Deaths of nearly 100 gay men in Sydney identified as hate crimes decades later

The deaths of almost 100 gay men between 1970 and 1990 have been directly linked to hate crime by one of Sydney’s largest LGBT health charities.

Police had previously discovered 88 cases where gay men had died under suspicious circumstances between 1970 and 1990.

However, a new report from ACON, an LGBT health and advocacy charity in New South Wales has concluded that many of these deaths can be linked to both homophobia and inadequate investigations by police at the time.

The report published on Monday follows an investigation prompted by an initial inquest into the death of Scott Johnson, a 27-year-old mathematician who was found dead at the bottom of a 200-foot cliff in 1988.

(Facebook/Justice for Scott Johnson)

Johnson’s death was originally listed as a suicide, however, an inquest in 2017 found that Johnson was likely the victim of a homophobic hate crime.

In 2017, authorities began to re-examine 87 other cases, some of which were listed as suicides by police at the time.

The ACON report individually examined the 88 suspected anti-gay killings and found that there were multiple underlying themes in many of the attacks – determining that homophobia was a clear motivating factor in at least 50% of the cases.

(Adam Berry/Getty Images)

As many as 30 deaths of gay men who died in Sydney and the surrounding area remain unsolved.

Related: Hundreds of homophobic attacks took place in Australia during survey vote

The report called ‘In Pursuit of Truth and Justice: Documenting Gay and Transgender Prejudice Killings in NSW in the Late 20th Century’ aimed to highlight both the deaths as a whole as well as the issues that have remained in the 40 years since these killings began.

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