These guides have been developed to provide resources to instructors interested in teaching with the Hall-Troubridge Digital Collection and to offer students the opportunity to engage with archival resources to enrich their learning experience.
Human sexuality and gender identity have long been a point of fixation for law-making cultures. Contrary to a linear understanding of progress, sexuality and gender both have rich, complex, and shifting relationships with the law. One of the largest influences on sexuality and gender laws on a global scale remains British colonization. While some countries never saw the need to make laws about certain sexual acts, others began the process of either legalizing or criminalizing same-sex sexual acts at different points in history.
While many countries officially legalized same-sex activity in the midth century, others, such as France, legalized it in the lateth century, a time period in which laws in the United Kingdom and the American colonies specifically deemed male same-sex activity a capital offense.
The death penalty on the basis of "sodomy" remained on the books in the United Kingdom until , with the last known execution taking place in , less than years before Hall would pen The Well of Loneliness. The impacts of such laws on societies remain. In the US and the UK, laws designed to prohibit "lewdness" and to eliminate "vice" resulted in stringent regulations banning the mailing, selling, or distributing of "obscene" materials.
In the United States, the infamous Comstock Act of regulated definitions of "obscenity. Hall became intimately familiar with the legal arguments and challenges in various attempts to allow publication of The Well of Loneliness to English-speaking audiences.
