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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Ava Sasani

‘Archaic’: the Tennessee town that made homosexuality illegal

A brown hand holds a rainbow flag in the foreground, with the white pillars of a DC building.
The ordinance in Murfreesboro was essentially a covert ban on LGBTQ+ existence. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

For five months this year, homosexuality was prohibited in a Tennessee college town.

In June, the city council of Murfreesboro enacted an ordinance outlawing “indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct”. The rule did not explicitly mention homosexuality, but LGBTQ+ people in the town quickly realized that the ordinance references 21-72 of the city code, which categorizes homosexuality as an act of indecent sexual conduct.

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