The Buggery Act

Today, we’re tracing the history of Section 377, India’s anti-queer sex law...or how Ann Boleyn caused queer Indians to be prosecuted 🤔🤔🤔

It starts with King Henry VIII, who had beef with the Catholic Church. He was annoyed that the Church wouldn’t let him divorce his 3898th wife, so he came up with The Buggery Act as a way to wrest power away from the institution.

Here’s how: he wrote that the punishment for sodomy included loss of property and that it applied to every man **including clergymen.** He then wielded the law almost always against members of the Church. Thus, the anti-sodomy law was created in order to strip Catholic institutions of land, label members of the clergy as sodomites and felons, and ultimately undermine the credibility of the ⛪.

Tl;dr Henry was just power hungry. He didn’t actually care about prosecuting (and persecuting) any real gay men 👨‍❤️‍👨

After Henry died, the Buggery Act was enforced sporadically according to future rulers’ whimsy. But when it came time to draft India’s Penal Code in 1861, they put a guy in charge who was a major prude and homophobe. He used the Buggery Act as precedent, but wrote India’s statute to more fully encompass any and all queer sex.

England’s law penalized sex between two men or a man and a beast. British India’s new law criminalized *any* penetrative sex that was “against the order of nature,” meaning any type of sex deemed “abnormal” could be penalized.

After independence, this law became Section 377 of India’s constitution. When India made headlines for finally revoking Section 377 in 2018, many news articles reported that the law had been word-for-word ripped from England’s anti-sodomy law 🗞️📰🗞️

The truth is that the anti-queer law that India had been adhering to since independence was a replica of the colonial-era law...which was actually a manipulation of England’s law...that had been enacted so King Henry VIII could marry Anne Boleyn.

😆 But that’s a lot harder to fit into a headline 😆