The homosexual law reform campaign moved beyond the gay community to wider issues of human rights and discrimination. Extreme viewpoints ensured a lengthy and passionate debate before the Homosexual Law Reform Act was passed 25 years ago, in July 1986.
Social and political groups for homosexuals in New Zealand began with the Dorian Society in the 1960s. By the next decade, sexual and social liberation was in the air.
Fran Wilde was a Cabinet minister in the Labour
government of the 1980s, and is perhaps best known for her private members bill for
homosexual law reform. She left Parliament to become the first female Mayor of
Wellington.
