. Despite his parents not allowing him to watch it, he did anyway – a rite of passage for so many, especially LGBTQIA+ viewers. Mercado continues campaigning for the surviving episodes [many were lost when tapes were destroyed] to sashay out of the National Film and Sound Archives in Canberra and onto a streaming platform. “Number 96 is so important, and it has to be remembered,” he says.

Hasham joins Mercado for Number 96: TV’s First LGBT Show, a special retrospective screening of an episode of Number 96, plus Mercado’s documentary Outrageous: The Queer History of Australian TV as part of the 30th Queer Screen Mardi Gras Film Festival (MGFF) during Sydney WorldPride.

It’s difficult, now, to appreciate just how big a deal Number 96’s low-key presentation of Don, loved by his neighbours (including Dorrie), was. The show would broadcast the first queer kiss on Australian TV, and it ended before the historic first Mardi Gras protest in 1978. Homosexuality would not be decriminalised in NSW until 1984. 

Esteemed former Justice of the High Court Michael Kirby notes, in Mercado’s doco, that he would watch Don at home, holding hands with his partner, while he was a young law student and feeling hope. “It must have been surreal for Michael to be sitting there, as a gay lawyer himself watching this representation on TV, with many of those early episodes showing Don representing gay men in court,” Mercado says. “Michael considers the show so important [in terms of the gay liberation movement] because it was going out on a wide scale.”

While Hasham was (and is) straight, he remains a great ally. He wrote back to every queer man who reached out to him during the show’s run, and in 2023 he’s showing up for the MGFF special event. “At his audition by [producer] Bill Harmon, Joe’s immediate response to how he’d feel about playing gay was to say, ‘I just want to make sure that my gay friends aren’t going to have an issue with how he’s portrayed.’ That’s how Bill knew he’d found the right actor.”

Kirby suggests the positive depiction of Don and the normalisation of queer lives helped the country’s more effective and inclusive approach to the HIV/AIDS crisis, as compared to the UK and US. The show also introduced Les Girls legend and trans woman Carlotta as Robyn Ross, a fellow showgirl whose gender identity was initially unknown by prospective partner Arnold Feather (Jeff Kevin). While this ‘reveal’ doesn’t stand up to contemporary conversations around gender identity, Carlotta remains proud of the pioneering televisual moment, a world first for a trans person portraying a trans character on screen. 

_{Photograph: Supplied/Outrageous | Benjamin Law, Andrew Mercado, Sarah Walker and Shane Jenek}

Indeed, internationally recognised drag star Shane Jenek (aka Courtney Act) and author and screenwriter Benjamin Law – both talking heads on Outrageous – were also impressed. “I loved hearing what Carlotta, Shane and Ben had to say,” Mercado says. “Over the years, people have looked at that clip and said they turned Robyn into a punch line, but Arnold’s love life had always been a series of comic misadventures.”

The joke was on him, Mercado suggests, not Carlotta, and Arnold let Robyn down gently. “It was incredibly ground-breaking.”

Progress in queer representation never follows a straight line. Celebrated author and screenwriter Sarah Walker wryly assesses the first appearance of a lesbian character on Australian TV, with cabaret star Toni Lamond depicting Karen Winter in a controversial (and ultimately censored) storyline as a would-be murderer embroiled in a devil-worshipping cult. “I think that speaks to the fact that you get good queer representation with good queer writing,” Mercado suggests. “David Sale, who created and wrote for Number 96, knew the world of gay and bisexual men. There clearly weren’t any lesbian scriptwriters working on the show. I don’t think we see that until we get Denise Morgan writing for Prisoner. When we finally got to great lesbian representation, it’s because there was a lesbian writer in the room.”

Mercado hopes that Number 96 will regain its rightful position in Australian televisual history, off the back of its game-changing representation. “It’s a real tragedy to me that we were so far ahead of the pack, and then, for a long time, we were basically falling behind the rest of the world.”

Outrageous celebrates the show’s cultural impact. “The entire reason for making it was to set the record straight, because during the 50th anniversary of Stonewall in 2019, they counted down the great queer pop culture moments in the 50 years since, and nobody mentioned Number 96. And in their defence, that’s because they’d never heard of it.”

More people need to hear about it, Mercado argues. “I’m absolutely thrilled and hoping that the international people who are here for WorldPride see this title ‘TV’s first LGBT show’, come, go ‘wow’, and consider what their childhoods would have been like if there’d been a show like this on TV every night of the week that rated so highly and everyone was talking about.”

Number 96: TV’s First LGBT Show is screening alongside the premiere of Outrageous: The Queer History of Australian TV on Thursday, Feb 16, 2023, as part of the 30th Queer Screen Mardi Gras Film Festival.