The legal system subjects lesbians and gay men to separate and unequal treatment.
Over the last quarter of a century, there has been a dramatic improvement in the lives of lesbians and gay men. However, this is largely due to the self-help efforts of the homosexual community. There’s been no significant gay law reform since the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1967. Minor changes, like the lowering of the age of consent to 18 in 1994, have often perpetuated discrimination.
The legal system is, effectively, a system of ‘sexual apartheid’. It subjects lesbians and gays to separate and unequal treatment in terms of the laws governing sexual behaviour, marriage, employment, child adoption, membership of the armed forces and so on.
This institutional discrimination is premised on the doctrine of straight supremacism: the idea that heterosexuals are superior to homosexuals. Reflecting this belief, the law denies gay people many of the basic human rights that straights take for granted. This entrenched denial of legal rights to queers is in some ways analogous to the race discrimination which was practised by the apartheid regime in South Africa. Obviously, it is not based on the extreme economic deprivation and police state brutality that characterised the South African system. At the level of supremacist ideology and legal discrimination, however, there is a shocking degree of similarity (but no comparable public outcry).
Lesbians and gay men in Britain have never, of course, been banned from living in particular neighbourhoods, as were black people under apartheid. Yet we can be refused housing by a landlord who is prejudiced against our homosexuality, and we have no form of legal redress.
Nor are queers officially forbidden to use ‘hetero only’ bars or restaurants. But we can be lawfully refused service by any leisure venue or retail outlet which objects to ‘poofs’ and ‘dykes’, and in law there is nothing we can do about it.
Although lesbians and gays are not excluded from the right to vote, which is what the apartheid regime did to black people, we might as well be. Queer votes count for little in electorates dominated by heterosexuals and in legislatures with a in-built straight majority which consistently refuses to uphold lesbian and gay human rights.
In some respects, the system of ‘sexual apartheid’ causes forms of suffering that even the South African regime never inflicted. Black people under apartheid were denied the right to inter-racial marriage and separated from their partners by the mining and domestic labour systems. However, they were never subject to a blanket ban on marriage and automatically refused inheritance rights on the death of their partner, as happens to lesbians and gay men.
Moreover, although black families in South Africa were often torn apart by the apartheid system, black children who lived with their parents could count on getting love, understanding and support – and a sense of self-respect and black pride. In contrast, gay kids grow up in the prison of a heterosexual home, with straight parents who often despise, mistreat and reject them. This leaves many of us suffering from a lack of identity and low self-esteem, which can later lead to severe depression and destructive behaviour patterns such as alcoholism and suicide.
Thankfully, we have recently witnessed the demise of race apartheid in South Africa and the adoption by the ANC government of a post-apartheid constitution which is the first constitution in the world to explicitly guarantee equal treatment to homosexual men and women. How much longer will lesbian and gay people in Britain have to wait for an end to the system of ‘sexual apartheid’ which treats us as second class citizens?
* Peter Tatchell’s new book, We Don’t Want To March Straight – Masculinity, Queers & The Military, is published by Cassell, £4.99.