How Hong Kong passed homosexuality law, decriminalising same-sex acts, in 1991

“The Legislative Council yesterday passed legislation decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting men aged 21 and above in private, ending an 11-year debate,” ran the opening lines of a story in the South China Morning Post on July 11, 1991.

A review of the law had been prompted by a comment made in 1980 by then governor Murray MacLehose, who said he favoured a change in the laws on homosexuality. In July of that year a Law Reform Committee group was set up to consider the decriminalisation of gay sex. In a report published on June 8, 1983, it recommended that consenting adults, male or female, should be allowed to carry on with their sex lives in private.

The document included a comparative law review of similar populations with majority Chinese communities and found that “the prohibition of homosexuality in law only came about in British colonies with the onset of the Victorian era, and [...] the only Chinese societies left with anti-homosexual laws are Singapore and Malaysia, due to their history as British colonies.”

“The subcommittee’s reasoning”, the Post reported on June 8, 1983, “notes that homo­sexuality can only be deemed to be abnormal in that a minority of the population express it. But other minority conditions such as athletic or academic brilliance are not similarly discriminated against.”

The law reform, which the Post charac­ter­ised as a political “hot potato”, started and stalled in the years that followed. Gay groups eventually took matters into their own hands in 1988, when they launched a letter-writing campaign to press for decrimi­nalisation of gay sex. “The group said problems faced by homosexuals ranged from blackmail to police harassment in private places,” the Post reported on August 29 of that year.

It was July 1990 by the time the Legislative Council voted 31 to 13 in favour of decriminalisation.

Same-sex marriage is still not recognised in Hong Kong.