Blackmail, and not human rights, probably lay behind parliament’s decision to decriminalise homosexual acts in private 50 years ago today, planting a seed for the country to eventually become one of the most progressive in LGBTIQ laws.

Researcher Eman Borg, who wrote his undergraduate thesis about the attitudes that led to the January 29, 1973 legal breakthrough, has pored over hundreds of pages of transcripts of parliamentary debate of the time. It was an effort to understand the social, cultural and political context of how the law came about seemingly out of the blue. 

Researcher Eman Borg

“In 1972, Malta was still recovering from a very tense political divide. The interdett and dnub il-mejjet were still very fresh wounds. Labour had just re-elected Dom Mintoff and been re-elected into government, and the British naval base was leaving the island,” Borg told Times of Malta. 

“So Malta was cutting its teeth on independence and self-governance and that was really what was dominating the political discourse at the time. 

“What was not being discussed was the decriminalisation of homosexuality.”

None of the manifestos of the political parties that had stood for election had promised in writing to introduce such legislation. No lobby groups were advocating for it and there was no outcry from the public to see the law introduced. 

“In fact, this was one of the things the PN in opposition was arguing at the time, that there was no need for this discussion because it was not something being discussed by the man in the street. Society was not crying out for this amendment.

“On the other hand, the Labour Party was saying listen, this is a dormant law that could potentially be exploited to harm people.” 

The bill put forward was to amend the criminal code so as to abolish adultery and homosexual acts in private. 

Anyone caught could be subject to a punitive sentence – although the last documented use of the law had been sometime in the 1890s.

So why the urgency? 

The clue was a parliamentary speech given by Labour MP Albert Hyzler, in which he said that an acquaintance “has been blackmailed since being caught in the act”. He argued strongly that the law was needed to prevent homosexual men from living in fear. 

The report in The Times on the third reading of the bill.

PN MP Ugo Mifsud Bonnici countered, saying that blackmail would still proliferate given the societal stigma associated with the act. “I’m afraid blackmailing will still be a factor even if such law is repealed as homosexuality is condemned by society,” Mifsud Bonnici argued. “This is a fact, the person is ashamed and the person will hide it and so blackmailing will still happen as the person will be afraid.” 

Borg theorises about the possibility that blackmail could have been affecting a high-profile person, but what seems clear, he said, was that blackmail was underpinning the sense of urgency that the Labour Party felt towards changing the law. 

"The Church was also an active participant in this debate, with the justice minister being asked if he had conferred with the bishop before drafting the final version of the law"

“So what Labour was saying, in essence, was, listen, we need to protect those who are vulnerable. Giving power to this law allows blackmail to happen, so let’s remove the law and blackmailing will not happen,” Borg said. 

So did Maltese MPs in 1973 come to some groundbreaking conclusion about LGBTIQ rights? 

Not quite. Both sides of the house agreed that homosexuality was “abnormal”. They debated at length about the “causes” of homosexuality and stressed the need for the protection of traditional family values and religion. 

The Church was also an active participant in this debate, with the justice minister being asked if he had conferred with the bishop before drafting the final version of the law. 

What Borg also finds interesting in the debate is that, while both parties professed their dedication to Catholic values, they differed on another aspect: the Labour Party took the position that what was “immoral” was not necessarily unlawful. 

“An example they used at the time, which I found both somewhat future-thinking and hilarious, is that masturbation was illicit but was not a crime. They argued that homosexuality in private was the same case.

“But what we find here is the seed of a debate that perhaps led to Malta becoming more secular, because a governing party was saying that morality should not be law. And perhaps that was an unconscious step in the decision to argue that Malta should separate the Church from the state, perhaps without them even realising exactly what they were doing.”

Although for several years after 1973, legislative efforts to give the community protection and recognition in law stagnated, the seed had been laid for adopting a civil unions act in 2014, granting same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as marriage, enacting a groundbreaking gender identity law in 2015 and allowing same-sex marriage in 2017. 

“I find it poetic that 50 years after this law, in what is certainly a coincidence, Malta will be hosting EuroPride,” Borg said. 

“The seed of Malta becoming one of the most progressive states when it comes to LGBTIQ rights did not necessarily start in 2013, but all the way back in 1973 when for a few months the country hotly debated homosexuality and decriminalised homosexual acts in private.”