Gay history and gay legal history are two intricately intertwined strands of gay culture. Gay legal history is a story of large-scale persecution and discrimination, and so it follows that gay legal history has had a profound effect on the broader development of gay culture. What's more, gay culture is everybody's culture.

It’s incredible to think that LGBT activism is so recent, and that legal provision against discrimination is generally even younger, and still non-existent in many areas, And this when LGBT people have been propping up world culture from Plato, through Leonardo da Vinci to Oscar Wilde.

Although same-sex relationships were common in ancient Greece, Rome and pagan Celtic societies, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, severe laws against homosexual behaviour appeared. An edict by the Emperor Theodosius I in 390 condemned all "passive" homosexual men to death by public burning. This was followed by the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian I in 529, which prescribed public castration and execution for all who committed homosexual acts, both active and passive partners alike.