1533 and the long English shadow
Henry VIII’s Buggery Act 1533 moved the offence from church to royal courts. It was about jurisdiction as much as sex: dissolve the monasteries, absorb canon crimes, centralize punishment. The death penalty lasted, with interruptions, until the 19th century. The Labouchere Amendment (1885) added “gross indecency” between men — the clause that caught Oscar Wilde. England and Wales decriminalised private consensual acts in 1967, with an unequal age of consent that took decades to fix.
Colonies as carbon copies
The Indian Penal Code’s Section 377 (1860) and Caribbean buggery clauses are this history’s most successful export. Independent states kept the language because rewriting a criminal code is work and because the language still pleased somebody. The global law page is the sequel.
Medicine enters, uninvited
Nineteenth-century sexology (Krafft-Ebing, later Ellis, Hirschfeld) tried to turn sinners into patients. That was not automatically liberation. Diagnosis can be a kinder prison. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM in 1973 after a fight; “sodomy” as a medical term was already embarrassing by then. What lingered were myths about anatomy and disease that the health desk exists to retire.
Paragraph 175
German law’s Paragraph 175 criminalized male same-sex acts from 1871. The Nazi state expanded it and filled the camps. West Germany kept a version; East Germany liberalized earlier. Full deletion came in 1994. The documentary Paragraph 175 is required, not optional. This is the century when a sodomy clause became an instrument of industrial murder.
Repeal as a series, not a holiday
France 1791, Brazil 1830, Illinois 1961, Wolfenden 1957 leading to the UK 1967, South Africa 1998, Lawrence 2003, India 2018, Singapore 2022, a Caribbean cluster in the 2020s — and then Burkina Faso and Trinidad in 2025, reminding everyone that history does not only run one way. Modernity is a process, not a continent.
Educational material, not a diagnosis, prescription, or legal opinion. Consenting adults only. Laws change; check primary sources and a licensed professional in your jurisdiction. If you are in danger, local emergency services come first.