Law According To A King

"We were fighting and it was for our lives," said Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, of the moment when police stormed the Stonewall Inn on June 28th, 1969, and with these nine short words, she summed up the long history of the struggle for queer legal liberation. This blog post will take us through how the UK, and the world, moved from the medieval criminalisation of homosexuality to the current state of legislated equality, and a look towards the future of the next steps in the story of LGBTQ+ rights.  The first time in law that male homosexuality was targeted for persecution in the UK came under the Tudor monarch Henry VIII, whose Buggery Act of 1533 outlawed sodomy in England with the penalty of death. The preamble to the Act cited the absence of "sufficient and condign punishment" in law to deal with the "detestable and abominable vice" of homosexuality as the core reason for the bill's passage, though modern scholars, including Johnson and Lafitte, attrib...

 In Britain, the law regarding sex work is complex. Certain acts, namely that of engaging in sex for money, is legal, but a number of related acts, from soliciting in public, 'kerb crawling', managing a brothel, and others are illegal, severely restricting the work of prostitutes and other sex workers. Laws intended to protect sex workers, such as child prostitution, trafficking and the offence of paying a sex worker who has been subjected to force, are haphazardly enforced, leaving sex workers in a grey area - fearing the police and prosecution, but relying on the law to protect them. This blog post will examine some of the key failings in the law that leave prostitutes in dangerous territory, and the fight by groups such as the English Collective of Prostitutes to decriminalise prostitution entirely.  The key legislation outlawing street prostitution, public solicitation, and brothels are the Policing and Crime Act 2009, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Sexual Offences A...