Despite being a member of the LGBT community, my historical knowledge regarding LGBT issues is pretty limited. So while I was deciding what dataset I should use to learn Tableau, I had an idea. I figured I could use leverage existing data to learn Tableau and get a much needed history lesson at the same time!

I wanted to get a global perspective on gay rights. Luckily Wikipedia has a very helpful article for LGBT rights by country/territory. I decided to use data on the decriminalization of homosexuality since I surmised it could shed some light on how cultures’ views on homosexuality have or haven’t shifted over time.

It should be noted however that the decriminalization of homosexuality is not necessarily the same thing as homosexuality being socially accepted, and it doesn’t speak to other LGBT related rights such as gay marriage, or transgender rights. This holds true even for regions where homosexuality has never been illegal. However, we can still see a shift in the degree to which homosexuality is seen as a crime.

I created a Tableau story to depict regions where decriminalization occurred during each century over the 18th to the 21st centuries.

We will start by showing the regions where homosexuality was never criminalized and then highlight regions that underwent decriminalization during each century.

And there we have it, a complete timeline of homosexuality’s decriminalization.

We started with relatively few regions where homosexuality was not criminalized and ended up with few regions where it is criminalized. It was reassuring to see just how global this shift has been.

Most of the regions that have not decriminalized homosexuality are regions in the middle east and Africa. What is interesting is that the majority of regions in Africa where homosexuality is not illegal, it was never criminalized to begin with. In fact Africa has the largest number of regions where homosexuality was never criminalized. Is this because Africa is more tolerant? The data doesn’t directly tell us, but probably not. Some of the evidence that points to this is just how comparatively few countries in Africa decriminalized homosexuality in the following centuries. Additionally, while we see a wave of homosexuality decriminalization on all other continents in the 1900s, Africa is largely left out of that wave.

At the global level the majority of decriminalization occurred in the 1900s. In the United States decriminalization did not begin until the mid to late 1900s. I live in California, and I was surprised to see states like Ohio, Illinois, and North Dakota decriminalized homosexuality before the California did. Many of the states that decriminalized homosexuality did so in the 1970s. It turns out a significant number of states never decriminalized homosexuality, however in 2003 the US Supreme Court made a ruling in the historic case Lawrence v. Texas, which effectively nationally decriminalized homosexuality.

There is a lot more to explore in this data and a lot more to learn about LGBT history in general. We’ve barely scratched the surface! We haven’t learned anything about other LGBT related rights such as marriage equality, workplace equality, or transgender rights to name a few. Still this analysis was a great place to start and we were able to get a decent macro level view of homosexuality’s criminalization in a short amount of time.