One of the main characters, in the Gothic Novel I’m writing, is a shapeshifter who’s unapologetically pansexual and occasionally gender-fluid, so this was a question I was bound to ask myself.
1701: could you be killed for being gay?
Specifically, we assume the character left England in the wake of the 1542 “Witchcraft Act”, being born as the familiar of a witch, but the 1533 Parliament Act #25 was bound to be equally troubling.
There are a lot of interesting parallels that can be drawn between the anti-sorcery movements, which are mostly constituted by persecutory acts against women, and hate crimes committed in the same society against LGBT+ people. It’s a concept it would really be great for certain people to understand: oppression against women and oppression against gay and trans people, for instance, are only different manifestations of the same phenomenon.
But was it the same in all countries, or were there places we could have looked at as safe-havens?
We try to figure it out today in the free article on my Patreon.
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