26 May 1895: The trial of Oscar Wilde. The playwright is convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.
5 September 1957: The Wolfenden Committee’s report on homosexual offences and on prostitution is out at last, after three years’ preparation. Homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private will no longer be a criminal offence.
12 April 1971: Gay Lib is in the business of rocking the boat. Though they want legislative and attitude changes these young homosexuals, by their very acceptance of the normality of homosexuality, challenge the status quo.
24 February 1976: Eighteen guardsmen in the elite Household Division are being discharged from the army for being involved with a homosexual magazine, and one officer is also being called on to resign his commission.
25 June 1977: The Bay goes gay: Christopher Reed reports from San Francisco, where homosexuality is a political force that can make or break the city’s top men, mayor, sheriff, district attorney.
12 April 1995: The gay community reclaims the word “queer” and not everybody is happy. Francis Wheen looks at writer Paul Johnson’s launch of a crusade to ‘protect the English language.’
9 August 1999: Do we really need gay florists? Ghettos are not the answer. Integration, not segregation, is the route to a really liberal society.
27 March 1999: British tourism industry chases the pink pound. Out of the closet and into the money is the new idea for travel firms.
24 January 2016: As Italy’s Senate prepares to vote on the introduction of civil unions, we take a look at the rights of gay and lesbian couples across the continent.
27 February 2017: The Caravan Club, once billed as the capital’s greatest bohemian rendezvous, is recreated for National Trust and National Archives Queer City project. For the police, it was a place so dangerous that it required regular surveillance and a raid, which resulted in more than 100 arrests.
13 April 2017: In spite of improving equal rights legislation in the West, many parts of the world remain at best unwelcoming and at worst dangerous for gay people. Recent reports of torture and concentration camps in Chechnya are the latest of many examples. Owen Jones calls for a global uprising against homophobia.
25 April 2017: 30 years of gay style: from disco chic to hipster bears.
