The Beat Brisbane Queensland LGBT history, naughty Gay Brisbane in the 80’s

Mafia + McDonalds vs Homophobia + Government

The Beat faced notoriety in the Brisbane nightlife scene, due to my investors Vic & Gerry (fair and encouraging, yet very hands-off bosses) who years later would be under investigation for also running illegal gambling clubs and massage parlors, and for how “out” we were, flagrantly proud to be gay-friendly.

This all partially resulted in unveiling a long trail of police corruption, which assisted toppling the Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen government, and which started a chain of events that changed Queensland’s political landscape and brought in a new era of change to eradicate anti-gay laws and forced Queensland to step in line with rest of country.

In the early 80’s, other gay bars included the Terminus (249 Brunswick St), Alliance Hotel/Ambush Bar (320 Boundary St), Hacienda Hotel/Zuloos Bar (Brunswick & McLaughlin St) and The Sportsman Hotel (130 Leichhardt St). Each of these bars had a typically loyal and regular customer set, and generally would keep a low profile to fly under the radar.

At a time when it was illegal to be gay, and against a backdrop of the Queensland Government creating laws specially to shut down gay bars, The Beat decided to be bolder, stronger, and louder in the community, and not hide that it was a gay bar. This was intentional, partially to divert attention away from the other business operations of my ‘investors’.

We decided to make the gay symbol at the time — the pink triangle (this was at a time well before the rainbow flag symbol was adopted) — the centerpiece of its logo which I created, and painted it on the brick exterior of the building facade — it made no secret of what The Beat was — and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Queenslanders over time, joined us.

The Beat is located at 677 Ann Street in the Fortitude Valley, one of the main streets of Brisbane, and nearly everyone coming to Brisbane from the northern suburbs, or the airport, would drive right past our pink triangled facade. For legal reasons I incorporated the words “mixed party” onto my logo design.

I led the re-branding of the space from Cockatoo / Beat restaurant to The Beat, engaging international DJ’s such as “Baby”, rehearsing nightclub performers, staffing, hosting V.I.P.’s (and police and journalists), budgeting, operations, interior design and marketing.

The licensing authority was attempting to shut us down on a technicality. To get the liquor license, I had to declare The Beat as a bistro that operated under a restaurant license (even though only 1 in 1000 customers wanted food) Of course, we did not have any.

In order to maintain our ability to serve alcohol, over time, I utilized either student chefs, greasy spoon bicycle deliveries, grocery shop chips and other pantry items. On a tip off from friends inside the police, a few days before a licensing raid, a regular lesbian customer and fan of The Beat, who owned the franchise license for the local McDonalds restaurant, and I put our funniest plan in place.

I would give her and all her staff free entry and free drinks (she was a lesbian boozer), in exchange for 2 or 3 times a night bringing over all the 30-minute old, un-sold de-branded hamburgers, chicken nuggets and chicken sandwiches destined for the bin. We setup a completely fake kitchen at the rear corner the main floor at The Beat, with a large working refrigerator (we used for champagnes and wines chill), non-working oven, used pots and pans and a glass display counter with all the McDonalds throw-a-ways. We removed all the McDonald’s branding and placed these sumptuous fast-food feasts directly onto cheap plates from Lucky’s Trattoria, with The Beat branding – just a toothpick with a paper flag printed with The Beat logo on it.

One of my glass picker-uppers was tasked with watching for anyone suspiciously looking like undercover police or licensing squad and then immediately go stand in the ‘kitchen’ ready to serve, pretending to be the cook.

Sure enough, when the licensing raids came, they were unable to do anything, since we had complied with our license, as disgusting as it was. The funny part, some customers got the munchies and bought the aged McFood and enjoyed.

This went on for about another year. Indeed, inspired by the new Liquor Act making it an offense to serve deviants, we re-branded our diner accordingly.

Our neighboring restaurant, Lucky’s Trattoria, which was additionally a money laundering front for the local mafia was partially owned by a short, stout and lovely Italian man named Luciano (“Lucky”) who took pride in his restaurant. He also enjoyed the increased business from The Beat as we got busier, and over time, Lucky became super gay friendly, and his restaurant stayed open until the wee hours of the morning, adjusting his closure time based on how busy we were by the hour.

Overnight, Lucky’s Trattoria became the gay and drag queen restaurant of choice, Luciano loved the attention.

Lucky’s son became a regular at The Beat and seeing his own franchise opportunity put in menus, used his Lucky’s Trattoria kitchen to cook, and supplied sample dishes to put in the display cabinet. When someone ordered, one of our staff would run out our backdoor, down the back alley of Lucky Lane to Lucky’s kitchen and bring back the dish to serve.

I coined “Lucky Lane” as a triple entendre based on adjacent Lucky’s Trattoria, the “L” shape of the delivery lane, and the outdoor sex that would occur in our dark, shattered beer bottle, used syringe and potholed rocky service alley – i.e. getting ‘Lucky’. Much to Lucky’s amusement, I had my resident designer paint a faux “Lucky Lane” street sign on the building wall at the entrance off Ann Street.

Close to Cockatoo Club / The Beat, Tony Bellino also owned Pinocchio’s Restaurant (formerly Kitty’s Nightclub at 648 Ann Street) and ran a gambling den upstairs managed by Luciano Scognamiglio. The Red Garter bordello was across the access lane.

Gerry and Vic also owned The Roxy in partnership with a notoriously dangerous man named Robert Chan (210 Brunswick St), and separately owned Manhattan (201 Brunswick St), Bubbles Bath-House (142 Wickham St), Oriental Social Club (235 Brunswick St) and the World By Night strip club (548 Queen St).

Most of these venues, also had additional secret cash businesses operating above them, either gambling or prostitution bordellos. Additionally, other nearby bars and restaurants also had late night questionable enterprises operating from above them or were money laundering fronts for any of the Brisbane underbelly at the time.

If you needed a policeman or a politician at 2am, you only had to visit the 2nd floor of most of these places.

You could also find me, for a very brief time, at World By Night, when I was a (not so proud) male stripper in a go-go bar.

The fine art of perception

When I was working as bar manager at the Cockatoo Club, a few times, in my wanderlust for travel I would pop up to Singapore for mid-week short stay and visit the House of Hung jewelry shop next to the Hilton Hotel on Orchard Road. Here, I would legally purchase raw uncut diamonds. You could travel across borders, including Singapore/Australia without any customs duties, if the diamonds were uncut and declared.

I would bring them back to Cockatoo Club, and on weekends, wait for people to get suitably drunk, and then say “Psst, wanna buy a diamond?” in a rather secretive way. Then discreetly roll them out onto a small black cloth at the end of the bar. Drunken customers would think this was stolen merchandise, and therefore think this would be a great deal. I would sell them for about 400% more than I paid – slightly less in price than if you would buy them at the Wallace Bishop Jewelry shop in Brisbane.

I would then split the profit share with Michael and later Jerry and some bar staff, and everyone was happy, including the customers that purchased. A few that had the diamonds cut/set into jewelry came back to buy more from me. The profits would more than pay for my next trip.

Decades later, Richard & Paul Hung, at the family-owned House of Hung shop in the Far East Shopping Centre, still remembered me, and we regularly shopped there, and sent family/friends who were visiting for family discounts. For a gay man, their shop name was very easy to remember.

Climbing Out of the Rabbit Hole

Typical Friday and Saturday club goers would now come during the week, just to ensure they didn’t miss a scene change to a new theme. Business was building, most importantly the weekday business. As Vic put it, I was becoming “clean again” – no more booze or drugs, and amazingly was getting a clearer head in decision making.

I think it was around this time I finally became an adult thinking entrepreneur, and no longer a boy living out a real-world addiction infused and hazy gay fantasy, yet my promiscuous vice remained.

I handed out batches of secret complimentary door passes (to avoid cover charges) to hundreds of local cute (and typically big haired gay boys) on condition of secrecy, and never handed them out to women, ugly gay leeches, or knowingly straight men. I also targeted blonde surfer boys on the Gold Coast / Surfers Paradise, by visiting the few gay clubs with fistfuls of passes and promises of free drinks. I never solicited the clientele from competing clubs such as The Terminus, since keeping a happy scene was just as important, indeed, I tried to avoid visiting competitors bars and clubs for fear of misinterpretation.

The combination of what today would be called guerilla marketing, ensured that most of our regular customer base were hot, young, good looking, gay boys. Yet legally, everyone was welcome, if they paid the cover charge.

Further, realizing that profit on soft drink is MUCH higher than that of alcohol, I would designate some late-night hours to be soft-drink only bar times, usually around 4am when the club was full. This had an additional benefit of pacing my customers alcohol levels, keeping them partying (and spending) for longer, often until 7am. The cost benefit analysis is simple, and one of the secrets of the bar trade to this day, as an example:

Suspecting some sticky fingers from my own bar staff within the 3 bars, I instituted a “cash register control system: to make the bartenders THINK I was able to track cash and balance this with weekly alcohol consumption. Actually, it’s impossible due to the combination of post mix syrup soft drinks, bottled bear and different prices of different alcoholic drinks. But my staff had not figured that out. A week after installing this, I noticed the cash take consistently went up by about 10%.

A few months later, during a scene change, without saying anything to any of my bar staff, I had purchased half a dozen old 2nd hand security cameras, at the time, these were big clunky things. My resident designer screwed each above the bar, pointing them generally towards the array of tills. He stuffed the cables up into the ceiling tiles, so it looked like they were connected. He then put an old broken TV set in my upstairs office, along with an old clunky Betamax videotape machine below the TV. Again, all perception and nothing explicitly said to the staff. Indeed, these days, fake pretend security cameras, with a tiny blinking red light powered by a battery, are commonplace in most bars worldwide.

In the coming weeks, the weekly cash bar take went up again but this time by about a whopping 25%. Although I suspected a couple of them, I never worked out, nor cared, which of the staff had sticky fingers, since personalities (and sometimes their flirty looks) brought regular customers made up for it in the long run. Most bars and restaurants assume a 10% theft rate by staff in their operations.

The combination of regular themed decor changes, secret door cover charge system, soft drink spree at peak times and pretend anti-theft security measures was my key to building up the business from about AUD $12,500 a week to over AUD $40,000 in profit each week – in the mid 1980’s.

Delivering the “take” every Monday late afternoon to Gerry & Vic’s office was also interesting. We had a slew of little canvas bank bags, and each week, the cash was counted and buddled in clusters by denomination and wrapped with a single rubber band. Each bank note domination bundle was put into its own canvas bag, at the time $5, $10, $20 and $50. The heavy coins, in another bag. The weirdly shaped and very heavy $0.50 cent coins and below were never delivered, and instead used in our operational costs.

After retaining a cash float in my office at The Beat, I would take the bags together shoved into in a common department store shopping bag, for the 3 or 4 block walk to Gerry & Vic’s office above their Manhattan Club, along with a single tiny piece of paper from my bookkeeper detailing in handwriting each bags value, plus a combined total note.

Either Gerry, Vic or their GM Robin would simply place each bag on a kitchen weight scale on their desk, and thereby know, almost accurately, how much each was containing. If the combined value of each of the collective bags was equal to, or more than the previous week, I was “good to go”. If it was less, they looked for an explanation, and were always polite in those weeks.

Fortunately, nearly all weeks the combined value of the weight of the bags were getting heavier. If particularly heavy in a given week, they would often reach into one of the bags, usually the one containing the $20 rubber band wrapped bundles and throw it at me saying “good job kid” – I would then divvy up this bonus with my bar staff and DJ, which built loyalty and commitment.

Vic and Gerry were so thrilled at the new waterfall of cash this young kid was making them, we upped the game, acquiring adjoining building spaces, expanded the club, more than doubling its size.

Amidst various anti-gay, anti-police, anti-government, anti-anything campaigns by news media, print, radio, and TV, grabbing at straws trying to sell advertising, The Beat became more and more popular, proving there’s is no such thing as bad press.

Action in changing human rights

Various celebrities made The Beat an ‘in-place’ late at night after a local concert to unwind in relative privacy and/or show their support against the ridiculous antiquarian silliness of the government.

We stored signage and made space available upstairs of The Beat for creation of protest signage and banners. Even journalists would regularly come to The Beat hoping to catch a police action against our customers or us. Sometimes these journalists were friends, sometimes they were just after “the back story”.

Queensland Courier Mail print journalist Phil Dickie and ABC TV Four Corners The Moonlight State (May 1987) reporter Chris Masters (who came up from Sydney to investigate) were likely the most famous for researching and reporting stories on organized crime and police corruption, with a substantial monthly bribery trail (called “The Joke“) which led to The Fitzgerald Inquiry.

Jack Herbert, known as the ‘Bagman’ reportedly collected more than $3 million in protection money that allowed illegal gambling and prostitution to flourish in Brisbane as part of The Joke which would come crashing down after a series of stories in The Courier Mail newspaper and the broadcast of The Moonlight State on Four Corners in May 1987. Herbert would become the Fitzgerald Inquiry’s star witness, telling all in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

I should also be clear that around this time, I was asked (not by Gerry or Vic, but rather by a vice-squad policeman) to help match-up Phil Dickie or Chris Masters with an underage date, presumably, to use as a silencing tactic — I never followed through. It was around this time I saw the writing on the wall to leave, since the ‘wagons were circling’ a little too close to home.

In addition to owning The Beat, and other clubs, Gerry and Vic ‘apparently’ owned illegal casinos and massage parlors and admitted making $1 million a year from gambling while police turned a blind eye.

All’s well that ends well

The Fitzgerald Inquiry (a judicial inquiry led by Queens Counsel Tony Fitzgerald) was commissioned in May 1987 by the Deputy Premier Bill Gunn (while ‘old Joh’ Bjelke-Petersen went to Disneyland), to investigate corruption, bribery and misconduct in the Queensland Police force, and the entire system of government. One of its recommendations was that a newly established Criminal Justice Commission review the laws governing consensual sexual behavior, including gay activity.

This proposal became core focus in the 1989 election. The National Party which was heavily implicated in corruption by the Fitzgerald Inquiry, tried to solidify conservative support using his party’s opposition to the legalization of gay conduct claiming that his party’s corruption was a “secondary issue” to moral issues like homosexuality.

The Fitzgerald Inquiry spent years investigating long-term police corruption. Significant prosecutions followed the inquiry leading to 4 ministers being jailed and numerous convictions of other police.

Former Police Commissioner Sir Terence (Terry) Lewis was convicted of corruption, jailed, and stripped of his knighthood, and former Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was charged with perjury.

It also led to the end of the National Party of Australia’s 32-year run as the governing political party in Queensland.

Shortly before his defeat, Premier of Queensland, Russell Cooper (and Police Minister) of the National Party said, a Labor victory would, “open the floodgates and see a sea of sodomites flooding into Queensland.”

The new Labor Government buoyed by a landslide victory swiftly implemented changes in the Criminal Code which repealed the anti-homosexuality laws on 19 January 1991.

In 1991, Gerry Bellino and Vic Conte were charged with tax-avoidance offences. Gerry Bellino, a friend of Jack Herbert (the bagman collecting bribes for police commissioner Terry Lewis), was jailed in 1991 for 7 years after The Fitzgerald Inquiry for paying bribes of $17,000 a month to police as part of the ‘The Joke’ scheme. He was released in 1999. Vic Conte was also jailed in the aftermath.

With the departure of Gerry & Vic, John Hannay acquired The Beat and his family have operated it since.

The Beat is still in operation today, indeed it’s the longest running club with the same name in Australian history, and in its own way, is a landmark in LGBT Queensland history.

Today, Australia is one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world.

All’s well that ends well.