1961
Illinois becomes the first US state to decriminalise homosexuality
Governor Otto Kerner signed Illinois’s revised criminal code into law on July 28, 1961. Buried inside it, among hundreds of pages of routine legal housekeeping, was the quiet removal of the state’s sodomy statute. On January 1, 1962, it took effect, and Illinois became the first state in America where gay sex was not a crime.
Almost nobody noticed. The repeal came from adopting the American Law Institute’s model penal code wholesale, and it passed as part of a much larger overhaul rather than as a debate about homosexuality. There was no campaign, no headline, no moment of national reckoning. There was just a line that was no longer there.
Two men had pushed for it: the Reverend James Jones, an Episcopal priest, and Paul Goldman, a Chicago lawyer. Goldman was straight. He had taken the cause up after his gay law school roommate killed himself.
It would be eight years before Stonewall, and forty before the rest of the country caught up - thirty-five more states repealed their own laws, and the Supreme Court struck down the last fourteen in 2003. Illinois got there first, in silence, with nobody watching.
Gerber/Hart Library: the decriminalisation of sodomy in Illinois