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Gay marriage remains illegal in Northern Ireland.Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, New York University Scotland legalised gay marriage in December 2014. Several gay couples were wed at the stroke of midnight on 29 March 2014, when the law officially came into effect. Section 28 was repealed in Scottish law in 2000, and from English, Welsh and Northern Irish law in 2003.Ģ004: The Civil Partnership Act allowed same-sex couples to enter into same-sex unions with the same rights as married couples.Ģ014: The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, which recognised same sex marriages, entered into law in England and Wales. The notorious "Section 28" caused widespread outrage and as the catalyst for a massive surge in gay activism, including the formation of LGBT rights group Stonewall UK. In 1972, upwards of 2,000 gay men and women marched in London's first Pride parade.ġ988: Then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced an amendment to the Local Government Act 1988 banning state schools from teaching or promoting the "acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". "Even those supporting decriminalisation called homosexuality 'a disability' and 'a great weight of shame'," says the Huffington Post.ġ972: By the early 1970s, "gay rights organisations were springing up locally and nationally," says the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive.
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The same year Wildeblood was the only openly gay man to testify before Lord Wolfenden's inquiry, which would ultimately recommend the decriminalisation of homosexuality.ġ957: The Wolfenden committee published its report, based on three years of testimony from police, psychiatrists and gay men themselves.Īll but one of the committee's 15 members, drawn from the world of politics, law, medicine and academia, agreed that homosexual acts between consenting men over the age of legal majority - 21 at the time - should not be a matter for the law.ġ967: The Sexual Offences Act 1967 stipulated that private sex acts between consenting men over the age of 21 would no longer be a criminal offence in England and Wales, although Scotland did not follow suit until 1980 and Northern Ireland until 1982.ĭespite cross-party support for the Act, MPs were hardly lining up to accept homosexuality as a legitimate orientation. The act's main purpose was to protect girls from sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent to 16, but another provision in the act criminalised "gross indecency", which in practice extended existing laws against "buggery" to criminalise all sex acts between men.ġ895: Author Oscar Wilde's ill-advised attempt to sue the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for publicly accusing him of being a "sodomite" resulted in the writer himself being put on trial.ġ955: Peter Wildeblood, a journalist convicted of buggery and sentenced to 18 months in Wormwood Scrubs, published Against the Law, a book detailing his persecution at the hands of the law, which helped to normalise the taboo subject of same-sex relations. Scotland followed suit in 1889.ġ885: The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 came into law. They were hanged at Newgate prison, London.īuggery ceased to be a capital crime in 1861, when the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 downgraded the punishment to life imprisonment in England and Wales. The two labourers had met a third man in a tavern and gone to his rented room, where the landlord claimed to have caught them engaged in "buggery". Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford, was the first person to be executed under the Buggery Act in 1540, although Historic England claims the charges were most likely "politically motivated", given that Hungerford was also accused of treason and witchcraft.ġ835: James Pratt and John Smith became the last men in Britain to be executed for homosexual acts. The text of the act described "buggery" as a "detestable and abominable Vice", punishable by death whether committed with "mankind or beast". Here are some of the key dates in the history of gay rights in the UK:ġ533: The Buggery Act, the first ever law to specifically outlaw anal sex, was signed into English law. The act, which decriminalised homosexual sex acts between consenting men over the age of 21, opened the door to a slew of legal and social changes which would transform the way British society viewed same-sex relationships over the next 50 years. Fifty years ago, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 came into effect.