In 1948, Axel and Eigil Axgil and their colleagues founded Denmark's first gay rights organization, Kredsen af 1948 (The Circle of 1948). Inspired by the UN Declaration of Human Rights of that year, homophile organizations like Kredsen af 1948 began to lobby states for gay rights. For affluent democracies, the birth of the gay liberation movement and the dawn of the 1970s heralded a marked, albeit gradual, expansion in the legal protections that states provided gay and lesbian minorities. By October 1, 1989, the first same-sex couples – including the Axgils, who celebrated four decades as a couple and as human rights activists – had entered into registered partnerships in Denmark. Although progress has been slow and has often provoked countermovements intended to block progressive legislation and to promote anti-LGBT policies, the proliferation of LGBT-friendly legislation has amplified the voice of a once politically invisible group and has become a recurrent theme in modern European politics.

Legal recognition of LGBT minorities varies greatly across European states, however. In this chapter, I explore LGBT norm diffusion by examining legislative changes across states. Europe is distinctive in that it houses states at both ends of the global spectrum of LGBT egalitarianism, with wide discrepancies both in legislation, which this chapter examines, and in the social acceptance of LBGT minorities (Chapter 5). While some states (e.g. Denmark) quickly became the world's leading advocates for LGBT rights and provided the most extensive legal measures to their citizenry, others have only recently decriminalized homosexuality (e.g. Romania in 2001). Furthermore, some states in the region have introduced or proposed legislation that retrenches the rights of LGBT minorities, such as bans on same-sex unions or bills banning gay propaganda. Figure 4.1 shows how EU member states have varied in adopting LGBT legislation over three decades. The 12-point LGBT legislation score counts various pieces of pro-LGBT legislation, described in detail in Table A.1 in the Appendix.

Transnational activists have long publicized this imbalance in legal recognition of LGBT minority rights as a central concern for those working to achieve social equality across Europe.