[freedomben]

You seem insistent that there's no nuance whatsoever involved in this, yet I find this hard to accept.

Just in the article you linked to, it says that 49,000 gay men were pardoned. It also says the law against "gross indecency with a man" was passed in 1885 and was only repealed in 1967. The law against "buggery" was first used in 1533 and was in place until the 19th century!

If we assume that 100 million people lived through those times, and that the conservative estimate of approximately 3% gay population held, then there would have been 3,000,000 gay people during that time. That means that 1.6% of gay people ended up prosecuted. If we only consider men, then 3.2% ended up prosecuted. This seems to me to be a little more nuanced than you are suggesting, otherwise there wouldn't be such a huge inconsistency in enforcement.

Since we're urging each other now, I’d urge you to spend more time thinking about how perception can differ from reality, what the pitfalls are of binary thinking and blind acceptance, and why Socrates encouraged people to have humility about what they think they know.

[foldr]

Most people didn’t tell a policeman that they were having gay sex. Turing did, so he was prosecuted. The police officer who initially arrested Turing would have had no idea about his security clearance or role in the war effort (which did not begin to be declassified until the 1970s). So what exactly is this “nuance” that you think needs to be added here? Could you at least be specific?

I’d also add that your hypothetical conviction rate of 3.2% is pretty high, considering that people generally have sex in private. As a point of comparison drawn at random, the current conviction rate for car thefts in England and Wales is 2.12%.