ABSTRACT
Historically, the first suggestions for complete social and legal sexual equality could be traced to an emancipation movement in connection with the French revolution (de Villette, 1790) 1 and, more directly, to the German gay rights pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1864). 2 In Finland, legal recognition of same-gender partnerships was first proposed in 1974 in the charter of the Finnish Organization for Sexual Equality (SETA). 3 Initially, demands for partnership laws in Finland were tentative as SETA had partial roots in both Stonewall radicalism and the London Gay Liberation Manifesto of the early 1970s. These movements cited religion, psychiatry, and the family as the three main sources of gay and lesbian oppression. From that perspective, the “family” was defined as one dominated by a heterosexual male. In later years, however, the Australian sociologist Dennis Altman (1981)—an influential figure in the birth of the Finnish gay and lesbian movement—suggested a redefinition of marriage to include same-gender couples.
