British Colonial Anti-Gay Laws: Buggery Act to Section 377

British colonial anti-gay laws are the criminal statutes Britain carried into its empire, above all the Buggery Act 1533 and the "unnatural offences" clause drafted for India in 1860, Section 377. They made consensual same-sex acts felonies in dozens of colonies, and many of those provisions survive today.

This guide follows the laws from a Tudor statute through the Indian Penal Code and the codes of Africa and the Caribbean, then charts the modern repeals and the places where the old laws still stand.

What Are British Colonial Anti-Gay Laws?

British colonial anti-gay laws are the criminal provisions that British rule carried around the world, usually under older words rather than any modern term. The central ones are the offence of "buggery", the Indian Penal Code's "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" in Section 377, and the later "gross indecency" laws. Together they made consensual sex between men a crime across much of the empire.

They arrived by three main routes. Some territories received English law directly when Britain settled or annexed them. Others copied the Indian Penal Code, drafted in the 1830s and enacted in 1860, whose Section 377 became the model across South and Southeast Asia. A third group used codes built on the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899, drafted for Australia but exported to parts of Africa and the Pacific.

The laws were never one single statute, and they did not all punish the same acts. Some named only anal intercourse. Some added "gross indecency" between men. A few were later widened to mention women. What they shared was a colonial origin and a long afterlife, often in countries that kept, copied or stiffened the provisions after independence.

The Buggery Act 1533

The Buggery Act 1533 is usually described as England's first civil law against sodomy. Its full title was "An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie" (25 Hen. 8 c. 6), passed in the reign of Henry VIII. Before it, such cases sat with the church courts. The statute moved the offence into the royal courts and made buggery with mankind or beast a felony punishable by death.

The Act's timing mattered. It arrived during Henry VIII's break with Rome, when Parliament was transferring church powers to the Crown. Making the offence a secular felony was part of that shift in jurisdiction.

The statute did not stay settled. It was repealed, restored, repealed again and re-enacted within three decades, then survived in substance for centuries. An Irish statute of 1634 established the same offence in Ireland.

From the Buggery Act to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861

In 1828 Parliament consolidated the English offences and kept the death penalty. The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 then replaced execution with imprisonment. Section 61 of that Act punished "the abominable crime of buggery" with penal servitude for life or for any term not less than ten years.

Before that change, the law killed. James Pratt, aged 30, and John Smith, aged 40, were convicted in 1835 and hanged outside Newgate Prison on 27 November 1835, the last men executed for sodomy in England. A police magistrate, Hensleigh Wedgwood, wrote to the Home Office that year asking for the sentences to be commuted. The request failed.

In 1885 Parliament added the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Its Section 11 created the offence of "gross indecency" between men, in public or private, with up to two years' imprisonment. That clause, not the older buggery law, was used against Oscar Wilde in 1895 and Alan Turing in 1952. The Turing case is covered in Why Was Alan Turing Prosecuted for Homosexuality?, and the longer English chronology appears in When Did Homosexuality Become Illegal? A Legal History.

Section 377: Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code

Section 377 was written for India. The Indian Law Commission, led by Thomas Babington Macaulay, produced a draft penal code in 1837, and the finished Indian Penal Code was enacted on 6 October 1860. Section 377 said: "Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal" could be imprisoned for life, or for up to ten years, and fined.

The section never used the word "homosexual", and it did not name gay people. It criminalised a category of acts, and it gave courts no definition of "against the order of nature", so interpretation varied from case to case. In practice it was used mainly against sex between men.

Macaulay's code was meant to be uniform written law for a vast territory, replacing the patchwork of received English law and local practice. The International Commission of Jurists describes Section 377 as modelled on the Buggery Act. The Indian Penal Code then became a template, and colonial officials carried its chapters, including Section 377, into other colonies.

How One Clause Travelled the Empire

From India, the clause travelled. A 2021 BBC survey of Asia listed Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Sri Lanka among the places where Section 377 or a close relative survived into the twenty-first century.

Pakistan and Bangladesh kept Section 377 almost verbatim from the Indian Penal Code they inherited at partition. Myanmar's Penal Code carried the same clause. Malaysia's Penal Code criminalises carnal intercourse against the order of nature in sections 377A and 377B. Sri Lanka took a slightly different path: its 1883 Penal Code used sections 365 and 365A for "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" and "gross indecency".

Singapore kept Section 377A, which criminalised gross indecency between men, until Parliament repealed it in November 2022. The repeal took effect on 3 January 2023. Singapore was a rare case of legislative repeal in Asia, where most change has come through the courts, as it did in India.

The Other Colonial Models: Africa and the Caribbean

Not every colony used Section 377. In West Africa, the Caribbean and parts of East Africa, other English models did the work.

In the Gold Coast, the Criminal Ordinance of 1892 made "unnatural carnal knowledge" an offence. That clause survives in Ghana as section 104 of the Criminal Offences Act 1960. In Nigeria, the colonial government consolidated a Criminal Code in 1916, drawing on the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899, and criminalised unnatural offences in section 214. Kenya's Penal Code of 1930 carried "unnatural offences" in section 162 and "indecent practices between males" in section 165. Uganda's Penal Code Act of 1950 did the same in sections 145 and 148.

Queensland's 1899 code deserves a mention of its own. Drafted for an Australian colony, it criminalised carnal knowledge against the order of nature and became a second imperial model, exported to Papua New Guinea and influencing codes in Africa. The empire did not export one clause; it exported a habit of legislating the same acts.

In the Caribbean, the route was often direct reception of English law. Jamaica's Offences Against the Person Act of 1864 kept "the abominable crime of buggery" in section 76, punishable with up to ten years' hard labour. Sierra Leone still applies section 61 of the English Offences Against the Person Act 1861 through its Courts Act 1965. The Gambia's Criminal Code of 1934 carried an "unnatural offences" section, section 144.

Some states later widened the old laws. The Gambia amended its code in 2005 to extend provisions to women, and several Caribbean legislatures raised penalties during the twentieth century.

Colonialism and Homosexuality: What the Evidence Shows

The evidence supports a direct connection between British colonialism and the criminalisation of homosexuality, and a partial one. British rule did not introduce every moral objection to same-sex acts, but it did introduce and standardise a specific set of criminal laws in places where they had often not existed in that form. For the different ways earlier societies treated same-sex relations, see Homosexuality in Ancient Times: Did LGBTQ+ People Exist?.

Human Rights Watch's 2008 report "This Alien Legacy" traced the origins of sodomy laws in British colonialism. Enze Han and Joseph O'Mahoney's 2018 book found that the empire spread criminalisation through several routes and that the legacy varied by region. Douglas Sanders, writing in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law, called Section 377 the iconic example, a rewriting of the old buggery law whose language travelled around the British colonial world.

In the Gold Coast, researchers note that pre-colonial societies did not carry the same criminal sanction that the 1892 ordinance introduced. In India, the colonial code displaced a much more varied legal and social landscape. None of this means every pre-colonial society was permissive. It means the uniform criminal prohibition is largely a colonial artefact.

The other side is equally documented. After independence, many states kept the laws, and several strengthened them. Britain exported the framework; independent governments then chose to retain or extend it.

Britain's own position shifted late. In 1967 England and Wales decriminalised private acts between men over 21, well after the older and harsher law had been installed across the empire. In April 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May told Commonwealth leaders she regretted Britain's role in introducing the laws and their legacy of discrimination, violence and death, and urged remaining states to decriminalise. The International Commission of Jurists reported in 2023 that more than 30 states criminalise same-sex conduct through laws with British colonial roots.

The Human Cost of the Laws

The laws look abstract in a statute book. They were not abstract to the people charged under them.

In Botswana, Letsweletse Motshidiemang challenged the Penal Code's sodomy provisions. The High Court in Gaborone ruled on 11 June 2019 that sections 164 and 167 were unconstitutional, and the Court of Appeal affirmed the decision on 29 November 2021. In Belize, Caleb Orozco spent years challenging section 53 of the Criminal Code; the Supreme Court struck it down in 2016 and the Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in 2019.

In Namibia, Friedel Dausab challenged the common-law crimes of sodomy and unnatural sexual offences, and on 21 June 2024 a three-judge High Court held them unconstitutional. In India, Navtej Singh Johar and other petitioners convinced the Supreme Court on 6 September 2018 to read down Section 377 so it no longer reached consenting adult conduct.

The Wolfenden Committee had warned in 1957 that laws against private homosexual conduct invited blackmail. The International Commission of Jurists has made the same point about Sri Lanka, where the colonial-era provisions are used to arrest, harass and extort money from people, often without charges. Criminal provisions also complicate HIV prevention, because people who fear prosecution avoid testing and treatment.

Modern Repeals: When Former Colonies Decriminalised

Decriminalisation has come in waves. Britain moved first in 1967, settler colonies followed between the 1960s and 1990s, and a later wave of court rulings ran through Asia, Africa and the Caribbean from 2010 onward.

The pattern is uneven. Some changes were legislative, as in Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Hong Kong, Fiji, Lesotho, the Seychelles and Singapore. Others came from courts, as in South Africa, Belize, India, Botswana and the Eastern Caribbean. A court win is not always the end of the matter: Trinidad and Tobago's 2018 High Court ruling was overturned on appeal in March 2025, leaving sections 13 and 16 of the Sexual Offences Act in force.

Where Colonial-Era Laws Stand Today

The table below is a snapshot, not a complete census. It covers former British territories and shows whether the colonial-era provisions still stand. Statuses are as of early 2023 except where later rulings are shown. Several 2024 and 2025 decisions are still working through appeals, so the map keeps shifting.

Most of the original statutes named acts between men. Some later amendments named women, and a few jurisdictions criminalised both sexes from the start.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Buggery Act 1533?

It was an Act of the Parliament of England, 25 Henry VIII c. 6, that made buggery with mankind or beast a secular felony punishable by death. Before 1533 such cases sat with the church courts. The statute was repealed and restored several times, re-enacted in 1563, and later replaced in 1828 and 1861.

How did British colonial anti-gay laws spread?

Britain spread them through three main channels: received English statutes and common law, the Indian Penal Code of 1860 with Section 377, and codes modelled on the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899. Colonial administrators copied the clauses into local penal codes across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, where many remain.

Did colonialism create the criminalisation of homosexuality?

British rule did not invent every disapproval of same-sex acts, but it standardised and exported a specific criminal framework that many pre-colonial legal systems did not have in the same form. Scholars such as Enze Han and Joseph O'Mahoney show the spread was real and uneven, and that independent states then chose to keep or extend the laws.

Which former British colonies still criminalise same-sex relations?

Provisions survive in many countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica and Guyana. The International Commission of Jurists reported in 2023 that more than 30 states criminalise same-sex conduct through laws with British colonial roots.

Sources and further reading

1. BBC News: 377: The British colonial law that left an anti-LGBTQ legacy in Asia
2. International Commission of Jurists: Decolonising the law: Repeal antiquated morality laws
3. Douglas E. Sanders, 377 and the Unnatural Afterlife of British Colonialism in Asia (Asian Journal of Comparative Law)
4. Offences Against the Person Act 1861, section 61 (legislation.gov.uk)
5. The National Archives: LGBTQ+ Rights in Britain, Source 2 (Pratt and Smith, 1835)
6. Human Dignity Trust: Motshidiemang v. Attorney General Botswana (2019)
7. Singapore Statutes Online: Penal Code (Amendment) Act 2022
8. Human Dignity Trust: Criminalisation of LGBT People in Kenya