Throughout the centuries there were sporadic efforts to eliminate Homosexuality and Gays themselves from various cultures. Since we use English Law as our basis as opposed to Napoleonic Code I will describe the sequence of events that led to our being a criminal class for just existing using English efforts. (Please let me know in the comments if there is another cultural/ethnic milieu you would like me to cover regarding criminalizing LGBT.)
The first instance of attempting to criminalize LGBT came about as xenophobia and anti semitism. The merchants from a then economically strong Italy (Lombardy) were scapegoated as usurers and there was an effort to reduce their power over the wealth poor British.
The first significant reference to civil laws against homosexuality in England occurred in 1376, when the God Parliament unsuccessfully petitioned King Edward III to banish all "Lombard brokers" because they were usurers, and other foreign artisans and traders, particularly "Jews and Saracens," who were accused to having introduced "the too horrible vice which is not to be named" which they thought would destroy the realm.
You read that correctly, at one time we and what we do was considered to be just as horrific as
Lord Voldemort.
It was the Protestant Reformation and a scheming Henry VIII that brought about the permanent codification of our existence as a felony. In order to have an easily tried felony to charge the Catholic leadership living in the British Isles at the time that deems not only the death penalty but all possessions of those judged guilty would become the property of the crown. Thus the property held by the Vatican in England was easily swooped up in the difficult to deny crime of Buggery.
But it was not until 1533 that a statute was actually enacted against homosexuals. The Act (25 Henry 8, chapter 6) adjudges buggery a felony punishable by hanging until dead. The Buggery Act was piloted through Parliament by Thomas Cromwell in an effort to support Henry VIII's plan for reducing the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, as the first step towards depriving them of the right to try certain offences, which supported his policy of seizing Church property. Thus it was defined as a felony without benefit of clergy, which denied homosexuals in holy orders the right to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts, with the result that a conviction entailed loss of property to the Crown.
This remained a capital crime in
England until 1828
As noted previously our legal system has English roots and as each colony became more organized sodomy laws were adopted. Usually with the death penalty.
Virginia had the first written prohibition against sodomy, enacted in 1610. It is of note that this was repealed after only eight years and no other colony had a written law against sodomy until Plymouth adopted one in 1636. (Maryland, founded between those dates, adopted all English laws, including the sodomy law, by consensus, even though none appeared in any written code).
Plymouth Colony had been founded by Puritans who left England because of persecution due to their fundamentalist beliefs. These same Puritans put their beliefs into secular law, showing the same intolerance to other views that theirs had faced in England. Plymouth’s statute outlawed sodomy based on the Biblical proscription in the Book of Leviticus.34 Nearly identical laws were adopted by Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. This made sodomy a capital offense, just as if the colonies had followed the English statute.
New Hampshire was part of Massachusetts for more than fifty years and, upon separation, enacted a Biblical law very similar to that of its parent colony.
Connecticut, several years after founding, adopted the laws of England formally, then moved to a Biblical statute three years later.
Rhode Island, founded as a religious haven by dissenter Roger Williams, showed no more tolerance than other colonies. Its capital sodomy law also quoted Leviticus.
New York and New Jersey originally were Dutch colonies that were taken over by the English. Dutch criminal law had not been carried to the New World, but there are three known prosecutions for sodomy in what now is New York, leading to at least two death sentences. Authority for the prosecutions apparently rested on "natural law," a religiously oriented belief that there is a higher, immutable law that always overrides the enactments of humans. Once the colonies became English, a sodomy law similar to that of England became fact in each.
Pennsylvania’s Quaker influence is shown by the fact that it generally rejected harsh or sanguinary penalties for crime. Sodomy, a capital offense elsewhere, was considered deserving of no more than six months in jail. However, as Quaker influence waned and Pennsylvania grew more populous and heterogenous, harsh laws based on those of England came to fore there as well.
Delaware originally was settled by Swedes and it had a chaotic legal system for a number of years. There is no evidence that sodomy was illegal during this time. It became an English colony as part of Pennsylvania and, when that Quaker colony adopted a surprisingly lenient sodomy law, it was in force in the Pennsylvania counties now constituting Delaware. After it broke away in a dispute, Delaware rejected Pennsylvania laws for its own, and went some 15 years before outlawing sodomy.
Maryland, upon founding, was given a charter obliquely referring to English laws. Although the charter did not make specific reference to adoption of English laws, Maryland was the one colony that, without question, considered all English laws to be local. There were three sodomy prosecutions from the founding of Maryland until a sodomy law was enacted 161 years later.
Virginia, in 1607 the first of the colonies to be founded, existed for three years without a sodomy law. The first settlers in Jamestown all were male and there is evidence of sexual relations in the colony from its beginning. Three years later, while under martial law, a military regulation was adopted making sodomy a capital offense. After eight years, when the colony had stabilized, the regulation was repealed. The laws of England may have been considered in force by common consent, as Thomas Jefferson mused, because a man was hanged for sodomy in 1625 when there was no statute on the subject. Formal adoption of English law would not occur until 1661.
Illinois was the first state to invalidate their anti sodomy law in 1961
The Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 decriminalized civilian sexual activity.
Don't Ask Don't Tell for those in the military, prohibiting same sex activity on and off military installations, was not repealed until 2010. Although egregious, DADT was seen as an advancement over previous military law. When DADT was enacted in 1993 it was seen as lenient and comparatively it was, at that time there were still soldiers from WWI imprisoned for consensual sex under the previous law.