The Long Fight

Chapter 0

Before you read

You will sometimes hear that homosexuality was never really punished, that the whole history of persecution is a modern invention, and that today's laws about which restroom a person may use are simply about privacy and have no ancestors. This exhibit answers with the record: the statutes themselves, the court files, the execution registers, the camp numbers, the firing letters, the clinic orders, and the bills signed this year.

It is a long record, so we have built it as a ledger rather than an argument. Each room gives you the law in its own words, the penalty it prescribed, who it reached, how often it was actually used, and who counted. Where a popular claim does not survive contact with the evidence, we say so, including when the claim is one our own side likes. The last two rooms are given over entirely to what the skeptic gets right and to the numbers with their sources attached.

How to read the tags

This museum does not ask you to take its word for anything. Every claim in every room carries a confidence tag, and the tags mean exactly what they say.

Verified means we read the primary source ourselves, or two independent reputable sources agree. Corroborated means one reputable secondary source supports it and we could not reach the original. Contested means specialists disagree, and we tell you who and why rather than picking the version we prefer. Unverified means we could not confirm it and are telling you so instead of quietly dropping it.

One more boundary. This exhibit names public officials, litigants, defendants in reported cases, and authors, in their public roles. It names no private living person, and it does not out the dead on a hunch. Where a person's own words survive, we quote them. Where they do not, we say what the record shows and stop.

Sources for this room: the full dossiers behind every chapter are held in the museum's research record and are cited chapter by chapter as you go. The method itself is set out in Our Method.

Room I · Part One: The old law

The oldest statutes

Assyria c. 1076 BCE · Judah 7th to 5th century BCE · Athens 346 BCE · Rome 50 BCE to 300 CE

The record does not begin with a ban on love. It begins with a law about humiliation. On a clay tablet from Assur, copied in the reign of Tiglath-pileser I, two paragraphs sit side by side: one punishes a man for spreading the rumour that another man is penetrated, and the next punishes the man who does the penetrating. Read them together and you can see the machinery that will run for the next three thousand years. The law is not interested in desire. It is interested in who is on top, who is free, and who may be seen.

Assyria: the first surviving statute

Four things in that text matter, and all four recur for the next three millennia. First, only the active man is punished; the penetrated man is not charged at all. Second, the object of the offence is his tappa'u, his peer, a free Assyrian of equal standing: nothing is said about slaves, foreigners or boys, and nothing whatsoever about women. Third, the penalty is talionic and then some, the same act done to him, followed by castration. Fourth, and most revealing, the paragraph immediately before it treats the accusation of being penetrated as an injury done to the accused, punishable with fifty blows, a month of forced labour for the crown, a shaved head and a talent of lead.

Verified the text, in three independent translations. Contested whether paragraph 20 describes rape or any act with a peer: Martti Nissinen reads both paragraphs as protecting a free male citizen's masculine status rather than prohibiting sex; other surveys read paragraph 20 as a rape provision; Roth's translation leaves it open.

Judah: two verses, and the fight over what they meant

This is the verse that later legislators copied rather than paraphrased. A Latin version of it heads the title "On debauchers" in the Roman Collatio around the 390s, sitting directly beside the Roman statutes. Sixteen centuries later the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 reproduces it almost word for word as the colony's eighth capital law, with "Lev. 20. 13." printed in the margin. You will meet it again in Room IX, on this Commonwealth's own statute book.

What the Hebrew phrase mishkevei ishah, "the lyings of a woman," covered in the first instance is genuinely disputed among specialists. Contested Saul Olyan (1994) reads the idiom as anal intercourse specifically; Jerome Walsh (2001) reads the grammar as targeting the receptive partner; Jacob Milgrom (2000) confines the rule to the chapter's list of forbidden unions and to Israelites in the land; Idan Dershowitz (2017) argues the verse is a later editorial addition; Jan Joosten (2020) reads "on the bed of a woman," a prohibition on intercourse with a married man; Robert Gagnon (2001) defends the broad traditional reading. What is not in dispute is the reception: Philo already read it around 20 to 40 CE as a death sentence for both parties, and the Septuagint, Old Latin and Vulgate all render it that way.

Athens: the law policed status, not sex

Athens did not prohibit sex between males. It policed who could do what with whom, and it enforced those lines hard. The four provisions we can recover, quoted or paraphrased in Aeschines' prosecution of Timarchus in 346 or 345 BCE, are these: it was a serious offence to hire out a boy as a prostitute (father, brother, uncle or guardian alike); the hubris law reached anyone who outraged "a child or a man or woman, or any one, free or slave"; a citizen who had prostituted himself lost the right to hold office, to speak in the assembly, to serve as priest or herald, and to enter the purified ground of the people's assembly; and a slave who courted a free boy took fifty lashes.

Timarchus was convicted and lost his civic rights. Demosthenes, speaking three years later, says he was still disfranchised. Verified by two contemporary speeches.

And the same prosecutor told the same jury, in the same speech, that he was himself a lover of boys and saw no shame in it, distinguishing "love that is honorable" from hiring a body for money. The slave-flogging law exists precisely because a free man's courtship of a free boy was lawful. This is what a bounded tolerance looks like from the inside, and the museum shows it rather than flattening it.

Plato writes the sentence that outlives the city

This is a philosopher's proposal for an imagined colony, not an Athenian statute, and the museum will not pretend otherwise. Its importance is that the phrase escaped the page. "Contrary to nature" travels from Plato to Paul's letter to the Romans, to Philo, to the lawyers of the Christian emperors, to Aquinas, to Blackstone's "infamous crime against nature," and into the General Laws of Massachusetts, chapter 272, section 34, where the words are still printed today. You can follow that one sentence across twenty-three centuries in Room XIX.

Rome: a status rule, and a law nobody used

Rome had a statute, the lex Scantinia, and almost nothing about it is knowable. Its date, its text and its penalty are all unknown; it existed by 50 BCE; and in seven centuries of surviving records it appears in court exactly twice, both times as a political weapon. Caelius wrote to Cicero that when an informer laid a charge against him under the law during the games he was presiding over, he immediately laid the same charge against the censor who had arranged it, and treated the whole business as farce. Domitian is said to have condemned "several men of both orders" under it. Juvenal has a character tell the moralists that if statutes are to be raked up they should cite the Scantinian first.

What Rome did have, in black letter, was a status rule.

Read it closely. The freeborn body is protected; forcing one is capital. The free man who chooses the passive role is degraded, losing half his estate and half his testamentary freedom, but he is not killed. Slaves are simply outside the frame: a master's use of his own slave was lawful. Nothing is said about the consenting active partner and nothing at all about women. Barnes's summary of the imperial centuries is blunt, and we print it because it cuts against the easy story: relations between consenting freeborn adult men were legally tolerated throughout Roman imperial society.

Verified the Sententiae text, the two Scantinian court episodes, and Domitian's enforcement. Contested the date, content and penalty of the lex Scantinia itself. Unverified any figure for prosecutions: none exists.

Sources: ORACC P281779 and Roth (1997) for the Assyrian laws; Sefaria (JPS 1917) and eBible.org (KJV) for Leviticus, with Olyan (1994), Walsh (2001), Milgrom (2000), Dershowitz (2017), Joosten (2020) and Gagnon (2001) on the scope debate; Perseus for Aeschines (Adams, Loeb 1919) and Demosthenes (Vince, Loeb 1926); Project Gutenberg for Plato (Jowett 1871); Perseus for Cicero's letters (Shuckburgh) and LacusCurtius for Suetonius (Rolfe 1914) and Quintilian; the Roman Law Library at Grenoble and Hyamson (1913) for Pauli Sententiae and the Collatio; Matthew Perry, "The Lex Scantinia and the Public Response to Stuprum," Eugesta 13 (2023); Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality (1999); T. D. Barnes (2012). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Room II · Part One: The old law

Justinian's sword

Rome 342 and 390 · Constantinople 528 to 559 · Toledo 642 to 693

In the space of about two hundred years the law changes its mind about what it is doing. It stops policing a man's rank and starts policing an act, it borrows a verse from Leviticus to justify itself, and for the first time it says plainly that the penalty is death. Everything after this room, in the Latin West at least, is a footnote to what the Christian emperors wrote down.

342: the sword is drawn, the penalty is left vague

The penalty is "exquisite punishments," unspecified. Most scholars take the avenging sword to mean death; the law does not say so in terms. Contested John Boswell read the statute as outlawing same-sex marriages, which had, he argued, been legal in fact until then. His critics answer that nubere here is the ordinary vulgar idiom for a man taking the bride's role, that is, the passive sexual role, and that this is a general penal statute rather than a marriage law. We present the disagreement rather than choosing the more quotable version.

390: burning, in public, and what the abridgement hid

Forty-eight years later a second law survives in two forms, and the difference between them is a lesson in how records are made. The Theodosian Code's compilers, working in 429 to 437, kept a short general rule. The full text, preserved in the Collatio, shows something narrower and uglier.

Two honest notes belong on this label. The original was an order to one official about the male brothels of one city, and the Code turned it into a general law of the Empire by cutting the details out. And Unverified: no execution under this law is recorded in any surviving source. Barnes, Boswell and Cantarella all looked and all found none. The correct sentence is "the law ordered," not "the state burned." That distinction is exactly the kind this exhibit refuses to blur, in either direction.

533: for the first time, death for the act itself

No distinction of role, status or consent is stated. This is the first Roman text that plainly makes intercourse between males capital as such. Verified.

The prosecutions, as two independent witnesses describe them

Five years before the Institutes, the machinery was already running. The chronicler John Malalas records that in 528 several bishops were accused; two are named. Isaiah of Rhodes, formerly night prefect of Constantinople, was tortured and exiled. Alexander of Diospolis was castrated and paraded through the streets on a litter. The emperor then decreed that those detected should be castrated, and Malalas adds that many were arrested and died of the mutilation.

Unverified Any total for those executed or mutilated under Justinian. No source gives a number. The documented victims are two named bishops, an uncounted "many," and the cases Procopius describes. Any figure you see quoted for this reign has been invented somewhere along the way.

538 and 559: earthquakes, famine, and a warning

Justinian returned to the subject twice more. Novel 77, conventionally dated to about 538 and addressed to the people of Constantinople, ties such acts to natural disaster: "it is because of such offences that famines and earthquakes and pestilences come." It orders the city prefect to arrest those who persist after a public warning and to subject them to the ultimate punishments. Novel 141, dated by its own subscription to 15 March 559, invokes the destruction of Sodom, tells offenders to confess to the Patriarch and do penance before the coming holy days, and prescribes no new penalty; the sword of the Institutes stands behind it.

Toledo: castration written into a kingdom's code

In the Visigothic kingdom the law goes further than Rome's, and it reaches both partners.

Fifty years later King Egica widened it to its furthest reach: "if any man whosoever, of any age, or race, whether he belongs to the clergy, or to the laity," is convicted, he suffers castration plus the penalties of the church council of 693, which were excommunication, scourging, having the head shaved as a mark of infamy, and banishment. That is the broadest personal scope of any law in this room.

Sources: Codex Theodosianus Book 9 and Codex Iustinianus Book 9 (Mommsen and Krueger texts, The Latin Library); the Collatio (Mommsen text, Roman Law Library, Grenoble) with Hyamson's 1913 translation, Internet Archive; Justinian's Institutes (Latin, The Latin Library; Moyle 1913, Project Gutenberg; Sandars 1876, Internet Archive); Novels 77 and 141 (Schoell and Kroll's Latin, Grenoble); John Malalas, Chronicle 18.18 (Jeffreys, Jeffreys and Scott, 1986), with Theophanes AM 6021 as a parallel witness; Procopius, Anecdota 11 and 16 (Dewing, Loeb 1935, LacusCurtius); the Visigothic Code (Scott 1910, LIBRO); C. J. Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, vol. 5 (1896), pp. 243 to 245, for the Sixteenth Council of Toledo; T. D. Barnes, Roman Legal Tradition 8 (2012), pp. 43 to 62. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Room III · Part One: The old law

The sin without a name

Fonte Avellana 1049 · Nablus 1120 · Rome 1179 · Castile 1255 · Orleans c. 1260 · Paris 1307

Between the eleventh century and the fourteenth, three things happen at once. The church builds a category and gives it a name it insists cannot be spoken. Secular kings, for the first time since Justinian, write their own penalties. And the charge is welded to heresy, which is the hinge that moves the offence out of the confessional and onto the pyre. This room is where the machinery of the next six hundred years is assembled.

1049: a monk writes the first book, and the pope softens it

Peter Damian, a hermit of Fonte Avellana, sent the newly elected Leo IX a long treatise now known as the Liber Gomorrhianus, the Book of Gomorrah. It is the first Latin work devoted entirely to the subject. Damian sorts the "vice against nature" into four kinds in ascending gravity, solitary acts, mutual masturbation, acts between the thighs, and the consummated act, and demands that any cleric guilty of any of them be stripped of his orders.

The pope's answer is the part usually left out. Leo praises the book and then rules more leniently than its author asked: those who sinned "not over a long period nor with many" are to be restored to their rank after due penance. Only the habitual, those with many partners, and those guilty of the consummated act are removed from orders.

Verified the treatise, its date, its addressee and the four-fold scheme. Corroborated the exact Latin wording of Leo's nos humanius agentes sentence. Contested what the reply meant: some scholars read it as a rebuff to Damian, others as an endorsement that went further than he did. The text supports a middle reading, and we print it rather than choosing a side.

1120: the earliest medieval law that says burn them

Seventy-one years later, in a kingdom under famine, locusts and raids, the Patriarch of Jerusalem and King Baldwin II summoned an assembly at Nablus and issued twenty-five canons, the only surviving legislation of the first Latin kingdom. Four of them deal with sodomy.

Verified the Latin text, read in Mansi. Corroborated the claim that it is the earliest such medieval law. Unverified any enforcement: there is no record of the Nablus canons being carried out. What matters here is the date on which burning entered the black letter.

1179: the first general council to legislate

The novelty is the last clause. Elvira and Ancyra, eight centuries earlier, had handled penitents. Lateran III is the first ecumenical council to name the vice and to impose a sanction on laymen as a class. Still no corporal penalty, and still no reference to the secular power. That comes next, and it comes from kings.

1255 to 1265: the kings write their own penalties

The same king's Siete Partidas, compiled in the following decade and given binding force in 1348, makes the accusation public and the penalty capital: any person of the people may accuse; if it is proved "they must die for it, the one who does it as well as the one who consents to it." And it writes in two exceptions that the modern reader should not skip: no penalty for anyone forced, "because those who are forced are not at fault," and none for a person under fourteen, "because minors do not understand how great a wrong it is."

In Orleans, around 1260, a compilation by jurists of the law school produced the first European text to write a penalty for women.

1272: the ranking that puts consensual love above rape

Thomas Aquinas, writing the Summa's treatment of lust, sets out an order of gravity. The "unnatural vice" comes first, then incest, then adultery and the rape of a wife, then seduction and the rape of a virgin, and last of all simple fornication. His stated reason is not harm to any person. It is that in sins against nature "an injury is done to God, the Author of nature," while the others transgress only right reason.

Read plainly, the most influential theologian of the Latin church ranked consensual sex between two men as a graver sin than the rape of a woman, because the first offends God directly and the second offends a human being. He was drawing on a chain that ran back through Gratian's canon-law textbook of about 1140 to Augustine. He prescribed no civil penalty. He did not need to: the kings were already writing them.

Verified the Summa text, read in full in the 1920 Dominican Fathers translation. Corroborated the Gratian link, on the 1920 editors' apparatus.

England: the fiercest paper penalties in Europe, and no bodies

Two English treatises of about 1290 prescribe deaths that were, so far as the record shows, never carried out. Fleta orders that "sodomites shall be buried alive in the earth, provided that they were taken in the act and convicted by lawful and public testimony." Britton puts sorcerers, renegades, sodomites and heretics under the same sentence as those who burn houses: the fire.

Both are private treatises, not statutes, and a manuscript gloss printed by their nineteenth-century editor explains why nothing followed: the inquisitors of Holy Church were to make the inquest and then "deliver him to the king's court to be put to death," a two-key arrangement that in practice turned very rarely. There is no evidence any such punishment was carried out in England before the statute of 1533, which is the subject of Room V.

Verified both texts, read in public-domain editions. Corroborated the non-enforcement, which rests on the absence of any recorded case.

1307: the charge as a weapon

On 13 October 1307 the officers of Philip IV arrested the Knights Templar across France. The articles of accusation charged that the order's reception ceremony required denial of Christ, spitting on the cross, obscene kisses, and permission for recruits to have carnal relations with one another. Confessions followed under torture. The order was suppressed in 1312 without a finding of guilt, and its Grand Master was burned in 1314 as a relapsed heretic.

The Templar affair belongs in this room not as a prosecution of sexual acts but as the clearest demonstration of what the charge had become: an instrument for destroying a rich and independent institution. That pairing of sodomy with heresy, which the Italian communal statutes were making at the same moment and which a Castilian decree would formalise in 1497, is the legal mechanism that carries the offence from the church court to the stake.

Corroborated the arrests, charges and suppression are settled history; the specific counts of articles and confessions are reported at second hand here and are flagged in our research record for checking before they are ever printed on a label.

Sources: Peter Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus (Letter 31 in Reindel's MGH edition; Patrologia Latina 145; Payer's 1982 translation) and Leo IX's reply (Denzinger-Schoenmetzer 687 to 688); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q. 154 aa. 11 to 12 (Dominican Fathers, 1920, New Advent); Mansi vol. 21 for the Council of Nablus, with Kedar, Speculum 74 (1999); Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (1937) for Lateran III, checked against Tanner (1990); Opusculos legales vol. 2 (1836) for the Fuero Real and Las Siete Partidas vol. 3 (1807), with Placido Fernandez-Viagas Escudero, Anuario de Estudios Medievales 49/2 (2019); Rapetti's 1850 edition of Li Livres de jostice et de plet; Fleta (1685 Selden edition) and Britton (Nichols, 1865); Human Rights Watch, This Alien Legacy (2008); Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed. (2006). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Room IV · Part One: The old law

Counting the burned

Florence 1432 · Bruges 1482 · Zaragoza 1572 · Groningen 1731

Three rooms of statutes have told you what the law permitted. This room asks the harder question: what was actually done, to how many people, and how do we know. It is the room where this exhibit is easiest to catch out, so it is the room where we show our working. There is no Europe-wide total. There never has been. What there is, is a set of local series, each with a scholar's name on it, and they do not all point the same way.

Florence, where the law was a fine

Start with the case that most embarrasses a simple story of persecution, because an exhibit that hid it would deserve to be disbelieved about everything else.

So in the best documented city in Europe, a capital statute produced a system of fines, and prosecution on a scale that implicated a large fraction of the male population without killing them. Hold that. Then look one country north.

The Southern Netherlands, where it was the fire

The soundest series in this whole exhibit comes from the bailiff accounts of Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Antwerp, Brussels, Louvain and Malines, rendered to the prince's own Chamber of Accounts and reconstructed by Jonas Roelens.

The object that decided whether a woman burned

There is a legal mechanism behind that disparity, and it is startlingly concrete. The Spanish jurist Antonio Gómez set it out in his commentary on the Leyes de Toro, and it turns on whether an object was present.

Spain, and a correction the literature never carried forward

The three tribunals of the Aragonese Inquisition tried 923 sodomy cases between 1570 and 1630, and their tables record 170 death sentences. That is the figure you will find quoted. It is wrong, and the person who showed it was wrong is the scholar who compiled it.

The Dutch Republic, 1730, and the twenty one at Faan

The largest single European persecution before the twentieth century. Over three hundred men prosecuted in about three years, and at least seventy five executed. You will see a figure near a hundred; two of our researchers worked this slice independently and the second one showed why it is contested, because "prosecuted," "convicted" and "executed" cover different sets of people and are routinely added together. At least seventy five is the number two or more scholars will support, so that is the number here.

France, where almost nobody burned, and the panic was enormous

So what is the total?

There isn't one. The closest thing in print is Louis Crompton's survey of "presently known male deaths in Europe and the Americas," which he put at about 400 in 1980.

Sources: Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford University Press, 1996), especially the comparative note at page 47 and the appendix of penalties; Jonas Roelens, "Visible Women: Female Sodomy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Southern Netherlands," BMGN, Low Countries Historical Review 130, no. 3 (2015), open access, read in full, with Table 1 and the Bruges bailiff account at the National Archives of Belgium; E. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, Table 18 and footnote 28 at page 288, and Monter (1974) on Geneva and Fribourg; Rocio Rodriguez Sanchez, Mirabilia 32 (2021), open access; Theo van der Meer (1993), read in Dutch, and his "Tribades on Trial," Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1991); River Baars and Sophie Rose, Journal of Social History (2026); Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2003), and "The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791," Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980 to 1981); Michel Rey, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 29 (1982), read from the page images, on the Archives de la Bastille; the French Penal Codes of 1791 and 1810, tested by term search across the promulgated printings. Two gaps are recorded rather than papered over: Guido Ruggiero's Venice figures are reported at one remove because the book is lending restricted, and Rafael Carrasco's execution total for Valencia could not be found in any citing work, so Monter's figure has not been substituted for it.

Room V · Part Two: The English rope and its empire

The detestable vice

Westminster 1533 · Lancaster 1806 · Newgate 1811 · Newgate 1835

England wrote the fiercest paper penalties in medieval Europe and hanged nobody. Then, in 1533, Parliament moved the offence out of the church courts and into the King's, and three centuries later the country was hanging men for it at a rate no other European state could match. This room is the gallows century, and it is deliberately full of names, because the record has them.

1533: the statute that starts the line

Every colonial "against the order of nature" clause in Room VII, and every American colonial capital law in Room VIII, descends from this sentence. So does the rope in the rest of this room.

The gallows century, counted

Two scholars counted the executions independently and agree on the scale. A. D. Harvey found that in the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century more than fifty men were hanged for sodomy in England, and that in 1806 there were more executions for sodomy than for murder. H. G. Cocks, working from the printed Judicial Statistics, found that between 1806 and 1835, 404 men were sentenced to death for sodomy and 56 were executed.

A contemporary document shows what that meant in proportion. A Parliamentary return covering England and Wales from 1805 to 1820 records 48 men convicted of sodomy and 33 executed, against a total for all capital felonies of 10,971 convicted and 1,250 executed.

Verified two independent scholarly counts and a contemporary Parliamentary return agree on the order of magnitude. Their totals differ because their date ranges and definitions differ, and we print all three rather than picking the largest.

Warrington, 1806

In May 1806 about twenty-four men in and around Warrington were arrested. Nine were tried at the Lancaster assizes that August; five were convicted of buggery. Samuel Stockton, John Powell and Joseph Holland, a well-off pawnbroker, were hanged on the new drop behind Lancaster Castle. Thomas Rix, a Manchester artisan, was hanged at the end of September after the Warrington magistrates had finished questioning him about rumoured gentry involvement. Two men who turned King's Evidence, one of them among the richest men in Warrington, saved themselves.

Vere Street, 1810 and 1811

On 8 July 1810 Bow Street officers raided the White Swan in Vere Street, Clare Market, and arrested about twenty-three men. Six were pilloried on 27 September and pelted by a crowd reported in the thousands. On 7 March 1811, Ensign John Newball Hepburn, aged 42, and Thomas White, a drummer boy of about sixteen or seventeen, were hanged in front of the Debtors' door at Newgate before what the press called a vast concourse of spectators. A duke and two lords were reported to have watched from the Press Yard.

1828: death re-enacted, and the proof made easier

The consolidating Act of 1828 kept the penalty, "every Person convicted of the abominable Crime of Buggery, committed either with Mankind or with any Animal, shall suffer Death as a Felon," and quietly removed a barrier to conviction. Section 18 provided that it should no longer be necessary to prove emission of seed: "the carnal Knowledge shall be deemed complete upon Proof of Penetration only." The years of the highest hangings are also the years in which the evidence became easier to assemble.

1835: the last two

On 21 September 1835 James Pratt, aged 30 and married, and John Smith, aged 40, were tried at the Old Bailey. They had met in a room rented by William Bonill at 45 George Street, Southwark. The landlord, suspicious of Bonill's visitors, watched through the keyhole; he and his wife gave the evidence. The Proceedings record the outcome in seven words apiece: "SMITH GUILTY. DEATH. Aged 40. PRATT GUILTY. DEATH. Aged 30." Bonill, who had only provided the room, was transported for fourteen years and died in Van Diemen's Land in 1841.

The magistrate who committed them, Hensleigh Wedgwood, wrote to the Home Secretary asking for mercy and made an observation the museum prints in full, because it is the sharpest thing anyone said about the law in that century: sodomy was in effect "the only capital crime that is committed by rich men but owing to the circumstances ... they are never convicted." The Privy Council reprieved every other capital convict of the September and October sessions and left Pratt and Smith to hang. Charles Dickens saw them in the condemned ward and wrote it into Sketches by Boz: "The two short ones, the turnkey whispered, were dead men."

They were hanged in front of Newgate on the morning of 27 November 1835. They are the last men known to have been executed for sodomy in England. Death sentences continued to be pronounced into the 1850s, and every one was commuted; the penalty itself was not removed until 1861.

Verified the Old Bailey record, the execution broadsides, the Wedgwood letter, Dickens, and Historic England all agree on names, date, offence and outcome.

1861: the rope comes down, the offence stays

Sources: the Buggery Act 1533 (Statutes Project, from Pickering's Statutes at Large); Offences Against the Person Act 1828, ss. 15 and 18, and Offences Against the Person Act 1861, ss. 61 to 62, both from legislation.gov.uk; Old Bailey Proceedings Online t18350921-1934; A. D. Harvey, The Historical Journal 21 (1978), pp. 939 to 948; H. G. Cocks, Past & Present 190 (2006), pp. 121 to 146; Arthur N. Gilbert, Journal of Social History 10 (1976), pp. 72 to 98, with Harvey's dissent from his naval figures noted in our record; the Parliamentary return of 1821 (Chester Courant, 3 July 1821); contemporary newspapers and the Newgate calendar transcribed by Rictor Norton; Historic England, "Law and Oppression." Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Room VI · Part Two: The English rope and its empire

Gross indecency

Westminster 1885 · Old Bailey 1895 · Knutsford 1952 · London 1957 · Strasbourg 1981 · Westminster 2017

The law that caught Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing was added to a bill about something else, late in the evening, in a few minutes, with almost no debate. It is worth knowing exactly how casually the most consequential clause in British gay history was passed, because the record shows it plainly.

6 August 1885: a clause added at the end of a sitting

The Criminal Law Amendment Bill was chiefly about raising the age of consent for girls and suppressing brothels. Late in the sitting of 6 August 1885, Henry Labouchere, member for Northampton, moved a new clause. Asked whether it was within the scope of the bill, the Speaker ruled: "At this stage of the Bill anything can be introduced into it by leave of the House." Labouchere's clause carried a maximum of one year. Sir Henry James moved to substitute two for one. Labouchere agreed. The clause "as amended, agreed to, and added to the Bill." Royal assent followed on 14 August.

For the first time every sexual act between men, not only buggery, was criminal, in private as well as in public, with no limit of age or consent. Because such acts were private, prosecutions leaned on letters and on one partner's testimony against the other, and the section earned the name it still carries: the blackmailer's charter.

1895: the trials

Two Old Bailey trials followed Wilde's failed libel prosecution of the Marquess of Queensberry. The first, in April 1895, ended with a hung jury. The second, prosecuted by the Solicitor-General, convicted both defendants: "WILDE was then put on his trial, and also being FOUND GUILTY, both the defendants were sentenced to Two Years' Hard Labour."

The ceiling the judge called inadequate was the two years Sir Henry James had suggested, off the cuff, ten years earlier.

The statistics the government kept on itself

The Wolfenden Committee printed the police figures for England and Wales in its own appendix. They are the best measure we have of the machine at work.

The purge, and one of its names

After the war, sharpened by Cold War security panic, the Home Office and several chief constables pressed a drive against male homosexuality: agents provocateurs, letters as evidence, immunity offered to one partner to testify against the other. The actor John Gielgud was arrested for importuning in 1953. In March 1954 Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, the journalist Peter Wildeblood and the landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers were tried at Winchester on evidence from two Royal Air Force servicemen who were granted effective immunity to give it.

And on 31 March 1952, at the Knutsford Quarter Sessions, Alan Turing pleaded guilty to gross indecency under section 11. He had reported a burglary and, in the course of it, told the police about his relationship with a younger man. Sentence was postponed and he was placed on probation for twelve months on condition that he submit to "organo-therapy," a course of oestrogen injections. His security clearance was withdrawn and he was barred from further work for GCHQ. He died at home in Wilmslow on 7 June 1954 of cyanide poisoning; the inquest recorded suicide, a verdict some later scholars have questioned.

Verified the conviction, the probation condition, the withdrawal of clearance, the date of death, the 2009 apology and the 2013 pardon. Contested the suicide verdict.

1957: "not the law's business"

It took ten years for even that narrow recommendation to become law.

1967: legal, in a box

1980 to 1982: Scotland, Strasbourg, Northern Ireland

Scotland extended the 1967 model in 1980. In Northern Ireland the law fell to a court. Jeffrey Dudgeon, a Belfast man investigated under the sodomy law, took his case to Strasbourg, and on 22 October 1981 the European Court of Human Rights held, by fifteen votes to four, that the law breached Article 8.

It was the first international human-rights ruling to strike down a sodomy law. Northern Ireland's law was repealed by Order in 1982. Dudgeon became the precedent for Norris v. Ireland in 1988 and Modinos v. Cyprus in 1993, and its reasoning was later cited in the Indian and Caribbean judgments that undid the colonial statutes in Room VII.

1988 to 2003: Section 28, and the end of the line

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 forbade a local authority to "intentionally promote homosexuality" or to promote in schools "the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." No prosecution was ever brought under it. It chilled school and library provision for fifteen years, and was repealed in Scotland in 2000 and in England and Wales in 2003.

The age of consent was equalised at sixteen with effect from 8 January 2001, forced through under the Parliament Acts over the opposition of the House of Lords. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 repealed the specifically homosexual offences, buggery and gross indecency between men, and replaced them with gender-neutral ones. That ended a separate criminal category of homosexual acts in England and Wales that had run unbroken since 1533.

2017: the pardon, and its two conditions

Turing received a posthumous pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy on 24 December 2013, granted, the government acknowledged, without the usual requirements being met, "reflecting the exceptional nature of Alan Turing's achievements." The wider pardon came with the Policing and Crime Act 2017, section 164, which pardons deceased men convicted or cautioned under the listed offences: the Acts of 1533, 1548, 1562, section 15 of the 1828 Act, section 61 of the 1861 Act, section 11 of the 1885 Act, and sections 12 and 13 of the 1956 Act. Living men are pardoned under section 165 only after obtaining a "disregard" of the conviction.

Sources: Hansard, HC Deb 6 August 1885, vol. 300; Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 s. 11, Sexual Offences Act 1967, Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 s. 80, Local Government Act 1988 s. 28, Local Government Act 2003 s. 122, Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 s. 1, Sexual Offences Act 2003 sch. 7, and Policing and Crime Act 2017 ss. 164 to 165, all from legislation.gov.uk; Old Bailey Proceedings Online t18950422-397 and t18950520-425; the Wolfenden Report (Cmnd. 247, 1957), paras. 13 to 14 and 61 to 62 and Appendix I; Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, application no. 7525/76, HUDOC; Ministry of Justice press releases of 24 December 2013 and 31 January 2017; Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983); Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship (1996); Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out (1977); H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1948). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Room VII · Part Two: The English rope and its empire

Section 377

Calcutta 1837 · London 1860 · Brisbane 1899 · Delhi 2018 · Delhi again 2026

Fifty two words, written for India by an English commission, are the reason a man can go to prison in Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos, Lusaka, Lilongwe and Dar es Salaam today. This room puts the parallel texts side by side so you can watch one sentence travel. When people say these are African laws or Asian laws, this is the page that answers.

1837: a refusal to explain

Thomas Babington Macaulay's Indian Law Commission drafted a penal code for British India. On the clause that became section 377, the commissioners declined to give their reasons.

1860: the fifty two words

1871: and the same Act that registered the people

Eleven years later the same government passed an Act whose long title was "An Act for the Registration of Criminal Tribes and Eunuchs." Its part on eunuchs did not punish an act at all.

And the register itself, in section 24, tied the two halves together in a single sentence: it was a register of eunuchs "reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children, or of committing offences under section three hundred and seventy-seven of the Indian Penal Code." Criminalising the act and registering the identity were written into the same statute, cross-referenced to each other. A Lieutenant-Governor stated the policy's aim in 1865: to prevent an increase in their number "and thus gradually lead to their extinction." Corroborated, from a historian quoting an archival file our researcher could not open, and flagged for verification before it goes on a wall.

The export: two templates, not one

Here is a correction this exhibit owes you, because the simple version of this story is slightly wrong. The laws of British Africa are not all children of section 377. There were two drafting templates. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 is one. The other is the Criminal Code Act of 1899, drafted by Samuel Griffith for Queensland, Australia, and it is Griffith's text, not Macaulay's, that Kenya, Uganda and southern Nigeria received. Nigeria carries both, north and south.

You can tell them apart by a fingerprint. Griffith's version has three limbs, and the third one is unmistakable.

The court that said it out loud

This is not an inference drawn by a museum. It is a finding of fact by an African high court, in a case the state was defending.

India takes it back, in four steps and one reversal

The Delhi High Court read section 377 down in 2009. The Supreme Court reversed that in 2013, and the sentence it used to justify the reversal is worth looking at closely.

In 2014 the Supreme Court held in NALSA that requiring surgery as the price of legal gender recognition "is immoral and illegal." In 2017 it found a constitutional right to privacy. And in 2018 it finished the job.

Chandrachud J, Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India, 6 September 2018, paragraphs 3 and 4. The order at paragraph 156 held section 377 unconstitutional so far as it criminalised consensual adult conduct, and overruled Koushal. Section 377 was replaced with no successor provision when a new criminal code took effect on 1 July 2024.

A Massachusetts footnote that is not a footnote

Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act has an American thread, and it was established in a federal courthouse in Springfield, Massachusetts. Sexual Minorities Uganda sued the American evangelist Scott Lively for his part in the campaign. The case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, and the judge who dismissed it wrote this into the order.

Sources: The Indian Penal Code, as originally framed in 1837, with Notes (HathiTrust page images) for Macaulay's note, with the caution recorded above; Indian Penal Code, Act XLV of 1860, section 377, as reproduced verbatim in Navtej; Criminal Tribes Act 1871 (Act XXVII of 1871), sections 24 and 26; Jessica Hinchy on the registers of eunuchs in colonial India; Criminal Code Act 1899 (Queensland), section 208; Penal Codes of Kenya (Cap 63, ss. 162 and 165), Uganda (Cap 120, s. 145), Nigeria (Cap 77, ss. 214 and 217), Zambia (Cap 87, ss. 155 and 158), Malawi (Cap 7:01, ss. 153 and 156), Tanzania (Cap 16, s. 154) and Botswana (Cap 08:01, ss. 164 and 167); Letsweletse Motshidiemang v Attorney General, High Court of Botswana, 11 June 2019; Naz Foundation v Government of NCT of Delhi (2009); Suresh Kumar Koushal v NAZ Foundation (2013); National Legal Services Authority v Union of India (2014); Justice K. S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017); Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India (2018); National Crime Records Bureau figures for 2016; Gazette of India, Extraordinary, 30 March 2026, for the Transgender Persons Amendment Act; Sexual Minorities Uganda v Lively, United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Documents 59 (14 August 2013) and 350 (5 June 2017), retrieved from the Government Publishing Office; the Judiciary of Uganda press release of 3 April 2024. The text of Uganda's 2023 Act itself is marked corroborated in the museum's research file, because the Ugandan legal information institute refused every request, and it is the top outstanding verification on this room.

Room VIII · Part Three: The American statute book

Death in the colonies

Jamestown 1610 · New Amsterdam 1646 · Chester 1682 · New Castle 1700

By 1776 every one of the thirteen colonies could hang a man for sodomy. That is the finding of Louis Crompton, who went looking for the executions and found almost none. Both halves of that sentence are true, and this room is built on the space between them, because that space is exactly where the honest argument about this history lives.

The law arrives with the ships

Virginia's "Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall" of 1610, the martial code of the Jamestown settlement, made sodomy a capital offence before the colony had a civil government. Elsewhere the English Buggery Act of 1533 was simply treated as being in force. South Carolina went further and in 1712 copied 25 Henry VIII c. 6 into its own statute book verbatim, death penalty and all, where it stayed for a hundred and sixty one years.

New England did something different, and Room IX has it in detail: the Bay Colony did not copy the English statute, it copied Leviticus. Rhode Island was the exception among them, resting its 1647 law on the English acts and on Romans rather than Leviticus, and defining the offence in Paul's words as "a vile affection, whereby men given up thereto leave the natural use of women."

The executions we can actually document

Four sentences survive with enough record to name the people. They are not what a modern reader expects, and the exhibit will not tidy them.

Richard Cornish, a shipmaster, was hanged at Jamestown between November 1624 and February 1626 for buggery. Two men who said afterwards that he had died wrongfully were themselves mutilated for saying it.

William Plaine of Guilford was hanged in New Haven Colony in 1646. Be precise about what he was convicted of, because the record is precise. Governor Eaton wrote to the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay for advice, and John Winthrop recorded the answer: Plaine "had committed sodomy with two persons in England," had "corrupted a great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbations ... above a hundred times," and had "insinuate[d] seeds of atheism." No New Haven statute then made masturbation capital. The Bay magistrates and elders "did all agree, that he ought to die, and gave divers reasons from the word of God." Ten years later New Haven wrote that exact fact pattern into its code.

Jan Quisthout van der Linde, a soldier, was sentenced at New Amsterdam on 17 June 1660 to be tied in a sack and drowned. The boy in that case, Hendrick Harmensen, was whipped and sent away.

The one code that named women

Pennsylvania: the counterweight, and then the colour line

The Quaker province did the opposite of everyone else. William Penn's Great Law, enacted at Chester on 7 December 1682, made sodomy the one thing it was nowhere else in English America: not a hanging matter.

Eighteen years later the same colony showed what else its statute book could do. On 27 November 1700 one session of the Pennsylvania assembly passed two acts. Chapter V punished sodomy with life imprisonment, quarterly whipping through the first year, and, for a married man, castration. Chapter LXI, "An Act for the Trial of Negroes," created a special court of two justices and six freeholders, with no jury, and provided:

In 1706 castration was dropped for white men. The death line for Black men was re-enacted. In 1718 Pennsylvania restored death for everyone, as the price the Crown extracted for accepting Quaker affirmations in court, and the province's law matched England's until 1786.

The colonial statute book, in one view

Sources: "Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall" (1610, printed London 1612); New York State Archives, Dutch colonial council minutes, series A1809, volume 4, in New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, volume 4, translated by A. J. F. van Laer (1974), for the Creoli and Quisthout sentences; John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. Savage (1853), volume 2, for Plaine (note that the 1908 Hosmer edition omits the passage); Acts and Orders of Rhode Island (1647), in Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, volume 1 (1856); New-Haven's Settling in New-England, and some Lawes for Government (London, 1656), reprinted in Trumbull, True-Blue Laws (1876); Charter to William Penn, and Laws of the Province of Pennsylvania 1682 to 1700 (1879); Mitchell and Flanders, eds., The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1801, volumes 2 and 3 (1896), including the law officers' reports in the appendix; Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, volume 2 (1837); Louis Crompton, Journal of Homosexuality 1 (1976); Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History (1976) and Gay/Lesbian Almanac (1983), and the OutHistory presentations of both; Richard Godbeer, "'The Cry of Sodom'," William and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995). The date of the Creoli sentence is contested between the State Archives translation, 25 June 1646, and O'Callaghan's nineteenth century calendar, which gives March; this exhibit uses the archival translation and records the discrepancy.

Room IX · Part Three: The American statute book

Our own colony

Plymouth 1636 · Yarmouth 1649 · Boston 1641 to 1887 · Beacon Hill, still open

This is the ground you are standing on. Dartmouth, which became New Bedford, Fairhaven, Acushnet and Westport; Taunton; Freetown, part of which became Fall River; Rochester, which became Marion and Mattapoisett; and Yarmouth on the Cape were all Plymouth Colony towns. The 1636 capital law and the court cases that followed are the first written rules about same-sex acts that ever governed the South Coast. And the last of those rules has not yet been taken off the books.

1636: the first list

On 15 November 1636 a committee of the General Court at Plymouth produced the colony's first code. Its capital list is six lines long.

1637: the first punishment, at Plymouth

Five years later, at the General Court of 1 March 1641/2, Edward Michell and Edward Preston were whipped at Plymouth and then again at Barnstable "for lude & sodomiticall practices tending to sodomye" with each other. John Keene, who had refused Preston, was made to stand and watch the whipping "though in some thing he was faulty." The phrase "tending to sodomye" is the clearest statement in the record that the colony distinguished the capital crime from lesser acts, and whipped for the latter.

1649: Yarmouth, and the first two women

In March 1648/9 the Grand Enquest presented two women of Yarmouth, then a Plymouth Colony town.

This is the earliest known prosecution of two women for a same-sex act in what is now the United States, and it happened twenty-six miles from this museum's front door. Verified the court entries. Corroborated the ages and the "first known" description, which is a claim about absence and is tagged accordingly.

One more entry belongs beside it, because it shows the same court punishing a false accuser. In October 1649 Richard Berry accused Teage Joanes of sodomy; in March 1649/50 Berry "acknowlidged before the Court that hee did wrong the aforsaid Teage Joanes ... and had borne false wittnes against him vppon oath," and was whipped at the post for it.

1641: Boston copies the verse

The printed Laws and Liberties of 1648 added two exceptions that then travelled: no death "unles the one partie were forced (or be under fourteen years of age in which case he shall be seveerly punished)." Plymouth adopted the same wording in its revision of 6 June 1671, which added a clause covering everything short of the capital act: "And all other Sodomitical filthiness, shall be surely punished according to the nature of it." That 1671 printed book was the law of Dartmouth, Taunton, Freetown, Rochester and Yarmouth until the charter of 1691 merged Plymouth into Massachusetts.

1697 and 1712: the province, and one execution

The province re-enacted death in 1692, London disallowed that act in 1695, and the General Court passed a new one on 23 October 1697: "For avoiding of the detestable and abominable sin of buggery with mankind or beast, which is contrary to the very light of nature ... the offender and offenders ... shall suffer the pains of death."

In January 1711/12 a grand jury at Charlestown arraigned a man recorded as "Mingo, alias Cocke Negro," an enslaved man held by the chief justice of the province, "for forcible Buggery." Judge Samuel Sewall's diary records the trial the next day, the conviction, that "Not one word" was spoken on his behalf, and the execution on 15 February after the Thursday lecture. No court file has been found. The word "forcible" suggests a human victim, but the surviving record does not identify the object of the charge, and we will not fill that silence in.

1785 to 1887: the Commonwealth writes its own words

The independent Commonwealth kept the death penalty in "An Act against Sodomy," passed 3 March 1785. It removed it twenty years later.

The Revised Statutes of 1835, in force from 1836, produced the wording that survives: "Every person, who shall commit the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind, or with any beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison, not more than twenty years." The maximum had doubled from ten years to twenty. In 1887 the legislature added a companion misdemeanour reaching acts the older section did not, and gave prosecutors a remarkable licence: section 2 of that act provided that an indictment need not describe the act at all, only allege "an unnatural and lascivious act." The old formula, the crime not to be named, had become a rule of pleading.

1974 and 2002: the courts close the door

In Commonwealth v. Balthazar (1974) the Supreme Judicial Court held that the 1887 section "must be construed to be inapplicable to private, consensual conduct of adults." In February 2002, sixteen months before the Supreme Court of the United States decided Lawrence v. Texas, the SJC extended that rule to the crime-against-nature section itself, on the Attorney General's formal undertaking that no one would be prosecuted under either section without probable cause that the conduct was public or non-consensual.

And here is where the room stops being history

Both sections are unenforceable against private consensual adult conduct. Both are still printed in the General Laws of the Commonwealth. The words in section 34 are, but for spelling, the words of 1836, which carry the "crime against nature" of 1805, which carries the "detestable and abominable" of 1697, which carries the Leviticus formula the Body of Liberties translated in 1641. The number on the page is still twenty years.

Sources: Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, vols. 1, 2, 3 and 11 (Shurtleff and Pulsifer, 1855 to 1861), Internet Archive; William H. Whitmore, ed., The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts (1889), p. 55, for the Body of Liberties; the 1648 Laws and Liberties (Farrand ed., 1929) as quoted by Crompton and Katz; William Brigham, ed., The Compact with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth (1836), pp. 243 to 244, for the 1671 revision; Acts and Resolves of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, vol. 1 (1869), pp. 55 to 56 and 297; The Diary of Samuel Sewall (Thomas ed., 1973), vol. 2, pp. 677 to 678, via Katz; Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1801), vol. 1, pp. 223 to 224; General Laws of Massachusetts (1823), vol. 2, pp. 129 and 146; Revised Statutes (1836), ch. 130 s. 14, p. 741; Acts of 1887, ch. 436, p. 1099; Commonwealth v. Balthazar, 366 Mass. 298 (1974); GLAD v. Attorney General, 436 Mass. 132 (2002); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003); malegislature.gov for c. 272 ss. 34 and 35 and for bills S.1034 and S.2564 of the 194th General Court; Louis Crompton, Journal of Homosexuality 1 (1976), pp. 277 to 293; Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (1983) and OutHistory; Robert Oaks, Journal of Social History 12 (1978); Colin Talley, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Room X · Part Three: The American statute book

The purge

Newport 1919 · The Army 1942 · Washington 1953 · Springfield 1961

The gallows was gone and the sodomy statutes had shrunk to a misdemeanour almost nobody was charged under. What replaced them needed no judge. This room is about three administrative machines running at once, the military discharge, the federal security file, and the liquor licensing board, none of which required a crime, a jury, or a sentence. It begins forty miles from this building.

Newport, 1919: the Navy makes the evidence

The Navy ran an undercover operation at the Newport Naval Training Station, and the method was the thing. It assigned young enlisted men as decoys and sent them to have sexual contact with the men under suspicion, so they could testify to it afterwards. The men caught that way were court-martialled. A Senate subcommittee investigated two years later, and what it was angry about is the whole of this room.

The report did not ask whether the Navy should have been hunting these men. It did not suggest anyone convicted had been wronged. It recommended no conviction be reviewed. Its entire moral energy went to the decoys, whom it treated as victims. Nobody imprisoned at Portsmouth got anything from it. A state that could be shamed about its methods and not about its purpose.

Machine one: the regulation, in its own words

The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 set no substantive standards at all. It delegated them entirely to the War and Navy Departments, which is why every exclusion that follows is regulatory and never statutory. Here is the standard those departments wrote.

The revision of 15 March 1942 filled that in, and its language is worth reading slowly, because it tells you what the examiners were actually looking at.

More than eighteen million examinations were conducted under this apparatus. Somewhere between four and five thousand men were turned away at induction. That is the most important small number in this room: the system built to exclude at the door barely excluded anyone, because the war needed bodies. What it produced instead was a category, a file, and a way of removing a man later without charging him with anything.

The blue discharge, and the certificate that would not say why

Between 1 December 1941 and 30 June 1945 the Army issued 48,603 blue discharges. 10,806 of them, 22.23 percent, went to African American servicemen, who were well under a tenth of the force. Corroborated: the figures are consistent across four independent works and trace to a January 1946 memorandum by the Adjutant General that our researcher could not open. The denominator is genuinely contested between sources, so this exhibit says "well under a tenth" rather than printing a precise share.

The same instrument, in the same years, out of the same offices, was used against Black soldiers and against homosexual soldiers. That is not a coincidence to note in passing. It is the clearest American example of a punishment with every consequence of a criminal conviction and none of its procedure, and Room XIV shows you the same trick performed with a restroom door.

The benefit Congress never took away

The G.I. Bill of 1944 turned on one phrase, repeated across education, loans, employment and unemployment pay: discharged "under conditions other than dishonorable." Section 300 of the Act then listed the separations that barred a veteran from benefits, and it listed them exhaustively: general court martial, conscientious objection with refusal of duty, desertion, and an officer's resignation for the good of the service.

Sixteen weeks

On 20 October 1945 the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black newspaper, ran "Courier Launches Probe of Army's Blue Discharges." A week later, "Courier Asks Secretary of War to Limit Army Blue Discharges." Then "Senator Raps Blue Discharges," then "Blue Discharges Reach Senate," then "House Committee Studies Discharges," and on 9 February 1946, "Courier Campaign Gets Results, House Committee Acts, Asks to Review Certificates."

Sixteen weeks from a Black newspaper's investigation to a congressional committee acting. The paper called the blue discharge "a vicious instrument which should not be perpetrated against the American Soldier," rebuked the Army for "allowing prejudiced officers to use it as a means of punishing Negro soldiers," and described homosexual recipients as "'unfortunates' of the Nation ... being preyed upon." The committee reported that the procedure "lends itself to dismissals based on prejudice and antagonism" and recommended automatic review of every blue discharge. The review never happened. The discharge was abolished in July 1947, not retroactively, and in the same month the Army closed the honorable route for homosexual personnel that it had opened only sixteen months before.

That opening is worth naming, because it shows the door could have gone the other way. In July 1945 the Surgeon General wrote that men "inadaptable for service by reason of homosexuality were entitled to honorable discharges providing they were guilty of no offense," suggesting such a person "was no more responsible for his condition than was one with mental deficiency." That produced War Department Circular No. 85 in March 1946. The Army's own historian records what came next: "The achievement of a more enlightened management of the homosexual problem during the end phase of World War II was rapidly lost in the postwar years." In May 1947 the reclamation procedure was deleted. In 1948 the honorable discharge provision went too. And in October 1949 a Department of Defense memorandum made the ban permanent and uniform across every service, more than a year before the Senate report everyone remembers.

Machine two: a file instead of a trial

In February 1950 a senator broadened his charge from disloyalty to "unsafe risks," and two of his numbered cases concerned homosexuality. Eleven days later a State Department official told a Senate subcommittee the Department had ousted 91 homosexual employees. Two senators then took testimony from the head of the District's vice squad, who said 5,000 homosexuals lived in Washington and about 3,700 worked for the federal government.

The report that followed on 15 December 1950 gave the purge its policy. Its security argument is a closed loop on the face of the page.

Machine three: the liquor board, which is how they reached everyone else

Almost nobody in this period was prosecuted for sodomy. A 1949 survey found that less than one percent of those subject to prosecution were actually charged and convicted. Illinois, across the entire life of its crime against nature statute, produced nineteen reported appellate cases, thirteen of them involving children. In New York in 1950, only 4.7 percent of those arrested for sodomy were sentenced to prison.

So how did the state actually reach people? Through the licence. Prohibition ended in 1933, liquor control went back to the states, and every state built a licensing agency armed with an open textured "disorderly" clause. Because a licence was a privilege, revocation was administrative: substantial evidence at the agency's own hearing, no jury, and no criminal conviction of anyone required. New York's legislature left the word undefined on purpose, in its own words, "lest the craft of men evade the definition."

California drew the line differently, and then its legislature tried to erase the line. In Stoumen v. Reilly in 1951 the state Supreme Court reversed the suspension of the Black Cat's licence in San Francisco, unanimously, in a sentence that ought to be on a wall.

Chief Justice Phil S. Gibson, Stoumen v. Reilly, 37 Cal. 2d 713 (28 August 1951). Our researcher corrected two errors this museum was carrying: the case is Reilly, not Reno, and Gibson wrote it, not Traynor.

Four years later California added a provision making a licence revocable where the premises were "a resort for ... sexual perverts," which restored precisely what Stoumen had forbidden. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1959 as unconstitutional, and in the same opinion left the door open for any "public display which manifests sexual desires." The statute fell. The conduct theory survived. Twelve of San Francisco's thirty gay bars are reported to have lost their licences in the two years that followed.

Virginia wrote homosexuals into its liquor regulations in 1934, alongside drunks, prostitutes and gamblers. Those regulations stood until 1991. Fifty seven years.

Now hold two facts together. In 1950 New York reduced consensual sodomy from a felony to a misdemeanour, the first state in the country to do it. In the same years its Liquor Authority was closing gay bars on a twenty eight word clause and winning in court without an opinion. The criminal law softened while the administrative machine ran at full throttle. That is the shape of this whole period, and it is why counting sodomy prosecutions tells you almost nothing about how people were actually policed.

1961: the first repeal, which nobody noticed

On 28 July 1961 the Governor of Illinois signed House Bill 342, and on 1 January 1962 Illinois became the first American state without a sodomy law. It had replaced a statute descended from an 1809 territorial law that carried five years, a fine, and up to five hundred lashes, and whose maximum had been life until 1874.

The mechanism of the repeal was one drafting decision: the new code defined deviate sexual conduct and created no offence for it. The drafters' own note: "This Article is not intended to proscribe any sexual conduct between consenting adults unless such conduct adversely affects one of the interests sought to be protected." Illinois also went further than the Model Penal Code it was working from, which kept a loitering to solicit offence. Illinois considered solicitation "essentially a private rather than a public irritation" and dropped it.

But look at what it kept. Section 11-9 made four things public indecency. Three are orientation neutral. The fourth is "a lewd fondling or caress of the body of another person of the same sex," with no intent element, so that a man and a woman could do in public what two men could not. The drafters said plainly that it was "aimed specifically at ... fondling between homosexuals." That asymmetry was amended in 1963 and the offence was not repealed until 1984.

Nor did the repeal stop the police. On the morning of 25 April 1964, outside Chicago's city limits, officers arrested 109 people at a bar called Louie's Fun Lounge, on a charge of being "inmates of a disorderly house." That is the same phrase this room has been tracking through the licensing boards, and it had nothing to do with sodomy. On 15 May a judge dismissed the charges against 99 of them. The punishment was never going to be the sentence. Police handed reporters the names, ages, addresses and workplaces, the papers printed them, and of the named teachers only one kept his job. A historian records reports of at least one suicide.

Illinois stood alone as the only state without a sodomy law for nine years and nine months, until Connecticut's new code took effect on 1 October 1971. Fifteen years after the American Law Institute recommended it, two states had followed.

Where it ends, and how long that takes

In 1957 the astronomer Franklin Kameny was fired by the Army Map Service because he had been arrested the previous year for consensual contact with another man. He appealed as far as the Supreme Court. When the appeal failed in 1961 he founded the Mattachine Society of Washington and spent the rest of his life on the case. The Civil Service Commission did not drop the bar until 1975. The State Department did not apologise until January 2017, sixty years after Kameny's dismissal.

Sources: Senate Naval Affairs subcommittee report of 19 July 1921 as carried by the Evening Star and the Albuquerque Morning Journal, read at Chronicling America; Mobilization Regulations 1-9 (1940 and 1942) and Army Regulations 615-360, 615-368 and 615-369, all read from the reprints in Neuropsychiatry in World War II, Volume I, Office of the Surgeon General, which also supplies the Army's own position on the discharge numbers, the Menninger figures and the reclamation estimate; RAND MR-323-OSD (1993) for the screening apparatus and the postwar rate; the National Research Council interim report of 1945 on 183 men; Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, 58 Stat. 284, sections 300 and 301, read at the Government Publishing Office; Longernecker v. Higley, 229 F.2d 27 (D.C. Cir. 1955); House Report No. 1510 of 30 January 1946, quoted at one remove and flagged as such; Pittsburgh Courier front pages of October 1945 to February 1946, from scans; Judith Adkins in Prologue 48 (2016), National Archives; Senate Document No. 241, 81st Congress, read in full from the Stanford Serial Set copy; Executive Order 10450, 18 Federal Register 2489, from the National Archives codification; New York Alcoholic Beverage Control Law section 106(6); Gloria Bar and Grill v. Bruckman, 259 A.D. 706 (1940); Stanwood United v. O'Connell, 283 A.D. 79 (1953); Stoumen v. Reilly, 37 Cal. 2d 713 (1951); Vallerga v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, 53 Cal. 2d 313 (1959); New Jersey Attorney General Administrative Executive Directive No. 2021-8 of 29 June 2021 with its appendix of 126 actions; One Eleven Wines and Liquors v. Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, 50 N.J. 329 (1967); "Deviate Sexual Behavior Under the New Illinois Criminal Code," 1965 Washington University Law Quarterly 220, read in full; the Illinois Criminal Code of 1961, House Bill 342, Laws of Illinois 1961 page 1983, with the Joint Committee's own comments, read from the Hawaii Legislative Reference Bureau's 1965 reproduction. Three corrections our researchers made to this museum's working notes are recorded in the research file: the California case is Stoumen v. Reilly and was written by Gibson; "Public Act 72-1983" does not exist and is a page number; and Illinois declined to criminalise solicitation rather than expanding it. A widely repeated story that the Illinois repeal was nearly stripped out could not be documented and is not told here.

Room XI · Part Four: The state and the clinic

Paragraph 175

Berlin 1871 · Rewritten 1935 · Upheld 1957 · Deleted 1994

One paragraph of one criminal code ran for a hundred and twenty three years. It was written by an empire, sharpened by the Nazi state, kept word for word by a democracy, upheld by that democracy's constitutional court, and finally deleted in 1994. More men were convicted under it after Hitler was dead than while he was alive. If you want a single object that shows how a persecution outlives the regime that perfected it, this is the one.

The destruction, in ten weeks

Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933. Within weeks the Prussian police closed Berlin's gay and lesbian bars; the Berliner Tageblatt of 4 March 1933 printed the list of the closed establishments. The homosexual press was banned. On the morning of 6 May 1933, about a hundred students arrived at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in trucks, in formation, with a brass band, working from a blacklist. SA men followed that afternoon. They took the books, the journals, the photographs and a bronze bust of Magnus Hirschfeld. On 10 May the bust was carried through the streets by torchlight and thrown onto the fire on the Opernplatz, where some forty thousand people watched about twenty thousand volumes burn, more than ten thousand of them from the Institute's library. Hirschfeld was abroad on a lecture tour. He saw the newsreel of it in a Paris cinema, never returned to Germany, and died in exile in Nice on 14 May 1935, his sixty seventh birthday.

1935: the rewrite

The offence already existed. The Reich code of 1871 had carried it forward from the Prussian code of 1851. What the Nazi state did on 28 June 1935, in force from 1 September, was to take the proof out of it.

The machinery followed the words. On 10 October 1936 Himmler created, by secret decree, the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, which built card files on men convicted and on men merely suspected. By 1940 it held more than forty thousand names. In a secret speech to his SS generals at Bad Tölz on 18 February 1937 Himmler set out the reasoning, telling them that if the burden continued it would mean "the end of Germany, and the end of the Germanic world," and that in the old Germanic custom such a man "was drowned in a swamp," which he described not as a punishment but as the extinguishment of abnormal life.

Convictions followed the curve you would expect: 948 in 1934, 5,320 in 1936, about 8,500 in 1938. Police could also impose preventive or protective custody, sending men to concentration camps with no trial at all, or after they had already served a court sentence.

The numbers, with their method attached

These are the most misquoted figures in this entire exhibit. Each one below carries who produced it and what it counts.

1941: death, for some

The women, and what the record actually says

This is a place where popular accounts overclaim, and the truth is worth stating exactly. There was no general criminal provision against sex between women in Germany proper. In June 1942 the Reich Ministry of Justice was asked directly whether there should be, and said no, in reasoning that is its own kind of evidence.

Five men whose names we have

Josef Kohout, a Vienna student, was arrested in March 1939 after the Gestapo found a photograph he had inscribed to a friend "in eternal love and deepest affection." Sachsenhausen, then Flossenbürg, then a death march in April 1945. His account, published in 1972 under the name Heinz Heger, was the first camp memoir by a pink triangle prisoner and is why the world knows the symbol at all.

Pierre Seel of Mulhouse was sixteen in 1939 when he reported a stolen watch to the police in a park known for cruising. They put his name on a list of homosexuals. When Alsace was annexed the list went to the Gestapo. He was arrested on 2 May 1941, tortured, interned at Schirmeck, and saw his friend Jo killed. He kept silent for forty years, then came out publicly in an open letter in 1982 after a church official called homosexuality a sickness.

Rudolf Brazda was convicted under Paragraph 175 in 1937 on the evidence of his love letters, expelled to Czechoslovakia, convicted again in 1941, and deported to Buchenwald in August 1942, prisoner number 7952, where he spent thirty two months. He spoke publicly only from 2008, as the last known surviving pink triangle deportee. "If I finally speak," he said, "it's for people to know what we homosexuals had to endure in Hitler's days."

Heinz Dörmer, a Berlin youth group leader, spent more than ten years in prisons and camps from 1935. After 1945 he was imprisoned again, under the same unchanged paragraph.

And Karl Gorath, a nurse from near Bremen, was twenty six when a jealous lover denounced him. Neuengamme, then a subcamp where he refused an order to cut Polish prisoners' bread rations, then Auschwitz, where he wore the red triangle of a political prisoner. He was liberated in 1945. In 1947 a West German court convicted him again under Paragraph 175 and gave him five more years. The judge who sentenced him was the same judge who had sentenced him under the Nazis.

The paragraph that survived the regime

That last sentence is not an anecdote. It is the structure of what followed. The Allied Control Council repealed Nazi laws by category, and the 1935 text of Paragraphs 175 and 175a was not among them. Men liberated from the camps as "175ers" were still criminals, and some were returned to prison to finish their sentences. The Federal Republic took the Nazi wording into its law in 1949 and applied it, unchanged, for twenty more years. In 1957 it was challenged, and the Federal Constitutional Court upheld it, expressly rejecting the argument that the 1935 broadening was Nazi injustice.

How it ended, and what was paid

East Germany's new code of 1968 dropped the old paragraphs. West Germany followed on 1 September 1969, ending the criminality of sex between adult men while keeping a special offence with a higher age of consent, narrowed again in 1973. East Germany struck its remaining provision without replacement in 1988, in force in 1989, five years before the West. After unification the country had two ages of consent, and on 11 June 1994 Paragraph 175 was deleted from the criminal code entirely. The statute book now records, against that number, one word: weggefallen. Lapsed.

On 7 December 2000 the Bundestag declared that the postwar prosecutions had violated the human dignity of those convicted, and apologised. In 2002 the Nazi-era convictions were annulled collectively and posthumously. That left the men convicted by the democracy still convicted, for another fifteen years. The rehabilitation law came into force on 22 July 2017: it annuls the postwar convictions in both German states and fixes compensation at 3,000 euros per annulled judgment and 1,500 euros for each year of liberty lost. Applications close on 21 July 2027. In 2019 the scheme was extended to men who had been investigated or held before trial without ever being convicted.

Austria's parallel paragraph 129, in force from 1852, was broader still: it covered women. Over fourteen thousand people were convicted between 1945 and 1971 alone. It was repealed in 1971 and immediately replaced with new offences, including a ban on homosexual associations and on "advertising" homosexuality, which lasted to 2002. Austria's rehabilitation and compensation law was promulgated on 22 December 2023, with applications opening on 1 February 2024.

The memorial in the Tiergarten, a tilted concrete stele with a window showing a looped film of a kiss, was handed to the public on 27 May 2008. Rudolf Brazda stood at it that June, sixty three years after Buchenwald, and twenty nine years before the last compensation claim under the law that convicted him is due.

Sources: Reichsgesetzblatt 1935 I, page 839, with the texts of Paragraphs 175 and 175a in the versions in force 1 September 1935 to 1 September 1969; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Gay Men under the Nazi Regime," "Paragraph 175 and the Nazi Campaign against Homosexuality," "Lesbians under the Nazi Regime," "Magnus Hirschfeld" and "Nazi Book Burnings"; German History in Documents and Images for the Berliner Tageblatt list of 4 March 1933, the Führer decree of 15 November 1941, the Reich Ministry of Justice decision of 18 June 1942, and the 1957 constitutional judgment; Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld on the destruction of the Institute; Rüdiger Lautmann, "The Pink Triangle: The Persecution of Homosexual Males in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany," Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980); Auschwitz Memorial, Robert Biedroń, "Nazism's Pink Hell"; Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933 to 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), for the Himmler speech in translation; Günter Grau, ed., Hidden Holocaust? (Cassell, 1995); Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade (Columbia University Press, 1996); BVerfGE 6, 389 (10 May 1957); Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 18/9882 (30 September 2016); Gesetz zur strafrechtlichen Rehabilitierung, in force 22 July 2017, full text at Gesetze im Internet; Pink Triangle Legacies Project for Pierre Seel and Rudolf Brazda; USHMM identification card for Karl Gorath; Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas on the Tiergarten memorial; Austrian Strafgesetz of 27 May 1852, paragraphs 129 and 130, and BGBl. I Nr. 152/2023. Where an English rendering of a German original rests on a single translator, the museum's research file records which, and the German text is given here so you can check it.

Room XII · Part Four: The state and the clinic

The clinic as courtroom

Knutsford 1952 · Washington 1948 · Jackson 1952 · Atascadero 1954

As the criminal law receded, something took over its work. The claim of this room is not that doctors were cruel. It is structural: when punishment moves from a court to a clinic, it keeps the coercion and loses the safeguards. No sentencing range. No maximum term. No appeal. And in the case that opens this room, that transfer is not an interpretation. It is a document.

1952: a court sentences a man to a hospital

Shortly before his trial, Alan Turing wrote to a friend and set out what he expected a conviction to do to his science.

Turing to Norman Routledge, early 1952. King's College, Cambridge, Turing Papers, AMT/D/14a. He was right.

On 31 March 1952 he pleaded guilty at Knutsford Quarter Sessions to gross indecency under the section of the 1885 Act that Room VI showed you being written. He was not imprisoned. He was placed on probation for twelve months on one condition: that he "submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Infirmary."

Turing described it himself in April 1952 as being "both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period." Organo-therapy was the period's euphemism. The substance was stilboestrol, a synthetic oestrogen, given first as tablets and then by an implant placed in his thigh. Its documented effects in men include breast growth and loss of libido, which is precisely why it was used. His biographer records that he removed the implant. Corroborated for the seventeen words of the probation condition, because our researcher could not reach the original Cheshire court order; the date, the court, the statute and the fact of a treatment condition are verified.

The American version: a diagnosis with no end date

In 1940 the Supreme Court of the United States upheld Minnesota's sexual psychopath statute, and in doing so blessed a form of words: persons who "by a habitual course of misconduct in sexual matters, have evidenced an utter lack of power to control their sexual impulses." Eight years later Congress copied it almost exactly into the law of the District of Columbia.

Now look at what else that same statute did on the same day. Section 102 created the District's solicitation offence, reaching anyone who addressed another person in a public place "for the purpose of prostitution, or any other immoral or lewd purpose." That is the provision used against men who spoke to men in Lafayette Square. Section 104 set sodomy at up to ten years. And section 202(e) provided that the sexual psychopath sections did not apply to anyone charged with rape or assault with intent to rape.

Six years in a penitentiary, on a diagnosis

The clearest single record of what this machinery did is a Michigan Supreme Court opinion of 1958. A man committed in May 1952 was sent first to a state hospital and then, four months later, to the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson, the state's main penitentiary, where he was still held six years later. He testified that his original commitment came about because he, "a Negro, was married to a white woman."

And here is the mechanism, in an exchange with the state's psychiatrist that the court preserved.

Atascadero, and what can be proved about it

California opened a hospital for sex offenders in June 1954 with a thousand patients. Its statutory definition of a sexual psychopath included a person with "a marked departure from normal mentality," which is not a diagnosis but a description of difference. A man so diagnosed had to register with the police for the rest of his life and carry the card at all times.

This is a place where an exhibit could easily overclaim, because the hospital acquired a slogan in the underground press of the 1970s and some of the worst allegations were disputed at the time by other gay journalists. So here is only what is documented, and by whom.

1973: how the diagnosis ended, which is not how you think

Homosexuality entered the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952 as a sexual deviation within "sociopathic personality disturbance." In May 1972 a psychiatrist addressed his own association's annual meeting in a mask, a wig and an oversized tuxedo, using a voice distorting microphone, to say that he was homosexual and to describe what his colleagues did to people like him. The mask exists because a psychiatrist could not safely say in 1972 what the association would formally accept eighteen months later.

In 1973 the association held a public symposium titled "Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature?" Seven named men, in the flagship journal of American psychiatry, arguing about whether millions of people were ill.

The counterweight, and it is a real one

Room X showed you a government purging its own employees on a psychiatric theory. It is worth knowing that in 1955, at the height of it, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry published a report on homosexuality in government agencies that criticised the witch hunts. A psychiatric body said so, in 1955, while it was happening. And by 1977 the same group described the sexual psychopath statutes as an experiment that "has failed," on the ground that future behaviour could not be predicted and sexual violence could not be treated by those means. The profession that supplied the theory also supplied its critics, and the exhibit should not flatten it into a single villain.

Sources: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983, and later editions), and his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, for the conviction, the probation condition and the treatment; Turing to Norman Routledge, King's College Cambridge, Turing Papers AMT/D/14a; Policing and Crime Act 2017, section 164, for the statutory description of the 1885 offence. Minnesota ex rel. Pearson v. Probate Court, 309 U.S. 270 (1940). The Miller Act, 62 Stat. 346 (9 June 1948), read from the Government Publishing Office scan of the Statutes at Large, sections 101 to 104 and 201 to 207. In re Maddox, 351 Mich. 358, 88 N.W.2d 470 (1958), read in full. Edwin H. Sutherland, "The Diffusion of Sexual Psychopath Laws," American Journal of Sociology 56 (1950), read in full. Paul Mark McNaughton, doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego (2020), open access, for the California material, built on the California State Archives and the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California. Michael Serber and Claudia Keith, Journal of Homosexuality 1 (1976), for the acknowledgement of aversive practice, with the caution that our researcher reached the passage at one remove and it must be obtained before the quotation is printed. Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry (1981), and Jerome Wakefield in World Psychiatry 23 (2024), for the 1973 mechanism. The other man in the Turing case was a private individual and is not named here, in this exhibit or in the museum's research file.

Room XIII · Part Five: The body in public

Dress not belonging to his or her sex

Columbus 1848 · San Francisco 1863 · Chicago 1978 · Houston 1980

Before any American law said which restroom a person could use, dozens of American cities said which clothes a person could wear on the street. The offence was appearing in public in a dress not belonging to your sex. These were not obscure rules. They were ordinary municipal law for over a century, they were enforced with arrests, and when the courts finally struck them down the cities defending them named the restroom as one of the reasons they were needed. That is not a modern parallel drawn by this museum. It is in the opinion.

The ordinances

Columbus, Ohio adopted one in 1848. San Francisco followed in 1863. Comparable ordinances ran in Chicago, Detroit, Miami Beach, Dallas, Toledo, Cincinnati and Houston, among dozens of other cities. Clare Sears, in Arresting Dress (Duke University Press, 2015), reconstructs the San Francisco law and shows what it was really for: not clothing as such, but the policing of who was permitted to appear in public at all.

The wording was close to identical from city to city, which is itself the evidence. Here is Chicago's, as it stood when two people were arrested under it in 1974.

The four reasons, and the sentence that follows them

When the case reached the Supreme Court of Illinois, the City of Chicago had to say out loud what the ordinance was for. It gave four reasons. The court printed them, and then printed one more sentence.

Read the third reason again, and then read Room XIV and Room XV. In 1978 a great American city defended a law against gender nonconforming dress on the ground that it was needed to prevent crimes in washrooms, and a court answered that there was no evidence for it. The restroom argument is not forty years younger than the cross-dressing ban. It was one of the ban's stated purposes, and it failed on the evidence then too.

How the bans fell, city by city

They were not repealed in a wave of enlightenment. They were dismantled one criminal case at a time, mostly between 1963 and 1986, usually by defendants who were transsexual women preparing for surgery, often represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Kate Redburn's peer-reviewed reconstruction in Law and History Review (2022) is the standard account and is open access.

The law that outlived them

One companion statute lasted much longer. New York's ban on being "masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration" in public, with an exception carved out for "a masquerade party or like entertainment," descended from an 1845 law aimed at masked rent rioters. Codified as Penal Law section 240.35(4), it was periodically turned on people whose gender presentation or protest the police wished to stop. The Second Circuit upheld it against a First Amendment challenge in 2004. In 2011 it was among the first tools New York City police used against Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in Guy Fawkes masks. New York repealed it in 2020. The related loitering provision, section 240.37, enforced against trans women for so long that it was known as the walking while trans law, was repealed in February 2021.

Where this room hands over

Two dates close it. In December 1975 Minneapolis became the first American city to bar discrimination against a person for "having or projecting a self-image not associated with one's biological maleness or one's biological femaleness." In 1993 Minnesota became the first state to write a comparable definition into its Human Rights Act.

And then, in 2001, the same state's Supreme Court drew the line that the next two rooms are about.

Sources: Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Duke University Press, 2015); Kate Redburn, "Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963 to 1986," Law and History Review 40, no. 4 (2022), open access at Cambridge Core, read in full for the case citations and the city by city chronology; City of Chicago v. Wilson, 75 Ill. 2d 525, 389 N.E.2d 522 (1978); City of Columbus v. Rogers, 41 Ohio St. 2d 161, 324 N.E.2d 563 (1975); Doe v. McConn, 489 F. Supp. 76 (S.D. Tex. 1980); City of Cincinnati v. Adams, 330 N.E.2d 463 (1974); Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. Kerik, 356 F.3d 197 (2d Cir. 2004); New York Laws of 2020, chapter 98; Goins v. West Group, 635 N.W.2d 717 (Minn. 2001); Minneapolis civil rights ordinance (December 1975) and Minnesota Statutes section 363.01, subdivision 41a, as quoted in Goins. Quotations from the Doe v. McConn opinion are Redburn's transcription and are marked corroborated in the museum's research file rather than verified against the reporter.

Room XIV · Part Five: The body in public

The bathroom

Boston 1887 · Birmingham 1944 · Washington 1964 · Houston 2015

There is a story that the sex-separated public toilet is simply how things have always been, a fact of architecture rather than a decision of law. It is not. It has a date, a legislature and a text. The first one in the United States was passed in Boston, it was aimed at women working in factories, and the mills it was written for were in Fall River and New Bedford.

1887: the first law, and it is ours

Notice who could be punished. Section 4 put the fine, not more than one hundred dollars, on the employer, and only after a factory inspector had given four weeks' written notice of the changes needed, and not even then if the changes had been made. The law regulated buildings. It did not create an offence that a person could commit by walking through a door. Hold on to that, because it changes.

New York followed two months later, on 25 May 1887, and did something subtly different: it wrote the requirement into a statute whose entire purpose was the protection of "women and children." Other states then copied New York rather than Massachusetts. The titles say it plainly. Tennessee, 1897: "An Act to require employers of females to provide separate water-closets for them." North Carolina, 1913: an act to compel businesses "Where Male and Female Employees are Employed to Provide Separate and Distinct Toilets." Arkansas, 1919: "An Act for the Protection of the Health of Women Workers."

What were the laws for? The dominant scholarly answer belongs to Terry Kogan, and this museum attaches his name to it because it is an interpretation and not a fact. Kogan argues that there was nothing "benign or gender neutral" about their origins, and reads them as a late attempt to shore up the nineteenth century doctrine of separate spheres for men and women. He also lists sanitary provision as one of four justifications, and the factory inspectors of the period were documenting real conditions: a New York report of 1887 found that in the sweated shops "The water-closets are used alike by males and females, and usually stand in the room where the work is done." Both things can be true. The statutes are verified. The explanation is Kogan's.

The same law, with a different line drawn

Within a generation the separate and plainly designated toilet had become a ready made instrument for marking status, and the status it marked was not only sex. South Carolina in 1915 made it unlawful for cotton textile manufacturers to let workers of different races use the same lavatories, toilets, doors, stairways or drinking buckets. Birmingham, Alabama went further, and the wording repays attention.

Massachusetts in 1887 fined the employer who failed to build the rooms. Birmingham in 1944 made it a crime for a person to walk into one. That second form, the offence committed by the individual who uses the wrong door, is the form the twenty first century restroom statute would take. Room XV has those statutes, and you will recognise the sentence structure.

1964: one line erased, one line left

1971 and 1972: the argument enters the record

When the House Judiciary Committee reported the Equal Rights Amendment, it answered the toilet question before anyone had to ask it.

Opponents took the opening. On the Senate floor in March 1972, days before the amendment passed by eighty four votes to eight, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina put it this way: if the amendment were read to forbid legal distinctions between men and women, it "would annul all existing laws of this nature, and rob Congress and the States of the constitutional power to enact any similar laws at any time in the future." The laws he named first were "laws requiring separate rest rooms for men and women in public buildings."

Then, in November 1972, the campaign that would beat the amendment opened with an issue of its own newsletter, and made the analogy explicit.

Jane Mansbridge, in the standard study of why the amendment failed, concluded that "the unisex toilet issue fed the fervor of the anti-ERA forces by giving them something absolutely outrageous to focus on," while her own legal reading was that the amendment would not in fact have required unisex toilets. And the borrowing from racial segregation was not only rhetorical. Gillian Frank's research documents a Florida woman writing to a state senator in 1973, "I do not want to share a public restroom with black or white hippie males," and a North Carolina legislator recording a colleague's refusal to have his wife in a bathroom with a Black man. The amendment fell three states short by the 1982 deadline.

The vocabulary arrives before the door does

The words that would later be attached to the restroom were assembled elsewhere first. Florida's legislative investigation committee published a report in 1964 warning of homosexuals in public bathrooms. In June 1977 Anita Bryant's campaign repealed Dade County's nondiscrimination ordinance by roughly sixty nine percent to thirty one, on the premise that gay people "are trying to recruit our children." In November 1978 California's Proposition 6, which would have required school boards to fire teachers for promoting homosexuality, was defeated fifty eight to forty two. Recruitment, the child, the predator: the vocabulary was complete decades before it was pointed at a door.

2008 to 2012: the modern advertisement, and two defeats

The fully formed campaign appears in Gainesville, Florida. After the city added gender identity to its nondiscrimination ordinance, opponents petitioned to strip it out and ran a television advertisement, posted on 28 June 2008, warning that the ordinance would give men "the legal right to enter public women's restrooms." Their literature claimed the ordinance "accommodates the 263 sexual offenders and/or predators living within Gainesville's city limits ... thereby especially placing women and children at risk." On 24 March 2009 Gainesville voters rejected the repeal by about fifty eight percent to forty two, and the protection stood. That is seven years before Houston.

On 3 April 2012 Anchorage voters went the other way, rejecting Proposition 5, which would have added sexual orientation and transgender identity to the city's equal rights code, by about fifty eight to forty two.

This room stops in 2015, with the argument fully assembled, tested at the ballot box in both directions, and still a matter of city ordinances. What happens next is that it becomes state law in half the country at once. That is Room XV.

Sources: Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts 1887, chapter 103, pages 668 to 670, official scan, Massachusetts State Library and Archives; Massachusetts Archives, 1887 Senate Bill 43 (the record page refused the request, so the sponsor and committee could not be read); Terry S. Kogan, "Sex-Separation in Public Restrooms: Law, Architecture, and Gender," Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 14, no. 1 (2007), and his amicus brief in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., No. 16-273 (filed 2 March 2017); George M. Kober, "History of Industrial Hygiene and its Effects on Public Health," in Ravenel, ed., A Half Century of Public Health (APHA, 1921), page 377; Elizabeth Sepper and Deborah Dinner, "Sex in Public," Yale Law Journal 129 (2019); General Code of the City of Birmingham (1944), chapter 45, sections 1110 and 1111, transcribed from the Birmingham Public Library Archives copy; King Institute, Stanford University, on the Birmingham campaign and the truce agreement of 10 May 1963; 42 U.S.C. 2000a; House Report No. 92-359, 92nd Congress, 1st session, 14 July 1971; 118 Congressional Record S4263 (daily edition, 20 March 1972), statement of Senator Ervin; The Phyllis Schlafly Report, vol. 6, no. 4 (November 1972); Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (University of Chicago Press, 1986); Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005); Gillian Frank, Slate, 10 November 2015; Autumn Sandeen, TransAdvocate, 18 January 2016, on the 2008 Gainesville advertisement; Equality Florida and Ballotpedia for the March 2009 result; Southern Poverty Law Center for the 2012 Anchorage result; Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996). Where a source could be reached only at one remove, or not at all, the museum's research file records which and why.

Room XV · Part Five: The body in public

The latest chapter

Charlotte 2016 · Twenty one statute books · 23 August 2026

This is the room the exhibit was built for. Everything behind you was preparation for one question: is the present wave of American restroom laws something new, or is it the latest turn of a very old wheel. You have seen the wheel. Now here is the turn, counted state by state, in the words the legislatures actually used.

The number, and why it moves

How far they reach

The grouping that matters is not how many but how far. A law about school locker rooms and a law about who may enter a prison or a shelter are not the same instrument.

The states that said no

Half the country did not do this, and several that tried failed in ways worth recording, because a wave that is resisted is a different thing from a wave that is not.

New Hampshire rejected it four times in two years, under two Republican governors. Arizona's legislature passed facility bills in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and all three were vetoed; a ballot referral for a general school restroom rule passed the Senate in February 2026 and then died in the House without a floor vote. Indiana's 2026 bill passed the Senate 37 to 8 and died in the House. Nebraska had the facility provisions amended out of its bill before passage and has only an executive order. Missouri, Alaska, Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan have no such law at all.

One thing to watch rather than report as settled: Arizona's Proposition 318 is on the ballot for 3 November 2026. It contains a restroom, locker room and shower room restriction tied to athletic spaces, it bypasses the Governor entirely, and it survived a court challenge in August. By its own terms it becomes law only if voters approve it, and only from 1 January 2027. As of the day this exhibit opened it is not law.

One statute that suspends itself

West Virginia wrote something into its own code that this exhibit has found nowhere else. Its school provisions are self-suspending: they do not operate for as long as a particular federal appeals court decision stands in the Fourth Circuit. The legislature enacted a restriction and simultaneously instructed it to sleep while the courts say otherwise. Which brings us to the courts.

The federal layer, in four reversals

In May 2016 the Departments of Justice and Education told every school district receiving federal money that Title IX required treating a student consistent with their gender identity. In February 2017 that guidance was withdrawn. In 2024 a new Title IX rule was issued. On 9 January 2025 a federal court in Kentucky vacated it nationwide. On 20 January 2025 an executive order directed the federal government to recognise two sexes, fixed at conception, and reached federal prisons and identity documents.

Four reversals in nine years, none of them by Congress. Every one was guidance, rule, or executive order, which is the same pattern Room X showed you: the durable American instrument in this field is administrative, not legislative.

The circuit split, and a boy who won too late

The federal appeals courts do not agree, and where you live decides which rule applies to your child.

And one thing about Grimm that belongs on a wall without any quotation at all. The case began in 2015, went to the Supreme Court once and was sent back, and ended in 2021. Gavin Grimm had left high school years before he won. He won, and it was too late to matter to him.

The evidence for the premise

Every one of the twenty one statutes rests on the same claim: that letting transgender people use the facility matching their gender identity creates a safety or privacy risk to others. This exhibit will be judged on how it handles that claim, so here is exactly what the evidence is, and exactly where it stops.

And then it arrives four towns over

Massachusetts is not on the list of twenty one. It has no such statute, and Room XVI shows you the Commonwealth going the other way: the 2016 public accommodations law, and the 2018 vote in which the state chose to keep it. State law and education guidance have protected transgender students' access to school facilities matching who they are for more than a decade.

None of that stopped the argument from arriving here. In August 2026, while this exhibit was being built, a public dispute in Rochester, a town in this museum's own region, was about exactly the question this room has been tracking. The school followed the law. The South Coast LGBTQ+ Network, which this museum is a project of, published a statement about it, and the sentence it chose to put in the title was "Trans children are children."

One number from Room XVI belongs here. When Massachusetts voted in November 2018 on whether to keep the protection, Rochester returned 1,474 yes to 1,269 no, which is 53.7 percent, against a statewide 67.8. Twenty two of the twenty three towns in this region voted to keep the law, Rochester among them, and it did so by a narrower margin than almost any of its neighbours. Eight years later the argument came back to that town anyway.

Where this room hands back to the rest of the exhibit

In 1978 the City of Chicago defended a law against gender nonconforming dress on four grounds, the third of which was "to prevent crimes in washrooms." The Supreme Court of Illinois answered in one sentence: "The record, however, contains no evidence to support these reasons." That is Room XIII. It was forty eight years ago.

In 1887 Massachusetts passed the first law in the United States requiring separate toilets by sex, and it fined the employer who did not build them. In 1944 Birmingham passed one that made it a crime for a person to walk through the wrong door, and it drew the line by race. That is Room XIV.

In 1533 an English statute made an act punishable by death and did not define it. In 1871 a British colonial act registered a class of people and made it an offence for them to be seen in public. In 1935 a German amendment removed the requirement of proof. In 1950 a United States Senate subcommittee argued that people who could be blackmailed must be exposed. Those are Rooms V, VII, XI and X.

The claim this exhibit set out to test was that homosexuality has not really been punished through history. The record above is the answer, and the last twenty one entries in it are dated within the last ten years. Room XVIII is where we take the strongest arguments against everything you have just read, and answer them.

Sources: the enrolled acts and codified statutes of the twenty one states named, read individually, with the exceptions recorded in the museum's research file; the North Dakota Legislative Assembly's own bill record for House Bill 1473 of 2023, checked directly for this room; West Virginia Code chapter 5, article 32; the 2016 Dear Colleague Letter, its 2017 withdrawal, the 2024 Title IX rule, Tennessee v. Cardona (E.D. Ky., 9 January 2025) and Executive Order 14168 of 20 January 2025; Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District, 858 F.3d 1034 (7th Cir. 2017); Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, 897 F.3d 518 (3d Cir. 2018); Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, 972 F.3d 586 (4th Cir. 2020), cited but not quoted; Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, 57 F.4th 791 (11th Cir. 2022) (en banc); A.C. v. Metropolitan School District of Martinsville, 75 F.4th 760 (7th Cir. 2023); Hasenbush, Flores and Herman, Sexuality Research and Social Policy 16 (2019). Corrections made in the course of building this room and recorded in full in the research file: Florida's session chapter is 2023-106, not the number in wide circulation; Alabama's shelter and prison language was stripped in the House, so trackers quoting the introduced bill are quoting a dead text; South Carolina's instrument is an annual budget proviso, not a statute; Virginia is excluded here because its restriction is agency model policy rather than enacted law, which is the single largest reason our list differs from others with the same total.

Room XVI · Part Five: The body in public

Massachusetts, the other way

Noble 1974 · Chapter 516 in 1989 · Goodridge 2003 · Question 3 in 2018

Room IX left you with words still printed in the General Laws of this Commonwealth: the abominable and detestable crime against nature, twenty years. This room is about the same Commonwealth, on the same day, going the other way. Both are true. A museum that showed you only one of them would be doing what this exhibit was built to argue against.

A seat, and a bill nobody would pass

In November 1974 Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the first openly gay or lesbian candidate elected to a state legislature anywhere in the United States. Two years earlier a young state representative named Barney Frank had filed the Commonwealth's first gay rights bill. It was refiled, and refiled, and refiled. Seventeen years passed between the filing and the signature. Unverified the bill's docket number, which our researcher could not find in any source, and we would rather leave the gap visible than invent a number.

1989: the second state in the country

Chapter 516 of the Acts of 1989 added sexual orientation to the Commonwealth's anti-discrimination law. Governor Michael Dukakis signed it on 15 November 1989. Only Wisconsin had done it before. Corroborated: the text of chapter 516 is not online, because the state's session law database begins at 1997, so the date rests on contemporaneous reporting and archival records rather than the statute itself.

Four years later the Commonwealth did something no state had done. The Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was created in 1992, and chapter 282 of the Acts of 1993 barred discrimination against students on the basis of sexual orientation in the public schools. The safe schools program that followed was the first of its kind in the country.

2003: the sentence that changed the argument

The first marriages were performed on 17 May 2004. A constitutional amendment to undo them was pushed through three constitutional conventions and died at the fourth, on 14 June 2007. Corroborated: the roll call sheets from those conventions are not online, so the vote counts here rest on contemporaneous reporting rather than the Journal. In 2008 the Commonwealth repealed a 1913 law that had been used to stop out of state couples from marrying here.

2011 and 2016: half a law, then the rest of it

Chapter 199 of the Acts of 2011, approved on 23 November 2011, put gender identity into Massachusetts law for the first time, and defined it carefully.

Chapter 134 of the Acts of 2016 closed the gap, and its operative sentence is the one the whole rest of this exhibit has been walking toward.

November 2018: the only time this was ever put to a whole state

Opponents took chapter 134 to the ballot as a veto referendum. Question 3 asked voters whether to keep the law. A Yes kept it. A No repealed it. It was the first and so far only statewide popular vote anywhere in the United States on whether to keep transgender public accommodations protections.

Where the Commonwealth was late, or wrong

A room called "the other way" earns nothing if it only lists the wins.

1985. The Department of Social Services placed two young brothers with Donald Babets and David Jean, a gay couple in Boston, and removed them after a newspaper article about neighbourhood opposition. The administration then adopted a foster care policy that in practice barred gay and lesbian foster parents, and it stood for roughly five years until litigation ended it. The governor who presided over that policy is the same governor who signed the 1989 civil rights law. Both belong on this wall.

1995. Massachusetts lost at the Supreme Court of the United States, nine to nothing, on this very statute. In Hurley, the Court held that the public accommodations law could not be used to compel a private parade to carry a message its organisers did not wish to convey. The nuance matters and is usually flattened: the Court did not strike the Massachusetts law down, and said plainly that it "does not, as a general matter, violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments." Massachusetts lost the case and kept the statute. The lawyer who argued and lost for the gay and lesbian group that day, Mary Bonauto, argued Goodridge eight years later and won.

Now. The Commonwealth writes strong law and underfunds the agency that enforces it. The State Auditor found that the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination exceeded its statutory time limits on 1,308 of the 2,854 investigations it completed in 2019 and 2020, which is 45.8 percent, and an earlier audit had found substantially the same thing. Reporting since has documented a retaliation complaint that took seventeen years and a discrimination case that ran fifteen. MCAD is the agency a person here turns to after being refused a job, an apartment or a table. A right with a fifteen year queue is a different right. Corroborated: the audit is posted on a state site that refused every automated request, so these figures come from reporting that quotes it directly, and the exhibit says so.

And the law that Question 3 preserved still carries the price of 1989 in its own text. Section 98 protects against discrimination on account of "sexual orientation, which shall not include persons whose sexual orientation involves minor children as the sex object." The clause is legally inert. It is also still printed there, and voters in 2018 were asked to keep the section that contains it.

Two documents, one Commonwealth, one day

Hang these opposite each other, because they are both the law of Massachusetts as this exhibit opened.

Sources: Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 440 Mass. 309 (2003); Opinions of the Justices to the Senate, 440 Mass. 1201 (3 February 2004); Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., 515 U.S. 557 (1995); St. 2011, c. 199; St. 2016, c. 134; St. 2008, c. 216; St. 2019, c. 8 (conversion therapy); St. 2022, c. 127; G.L. c. 272, ss. 34, 35, 92A and 98, retrieved 23 August 2026; Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Elections Division, certified municipal returns for 2018 Question 3, ElectionStats and Public Document 43, including the machine-readable municipal export downloaded 23 August 2026; Office of the State Auditor, audit of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, as reported by WBUR (30 May 2022 and 5 February 2025); ACLU of Massachusetts and GLAD Law case records for Babets v. Johnston; Massachusetts legislature bill history for S.2564 of the 194th General Court. Four items in the museum's research file are marked unverified and are not asserted here: the docket number of the 1972 bill, the text of chapter 516 of 1989, the constitutional convention roll call sheets, and the audit PDF's own page numbers.

Room XVII · Part Six: The record

The world's statute book today

Sixty-five states · Twelve death penalties · Every count checked 23 August 2026

Everything in the sixteen rooms behind you is history. This room is not. The laws below were in force on the day this exhibit opened, and the counts carry the date they were checked, because they move. If you have come this far believing that the punishment of same-sex love is a thing that used to happen, this is the room that answers.

How many, and who is counting

Two organisations count the world's criminal laws, and they publish slightly different numbers for good reasons. A museum should give both, and say what each is measuring.

The two counters are not in conflict. They agree in substance on sixty-five UN member states and sixty-six jurisdictions counting Gaza. Two of the sixty-five have no explicit national statute and are counted as criminalising in fact rather than in text: Egypt, where Law No. 10 of 1961 on the combating of prostitution supplies the charge, and Indonesia, where the national code is silent and the province of Aceh is not.

Where the penalty is death

Here the two systems measure genuinely different things, and flattening them is how a true statement becomes a false one.

ILGA classifies what the law says. The Human Dignity Trust classifies what is carried out, and by that measure names Iran, northern Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. Both are true statements about different questions. A museum label has to say which question it is answering, so this one says both.

Three of the twelve have the sentence in the statute and no documented execution under it: Brunei, which announced a moratorium on 5 May 2019; Mauritania, which has executed no one since 1987; and Uganda, where no one has been executed under the 2023 Act. Verified

What has actually happened, 2020 to 2026

Counts are not deaths. These are the documented acts of enforcement, with what the record does and does not establish.

Yemen. On 23 January 2024 a court in Dhamar sentenced nine people to death, seven by stoning and two by crucifixion, and twenty-three others to prison terms of six months to ten years, on charges including homosexuality and spreading immorality. On 1 February 2024 the court of first instance in Ibb sentenced thirteen students to death and three to flogging for "spreading homosexuality." As of 23 August 2026 neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch had confirmed any execution under those sentences. The correct word is sentenced, and this exhibit will not upgrade it.

Nigeria. On 29 August 2023 police in Warri, Delta State, arrested sixty-seven people at what they called a gay wedding and livestreamed the arrests on the state police force's own Facebook page. On 23 October 2023 the paramilitary NSCDC arrested seventy-six people in Gombe State. Sharia courts in the north have passed death sentences for sodomy; no execution under those codes for consensual conduct has been verified as carried out.

Uganda. The Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 was signed on 26 May 2023: life imprisonment for "homosexuality," death for "aggravated homosexuality," up to twenty years for "promotion." The first person charged capitally, a twenty-year-old man charged at Soroti on 18 August 2023, spent about two and a half years on remand; on 2 February 2026 the Chief Magistrates Court discontinued the case, the magistrate finding him of unsound mind after the detention. On 3 April 2024 the Constitutional Court upheld most of the Act, striking four provisions. The Supreme Court appeal, filed in July 2024, was set for hearing on 31 March 2026 and postponed on 27 March 2026; as of 23 August 2026 there was no new date. The Ugandan legal aid group HRAPF has documented 983 cases against individuals since the law took effect. Corroborated for the case count, which is an advocacy organisation's intake figure, reported monthly.

Iraq. On 27 April 2024 parliament amended the 1988 anti-prostitution law to punish same-sex relations with ten to fifteen years, "promoting homosexuality" with seven years, and the "intentional practice of effeminacy" and gender-affirming medical procedures with one to three years. An earlier draft proposed death and was dropped before passage.

The ledger runs both ways

It would be dishonest to end the count there. Since 2015, seventeen UN member states and one associated state have removed criminal penalties. In the same period five jurisdictions have added or restored them. Both columns are the record.

ILGA World's own summary of the year is the sentence this room turns on. In June 2026 it reported that the number of countries criminalising consensual same-sex relations "rose again for the first time in almost a decade."

And the restroom is not an American question

One more thing belongs in this room, because Room XV can otherwise be read as a story about one country's politics. It is not. In the 2020s at least ten national jurisdictions outside the United States, on four continents, have restricted by statute, constitution or supreme court ruling which sex the state will recognise a person to be, or which spaces and services follow from it.

Alongside it: Hungary's Fifteenth Amendment of 14 April 2025, holding that "a person is either a man or a woman," which built on the 2020 statute that ended legal gender recognition outright. Slovakia's constitutional amendment of 26 September 2025, carried by ninety votes of one hundred and fifty, recognising only two sexes. Russia's Federal Law 386-FZ of 24 July 2023, which banned gender-affirming care and legal gender change and voided marriages where a spouse had transitioned, followed on 30 November 2023 by the Supreme Court's designation of the "international LGBT movement" as extremist. Georgia's Family Values law of 3 October 2024. Bulgaria's Supreme Court of Cassation decision of 20 February 2023, closing the courts to legal gender change. And India's Transgender Persons Amendment Act, in force 25 May 2026, which deleted the statutory right to a self-perceived gender identity and replaced it with medical board assessment and a District Magistrate's approval.

The three doors that opened the other way

Three rulings built the international law that the decriminalisation column above rests on, and all three are public documents.

Sources: ILGA World, "Pride Month: new ILGA World data and maps on laws affecting LGBTI people globally," 1 June 2026, and the ILGA World Database country tables, queried 23 August 2026; Human Dignity Trust, "Map of Jurisdictions that Criminalise LGBT People" and the country profiles for Iran, Nigeria, Uganda, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Namibia, checked 23 August 2026; Iran Human Rights, 31 January 2022; Amnesty International, "Yemen: Huthis must stop executions and release dozens facing LGBTI charges," 9 February 2024; Human Rights Watch on the Warri arrests (30 August 2023), the Uganda Constitutional Court ruling (4 April 2024), the Iraq amendment (20 May 2024), Saint Lucia (31 July 2025) and the Dominican Republic (20 November 2025); Amnesty International on the Gombe arrests (October 2023); HRAPF periodic reports; For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers [2025] UKSC 16; the EHRC services Code of Practice effective 5 August 2026; Dudgeon v United Kingdom (1981) Series A no. 45; Toonen v Australia, UN Doc CCPR/C/50/D/488/1992; Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Advisory Opinion OC-24/17; ECPM, June 2025. Every count and every 2024 to 2026 fact in this room was re-checked on the web on 23 August 2026, and where a page could not be reached that is recorded in the museum's research file rather than papered over.

Room XVIII

What the skeptic gets right

In preparation

Room XIX

The record, in numbers and sources

In preparation