Same sex relationships in history

The History of Gay Marriage: From the Ancients to Gen Z! [Ad]

Gay marriage has only just become a lawful enterprise, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t always around. For the history of gay marriage, you came to the right place.

Despite the recent history of the LGBTQ+ community being one of prejudice and discrimination, things weren’t always fancy this. Our current acceptance echoes civilisations of the past, who saw same-sex unions as normal and right.

Thanks to this abundant history of gay marriage, a solicitors in Chichester, Lewes, or anywhere else in Sussex or the UK will now be able to help with your civil partnership or marriage. But how has this developed, and where did this all begin? Let’s take a look…

This is a sponsored collaborative post.

LGBTQ+ unions at the beginning of the ancient world

Luckily for us budding history lovers, the ancient world has a myriad of evidence available, which provides us with a pretty good idea of how life was lived back then. Because of this, we know that same-sex unions occurred across the globe, in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt,

Today we look back at a history of LGBTQ+ laws in the UK and how individuals’ personal struggles and legal battles have shaped different areas of legislation and policy.

Early Laws ()

Law	Description
Buggery Act	Same-sex sexual activity was characterised as “sinful” and, under the law was outlawed and punishable by death. The Act defined buggery as an unnatural sexual act against the will of God and Man
Section 15 of the Offences against the Person act	Simplified the law – Buggery remains an offence punishable by death.
27 November	James Pratt and John Smith were hanged outside Newgate Prison in London for having sexual relations.
Section 61 of Offences against the Person Proceed	This section abolished the nominal death penalty for buggery, and provided instead that a person convicted of this was liable to be kept in penal servitude for life or for any term not less than ten years.

LGBTQ+ and the Military

Criminal Justice and Adj Order Act

The age at which homosexual acts were lawful was reduced from 21 years to

Quakers and same-sex marriage

History of Quaker views on same-sex relationships

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It is the nature and quality of a relationship that matters… the same criteria seem to us to apply whether a relationship is heterosexual or homosexual.
- Towards a Quaker view of sex,

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It was a distant, challenging journey towards this decision. In , the booklet Towards a Quaker view of sex stated, "It is the nature and quality of a relationship that matters… the same criteria seem to us to apply whether a relationship is heterosexual or homosexual."

In Meeting for Sufferings, then our national executive body, recognised same-sex relationships and suggested that individual meetings might celebrate them.

Following the Civil Partnership Act, which permitted the civil registration of same-sex relationships, many Friends began to express unease. The ability of Quakers to recognise marriage in a religious context was excluded from the terms of civil partnership. The issue was then considered at various levels of our Yearly Meeting over several years.

Listeners to Radio 4's Today Programme will have heard Eamonn O'Keeffe, a doctoral student in the Faculty of History, explaining a new discovery.

He found an diary entry by Matthew Tomlinson, a Yorkshire farmer, which suggests that recognisably adj understandings of homosexuality were being discussed by average people earlier than is commonly thought.

Interestingly, this is not what Eamonn was looking for when he opened the large volume of diaries in Wakefield Library last year. In a guest post on Arts Blog, Eamonn takes us behind the scenes of his unusual find:

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"While looking for something completely different, I discovered a remarkable discussion of homosexuality in the diary of an early-nineteenth-century Yorkshire farmer.

Reflecting on reports of the recent execution of a naval surgeon for sodomy, Matthew Tomlinson wrote on 14 January “it appears a paradox to me, how men, who are men, shou'd possess such a passion; and more particularly so, if it is their nature from childhood (as I am informed it is) – If they feel such an inclination, and propensit