The placard the police confiscated
Helsinki, 1981: a placard reading "We encourage homosexuality" brought the police onto the scene.
On 16 May 1981, around a hundred people marched through the streets of Helsinki demanding equal rights for lesbians and gay men. It was the first large march of its kind in Finland, organised by the civil rights organisation Seta as part of its "Liberation Days". The association had taken the name from its founding month of May; it had been set up in 1974. The mood was militant, for although the country had abolished the criminalisation of homosexual acts ten years earlier, it had introduced a new ban at the same time: anyone who publicly encouraged "fornication" between persons of the same sex risked a fine or up to six months in prison.
The marchers took this very ban at its word, as a deliberate provocation: if encouraging was to be a crime, the state would have to show whether it really meant it. One placard read, in essence: "We encourage homosexuality". The police confiscated it, questioned participants who had shouted slogans and filed a complaint. There was no conviction. The ban remained a largely dead law, but one that for a long time still urged editorial offices and broadcasters to be careful. In any case, the message of the day had got through: those who ban visibility make it all the more necessary.
That same month, member of parliament Tarja Halonen, then chair of Seta, submitted a written question together with other parliamentarians on reducing discrimination against homosexuals. A few weeks later, on 26 June 1981, Finland's National Board of Health removed homosexuality from its list of diseases. In 2000, Halonen became president, the first head of state in the world to have previously led a queer organisation. The ban on "encouragement" only fell in 1999, twenty-eight years after it was introduced.