Legal status of homosexuality

Most of the world’s countries have at some point prohibited homosexual acts among consenting adults in private. Where, when and how were homosexual relations decriminalized in the world since the Age of Enlightenment? Historical data on the legality of homosexual acts and on population numbers in 203 present-day countries allows us to compute the annual share of the world population who live in a country where homosexual acts are legal (vs. a criminal offence), since 1760. Although France became the first country to decriminalize homosexual acts (1791) and inspired the first wave of decriminalization in Western Europe, Latin America and the Ottoman Empire, in the 19th century fewer than 25% of humans lived in a country which did not criminalize homosexual relations. The second wave of decriminalization, which was based on increasingly liberal public opinions regarding acts among consenting adults, started in Western Europe and North America in the 1960s and then spread to Oceania, Eastern Europe and finally Asia. In 2020, more than 75% of humans live in a country which no longer criminalizes homosexual relations. Liberalization has been uneven, though: homosexual acts are still a crime for most of the inhabitants in Africa and in Muslim-majority countries, and they are especially harshly punished in a few Islamic law states and sub-state entities. As the countries which criminalize homosexual acts today will grow demographically relatively fast in the coming decades, the share of humans who are legally free to engage in homosexual acts will likely decrease, except if a sufficiently large number of sufficiently populated criminalizing countries decriminalize soon.