Friday marks 35 years since the Homosexual Law Reform Bill was passed in New Zealand.
Pro-reform campaigners went up against a slew of MPs and New Zealanders in the 1980s who were desperate for sex between men aged 16 and over to remain illegal.
More than 1000 New Zealand men were convicted and shamed before the law changed.
But on July 9, 1986, the Bill narrowly passed, with 49 MPs voting for it and 44 against.
Former Gay Task Force member Bill Logan, who was part of the push to legalise it, says life as a gay person before the reform was "pretty scary" given you couldn't expect to have a public life or get many secure jobs.
"On the whole, gay people had to hide and they were second-class citizens, even in their families usually. It was scary growing up," he told The Project.
As the reform campaign began, coverage in newspapers and on television helped change the minds of New Zealanders, but so did the many people who came out as gay.
"Early on in the campaign, people would say, 'well it's not such a big problem, I don't know anyone who's gay, there's no one in my family who's gay'," Logan says.
"And of course by the end of the campaign, everyone knew that there was at least a cousin, most people knew they had a workmate who was gay."
The AIDS virus reached New Zealand in 1984, where fear then spread through New Zealand about how you could get infected.
"They were afraid to associate with gay men because they thought they might get AIDS through associating with them. Of course, that's impossible - you've got to get fairly intimate before you're going to contract AIDS," Logan says.
But this fear went both ways, he adds, because although it was used as a reason against changing the law, it was leveraged for why reform was needed.
"You're not going to be able to have gay men discuss what they need to discuss to prevent the spread of AIDS with their doctors, with health professional workers unless they can be open about their sexual practices."
Watch the video above.
