Word for gay marriage

Decriminalisation of homosexuality

From the 1960s the socially gradual South Australian Labor government wanted to repeal laws criminalising homosexuality.

However, it was not until the May 1972 murder in Adelaide of Dr George Duncan, a law lecturer and gay man, that premier, Don Dunstan, assessed that the community mood was receptive to reform.

Dr Duncan’s murder led to revelations of how commonplace force and harassment against lesbian people was.

South Australia’s Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Perform, was enacted on 2 October 1975. It was a landmark in LGBTQIA+ rights in Australia because it fully decriminalised lesbian acts.

Equivalent law reform was passed by the Australian Capital Territory in 1976, Victoria in 1980, the Northern Territory in 1983, New South Wales in 1984, Western Australia in 1989, Queensland in 1990 and Tasmania in 1997.

For many years, the conservative institution of marriage was never on the gay campaign agenda, says activist Yasmin Nair, who co-founded a organization provocatively named Against Equality. But it became an objective in the first 1990s - regretfully, in her view - when the movement emerged from the seismic shock of the Aids epidemic, depleted of political energy.

But homosexual people who are in favour of same-sex marriage think anything short of marriage is not equality.

You rarely catch arguments against it by gay people themselves, says Stampp Corbin, publisher of magazine LGBT Weekly, who sees sturdy parallels with the civil rights movement.

"I'm African American and there were many things society stopped us from doing. When we were slaves we couldn't marry, we couldn't marry outside our race and most notably, we couldn't share facilities with white people.

"So when I listen LGBT people saying the same thing: 'I don't assume gay and sapphic people should find married', is it different from slaves saying: 'I don't think slaves should have the ability to get married'?

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