Sodomy and Me; A Tale of Activism
By: Sarah J. Baker
Tags: Equality, LGBT Rights, Society, Memoir, History

It’s 1997. I’m 28 years old and living in the beautiful island state of Tasmania, the last bastion of Australian anti-gay sentimentality and dubbed by international media as “Bigots Island” due to some of the harshest anti-homosexual laws in the world.

In those days I was a Mormon, a seriously square peg trying to fit into an even more serious round hole. An emerging feminist, I’d been struggling with the faith I was raised in since my early teens and now, as a young woman, a wife, and a young mother, it was becoming ever more apparent that the religious community I existed in was not a place for individual expression, much less freedom of thought, and certainly not an ideal place for anyone who wasn’t white, straight, and male.

It was at a church function that I was approached by a woman asking that I sign a petition. Being the social activist type I was happy to meet another politically engaged Mormon so I sat down to listen to her. But as she passionately revealed the reason for her angst I, in turn, became passionately agast. Unbeknownst to me this quaint little island community I called home had managed to retain a certain law that was suddenly being challenged, and by some foreigners too if you please! How dare!

In 1997 the United Nations Human Rights Committee was putting pressure on Tasmania to repeal its archaic sodomy laws. The law, inherited from Britain after colonisation in 1788, criminalised anal intercourse whether consensual or not. This law had stood unchallenged until the 1970s when the first gay rights organisation ‘Campaign Against Moral Persecution’ (CAMP) was founded and a shift in Australian attitudes towards homosexuality began.

South Australia had led the charge in 1975 when distinctions were made between sodomy during rape and sodomy between two consenting adults; providing, of course, it was entered into behind closed doors. Other states soon followed and by 1990 the whole country had abolished a morally biased religious law in favour of a more secular and liberal view; all states, that is, except Tasmania.

By keeping sodomy firmly entrenched in the criminal code, Tasmania had hoped to keep its pristine shores free of an unwanted homosexual contingency. Perhaps they could all just head north to a more liberal society, was the thinking of many Taswegians. Melbourne and Sydney — Australia’s own Sodom and Gomorrah — would be a much more appropriate gathering place, and surely criminalising anal sex would achieve this aim. After all, an appreciation for all things anal is what defines a homosexual, is it not?

As my fellow Mormon clutched her pearls I found myself wondering, does the proliferation of homosexuality really come down to just one word? And what about gay women, how is their sexuality viewed legally? Little did I know that as I pondered this question a young Tasmanian, Hannah Gadsby, was rotting “quietly in self-hatred” and, despite today being the darling of comedy, still struggles with the low self-esteem fostered during that period of intense hate in our state's history.

So what is sodomy?

Depending on whether you speak the Queen’s English or the President’s you may have a different view of sodomy. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is, to put it bluntly, anal sex. However, according to the dictionary favoured by our American friends (Merriam-Webster) it also includes, to put it bluntly, oral sex. If we were to search even farther afield the broader definition goes so far as to include masturbation, which would put possibly 80% of the human population at serious risk of incarceration, sexually segregated incarceration at that — a rather ironic thought. As such sodomy laws were used to criminalize love between two people of the same sex regardless of gender.

The research told a different story

In 2011 Joshua Rosenberg, Professor of Global and Human Health at George Mason University, conducted the largest ever study into the sexual behaviour of the gay and bisexual male community. “Of all sexual behaviours that men reported occurring during their last sexual event, those involving the anus were the least common,” Rosenberger said. “There is certainly a misguided belief that ‘gay sex equals anal sex,’ which is simply untrue much of the time.” The study, which was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, revealed that 75% of the 25,000 homosexual men participating in the research stated that oral sex was their preferred style of sexual intimacy.

And what about straight men? If porn hub is anything to go by, a lot of straight men are sodomites, and no more or less than gay men considering half of them admit to it and the other half aspire to it. The only thing stopping them it seems is finding a willing female partner.

However, I didn’t need research to tell me what I already knew, though it sounds cliché; love is love. As for promiscuity (another archaic concept); that wanton act of having sex just for the simple joy of it. Who was I to question other humans for doing something I rather enjoyed myself?

As I sat there listening to the outrage of a woman — who really felt that homosexuality was not only a crime that God should judge but one that she and my entire religious community needed to ensure they could continue to judge (and punish) too— a different jury had come in for me and it was clear that I needed to speak up about this; in my church community, in my local community, and in my home where I was just starting to raise a socially aware and ethical child.