Alabama

Alabama serves up a standard dose of Bible Belt statehouse hypocrisy. Federal law forces the local government to respect your marriage license and stay out of your bedroom, but state politicians ban discussion in the classroom up to 5th grade on gay issues. That controversy is also present amongst gay men who don't see why children of this age should be subjected to sexually orientated topics. The main worry is the state's keeping unenforceable anti-gay laws dead on the books as a potential threat for the future.

So, how did Alabama get here?

1700s: The Muscogee Baseline

Long before modern borders exist, the local Muscogee and Cherokee nations acknowledge and accept men who step outside traditional gender boundaries or form intimate attachments with other men. European colonizers, in step with their missionary zeal, systematically dismantle these native customs to outlaw any gay sex and intimacy.

1841: Judges' gay obsessions

After much man-to-man masculine debate, the Alabama gay-fixated legislature passes the law to define sodomy as an explicit crime against nature. This new statutory landscape imposes a severe penalty of two to ten years of hard labor in the state penitentiary for private intimacy between consenting men.

1914: Judges ban kissing and more!

The Alabama Court of Appeals aggressively expands the reach of the state anti-sodomy apparatus during the landmark case Woods v. State. The justices rule, after much theorizing and practical experimentation, that private oral intimacy between men violates the existing crime against nature statute.

2003: An end to the terrorism?

Decades of targeted local police raids, entrapment and raids fail to keep their legal violence with impunity when a federal Supreme Court ruling strips away state sodomy bans. Local political figures continue to introduce performative statehouse measures to appease traditionalists, but the threat of criminal arrest for private intimacy finally dissolves.