In this blog, Contributing Editor Michael Stockwell explores how the criminalisation of homosexuality can alter gay men’s relationship with the state, complicate their status as victims of crime and remind us that the progress of gay rights is neither linear nor guaranteed.
The police took the position that they were more interested in prosecuting the more serious crime, and the more serious crime during the Bjelke-Petersen era was homosexuality, not those who assaulted and blackmailed homosexual men.
This was how the participants in my doctoral research remembered navigating the legal environment as homosexual men living in Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen era. In their recollection, a gay man could be the victim of violence and yet find himself occupying an uncomfortable position before the law due to the now repealed criminalisation of homosexual related acts under ss208-211 of the Criminal Code 1899 (Qld). Their reality was that crimes committed against them could become secondary to the perceived criminality of their sexuality.
It sounds like another world, and perhaps that is precisely why we should be concerned by it.
For much of the Western world, the last half-century has encouraged an assumption that the history of gay rights has followed an upwards trajectory.
Homosexuality is decriminalised → Discrimination protections follow → Relationships receive legal recognition →Marriage equality arrives. With each achievement, the preceding condition begins to appear both historical and outdated, and almost unimaginable.
However, history gives us considerably less reason for confidence.
In June 2026, ILGA World reported that 65 United Nations member states continued to criminalise consensual same-sex sexual acts. More troublingly, during 2025 that number increased for the first time in almost a decade. In seven UN member states, death penalty remains a legally prescribed penalty for consensual same-sex sexual activity. Thus, as we stand at this point in history, the global trajectory towards LGBTQIA+ decriminalisation, is moving backwards.
And what is even more disturbing, is the nefarious implications that extend far beyond the legality of LGBTQIA+ physical intimacy.
IDEAL to LESS-THAN-IDEAL-VICTIMS
Criminologist Nils Christie developed the concept of the ‘ideal victim’ to describe those people who, when harmed by another, are most readily granted legitimate victim status. The ideal victim is innocent, respectable and perceived as having done little to contribute to their own victimisation. My research suggests that homosexual men living under Queensland’s former criminal laws could occupy a considerably more precarious position. They could become what Joseph Patrick McAulay describes as ‘less than ideal victims’ – a sub-genre of citizens legally entitled to legal protection when they become victims of crime, but practically less able to claim an uncomplicated position of victimhood afforded to their heteronormative counterparts.
Criminalisation of homosexuality therefore does something more profound than legally prohibit homosexual sexual activity. It changes where homosexual men sit within society’s moral and criminal order.
The men I interviewed repeatedly described what amounted to an unofficial ‘hierarchy of criminality’. Within their understanding of Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, homosexuality sat close to its top. A man might have been assaulted, robbed or bashed, yet revealing the circumstances of that crime could expose his own sexuality to police inquiry. The victim could consequently become the main suspect of police scrutiny, while the person who harmed him would likely be deemed of comparatively less importance.
Hence the disturbing reality for gay men living under these conditions was that to executive authorities, the more serious crime was homosexuality, not being a ‘gay-basher.’
QUEENSLAND’S PAST – A WARNING FOR THE PRESENT
If 65 United Nations member states continue to criminalise consensual same-sex sexual activity, then millions of gay men continue to live under legal conditions capable of producing some variation of this Hierarchy of Criminality. They can be victims of assault, theft, blackmail, domestic violence or other crimes while simultaneously belonging to a population whose intimate lives are regarded by the state as potential more ‘criminal’ than the crimes committed against them. Where the penalty for homosexual conduct can extend to lengthy imprisonment, or even death, approaching the authorities after becoming a victim carries implications almost unimaginable to Australians who have grown accustomed to legal equality.
More concerning still, is the direction of travel outside within some United Nations member states. In 2025, Burkina Faso criminalised consensual same-sex sexual acts for the first time in its history, while Trinidad and Tobago reversed a recent decriminalisation ruling. Furthermore in march 2026 Senegal strengthened its criminalising provisions, followed by what ILGA World describes as a wave of arrests and violence. These are not remnants of an historical process gradually disappearing from the world. They are contemporary developments.
They also raise an uncomfortable question. If a state can move homosexual people from legality back into criminality, can it simultaneously move them from ‘ideal’ towards ‘less than ideal’ victims?
Queensland’s history suggests that it can.
Once homosexual conduct becomes criminal, the relationship between victim and state fundamentally changes. A gay man reporting violence may no longer approach the police merely as a citizen seeking protection. He may also be approaching an institution possessing the power to investigate him. The greater the legal or moral seriousness attached to homosexuality, the greater the possibility that the crime committed against the homosexual person becomes overshadowed by the perceived criminality of the homosexual person.
This is what is meant by an unofficial hierarchy of criminality. Not being enshrined in Legislation does not diminish their potency, rather it increases it. No parliament needs to enact a law declaring that assaulting a gay man is less serious than assaulting somebody else. It emerges when the criminal or moral status attached to the victim becomes sufficiently powerful that it competes with the wrongdoing committed against them.
At its most extreme, the hierarchy becomes progressively perverse. Where consensual homosexual activity is punishable by years of imprisonment or death, while lesser penalties attach to some offences committed against homosexual people, the victim has more to fear from revealing himself than the person who victimised him.
This is why the increase recorded by ILGA World in 2025 reflects the frightening broader theme raised in this series. It challenges the comfortable assumption that decriminalisation, once achieved, belongs permanently to history. It demonstrates that states can travel in both directions, and with frightening speed.
LGBTQIA+ rights therefore exist far beyond the confines of legislation. Their true measure is not merely whether homosexual conduct remains legal, but whether gay people can become victims of crime and expect the same protection, credibility and treatment afforded to everyone else.