The act's main purpose was to protect girls from sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent to 16, but another provision in the act criminalised "gross indecency", which in practice extended existing laws against "buggery" to criminalise all sex acts between men.ġ895: Author Oscar Wilde's ill-advised attempt to sue the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for publicly accusing him of being a "sodomite" resulted in the writer himself being put on trial.ġ955: Peter Wildeblood, a journalist convicted of buggery and sentenced to 18 months in Wormwood Scrubs, published Against the Law, a book detailing his persecution at the hands of the law, which helped to normalise the taboo subject of same-sex relations. Scotland followed suit in 1889.ġ885: The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 came into law. They were hanged at Newgate prison, London.īuggery ceased to be a capital crime in 1861, when the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 downgraded the punishment to life imprisonment in England and Wales. The two labourers had met a third man in a tavern and gone to his rented room, where the landlord claimed to have caught them engaged in "buggery". Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford, was the first person to be executed under the Buggery Act in 1540, although Historic England claims the charges were most likely "politically motivated", given that Hungerford was also accused of treason and witchcraft.ġ835: James Pratt and John Smith became the last men in Britain to be executed for homosexual acts. The text of the act described "buggery" as a "detestable and abominable Vice", punishable by death whether committed with "mankind or beast". Here are some of the key dates in the history of gay rights in the UK:ġ533: The Buggery Act, the first ever law to specifically outlaw anal sex, was signed into English law. The act, which decriminalised homosexual sex acts between consenting men over the age of 21, opened the door to a slew of legal and social changes which would transform the way British society viewed same-sex relationships over the next 50 years. Fifty years ago, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 came into effect.