When Homosexuality Was a Crime

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.We travel back to Chile in 2006 where more than 600,000 schoolchildren are marching through the streets to protest about their schools. The nationwide demonstrations will become ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.Our guest Sugandhi Jayaraman, lecturer in air transport management at the University of Westminster, discusses the changes in airports over time. We hear about the Irish priest w ...  Show more

It's a credit to the resilience of the gay community that when society tried to outlaw and silence them, they just created a language of their own to keep conversation (and gossip) alive. 

The language, polari, was born out of prejudice, and while it's now class ...

In the early 1990s, when homosexuality was still a criminal offense in India, a group of gay men and lesbian women set up the Counsel Club in the city of Kolkata. It was one of the first queer support groups in India. Their first meetings took place in secret at the home of one o ...  Show more

The 1980s have a lot to answer for - spandex, for one.

It also saw the first new anti-gay law in Britain for over a century.

Against the backdrop of the HIV epidemic, and increasing homophobia across the media and politics, the law Section 28 was passed in ...

Music for sex, dancing, and watching the straight world go by… The explosion of Disco provides an extraordinary window into the tumultuous world of the 1970s, with its themes of sex, drugs, race and sexuality. By the start of the 1970s, America was a nation of dystopian gloom. ...  Show more