OutWrite Books · The law, country by country
For most of the years in which our books were written, the love at their center was a crime in much of the world. This map shows where, year by year, from 1760 to today. Press Play, or drag the timeline to any year.
Tap or hover over any country to see its status in the year shown and how its law changed over time. Tap a pin to see the book and the law where it is set.
OutWrite Books is an independent LGBTQ+ book publisher, and every book on our list was written inside the law this map records.
Edward Carpenter published Love’s Coming-of-Age in Manchester in 1896, eleven years after Parliament made any act of “gross indecency” between men a crime. He made the case for loving freely anyway, under his own name, and shared his home with George Merrill for thirty years.
Robert Hichens published The Green Carnation in London in 1894, a comic novel about two men everyone in London recognized. The following May, one of them, Oscar Wilde, was sent to prison under that same law.
Neither man wrote in safety, and neither book pretends otherwise. They carry the pressure of the law on every page: what a character cannot say aloud, who he cannot be seen with, how the story is allowed to end.
The same is true of every book we are preparing. Each was written somewhere this map shows in red, in a year when that law was in force.
The map begins in 1760, when much of Europe and the Americas punished this love by law. Watch the colors change and you can see how recent the change is, how uneven it remains, and how in some places it has gone backward.
Every pin on the map is one of our books, placed where its story is set, in the year it was published. Tap a pin to read the law its characters lived under. New pins arrive as new books do.
Today's borders. Every year is drawn on today's map. Before independence, most of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean lived under colonial codes, and many of today's laws against gay men are those codes, kept after independence. The source records a place from the year its first modern criminal code applied; before that the country is shown as having no record.
One color per country. A country turns legal only when the whole country does. The United Kingdom changes color in 1982, when Northern Ireland followed England and Wales (1967) and Scotland (1980). The United States changes in 2003, when the Supreme Court struck down the last state laws in Lawrence v. Texas.
Many laws named only men. In England and Germany, among many others, the law punished sex between men and said nothing of women. The map shows a country as criminalizing if its law reached either.
The law is not the whole story. A law on the books says nothing about how hard it was enforced, and a country can be legal on paper and dangerous in practice.
Death penalty from 1950. The darkest red marks countries whose national law prescribes death, including where executions are suspended, as in Brunei and Mauritania. The record begins in 1950; earlier death penalties, such as England's for buggery until 1861, are shown as criminalized. So are countries where death applies only in some regions, as in northern Nigeria and parts of Somalia.
Marriage and civil unions. Shown from the year the law took effect nationwide, or the year a binding national court ruling opened it, as in Colombia (2007), Brazil (2011) and Lithuania (2025). A civil union here is a status a couple can formally enter; rights granted to couples who simply live together are not counted. Where marriage came region by region, as in the United States and Mexico, the country turns when it reached the whole country. Nepal, where some couples have registered marriages under a court order but no law yet provides for them, is not shown as having marriage.
Criminalization, 1760–2025: Jean-François Mignot, "Decriminalizing Homosexuality: A Global Overview Since the 18th Century," Annales de démographie historique (2022), deposited at HAL and as processed by Our World in Data. Marriage, civil unions and the death penalty, 1950–2025: Equaldex, as processed by Our World in Data (marriage, death penalty), checked against national legislation, court rulings and Pew Research Center, and corrected where they differ. Country notes and the law beside each book: OutWrite research. Last updated October 2026.