Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

The Nation
February 25, 2009

Carnal Knowledge
 
By JoAnn Wypijewski

Crisis of Faith

Sex panics make for bad law. It could be said that they make for bad
science, too, except that what has driven some of the most notorious legal
cases to emerge from such panics has been more a masquerade of science, a
belief tricked out in the language of medicine and social science to
distract from the mumbo jumbo at its core. The Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court is set to be the latest arena to test that belief, taking up
the admissibility of "dissociative amnesia," or "repressed memory," in a
case that some powerful interests no doubt hoped was as settled as the
grave.

The petitioner is Paul Shanley, a once famous "street priest" who became
infamous in the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, was tried in 2005,
convicted and sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in prison. Because the
media, particularly the Boston Globe, were central to the allegations and
the frenzy that provided the context, it has always been difficult to see
the case plainly. But because justice, as opposed to its many stand-ins, is
blind, imagine yourself or one you love as the defendant at the bar.

Read more online: 

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090316/wypijewski


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Background on the Shanley case:

THE PASSION OF FATHER PAUL SHANLEY
Paul Shanley became the most demonized among the church's fallen fathers.
But however numerous Shanley's sins, they have nothing to do with the
evidence to be presented against him in court. On the irrevocable damage
caused by recovered memories.
http://www.legalaffairs.org/printerfriendly.msp?id=635


The latest of many articles about the Shanley case in The Guide:

Any Prayer for Shanley?
By Jim D'Entremont

On November 9, 2007, a new trial motion was filed at Middlesex Superior
Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on behalf of Paul Shanley, 77, a former
Roman Catholic priest now serving a 12- to 15-year sentence for sexual
crimes he is said to have committed in the 1980s.
http://www.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=8B41D0A1-B29F-487
2-87127D9D88FC4717

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

1 January 2009 

PRESS STATEMENT:

SA LESBIAN AND GAY COMMUNITY HAILS THE APPOINTMENT OF JUDGE EDWIN CAMERON AS A NEW MEMBER TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT

The South African Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP), formerly known as the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE), greatly welcomes the appointment of Justice Edwin Cameron to the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest court.

This follows an announcement by President Kgalema Motlanthe this morning that he has chosen Judge Cameron to hold the vacant seat at the Constitutional Court from this year. This announcement followed a long and difficult process to choose the candidate. The President had to select among four distinguished legal minds.

Judge Cameron, the first openly gay and HIV positive person to hold one of the seats in our country’s highest court, now becomes worldwide the first person to hold such a position in the highest court of any country. He was among the few lawyers who defended anti-apartheid activists against the old regime and he is known for his criticism of the SA government on HIV/AIDS policies. Judge Cameron also set the legal strategy for the country’s constitutional and legal reform on the rights of lesbian and gay people.

The LGEP wishes Justice Cameron the best in his new post and is looking forward to his contributions into the implementation of our country’s Constitutional and legal promises of full equality, human dignity, freedom and justice for all.

ENDS

FOR COMMENTS, CONTACT:

Phumi Mtetwa

Executive Director

Lesbian and Gay Equality Project

36 Grafton Road (Corner Hopkins Str.); Yeoville

P O Box 27811; Yeoville; 2143

Tel: +27 11 487 3810/1

Mobile: +27 72 795 9195

Fax: +27 11 487 2332

Email: phumi@... 

Working for social, economic and political transformation!

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

This website is for people living with HIV. Many lonely girls join this
site and seek hot guys.

Are you alone, too? You can join this website for free and search girls
living with HIV in your local city. Then you can contact them via
email, IM or webcam and meet them for love thing.

This is totally free. You can place your ad via this link:
http://HIVLove.zu5.net/

Important notice to members of the Newsclippings group.

This is to advise you that any member of the Newsclippings Group can now post
news directly to the group.
Just E-mail to   newsclippings@yahoogroups.com
Only group members may post.
The list will not be moderated for the time being, so members are asked to
respect the charter of the group. Please only post GLBTI related news.
The list is NOT intended to function as a discussion group, there are any number
of other lists for that purpose.

This message is automatically sent each month to the Newsclippings Group.

Rod Liddle | March 29, 2008

Surely not many people still cleave to such a view, although we ought to remember that within my lifetime homosexuality was illegal in Britain.

This point is made frequently by lefties who wish to draw some sort of equivalence between the Muslim world and Britain: see, we persecuted the poofs, too. Yes, we did, unforgivably, but we didn't actually hang them, or whip them. Or indeed, as they do in Iran and Saudi Arabia, whip them first and then hang them.

Two gay kids were hanged in 2005 in Mashhad. They were 16 years old at the time of their offence, but this cut no ice with the Iranians. The whole business has re-emerged with the case of Mehdi Kazemi, a gay Iranian teenager whom the British Government wishes to send back to Iran. Kazemi's boyfriend was hanged there and he fears, reasonably enough, that the same fate awaits him. In the 29 years since Iran experienced its joyful and uplifting Islamic revolution, an estimated 4000 homosexuals have been put to death.

Peter Tatchell, the boss of the radical gay organisation Outrage, is the chap who has, predictably and laudably, led the campaign against Kazemi's deportation. Tatchell has stood as a Green party candidate in Oxford and is presumably still a party member. The Greens recently threw their lot in with Ken Livingstone in his bid to become re-elected as Mayor of London. Livingstone is not a homophobe, so far as I know, but he continues to invite to London Muslim clerics who support the murder of homosexuals and defends them for their views. In other words, he promotes fascistic and homophobic Islamic speakers.

But, still, the question remains: should Britain allow Iranian homosexuals asylum? Given the general warp and weft of the Government's policy towards asylum seekers, the answer is a clear no. People who seem to the public to have either a historic right to stay in Britain, either because of their own valour on behalf of our country or because of some ghastly malefaction occasioned by the close of our empire, are always barred: Gurkhas, Hong Kong Chinese, black Zimbabweans.

Algerians, Libyans, Pakistanis and so on who want to kill us all, and even tell the courts they wish to kill us all, are allowed to remain. The Government's policy and the law of the land on this sort of thing is, you have to say, beguilingly counter-intuitive. Based on this rationale, you might expect the Government to say no to someone of blameless countenance whose only crime is to have been born with a genetic disposition at odds with the medieval beliefs of his or her home country. And indeed that is exactly what the Government is saying.

The case against allowing Iranian homosexuals to stay becomes even stronger when you consider that, on average, homosexuals are an extremely law-abiding community, better educated than the norm and tend to be more economically productive. Further, they are less of a drain on the state for dependents because, homosexuality being what it is, they tend not to have many dependents. Given all of these points you would expect the Government to be utterly averse. Genuinely persecuted back home and potentially useful members of our society: they don't stand a chance, do they?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced last September that there were no homosexuals whatsoever in Iran, so I suppose we shall have to take his word for it. Perhaps we should let Kazemi stay here, then, for the simple reason that he does not exist.

March 21, 2008 - 1:50PM

People with a genetic variation that slows down HIV may also be causing a mutation to the AIDS virus that makes it less potent if transmitted to others, researchers say.

The human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS attacks immune system cells.

Like other viruses, it cannot replicate on its own but must hijack a cell and turn it into a virus factory.

HIV must evade several genes to do this, including an immunity gene called HLA.

"Some people have versions of the HLA gene that are known to force HIV to tolerate mutations that damage its ability to reproduce," Carolyn Williamson and Salim Abdool Karim at the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa wrote in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens.

The weaker virus causes slower disease progression in these people. Now it seems this weakened virus may get passed on and act the same way in others - even if they do not have the protective HLA genes, Williamson told Reuters.

"The significant difference to other studies is that this is showing the actual benefit is due to the genetic composition of the virus," said Williamson, an AIDS researcher at the University of Cape Town who led the study.

"This study shows you can have a survival advantage with a virus containing specific genetic signatures associated with lower replication."

The South African study tracked 21 women without the beneficial form of HLA who were recently infected with the weakened strain of HIV. The researchers found the women had much lower levels of HIV in the body than those carrying a form of the virus which had not mutated in this way.

"It is pretty well established if you have certain HLA genes you are better off," Williamson said.

"It is very likely that the virus in the people who did not have the HLA genes came from individuals who did."

The researchers followed the women from between one to three years and found that while the levels of HIV in their bodies fell, their number of crucial CD4 T cells that coordinate the immune system rose.

The goal of treatment is to lower HIV levels to help the immune system renew itself and keep people healthier longer, in part to stem the spread of the virus.

The researchers have not yet studied the women to see how much slower they progressed to full-blown AIDS, but said the findings could help researchers in search of an effective vaccine by understanding better why some survive longer.

The AIDS virus infects an estimated 33 million people globally. It has killed 25 million people and there is no cure or vaccine.

March 17, 2008 - 11:20AM

Sean Penn kissed his male 'Milk' co-star for what felt like "forever".

In the steamy scene, Sean is required to get passionate with his co-star Mark Martinez - who plays the famous cross-dressing disco singer Sylvester - and Mark says he "couldn't believe" how enthusiastic the Oscar-winner was.

Mark said: "I'm performing, and Sean comes onto the dance floor. He grabs me, and he just slaps the biggest kiss on me. It felt like the kiss was forever. I'm like, 'Is he going to stop?' I had to close my eyes, I just couldn't believe it!"

Mark also recalled a scene where he had to sing Sylvester's 1978 hit track 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real').

He told US TV network E!: "All of a sudden, Sean's pointing at me and he's talking to the assistant director. The assistant director comes up to me and says, 'Just to let you know, you are now going to break up Sean and his co-star James Franco's conversation. You're going to grab Sean, and Sean's going to be really excited, and he's going to kiss you.'

"I wanted to do another take, I'm thinking, we gotta do this thing again. We just didn't get it right. But Gus was like, 'It's perfect, perfect, perfect.' I said, 'No! It's not perfect! Sean was laughing at me during the scene!' "

Sean plays Harvey Milk in the film which tells the story of Milk, California's first openly gay elected official, who was assassinated by San Francisco Supervisor Dan White.

Sean split from second wife Robin Wright Penn last December after 11 years of marriage.

BANG! Showbiz.

Jamie Walker | March 08, 2008

The pair met in 1986 when Don Dunstan was 59, seven years after he quit the South Australian premiership in stunning circumstances. Cheng was 24, full-faced and boyish, not long off the plane from Hong Kong.

Within 18 months, they were sharing Dunstan's villa at Norwood in Adelaide's leafy inner east, and running restaurants together.

The young man was at Dunstan's bedside when he died of cancer in 1999, aged 72, feted as one of the intrepid political reformers of his day.

By then, their relationship was open and widely known. But the lengths to which Dunstan and his coterie had gone to conceal his bisexuality during the nine years he served as premier in the 1970s, as he divorced one wife and married another, remains sensitive in a state still very much in his thrall, even today.

Part of the story is now unfolding at the Norwood Concert Hall, around the corner from the faded glory of Don's place. The play Lovers and Haters: The Turbulent Times of Don Dunstan tugs at raw nerves, because there is such reluctance in Adelaide to rock the pedestal on which Dunstan has been placed.

Cheng, now 45, and with a life-time right of abode in the house under the terms of Dunstan's will, is far from alone when he says some things would be best left where they are, swept under the shagpile.

"He was my first love and he will be the love of my life," Cheng tells The Weekend Australian. "His memory will always be like that to me ... you know, sacred."

Lovers and Haters, by Melbourne-based playwrights Rob George and Maureen Sherlock, tracks the controversies that brought the Dunstan decade in South Australia to a shuddering end in 1979, destroying an era that is looked back on by true believers as a state renaissance.

True, there was much to admire in what Dunstan did as premier. The man who wore pink hotpants to parliament introduced Aboriginal land rights, decriminalised homosexuality, established Adelaide's cafe culture and promoted the arts.

One of his enduring gifts is the vibrancy of the Adelaide Festival, arguably the country's supreme arts event. Lovers and Haters premiered to a packed house on Thursday night as part of the biennial event.

"Just look around Adelaide at the moment, and I think everyone would feel Don's presence," says his longtime friend and successor as MP for Norwood, Vini Ciccarello, the woman who nursed him through those final difficult months of his life.

Yet a long-overdue reassessment of the Dunstan legacy needs to take into account the self-deception and disregard for some of the proprieties of public office that would ultimately destroy him politically. The tentacles reached through the upper echelons of the establishment in South Australia, and many of those they touched still occupy powerful positions.

Moreover, the events Lovers and Haters deals with helped to shape the subculture of conspiracy in Adelaide that occasionally bursts into the open with recycled nonsense about the so-called "Family" murders. The myth that the city was host to a clique of homosexual murderers, protected on high by other homosexuals, took hold during the Dunstan years and has proved impossible to shake.

The real story of Dunstan's unmaking is far more compelling. It starts with John Ceruto. The two met in 1966, when Dunstan was putting his lawyer's training to use as attorney-general in Frank Walsh's short-lived Labor government. With his shoulder-length blond hair and footballer's physique, Ceruto cut a striking figure.

Dunstan, though married, entered into an affair with him that would rumble through his most successful years in politics. Debate persists about the degree to which Dunstan was compromised by Ceruto, a man with a drug and heroin habit that would worsen progressively until his death from an overdose in 1991.

As journalists Des Ryan and Mike McEwen would write in their 1979 book It's Grossly Improper, on which much of the new play is based, Ceruto was occupying the place in Dunstan's bed formerly filled by his late press secretary, Gerry Crease.

Ceruto, although woefully unqualified, was appointed to the position of catering projects officer by Dunstan in 1971. He was despised by Dunstan's other staff. One of the most able, journalist Peter Ward, left in 1976 to join The Australian as Adelaide bureau chief. By this time, Dunstan had ended his sexual relationship with Ceruto, and in December of that year he married his second wife, Malayasian-born Adele Koh, who died two years later of cancer.

Described by the then National Times newspaper as a "bachelor (with) a touch of the Madison Avenue ad executive about him", Ward exposed in The Australian the existence of secret police Special Branch files on thousands of people, including a "pink list" of homosexuals, who were kept under surveillance. The story caused a sensation, partly because it stitched another strand in the noose that was tightening around Dunstan's premiership.

In 1972, an Adelaide University law lecturer, George Duncan, drowned after being pushed into the River Torrens in Adelaide's centre. A gay man, he had been attacked near a known homosexual beat; another man, dumped into the water at the same time, scrambled clear with a broken leg and was taken to hospital by Bevan Spencer Von Einem. Von Einem, it would later transpire, committed the gruesome murder in 1983 of a 15-year-old boy and was jailed for life. Two other killings with sadomasochistic and homosexual elements were linked to Von Einem, but never proved, providing grist to the rumour mill about the purported Family murders.

In this supercharged environment, Dunstan was publicly denying rumours of his own bisexuality. But he was not the only man of power and prominence struggling with a double life. The then South Australian chief justice, John Jefferson Bray, had been linked by police to the gay community. The sexuality of both men was in the background when Dunstan moved on Ward's revelations, as well as his concerns about police dragging their feet over the Duncan drowning, and sacked the then police commissioner, Harold Salisbury.

As the row dragged on, Dunstan was forced to call a royal commission. Supreme Court judge Roma Mitchell, the first woman lawyer in the country to put the letters QC after her name and who later became state governor, was appointed to run the inquiry. If Dunstan was trying to protect his government, he could not have chosen better. He knew that the man Salisbury had succeeded as police commissioner, John McKinna, had warned that Bray's private life was the talk of the force at the time he was appointed chief justice in 1967.

When McKinna took the stand at the royal commission, Mitchell closed down the questioning before he got anywhere near naming Bray. She later wrote to Bray privately, explaining it was just as well she had been in charge, because she was not confident anyone else would have prevented the "adverse publicity for you, which would have been monstrously unfair". The truth did not emerge until a few months ago, when academics Susan Magarey and Kerrie Round reproduced the letter in their biography of the late Dame Roma, who died in 2000. Bray's death was in 1995.

The passions Dunstan unleashed, though, are very much alive, as are many of those who figured in the tumultuous events that led to his downfall. Even now, few will discuss them. Premier Mike Rann, who was Dunstan's media adviser, declined to be interviewed for this article. His office said yesterday he would not be attending Lovers and Haters.

Retired Supreme Court judge Ted Mullighan, who was counsel assisting at the Salisbury royal commission, and now heads an inquiry into child abuse in South Australia, did not return calls. Nor did Peter Ward.

Writing It's Grossly Improper cost Des Ryan and co-author Mike McEwen their jobs at an Adelaide radio station. Ryan, now 56, spent two years unemployed before going on to a successful career as a newspaper editor, such was the fallout when the book was published privately by the two men in 1979. Many believe it was the trigger for Dunstan's resignation as premier, not the poor health he cited at the time.

"If you took on Dunstan in this town, you paid a price," Ryansays.

Ciccarello was in tears yesterday as she explained how Dunstan deserved so much better than the footnote provided by Lovers and Haters. Having sat, appalled, through the play's premiere, she left as soon as it finished. "I just couldn't bring myself to speak to anyone afterwards," she said.