The red areas are almost identical in both maps. The only difference is that the dot representing Hong Kong is missing on the right.

But let me tell you, the map on the right is not a historical map.  It's not about 1924. The red represents something that exists today. These countries have laws specifically criminalising homosexual acts.

There are no laws criminalising homosexuality in China, Mongolia, Japan, Korea or Thailand - countries that escaped full-blown Western colonialism.

Even countries that were colonized by other Western powers, shown in colours other than red in the first map, did not inherit anti-homosexual laws. Not Indonesia, not Indochina, not the Philippines.

But all the countries colonized by Britain have such laws. Hong Kong had them, up till 1991 when it was repealed.

I don’t need to say much more about the crap dished out by those in Singapore who think that anti-homosexual laws are a reflection of our “Asian values”. The map tells you where to look for the real culprit.

It all began with the Old Testament, that epic about a wrathful god. From then on, through the new religion, Christianity, to nearly the present time, non-procreative sex in all its various forms (oral sex, frottage, anal sex, even masturbation) were condemned in all the countries infected by this sex-averse ideology.

In the Middle Ages, sexual transgressions were dealt with under Canon Law - an ecclesiastical code of laws established by a church council. Enforcement was also the responsibility of the ecclesiastical courts, since morality (and Christianity defined sexual matters as matters of morality - other religions didn’t necessarily think so) was a spiritual matter, not a temporal one. 

Fleta: “Those who have dealings with Jews or Jewesses, those who commit bestiality, and sodomists, are to be buried alive after legal proof that they were taken in the act, and public conviction"

Britton: "Let enquiry also be made of those who feloniously in time of peace have burnt other's corn or houses, and those who are attainted thereof shall be burnt, so that they might be punished in like manner as they have offended. The same sentence shall be passed upon sorcerers, sorceresses, renegades, sodomists, and heretics publicly convicted"

You would have noticed how the sin of sodomy was mixed up with racial hatred, sorcery and heresy.

More importantly, we should note that sodomy was not defined as just a same-sex activity. The prohibitions were directed at any sexual activity, with whatever partner, that did not permit the possibility of conception. It’s only quite recently that we have narrowed our focus to anal sex, and only in the last 100 years or so that we have got into the habit of thinking that anal sex only happened between males, forgetting that heterosexual anal sex is just as likely.

Precisely because of this double narrowing, it came as a tremendous shock in November 2003 that a guy being sucked by a girl could be found guilty under a sodomy law. But that was its original scope!

However, if one looked back at the writings of the past, the sin that most exercised minds was sex with animals. Today, we see it as laughably marginal to any discussion about sexual variety. Anyone who puts sex with animals centrestage in any discussion of human sexuality will be seen as weirdly obsessed or hysterical. Or both.

(Note how in the quote from Fleta above, the order of transgressions were, firstly dealing with Jews, secondly, sex with animals, then sodomy.)

It would probably have been common too, since most people lived on farms where animals were easily at hand. 

The foregoing was generally the case across all of Christian Europe. But, in the 16th century, England took a different turn.

In 1533, King Henry VIII got his Parliament to pass the first civil law (meaning a criminal law established by a civil government) against "the abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast". It defined it as a felony punishable by hanging until death. 

Commentators of the day knew what lay behind the move. King Henry VIII --  the one with six wives -- was locked in a power struggle with the Pope. He wanted his marriages annulled so he could take fresh wives; Rome didn’t agree.

As the church stood in his way, he moved to undercut the reach and authority of the ecclesiastical courts. That was his motivation for stripping the ecclesiastical courts of jurisdiction over matters of morality, and putting them squarely under laws enacted by his Parliament and himself.

Ultimately, he forced a break and created the Church of England that would not answer to Rome.

After some flip-flops by Henry's immediate successors, Queen Elizabeth I reinstated the law in 1563, and from then on, sexual offenses remained under English secular law. Of course it was heavily informed by Christian thought, and in fact was to reach its most puritanical and prudish during the Victorian era (19th Century), an experience that continental Europe didn’t share. 

The Protestant challenge to Rome was not confined to England. Much of Northern Europe repudiated the rule of Rome. As nation states developed, many kingdoms enacted similar civil laws concerning sexual offences, e.g. Sweden and Russia.

The 18th century saw the rise of more secular and humanistic ideas we now call The Enlightenment. Some thinkers didn’t feel that heavy punishments for private sexual activity were justifiable.

The French Revolution of 1789 embodied many of the Enlightenment’s ideals, and the Napoleonic Code that was drawn up soon after made no mention of sodomy, buggery or the like. Since the Napoleonic Empire stretched over Germany, Holland, Spain and Portugal, the Napoleonic Code forms the basis for the laws in all these countries today.

This explains why Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, East Timor, Macao and the Philippines, even though they were colonized by European powers, do not have anti-homosexual laws.

Meanwhile, even the British thought death for sodomy a bit harsh. In 1861, (after the 1563 Act had been consolidated with other laws in 1828), the penalty was reduced from death to life imprisonment.

After the serious revolt of 1857 across much of the Ganges plain, (the Indian Mutiny), the British found themselves having to reorganize their administration of India.

One of the things they did was to set up a uniform legal code. Drafted by Lord Macaulay, the Indian Penal Code was finalised in 1860 and put into effect in 1862.

"Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature [1] with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment which may extend to 10 years."

In 1871, the Indian Penal Code was adopted by the Straits Settlements, which comprised Penang, Malacca and Singapore, these three ports being British possessions by then.

Other parts of the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia -- Burma, Ceylon, Maldives -- as well as the protectorates of Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Brunei, likewise modelled their laws on the Indian Penal Code.

And that is why the red of the first map is virtually identical to the red of the second map. 

Section 377, for offenses “against the order of nature” is not the only section that concerns gay people, although, as noted above, it was not meant to apply only to homosexual acts. We also have Section 377A.

Note: Section 377A is not a subsection of 377. It is a separate section by itself, and was inserted into the Penal Code later.

To understand how we got this one, we have to go back to Britain. 

During the 19th Century, there were a number of scandals involving prostitution and the treatment of innocent women by authorities charged with stamping out prostitution. The details are not relevant to this story, except that the law needed to be improved, and the Criminal Amendment Act of 1885 was tabled.

In the course of the Parliamentary debate on that, a Member of Parliament by the name of Labouchere, introduced an amendment, which thereafter was called the ‘Labouchere amendment’.  

"Any male person who, in public or private, commits or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour"

He effectively hijacked a piece of legislation regarding the treatment of women, to introduce a law that unequivocably criminalized a very broad sweep of homosexual acts.  

Even a situation where two men stood at urinals and looked at each other - no physical contact - would come within the scope of ‘gross indecency’.

It’s not clear to me why there was this turn of events. It’s been said that there was a crisis of masculinity during that period. Certainly, it coincided with the emergence in Europe of psycho-analytical enquiry into sexuality, and the beginnings of the conceptualization of heterosexuality and homosexuality.

In the years following, British colonies also incorporated similar clauses into their laws.

 
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