FORTHE GREATER PART OF THE PAST 2,000 YEARS the men who governed the British Isles were obsessed with something of almost no importance. Sodomy. This is despite the fact that there was disagreement about every aspect of the activity — including precisely what sodomy is. Nevertheless, the consensus for hundreds of years was that bum sex was such an abomination that practically everybody caught in the act had to be killed. Not only did that decision not solve the problem, it appeared sometimes to cause even more confusion.
Throughout this moral panic, brave men continued to have sex with each other, while even the ordinary folk who didn’t fancy it seemed excited by the thought. They packed the courtrooms when gay gentlemen came to trial. After far too long, sanity prevailed. First, the death penalty for buggery was repealed in 1861. A mere one hundred years later, in 1967, homosexuality was partially decriminalised. But as activist Peter Tatchell observes, “Until 1999, Britain had the largest number of anti-gay laws of any country in the world, some of them dating back centuries.”