#labouchere amendment

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

Also, I know we are all joking about the #sexban- but please bear in mind that it was a similar line (a late amendment, passed without scrutiny) in a 1885 that effectively criminalized homosexual activity for men.

This was the labouchere amendment, and it was the law which Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde (among thousands of others) were prosecuted under.

Now, it seems like the current law is unenforceable, but nonetheless it’s really worrying that we are just allowing laws like this to slip through parliament.

During Pride Month, we should remember our history.

[marzipanandminutiae]

I can't think of anything specific to ask but I'd love a cool Victorian fact?

The reason sapphic sex wasn’t criminalized in the UK by the same 1885 law that made the legal statues against m/m sex much more enforceable (the Labouchere Amendment) was not, as has been suggested, because Queen Victoria didn’t believe queer women existed.

It was because the politicians drafting the law didn’t want women to know such a thing was possible.

I can say with 100% certainty that women still figured it out.

[sherlocksvictoriansecret]

Sodomy (or buggery as it was called at the time) first became a civil offense, punishable by death, in 1533 when Henry VIII issued a formal decree on the subject, The Statute of 1533. Except for a short period in the 1500s, sodomy remained a capital offense in England until 1828.  Throughout the remainder of the 1800s the act of sodomy was a felony punishable by imprisonment.

In the 1600s and into the 1700s, the term "sodomite" applied to a practicioner of any form of non-reproductive sex, whether between members of the same sex or not.  Despite the threat of the death penalty, sexual acts between adult males and adolescent males and females were commonplace and--during the 1600s--generally socially accepted.  About 1700, gender lines and cultural expectations regarding sexual preferences became more rigid.

In the 1880s "the social purity movement"--a looseknit coalition of early feminists and social conservatives--set as its goal the containing of male lust in all its many forms, from adultery to prostitution to pornography.  In 1885, the social purity movement succeeded in pushing through a major revision of England's laws regulating sexual behavior.  The main focus of the legislation was not on same-sex relationships, but on protecting adolescent girls.  Prior to 1885, indecent assaults on persons over the age of thirteen were not punishable. Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 revised the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen.  Henry Labouchere, M. P., sought to make any indecent assault punishable by proposing an amendment that would make "gross indecencies"--regardless of the age of the victim--punishable as a misdemeanor.  The vague words chosen by Labouchere were later interpreted more broadly than his intended purpose to apply to consensual same-sex acts between adults. In 1895, a London jury found Oscar Wilde guilty of violating Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. For his crime, Wilde spent two years in prison.

Private consensual acts between adults, including same-sex sodomy, were decriminalized in England in 1967.

[sherlocksvictoriansecret]

The surprising truth about the lives of gay men in Victorian England

“Victorians more liberal than their Sixties counterparts, study suggests

Historian Jeff Evans, from Manchester Metropolitan University, has painstakingly sifted through more than 280,000 criminal cases at the National Archive at Kew which suggest that the supposedly prudish Victorians had a far more relaxed attitude to sex between men than their 1960s counterparts.

The records – which now form the biggest database of its kind – are believed to represent 64% of all indictable court cases relating to sex between men held in the Lancashire Assize and Quarter Sessions.

They show that outside of London, The Criminal Justice System in regions such as Lancashire simply weren’t interested in prosecuting gay men for their activities.”

[alltheuselessinformation]

Gross Indecency

So, I saw 'The Imitation Game' a couple of days ago, and I have to say, that movie is fabulous. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, 'The Imitation Game' is a great movie based off of a biography of Alan Turing, who was a famous British mathematician and pioneering computer scientist.

In 1952, Turing was also convicted of "gross indecency" under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, also known as the Labouchere Amendment. In practice, this law was used to prosecute virtually any male homosexual behavior. Oscar Wilde was also prosecuted under this law, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment and hard labor.

There is one particularly interesting thing about this amendment that I thought I should share: it, for some reason, only applied to men. This means that while hysteria over homosexuality was at a high at the time, and between men it could be punished very severely, lesbian activity was pretty much ignored by the law.

I have absolutely no idea why this happened, but it did. Maybe it was the casual misogyny of the era- the idea that women could not, or would not, possibly act in any way that could be considered immoral or socially unacceptable. That's just my best guess.

Anyway, that's all for today. I hope y'all didn't miss me too much over the holidays, but if you did, I assure you, I will update again pretty soon. Oh, and see 'The Imitation Game', if you haven't already. It really is fantastic.