California decriminalises consensual sex
A tie in the Senate, a flight from Colorado: in 1975, California's ban on consensual sex fell.
On 12 May 1975, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law in Sacramento that decriminalised consensual sexuality between adults in California. This removed criminal provisions against sodomy and oral sex that had been in the penal code since statehood in 1850 and could, at worst, mean life imprisonment. The "Consenting Adult Sex Act" came into force in January 1976.
The bill came from Assemblyman Willie Brown of San Francisco, who had campaigned for it for six years. His most important ally was the Senate leader George Moscone, who later became mayor of San Francisco. The vote in the Senate became a thriller. It was tied twenty to twenty, and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, who could break the tie, had travelled to Colorado of all places. A private plane brought him back to Sacramento. Meanwhile, Moscone kept his own senators in the chamber so that none of them would defect, as Willie Brown later recalled. In the end it was twenty-one to twenty. In the Assembly, the majority was clearer at forty-five to twenty-six.
Remarkably, the three main figures, Willie Brown, Moscone and the governor, were all heterosexual. The Republicans were determined to see the law fail.
The law was not a blank cheque. Sex with minors or under coercion remained a crime, and the text even provided for a minimum sentence of three years for violence. It was about private life between adults, nothing more.
The success also applied only to a single state. Nationwide, sodomy laws only fell in 2003, when the Supreme Court decided Lawrence v. Texas. California was almost three decades ahead.