THE LONG, LONG MARCH

The first Pride parade in London 50 years ago was preceded by hundreds of years of struggle, with sexual liberation at its core. David McGillivray looks back at its multifarious history and some of the brave pioneers who risked their lives for wanting to be themselves

- David McGillivray

FOR THE GREATER PART OF THE PAST 2,000 YEARS the men who governed the British Isles were obsessed with something of almost no importance. Sodomy. This is despite the fact that there was disagreement about every aspect of the activity - including precisely what sodomy is. Nevertheless, the consensus for hundreds of years was that bum sex was such an abomination that practically everybody caught in the act had to be killed. Not only did that decision not solve the problem, it appeared sometimes to cause even more confusion.

Throughout this moral panic, brave men continued to have sex with each other, while even the ordinary folk who didn't fancy it seemed excited by the thought. They packed the courtrooms when gay gentlemen came to trial. After far too long, sanity prevailed. First, the death penalty for buggery was repealed in 1861. A mere one hundred years later, in 1967, homosexuality was partially decriminalised. But as activist Peter Tatchell observes, "Until 1999, Britain had the largest number of anti-gay laws of any country in the world, some of them dating back centuries."

No wonder we have annual Pride parades. We need constantly to remind ourselves that what we've gained could be snatched away.

THE PROBLEM with gay sex seemed to coincide with the start of Christianity. Christians went along with Jewish-Roman theologian Flavius Josephus (37/38-100 AD), the first to claim that Sodom was destroyed because of sexual perversion. "Sodomite" took on a whole new meaning. A convoluted law from 342 AD appears in both the Theodosian Code and the Code of Justinian from emperors Constantius II and Constans. It decreed that marriage based on unnatural sex should be punished. In 390 AD, Emperor Valentinian declared homosexuality illegal - although just 20 years later the Romans left Britain.