“QUEER” PEOPLE.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17326, 11 February 1928, Page 14 (Supplement)

“QUEER” PEOPLE.

SYDNEY AN ASYLUM? When is a person “queer"? It is reported from Los Angeles that the defence for Hickman stated that the murderer’s grandfather was slightly queer, and menially unbalanced, because “he kept running aftei other women.” That, in itself, sccins a “queer” statement. One of tho city’s most immaculate “sheiks,” says a Sydney paper, sniffed and replied that any grandfather who could do that was decidedly sane. Was Chidley, Sydney’s most famous character of all time, “queer l Chidley, in one sense, was full of intelligence and sanity in his course to wear sensibly brief garments in a semi-tropical clime. It seems reasonable to suggest that the thousands of men who swelter in heavy tweed suits and tight collars and heap maledictions upon the defenceless head of our Mr Mares, are “queer," if not completely insane. „ Sydney’s women, on the other hand, are "delightful creatures, and very, very sane. _ There is, however, a distinct difference between a “queer chap” and a raving lunatic. The “queer-un” may continue to be queer for the term of his natural life, and cause nobody the slightest trouble. “There is no hard-and-fast line between sanity and madness,” said a well-known Macquarie Street specialist. “A man is put into an asylum only when he goes over the odds and annoys the general public. “If you examined a ‘queer’ person you would not be any wiser. No doctor will ever attempt to judge a man’s sanity in a court of law. There are no means of telling until he actually breaks out.”

Sydney is full of eccentric gentlemen’. There was a famous character at EdgecLiff who collected discarded fruit-peelings in the streets, and burnt them in bis home, as offerings to some heathenish idol at midnight. Then there was the strange case of the man at Arncliffe, who went into politics because he admired politicians. Mad or just “queer”? As for calling a man—apparently a married man—'“queer,” who keeps “running after other women,” well, in the words of a police officer, this fair city must be a gigantic lunatic asylum, with many lunatics therein.