How the world became more accepting of homosexuality
Over the last century, the world has seen a dramatic shift towards increased acceptance of the gay community, and of other sexual and gender minorities. An increasing number Legal rights have been granted in an increasing number of countries. The number of countries where homosexuality is decriminalised rose slowly until the post-WWII period, and has since soared:
In most countries ‘sodomy’ (usually defined as some form of male-to-male sexual act) was illegal just two generations ago.[1] Now many of these same countries have chosen to legalise same-sex marriage.
These legal advances have coincided with much greater social acceptance from the public. According to the General Social Survey in the US, the proportion of people who say that same-sex sexual relations are always or almost always wrong plummeted from about 80% in the 1990s to 30% today. The UK has seen similar changes. Even though anti-gay attitudes persist across the globe, most countries have seen positive changes in attitudes over the last decade.
We are still a long way from equality for sexual and gender minorities. But the increasing acceptance of the gay community represents an important expansion of the moral circle that has allowed a significant proportion of the population to freely express their identity and to live with less fear of persecution. So how did these changes occur, and what can we learn from the history of this progress that we can apply to other underrepresented or victimised groups?
1. IDEAS
New conceptual frameworks for thinking about gay people and their rights seem to have driven increased acceptance. The intellectual roots that have underpinned the recent wave of improvements in the West can be traced back to ideas of classical liberalism. In the 1700s, even when homosexuality was more or less universally reviled by the public in Europe, Enlightenment thinkers advocated for the decriminalisation of sodomy. Their arguments were based on the then-radical notion that the state should not be allowed to interfere in the private life of an individual, as long as their actions did not violate the rights of any other person. This motivated the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet to write publicly in favour of decriminalisation even though he felt that sodomy was “disgusting” and a “low vice”. Jeremy Bentham, a founding figure of utilitarianism, built a related argument from first principles. How can we justify prohibiting sex between two consenting members of the same sex? This involved nothing but pleasure, and as he wrote: “If a pleasure is not a good, what is life good for?”
These ideas spread to the political class and had an impact on legal rights. The French Revolution was fuelled by an expansive notion of rights. By omitting sodomy laws from the penal code of 1791 and the civil code of 1804, homosexuality was decriminalised across the whole of France. This had an impact across the globe, both on European colonies, and on new countries that were casting off their colonial shackles. In 1830, Dom Pedro I (of newly independent Brazil) adopted a penal code, inspired by the Napoleonic codes and the ideas of Bentham, that removed reference to sodomy as a crime.
Even much later, a belief in the right to privacy has driven advances in legal rights, even when prejudice towards the gay community remained strong. Consider John Wolfenden, who wrote the parliamentary report in 1957 that precipitated the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom. He said on television that homosexuality was “morally repugnant”, but advocated decriminalisation on the grounds that it was not the law’s business to interfere in private lives. Similarly, it was the foundational right to privacy (stemming from the Fourteenth Amendment) that underpinned the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling that decriminalized sodomy in all U.S. states.
The importance of classically liberal ideas might also contribute to the positive correlation we observe today between whether a country is democratic and the level of tolerance towards homosexuals (although many other causal factors could contribute to this correlation). Autocratic states have a poor record of protecting the rights of sexual minorities and fostering accepting attitudes. They tend to vilify minorities as a convenient enemy that needs to be suppressed or wiped out. The Nazis intensified legal injunctions against homosexual sex, and used an intentionally imprecise law to persecute both sexual minorities and political enemies. When Stalin outlawed homosexuality, his followers equated it with the enemy, calling it “Fascistic perversion” and reversing the creed of free love that the Bolsheviks had promoted under Lenin. More broadly, authoritarian states suppress individualism, activism, and open media – all of which have been crucial in encouraging increased acceptance of sexual and gender minorities.
Despite the importance of classical liberalism, we shouldn’t misinterpret the history as one of the West enlightening the rest of the world on gay rights. Many ancient societies appear to have had more permissive views of gender and sexuality than the ones that prevailed in pre-Enlightenment Europe. The Kamasutra, a foundational Hindu text, was written sometime between 400BCE and 300CE. It describes, with some enthusiasm, the best way for someone with male clothes and a non-binary gender to have sex with a man. And in early modern Japan, the concept of nanshoku (roughly, homosexual love) was accepted and depicted positively in fictional accounts.
In fact, some writers blame the global proliferation of anti-gay attitudes on the rise of Abrahamic religions and the colonialist imposition of these religions across the world. The Old Testament and the Quran both proscribe homosexuality, either with explicit injunctions (Leviticus says it is an “abomination”), or moralising stories. The most famous such story is of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose deviant sexual acts are supposedly responsible for their divine punishment. These religious diktats are persistent ideas, and the resulting association between homosexuality and moral deviancy has driven anti-gay campaigns. Anita Bryant, an American singer and evangelical Christian, led campaigns that successfully repealed gay rights laws in the U.S. throughout the 1970s. And the Catholic Church has consistently spoken out against LGBTQ+ rights, at least until recently. Today, a country’s religiosity is still strongly correlated to negative attitudes on sexual minorities (but note that a number of other factors could underly the correlation).
The West - especially the British - had a more direct role in inhibiting progress on gay rights by imposing strict anti-sodomy laws across many colonies. Section 377, part of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, banned “carnal intercourse against the law of nature” across the British Empire. This de facto outlawed homosexual intercourse, but also exacerbated anti-gay stigma by lumping it in with other non-consensual practices like rape and paedophilia. 38 former British colonies still outlaw male-to-male sexual activity today, with many of these laws stemming directly from the former colonial codes.
Progress towards more acceptance of sexual and gender equality has also been hindered by other damaging ideas. In particular, homosexuality has been repeatedly associated with other negative stereotypes. These associations probably start out as a symptom of prejudice, but once they take hold, they can cause further stigma. Three stereotypes stand out.
First, the U.S. and Western European powers linked homosexuality to communism – borrowing from the Nazi and Stalinist playbook that associated homosexuality with the political enemy. In a series of “Lavender Scares” after WWII, gay people were believed to be national security risks and potential communist spies. This led to a raft of criminal convictions for gay people in high-profile roles in the US and the UK, including, for example, Alan Turing.
Second, the AIDS epidemic, concentrated as it was among the male gay population in the West, led to a wave of backlash that perceived homosexuality as a harbinger of disease. The Reagan administration, for example, imposed an HIV travel ban by adding AIDS to the list of diseases that barred foreigners from entering the US in 1987.
And third, homosexuality and transsexuality have consistently been medicalised as a form of psychological pathology. Homosexuality, for example, was on the American Psychiatric Association’s official list of disorders until 1973.
When this medical framing first arose, it had some counterintuitively positive impacts on early campaigns for legal rights. It sometimes replaced outright moral and religious condemnation with a demand for containing and curing. In the 1960s, a UK opinion poll showed that a majority of the public disagreed with the criminalization of homosexuality because of this conceptual shift. But around the same time, the US was busy upholding a law that allowed gay people to be deported because they had a “psychopathic personality”. Only with a move away from the medicalised framework did gay people begin to be perceived as citizens deserving of full rights.
2. VISIBILITY
But ideas alone have limited power if no one is willing to stand up for them in public. Jeremy Bentham, after all, was unwilling to publish his writings on homosexuality for fear of trashing his public reputation. Increased, higher-profile visibility of pro-gay views, and of gay people more directly, has thus been necessary for generating widespread acceptance. But visibility is a double-edged sword. It can promote tolerance and acceptance, but can also lead to severe backlash. If exposure to gay people increases when the public is already somewhat predisposed to have positive attitudes, this can bring about further positive change, à la the classic social contact hypothesis. But when prejudice is extreme, visibility tends to bring about especially strong negative reactions. Because of this duality, progress has been far from linear – more a jolting, hiccupping, and sometimes reversing process towards increased acceptance.
When gay people had a visible public profile before the 1900s in Europe, this almost always came hand in hand with overt, often violent discrimination. Prejudice towards homosexuality was so widespread that any publicity was bad publicity. Scandals were the order of the day. The most famous of these was the trial of Oscar Wilde, who was convicted of sodomy in 1895 and in the process caused a homophobic media storm.
By the 1950s, attitudes had relaxed just enough for explicitly pro-gay organisations to spring up in Europe and the US. They founded small-circulation homophile magazines, such as Der Ring, Arcadie, and ONE, targeted at a gay audience. But these made little progress in making gay people more visible and accepted in wider society – the magazines were often censored and didn’t break into non-gay audiences. At this time, there seems to have been an accommodationist equilibrium: gay men had just enough freedom to live their lives in private, and their fear of backlash was sufficiently strong that they mostly chose to remain in the shadows.
The dynamic changed in subsequent decades. Pro-gay activism became starker, more visible, and more confrontational. This change was likely driven by increasing demands from gay activists, and by necessity. In response to a violent police raid on a gay bar in New York City in 1969, the gay community rose up to protest and began organised demands for the right to live freely and openly. The Stonewall Riots were a watershed moment that triggered a massive increase in the visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement. Gay pride marches, a clear symbol of a willingness to be “out”, began in U.S. cities the year after and later spread across the whole world.
Moving away from the accommodationist equilibrium, certain trendsetters were willing to be visible and make explicit demands for more rights. Harvey Milk became the first publicly gay person to be elected into public office in the U.S. He campaigned for gay rights and encouraged other gay people to come out of the closet – explicitly promoting visibility in the hope that attitudes would improve if people knew that they had a gay friend, or neighbour, or family member.
The tragic spread of AIDS through the gay population in the 1980s also changed the activist calculus. It often became impossible for people to hide their sexuality if they were directly affected. Even when it was possible to stay in the closet, the urgency of the crisis meant that more people felt they needed to speak up – to campaign for equal treatment before the law, or to lobby for changes to approval processes for life-saving drugs. This enforced visibility, however, exposed gay people to more discrimination, which was especially stark now that the public associated homosexuality with a deadly infectious disease.
Visibility is, however, a necessary condition for widespread acceptance. Because of this, progress has been stymied by censorship laws that prevent the spread of pro-gay media. One of the very first explicitly pro-gay films, Anders als die Andern (“Different from the rest”), released in 1919, was banned after it triggered protests from right-wing and Christian groups in Germany. Hollywood prohibited cinematic portrayals of “sex perversion” (which included depictions of homosexuality) from 1934 to 1968. Later, Margaret Thatcher’s government quashed pro-gay narratives using a new law, “Section 28”, after succumbing to fears that homosexuality was being “glorified” by school library books.
By contrast, undoing censorship of pro-gay media has been an important stepping stone on the path to acceptance. For example, the 1958 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared that pro-homosexual writing was constitutionally protected was crucial in permitting the spread of pro-gay narratives. From the 1960s onwards, fictional depictions of homosexuality by world-famous artists – James Baldwin, among others - garnered more widespread popularity.
The information ecology of the times can have important effects on these dynamics. Most recently, social media has allowed the spread of pro-gay stories without fear of censorship. At the same time, it may amplify viral hate stories and false news. This sometimes has violent consequences: in a recent example, fake news on WhatsApp was linked to honour killings of transgender people in India.
Another key driver of visibility for gay groups and narratives is political discourse. Above, the graph of attitudes towards homosexuality in the U.S. showed that they were stable until the 1990s, after which acceptance climbed rapidly. This study argues that this trend-break was driven by the 1992 Presidential Elections, which saw the Democratic party aligning as a pro-gay party for the first time, and discussions of gay rights issues entering the mainstream. The enormous uptick in the quantity of news media covering LGBTQ+ topics that resulted was a plausible driver of rapid changes in attitudes.
3. LAWS
As pro-gay ideas have percolated through society and homosexuality has become more visible, gay people have gained access to more legal rights. Regimes have not only decriminalised homosexuality, but have legalised same-sex marriage and transgender surgery, and begun to provide legal protection against discrimination. The Netherlands was the first country to legalise same-sex marriage in 2001. Since then, 28 other countries have made a similar step towards equal rights.
Legal rights and norms of acceptance both influence each other. For example, public attitudes influence whether democratic legislatures institute progressive laws. This is true even though those who draft pro-gay laws have often been inspired more by ideas of liberty and privacy than by acceptance per se. The UK government prevaricated for 10 years after the Wolfenden Report’s recommendation to decriminalise homosexuality. Their decision to change the law in 1967 was partly driven by an opinion poll showing that 63% of the British public didn’t think homosexuality should be criminal. By contrast, the Thatcher-led government that enacted Section 28 was emboldened by a national survey stating that the majority of the population believed that homosexuality was wrong. Attitudes can also affect the decisions of the judiciary, not just of the legislature. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld prohibitions against homosexuality based on their view of it as a “crime against nature” in 1986. Only once public attitudes had improved was this ruling overturned in 2003 in a similar case.
And influence can run in the other direction, too: when the law changes, this affects public attitudes. This experiment showed that attitudes towards gay marriage and gay people improve if people are told that the Supreme Court is likely to pass a same-sex marriage law. The law acts as a signal of what society finds to be socially acceptable. It can thus affect people’s behaviour by impressing upon them that discrimination against gay people is socially unacceptable. The law might affect public acceptance in other ways too. First, more liberal laws that decriminalise or protect LGBTQ+ groups might make these groups more visible. If gay bars are illegal, the public won’t bump into many gay people. But if a legal gay bar opens on their street, this opens an opportunity for social contact that might promote acceptance or backlash.
The law and attitudes don’t always change in tandem. And de jure legal rights alone are not enough to ensure the protection of vulnerable minorities if they are not supported by widespread acceptance. It is, of course, members of the public that make up the enforcers of those laws. So if public prejudice is still widespread, the police and the judiciary will often find ways of discriminating anyway. Take the example of the “Cairo 52”, a group of 52 people who were arrested in an Egyptian gay nightclub in 2001. They were subject to torture and humiliation, and were charged in courts whose verdicts could not be overturned. Egyptian law didn’t even mention homosexuality. Instead, the arrests and prosecutions were based on a 1961 law pertaining to “obscene behaviour” that was originally designed to avert prostitution. Using vague legal prohibitions to persecute homosexuality has been a common historical theme. “Gross indecency” laws - the Labouchère Amendment in the UK (1885), and similar laws passed in the late 19th century in Brazil, Italy, and Canada - rarely defined what gross indecency was supposed to mean. But they were used to criminalise any acts that seemed deviant given the attitudes of the time - including, of course, homosexual ones.
A new narrative linking LGBTQ+ rights with human rights has recently driven advances in legal status for sexual and gender minorities. There were some major early victories in international courts. In 1981, the European Court of Human Rights declared that the criminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland was against human rights. Since all European countries were bound by a convention on human rights, this had enormous knock-on effects, effectively leading to the decriminalisation of homosexuality across the whole of Europe.
Buoyed by this early success, NGOs (such as the International Lesbian and Gay Association), pushed for a human rights lens on gay rights issues. This took a while to take off, however. Amnesty International, for example, only included gay rights abuses as part of its mandate in 1991, after years of lobbying from LGBTQ+ organisations. And progress through international bodies like the UN was often hobbled by the need for cross-country consensus or unanimity. For example, a resolution proposed by Brazil to the UN Court of Human Rights in 2003 that affirmed the rights of sexual minorities was stymied by opposition from the Vatican, Pakistan, and Egypt. And the Yogyakarta Principles, a set of principles developed by international human rights groups to address the rights of sexual and gender minorities in 2006, have never been officially accepted by the UN.
But by the late 2000s, the link with human rights caught on in the public sphere. In 2011, Hillary Clinton got a lot of press for spreading the slogan “gay rights are human rights” in her role as U.S. Secretary of State. Since then, richer countries have begun to apply pressure on the international stage more consistently, with varying degrees of success. For example, the US and the UK lobbied to try to avert a bill in Uganda that imposed the death penalty for homosexuality. The implementation of the bill was not prevented, but delayed until 2014. But once implemented, Uganda took an economic hit – the World Bank withdrew a $90m loan, and its sovereign credit rating was lowered. The effectiveness of such deterrents is open to question. More successfully, the EU required 13 new member states in the early 2000s to implement an extensive anti-discrimination law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And international courts motivated by human rights concerns have continued to act as key loci of progress. For example, a 2018 ruling in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is set to spark the legalisation of same-sex marriage in up to 20 Latin American countries over the coming years.
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The advances in attitudes and rights for gay people are the result of a complex interplay of causal factors. Three themes stand out. First, ideas matter. Spreading ideas based on equality and rights can filter through and gradually transform people’s conception of discriminated minorities. This provides hints on how to transform attitudes towards other groups who are victims of prejudice - racial minorities, international migrants, women - and those who have currently have no opportunity to have their opinions considered: future generations or animals, for example. Second, empowering gay people and pro-gay narratives to become more visible has been a crucial step in generating widespread acceptance towards these groups. It is also a dangerous step, as it can expose people to vitriol, hate, and violence. Third, laws can protect minorities not only by ensuring the enforcement of rights, but also by interacting with and altering the social norms of prejudice towards minorities. Other projects for positive social progress should take into account this neglected effect of judiciary and legislative change.
[1] Historically, it has been much rarer to criminalise female-to-female sex. But that doesn’t bely greater acceptance. It’s been argued that the lack of early legal prohibition (for example, in eighteenth-century England) was driven not by acceptance of lesbianism, but by the fear of increasing visibility and awareness of female-to-female sex. And more recently, the increased visibility of lesbian and bisexual women has led to increases in the number of countries in which female-to-female sex is illegal.