Did anybody else hear it?
We're celebrating, because in the 1970s, Labour made us legal.
Were I and somebody who posted a comment on this site the only two people who heard Joseph Muscat say, at his press conference last night,”niddekriminalizzaw l-omosesswalita”?
Before that comment came in, I thought that maybe I had imagined it or heard wrongly, because there was nothing in the newspapers. Or that maybe he obsessing once more about that other lie of Labour’s, that the Labour government ‘descriminalised homosexuality’ in the 1970s.
It didn’t. It decriminalised sodomy, which was made a criminal act in ‘the olden days’ to protect women from assaults by their husbands, who used it as a form of contraception, after Inquisitors and other persons of authority received repeated complaints from the women themselves.
Of course, buggery between men was frowned upon too, for different reasons, but that’s not really what the law was concerned with. In fact, even in England, for all the fuss made about the prosecution of Oscar Wilde after a complaint by his lover’s father, most people forget or never knew that Lord Byron is thought to have had to leave his country because his estranged wife had accused him of sodomising her repeatedly.
It’s a horrid subject to talk about, but it’s all very well for Labour to mislead the ignorant (and here I mean ‘ignorant of the facts’) by giving the impression that homosexuality was illegal when it couldn’t possibly have been, just as black eyes couldn’t be made illegal.
It was sodomy that was illegal, whatever the genders involved. Homosexual women do not get involved with this kind of thing, so using Labour’s line of thinking, what are we to conclude – that lesbians were always legal?
I’m running out of patience.
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I heard it too.
Ghalhekk Toni Abela qal lil Lou Bondi ‘isib Grieg’.
Xi hlew.
Yes, he said Labour decriminalised homosexuality.
I’ve just been catching up with last week’s loubondi – as background noise – and picked up Gavin Gulia describing someone as overstuffed.
Could he possibly be referring to his fellow guest on the show, GWU’s Tony Zarb, I thought – or perhaps to Inkontri’s Joe Grima?
Or, as a long shot, to the Christmas turkey? I checked. It appears that he was pointing out that there’s an excess of staff at Air Malta.
I then heard the prime minister talk about roasters.
Good Lord – not back to fowl are we? I checked. It seems he was referring to the rosters for the overstuffed Air Malta.
So I heard right! Unbelievable.
Now there’s a question Reno Bugeja should ask him tonight.
[Daphne – Today’s Tuesday. That makes it Lou Bondi. Reno’s on Saturday night, unless something has changed and I haven’t noticed yet.]
“Of course, buggery between men was frowned upon too, for different reasons, but that’s not really what the law was concerned with.”.
You’re wrong about this. In the UK, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised private sexual acts between men who were over 21 (lesbian acts had never been illegal). Before that, sexual relations between men of any age were the specific target of the law against homosexual relations, a wider concept than sodomy, since the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act extended the laws regarding homosexuality to include any kind of sexual activity between males.
I’m referring to UK law because of the fact that Malta adopted UK penal law. I have never seen the relevant provisions of our Criminal Code pre-1973.
[Daphne – If you have never seen them, how do you assert that I am wrong? The law against sodomy – not homosexuality, I stress – in Malta banned it regardless of gender. Though the motive may have been the same – that it is ‘unnatural’ – where women were concerned, the situation was in effect very different, because it constituted a real crime. Though the crime at law was sodomy, the real crime as we would recognise it and deal with it today was sexual assault and rape. Women at the time that law went on the books were their husband’s chattels and had to submit to everything. Until fairly recently (within my own memory), the law in Malta did not even recognise the possibility of rape in marriage because of this. This law, misguided though its actual motivation might have been, gave women some protection against at least one form of abuse – and the abuse was extremely common, because women were not recognised as sexual beings and so it was a matter of any port in a storm, so to speak, if you wanted to avoid pregnancy. Maybe it’s hard for gay men to understand that what they want and seek and love was actually a nightmare of assault hell for women for centuries.]
… I couldn’t listen to that lying twerp any more after Parliament – kif flahtu?
[Daphne – Simple. I was out until late, missed parliament and got home in time for his press conference. And when I commented about the Malta/EU flag and the absence of an arma tal-partit, which is very poor branding strategy, my husband said ‘Imnalla m’ghandux arma ghax kieku kont naqliblu mil-ewwel, u kulhadd li naf kien jaghmel l-istess.’ So maybe they’re onto something. But whatever it is, if they have to appear without the party name or emblem to get people to listen to them, they have a big problem which isn’t going to be hidden with, to quote them, a small solution.]
They are now rebranded as Il-Partit tal-Ghaqal. Which is very dangerous, because that can be spelt wrongly as Il-Partit tal-Ghalqa or Il-Partit tal-Laghqa.
He is a highflying economist through and through.
You cannot expect him to also be an expert on human sexuality, can you ?
I found it quite unusual that the Leader of the Opposition used the budget speech and the ensuing press conference to talk about homosexuality and the legalisation of sodomy.
In fact, he seemed to be using the speech to launch his electoral campaign, with most of his sentences beginning with “Gvern gdid immexxi minni…”
I agree that the MLP did nothing more than decriminalize sodomy, and that, at least on paper, the old sodomy laws did not discriminate between one sexual orientation and another.
How those old sodomy laws were applied, in Malta and elsewhere is another story altogether.
However, the point here is that the MLP did nothing to curb the marginalization of gays and lesbians, which continues to be more pronounced in the Mediterranean cultures than in others.
It is useless to argue that being gay has never, in and of itself, been illegal. Governments have an obligation to go one step further.
Sexual orientation and family status must be spelled out as prohibited grounds of discrimination, along with discrimination on the basis of age and gender.
The MLP failed to address this issue while in government. Hardly a track record for young Joey to crow about.
In fairness, the PN has fumbled this issue as well, as has Malta’s current president, who privileges one form of family unit over all others.
[Daphne – I agree with you. I would add that the MLP actually has a greater problem with gay men (lesbians just do not feature in this debate, precisely because the problem is to do with the nature of male relationships and perceived threats to male honour) than the Nationalist Party does, because the vast majority of Labour support comes from the social strata that have most difficulty with honour and maleness issues.]
I would love to agree with you on that final comment. But then I read this:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20111122/local/Eddie-Fenech-Adami-in-warning-over-gay-rights.395010
Good grief! Is it visitor’s day at Dino Park?
[Daphne – He’s no longer in the Nationalist Party, still less its leader, and his attitudes are typical of his generation, so they don’t surprise me at all. Or even annoy me. ]
Nice picture of the Tux Force you got there.
I really can’t understand how with all the problems that our country and the whole world are facing, we still have politicians who are wasting their time and our money talking about homosexuals.
This is a subject that should just be ignored and the less we talk about it, the better for everyone.
They now have their rights, and maybe rightly so, but it is now time to devout their time to more urgent problems, for after all, talk as much as we want on the subject, will surely not lower our electricity ,tariffs or solve other important issues.
This is probably your dumbest recurring argument.
[Daphne – I make very few dumb arguments, Zachary, so I am pleased for you that you found a dumbest one.]
Of course anti-sodomy laws were meant to target homosexual men.
[Daphne – ‘Of course’? Why ‘of course’? I would say that ‘of course’ the law was meant to be used against husbands who forced themselves on their wives in a situation where those wives were chattels. I’ve said this to somebody else on this thread, but clearly it bears repeating. What gay men think of as pleasure was, for women throughout the ages, assault and rape. Women do not do that for fun, Zachary, unless they are extremely unusual. In a situation where men wished to avoid pregnancy and women were not thought to have any sexual feelings, husbands would use the other port, simultaneously depriving their wives of any pleasure while causing them hellish pain and misery instead. And how do I know this? Papers have been written about the many women who filed complaints against their husband with the Inquisitor.
And I repeat that it was not homosexuality that was targeted, but anal sex. Society did not like anal sex, for whatever reason, and frowned upon it. Close -even amorous – friendships between people of the same sex were more well tolerated 200 years ago than they were 30 years ago. Men could share a bed then without raising eyebrows, could go for walks holding hands, could kiss each other without having to be Italian, and could write passionate letters to each other. It was all classed as friendship. Women were even freer to share their lives and their beds with other women and call them their companions, to kiss and cuddle and whisper to each other. Read collections of letters written from one friend to another of the same sex and to our contemporary ears they sound just like love letters.]
I’m sure you’ll say that there is no record of such laws being enforced against gay men, but honestly, can you find me any examples of such laws being enforced against heterosexual men engaging in heterosexual “sodomy” (besides the high-profile case of Lord Byron you site above…which was not even in Malta)?
[Daphne – The records of the Inquisition, Zachary, include many cases of women who had been sodomised by their husband and who had been so much driven to despair by it that they filed reports for prosecution. Of course, they might even have been reports motivated by vengeance and spite – it still happens today with domestic violence reports – but the records are there. Closer to our own time, and you’ll have to forgive me for the fact that I might know a little bit more about 20th-century Malta than an American does, just as you know more about your hometown than I do, homosexual men did what they pleased and the law didn’t care. The only thing that prevented escapes from the closet was fear of what the family would say, not fear of the police. Grand Harbour was thick with British and American sailors and the rent-boys who serviced them, Zachary. There were probably as many rent-boys at the time as there were whores, and that’s saying a great deal. Whoever told you that Malta was really conservative back then probably lived in Mellieha. ]
Lesbianism is ignored by such laws because the patriarchal assholes who wrote such laws didn’t believe that women have any sexual agency or desires anyway, so it didn’t need to be legislated against. If there’s not a man involved, it’s not really sex (at least according to them).
[Daphne – That’s not the reason. See above.]
Even if we are to believe your (dubious) telling of history, you have to concede that this was a stupid and ineffective law that was rarely enforced, so why keep it on the books?
[Daphne – Oh for heaven’s sake, Zachary. I know you live with a Maltese family of Labour supporters, but must you do that thing of conflating fact and opinion? No, I do not think it was a stupid and ineffective law. Where married women – togther with children, the lowest form of human life before 1995 – were concerned, it was a law that protected them against at least one form of rape and assault. Sodomy-related prosecutions were always – for obvious reasons – made after a complaint (including the Wilde case). One assumes that where the sex is consensual and for mutual entertainment, one party isn’t go to rush to the police to complain about it unless there is a vested interest or strange situation a la Julian Assange and that Swedish woman. So it stands to reason that the authorities received far fewer complaints by men against their male lovers than they did by women against their husbands. Now this is my own opinion (not to be confused with fact): it is really very tiring when gay men insist on painting themselves as the tragic heroes of any given situation. Get over it already. How would you have coped as a woman if you make this much fuss about being a gay man?]
Will the PN (the party of smart and modern government!) ever explain why it voted against this decriminalization? I’m sure it was to protect all the poor Maltese wives from anal rape, right? Spare me…
[Daphne – It was left on the statute books, Zachary, because it had long fallen into ‘dead letter’ status, meaning that it was never used and nobody would have considered using it. Removing it from the statute books was a typical Mintoffian gimmick to get up people’s noses for its own sake. I’l tell you something about liberal Mintoff that perhaps your new famly did not. You might not like it, because it’s about gross injustice to women, not gay men. When Mintoff parcelled out plots of land to engaged couples who then built their homes on them, the procedure was that the land would be registered in the man’s name. The net result is that thousands of women now don’t own one brick of their home while their husband owns 100% because the land was registered in his name before marriage and the bank loan to build the house was in his name too because unmarried women couldn’t get loans to build houses, and I’ll bet you that most of those women don’t even know they don’t own their homes. Though they contributed to the building of the house financially and in other ways, they have nothing, no property, zilch. ]
I appreciate you passion about this issue, but you operate on a lot of false assumptions.
For instance, when you write, “What gay men think of as pleasure was, for women throughout the ages, assault and rape. Women do not do that for fun, Zachary, unless they are extremely unusual,” it tells me that either A) You assume that I enjoy anal rape (I do not) OR B) Only “extremely unusual” women enjoy consensual anal sex (The statistics don’t seem to be on your side: http://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/06/07/straight-people-have-anal-sex). I’m sure you don’t mean to sound like an American Republican, but you do when you write things like that.
You muddy the issue by bringing up the Inquisition: the law in question is most certainly descendant from the British Buggery Act (and subsequent Labouchere Amendment) rather than any pre-British penal code. The fact that you cannot produce any examples from more recent history (late 19th and early 20th century) is quite telling.
[Daphne – Yes. It tells that the law wasn’t used. And that times were changing or had changed. The police could not take action with a law like this unless there was a specific complaint and a witness. It is exactly the same as with the domestic violence laws today. Yet the Labour Party makes it seem as though the police went around rounding up homosexual men and jailing them. I grew up in that Malta, Zachary, and believe me nobody rounded up homosexua men or bothered about them. And rent-boys might actually have got preferential treatment, because even though there were large numbers of them back in the day, it always seemed to be the women who were picked up for ‘loitering with intent’. ]
You cannot argue out of one side of your mouth that this was a “dead letter” and then out of the other side say, “It was a law that protected them [women and children] against at least one form of rape and assault.” Which is it?
[Daphne – I’ll spell it out. By the time it became a dead letter, it was no longer needed because times and behaviour had changed. That is exactly why it was a dead letter. Because it was no longer needed and so it was no longer used – you know, a bit like the law in England which says that all swans are the property of the sovereign and that anyone who steals one will be hanged, or something to that effect. I can’t see David Cameron repealing that law and then making a fuss because the Conservatives have done something progressive. It was inconceivable, Zachary, that anyone would be prosecuted for sodomy in the 1960s.]
If it was a “dead letter” that means that it wasn’t protecting anyone. So I ask again, why would the PN (the party of smart and modern government) vote against its removal?
[Daphne – Who knows, and more to the point, who cares? What you should be asking is why the progressive Labour Party voted for the repeal of the sodomy law but then voted against EU membership. Nobody gives a damn about the sodomy law, but EU membership has changed all our lives for the better.]
Why wouldn’t they try to get it replaced with a law that REALLY protected women from such assaults?
[Daphne – They did, Zachary. The Nationalists did, not Labour. And the interpretation of the law on marital rape has changed too. ]
And if this decriminalization REALLY WAS, as you claim, just a political gimmick, why was Olivier so stupid as to fall into Mintoff’s trap? I’m sorry, but your arguments on this issue just don’t pass the smell test. That is why I’m disappointed: I know you’re a lot smarter than this.
[Daphne – Those two didn’t set traps for each other or fall into them. And you can hardly accuse Borg Olivier of being fusty and prudish. He led a very liberal – in the non-political sense of the word – lifestyle, though I think it is inappropriate to go into the details here. Let’s just say that today, it would be inconceivable to have a prime minister with that personal life. Mintoff was the same, incidentally..]
Regarding your last paragraph, my family and I are very well aware of the arcane and patriarchal property laws in Malta: we’ve had to struggle with them ourselves.
Certainly Mintoff was no feminist, but the fact that some women in Malta STILL don’t have a legal claim to the houses they helped build beggars the question, why has the PN, after over 20 years in government, done anything to rectify this situation?
[Daphne – Because you can’t. If a person owns a piece of property, you can’t take it away from them and give it to somebody else, even if that person is the spouse. What’s done is done. There were more and graver injustices of this nature which are impossible to rectify.]
Based on your telling of history, I’m beginning to believe that the PN only believes in reform when it benefits one of their more powerful constituencies. Is this not the height of patronage politics?
[Daphne – Since the late 1970s, Zachary, the Nationalist Party has been THE party of reform. You would never have been able to live in Malta before 1987, I can assure you. You would have been angry all the time.]
My last sentence should read: Certainly Mintoff was no feminist, but the fact that some women in Malta STILL don’t have a legal claim to the houses they helped build beggars the question, why hasn’t the PN, after over 20 years in government, done anything to rectify this situation?
Sort of a big difference there. Sorry for the error.