Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights in Queensland have advanced significantly from the late 20th century onwards, in line with progress on LGBTQ rights in Australia nationally.
Private consensual sex between men has been legal in the state since 1991, with lesbian sexual acts never criminalised. The age of consent was equalised to 16 years for all sexual acts in 2016. Sexuality and gender identity are protected attributes under both state and federal anti-discrimination laws. Same-sex couples may marry under Australian law, enter into a civil partnership under state law or live together in an unregistered de facto relationship. Same-sex couples may become parents through adoption, foster care, altruistic surrogacy and, for lesbian couples, IVF. In 2020, Queensland became the first jurisdiction within Australia to pass a law banning conversion therapy, with a maximum penalty of 18 months imprisonment and fines. State anti-discrimination protections for sexuality and gender identity were introduced in 2002 and in 2017 the gay panic defence was abolished from the criminal law. Transgender and intersex Queenslanders are able to update their government records and birth certificate, with the formal repeal of both the "divorce requirements" in 2018 and then the "surgery requirements" in 2024.
LGBTQ rights have been politically polarised: the Queensland branch of the Australian Labor Party supported the decriminalisation of homosexual sex and anti-discrimination protections as early as 1981 and have introduced various legal reforms when in power, while the socially conservative Liberal National Party of Queensland and its predecessor the National Party has traditionally been more hostile. Queensland has historically been Australia's most conservative state, concentrated in the decentralised regional/rural areas to the north and west of the metropolitan south-east corner, but the impact of social conservatism on Queensland politics and laws has declined significantly in the 21st century. The highest proportion of Queensland same-sex couples are concentrated in Brisbane's inner-city suburbs, with the top three being New Farm, Fortitude Valley and Teneriffe.
Same-sex marriage has been legal in the state since December 2017, after passage of the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 in the Australian Parliament. The 2017 Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, designed to gauge public support for same-sex marriage in Australia, returned a 60.7% "Yes" response in Queensland. The Brisbane and Griffith electorates returned the sixth and eighth highest percentages of ‘Yes’ votes in Australia out of 150 electorates. 2019 polling on gay rights consistently showed that even in regional areas, Queensland is no more conservative about the subject than any other states.
Laws regarding sexual activity Initially inherited from the British Empire, anti-homosexuality laws were retained by Queensland from 1895 until their repeal in 1991, while lesbian activity was always legal. Queensland's age of consent for all forms of sex is 16, since the age of consent for anal sex was lowered from 18 years to 16 years in 2016. Queensland was the last Australian jurisdiction to equalise its age of consent. A proposal to expunge the criminal records of men convicted of consensual homosexual acts was passed in 2017. The historical developments are considered further below.
Historical persecution As with other former British colonies, Queensland originally derived its criminal law from the United Kingdom. This included the prohibition of "buggery" and "gross indecency" between males. Similarly to the United Kingdom, lesbianism was never criminalised under Queensland law. A review of Queensland homosexual convictions between 1860 and 1954 revealed that judges tended to hand down sentences that, while still harsh, were at the lenient end of the scale.
The release of the Wolfenden Report in the United Kingdom in 1957 marked the beginning of a change in official attitudes in the English-speaking world, with its recommendation that homosexuality be decriminalised. Homosexual sex was legalised in England and Wales in 1967.
While other states in Australia began to liberalise their anti-homosexuality laws in the 1970s and 1980s, Queensland was ruled by the socially conservative National Party of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. His government actively used homophobia for electoral advantage, linking it to paedophilia and presenting it as morally deviant. At this time government policy was uniformly hostile; the Education Department refused to offer teaching work to openly gay men such as George Weir and in 1985 the government passed an amendment to the Liquor Act making it an offence for publicans to serve alcohol to "perverts, deviants, child molesters and drug users" or to allow them to remain on licensed premises. The Bjelke-Petersen Government intended that the new licensing law be used to refuse service to homosexuals. Although lesbianism was never criminalised directly, women could still be targeted by Bjelke-Petersen's "homosexual deviance" laws that allowed proprietors to call the police on patrons suspected of being lesbian. The 1970s also saw the beginning of a local gay rights movement, with meetings held at the 379 Club on George Street and the local chapter of the Campaign Against Moral Persecution launched in 1971.
Anti-homosexuality laws were enforced by police throughout the 1980s, including against men who were in same-sex relationships and were not aware that their private conduct was illegal. National Party politicians of the time such as Queensland minister Geoff Muntz and federal leader Ian Sinclair made their anti-gay views well known, with the latter claiming that the Labor Party's failure to condemn homosexuality was helping the spread of the newly discovered HIV. In 1987 then-Justice Minister Paul Clauson proposed extending the "gross indecency" offences to cover lesbians as well, but this was abandoned as enforcement would be impossible.
Fear of HIV and AIDS were at their height in the 1980s, with at least 45 positive AIDS tests and six deaths in Queensland by 1985. Then Health Minister at the time Brian Austin sought to relax some of the state morality laws, such as the ban on condom vending machines, but was overruled by the Cabinet. Instead the Bjelke-Petersen Government used the fear caused by HIV/AIDS infection of the blood supply to increase homophobic sentiment and demonise LGBT people further.
The first major public demonstration in favour of decriminalisation occurred on 31 August 1989, when several hundred people demonstrated outside Parliament House in Brisbane. The protests arose after five men from Roma were charged with a variety of anti-homosexuality offences. At the time the maximum penalty for "sodomy" was seven years in jail. Opinion polls published by The Bulletin during that era suggested that while a majority of Queenslanders did not support equal rights for gay people, they thought that private homosexual conduct between consenting adults should be decriminalised. Before legalisation about 460 men were convicted under the laws, with police making arrests as late as 1989.
Legalisation of male same-sex activity The Fitzgerald Inquiry was commissioned in the late 1980s in Bjelke-Peteresen's temporary absence, following allegations of corruption and misconduct in the Queensland Police. The inquiry subsequently investigated the entire system of government. One of its recommendations was that a newly established Criminal Justice Commission review the laws governing voluntary sexual behaviour, including homosexual activity.
This proposal was an issue in the 1989 state election. National Party leader Russell Cooper, whose party was heavily implicated in corruption by the Fitzgerald Inquiry, tried to galvanise socially conservative support using his party's opposition to the legalisation of homosexual conduct. During the election campaign he claimed that his party's corruption was a "secondary issue" to moral issues like abortion and homosexuality, adding that the then-Opposition Labor's policy of decriminalisation would send a "flood of gays crossing the border from the Southern states". As a result, Cooper was lampooned in Labor advertisements as a wild-eyed reactionary, a clone of Bjelke-Petersen and/or a puppet of National Party president Sir Robert Sparkes. Cooper's party lost the election to Labor.
Following its victory, the new Government of Wayne Goss undertook the proposed review into the legality of homosexuality. That review recommended that homosexual offences be removed from the state's Criminal Code and that the age of consent for private consensual conduct be 16 years for both homosexual and heterosexual conduct.
Goss' government largely implemented the changes in the Criminal Code and Another Act Amendment Act 1990, which was passed by the parliament on 28 November 1990 and received royal assent on 7 December 1990. Decriminalisation was strongly opposed by the National Party at the time, but they ultimately failed to prevent it. Repeal of the anti-homosexuality offences took effect upon proclamation on 19 January 1991.
Age of consent equalisation The initial decriminalisation of homosexuality in Queensland in 1991 failed to implement an equal age of consent, despite it being a majority recommendation of the 1990 Parliamentary Criminal Justice Committee review of homosexuality. Queensland's age of consent remained at 16 for oral and vaginal sex. By comparison, the age of consent for anal sex was set at 18, with section 208 of the Queensland Criminal Code imposing up to 14 years imprisonment for "sodomy" that involved a person under that age, whether male or female. When the government of Wayne Goss decriminalised male homosexual activity in Queensland, it imposed a higher age of consent for anal intercourse as a "pragmatic political response" to the objections of religious lobby groups, who largely equated homosexuality with anal sex.
In 1996 the Borbidge National/Liberal government changed the terminology in section 208 from "anal intercourse" to "sodomy" and doubled the applicable penalties. In October 2008 Labor's Attorney-General Kerry Shine raised the penalty for attempting under-18 sodomy to be the same as for committing the act.
By 2016, Queensland was the last state or territory in Australia without an equal age of consent for all sexual activity. Successive state governments had ignored repeated calls for reform since the 1990s.