The Wolfenden committee had been set up to investigate homosexuality and prostitution in , and included on its panel a judge, a psychiatrist, an academic and various theologians. They came to the conclusion with one dissenter that criminal law could not credibly intervene in the private sexual affairs of consenting adults in the privacy of their homes. The position was summarised by the committee as follows: There was no political impetus after the publication of the Wolfenden report to legislate on this matter, but by the Labour Government of the time showed support for Lord Arran's mode of liberal thought.
It was considered that criminal law should not penalise homosexual men, already the object of ridicule and derision. The comments of Roy Jenkins , Home Secretary at the time, captured the government's attitude: Jenkins himself had had homosexual relationships. According to gay activist Peter Tatchell , dissent against the bill could be summed up by the Earl of Dudley 's 16 June [2] statement that "[homosexuals] are the most disgusting people in the world Prison is much too good a place for them; in fact, that is a place where many of them like to go—for obvious reasons.
The Bill received royal assent on 27 July after an intense late night debate in the House of Commons. Lord Arran, in an attempt to minimise criticisms that the legislation would lead to further public debate and visibility of issues relating to homosexual civil rights made the following qualification to this "historic" milestone: The legal consequence of the legislation is often described as partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality as the act introduced a strict exemption from prosecution distinct from a full decriminalisation , the implication of this being that outside this exemption, technically speaking, homosexual acts continued to be a punishable offence in and of themselves.
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Peter Tatchell in his book Europe in The Pink claims that the legislation facilitated an increase in prosecutions against homosexual men. No subsequent reconsideration of the issue of male homosexuality in statutory law took place in England and Wales until the late s. This was rejected at the time, in part due to fears that further decriminalisation would serve only to encourage younger men to experiment sexually with other men, a choice that some at the time claimed would place such an individual outside of wider society.
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Variations in Sexual Identity Milestones among Lesbians, Gay Men and Bisexuals
In some regions, decades would pass without any prosecutions. Yet the Dutch, in the 's, mounted a harsh anti-sodomy campaign alongside an anti-Gypsy pogrom , even using torture to obtain confessions. As many as one hundred men and boys were executed and denied burial Greenberg, , Also, the degree to which sodomy and same-sex attraction were accepted varied by class, with the middle class taking the narrowest view, while the aristocracy and nobility often accepted public expressions of alternative sexualities.
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At times, even with the risk of severe punishment, same-sex oriented subcultures would flourish in cities, sometimes only to be suppressed by the authorities. In the 19 th century there was a significant reduction in the legal penalties for sodomy.
Don’t fall for the myth that it’s 50 years since we decriminalised homosexuality
The Napoleonic code decriminalized sodomy, and with Napoleon's conquests that Code spread. Furthermore, in many countries where homosexual sex remained a crime, the general movement at this time away from the death penalty usually meant that sodomy was removed from the list of capital offenses.
In the 18 th and 19 th centuries an overtly theological framework no longer dominated the discourse about same-sex attraction. Instead, secular arguments and interpretations became increasingly common. Probably the most important secular domain for discussions of homosexuality was in medicine, including psychology. This discourse, in turn, linked up with considerations about the state and its need for a growing population, good soldiers, and intact families marked by clearly defined gender roles.
Doctors were called in by courts to examine sex crime defendants Foucault, ; Greenberg, At the same time, the dramatic increase in school attendance rates and the average length of time spent in school, reduced transgenerational contact, and hence also the frequency of transgenerational sex. Same-sex relations between persons of roughly the same age became the norm. Clearly the rise in the prestige of medicine resulted in part from the increasing ability of science to account for natural phenomena on the basis of mechanistic causation.
The application of this viewpoint to humans led to accounts of sexuality as innate or biologically driven. The voluntarism of the medieval understanding of sodomy, that sodomites chose sin, gave way to the modern notion of homosexuality as a deep, unchosen characteristic of persons, regardless of whether they act upon that orientation. The effects of these ideas cut in conflicting ways.
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Since homosexuality is, by this view, not chosen, it makes less sense to criminalize it. Persons are not choosing evil acts. Yet persons may be expressing a diseased or pathological mental state, and hence medical intervention for a cure is appropriate. They also sought to develop techniques to prevent children from becoming homosexual, for example by arguing that childhood masturbation caused homosexuality, hence it must be closely guarded against.
In the 20 th century sexual roles were redefined once again. For a variety of reasons, premarital intercourse slowly became more common and eventually acceptable. With the decline of prohibitions against sex for the sake of pleasure even outside of marriage, it became more difficult to argue against gay sex. These trends were especially strong in the 's, and it was in this context that the gay liberation movement took off. Although gay and lesbian rights groups had been around for decades, the low-key approach of the Mattachine Society named after a medieval secret society and the Daughters of Bilitis had not gained much ground.
This changed in the early morning hours of June 28, , when the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, rioted after a police raid. In the aftermath of that event, gay and lesbian groups began to organize around the country. Gay Democratic clubs were created in every major city, and one fourth of all college campuses had gay and lesbian groups Shilts, , ch. Large gay urban communities in cities from coast to coast became the norm.
The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official listing of mental disorders. The increased visibility of gays and lesbians has become a permanent feature of American life despite the two critical setbacks of the AIDS epidemic and an anti-gay backlash see Berman, , for a good survey. The post-Stonewall era has also seen marked changes in Western Europe, where the repeal of anti-sodomy laws and legal equality for gays and lesbians has become common.
Broader currents in society have influenced the ways in which scholars and activists have approached research into sexuality and same-sex attraction. Some early 20 th century researchers and equality advocates, seeking to vindicate same-sex relations in societies that disparaged and criminalized it, put forward lists of famous historical figures attracted to persons of the same sex.
Historians and researchers sympathetic to the gay liberation movement of the late s and s produced a number of books that implicitly relied on an essentialist approach. In the s and s John Boswell raised it to a new level of methodological and historical sophistication, although his position shifted over time to one of virtual agnosticism between essentialists and their critics.
Essentialists claim that categories of sexual attraction are observed rather than created. Through history and across cultures there are consistent features, albeit with meaningful variety over time and space, in sexual attraction to the point that it makes sense of speak of specific sexual orientations.
According to this view, homosexuality is a specific, natural kind rather than a cultural or historical product. Essentialists allow that there are cultural differences in how homosexuality is expressed and interpreted, but they emphasize that this does not prevent it from being a universal category of human sexual expression. In contrast, in the s and since a number of researchers, often influenced by Mary McIntosh or Michel Foucault, argued that class relations, the human sciences, and other historically constructed forces create sexual categories and the personal identities associated with them.
For advocates of this view, such as David Halperin, how sex is organized in a given cultural and historical setting is irreducibly particular Halperin, In a manner closely related to the claims of queer theory, discussed below, social constructionists argue that specific social constructs produce sexual ways of being. There is no given mode of sexuality that is independent of culture; even the concept and experience of sexual orientation itself are products of history.
For advocates of this view, the range of historical sexual diversity, and the fluidity of human possibility, is simply too varied to be adequately captured by any specific conceptual scheme. There is a significant political dimension to this seemingly abstract historiographical debate. Social constructionists argue that essentialism is the weaker position politically for at least two reasons. Second, social constructionists argue that an important goal of historical investigations should be to put into question contemporary organizing schemas about sexuality.
There are related queer theory criticisms of the essentialist position, discussed below. Only an essentialist approach can maintain the project of gay history, and minority histories in general, as a force for liberation. Today natural law theory offers the most common intellectual defense for differential treatment of gays and lesbians, and as such it merits attention. The development of natural law is a long and very complicated story, but a reasonable place to begin is with the dialogues of Plato, for this is where some of the central ideas are first articulated, and, significantly enough, are immediately applied to the sexual domain.
For the Sophists, the human world is a realm of convention and change, rather than of unchanging moral truth. Plato, in contrast, argued that unchanging truths underpin the flux of the material world. Reality, including eternal moral truths, is a matter of phusis. Even though there is clearly a great degree of variety in conventions from one city to another something ancient Greeks became increasingly aware of , there is still an unwritten standard, or law, that humans should live under.
In the Laws , Plato applies the idea of a fixed, natural law to sex, and takes a much harsher line than he does in the Symposium or the Phraedrus. In Book Eight, the Athenian speaker considers how to have legislation banning homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate procreative sex widely accepted. He then states that this law is according to nature d. Probably the best way of understanding Plato's discussion here is in the context of his overall concerns with the appetitive part of the soul and how best to control it.