Preliminary Programme

Homosexuality was de-criminalized in Sweden in 1944. However, the following two decades saw a sharp increase in surveillance, regulation and judicial discipline regarding same sex encounters between men in Sweden, and in particular in Stockholm were the police established a special commission in order to combat “criminal homosexuality”. The increased policing of homosexual acts fits with a larger trend in the western world. While homosexual acts were illegal in many, but not all, western countries the policing seem to have been focused on the prevention of homosexual acts taking place in public or semi-public places regardless of the legal status of homosexuality.
The purpose of this paper is to explore one case of the policing of public sex between men in the western world in the period between the war and the emergence of gay liberation in the early 1970s. In order to do so I will connect with two common conceptualizations of the policing of homosexuality; Knowledge and Visibility.
Firstly I will explore which kind of specific knowledge the police produced regarding homosexuality. The production of knowledge on, and in many ways also the production of, a homosexual subject is a central part of the policing of homosexuality. In order to police effectively the commission had to acquire or create a minute knowledge of the policed subjects. Individual actions, desires and utterances were understood with an abstract discourse of how the homosexual male acted, walked and spoke. This kind of knowledge had large consequences for the individuals that were submitted to invasive police procedures, as well as for the individuals that were able to evade police attention by defying police knowledge.
Secondly I will explore how the police made the urban geography of homosexuality visible. In order to be able to police homosexuality the police also had to make homosexuals as well as the urban spaces, such as parks and public urinals, they frequented visible. A systemization and visualisation of the urban space through the gathering of statistics and extensive mapping also seem to have been key components of policing throughout the western world. I will also pose questions on how homosexual subjects and practices were codified through statistics and how specific places were imbued with meaning through the visualisation of the homosexual urban space. (Show less)

This presentation concentrates on how the society has perceived the question of fertility control in heterosexual premarital relationships. In Finland, the liberalization of attitudes concerning premarital sexuality in the latter half of the 20th century could be described as a question about accepting pre-engagemental sex. Although the ideal of no sex before marriage was widely recognized in the early and mid-20th century Finland, a steady couple getting married because of a pregnancy was commonplace. Many of the authors whose sexual autobiographies I have analyzed for this paper, presented starting a family this way as an unplanned, yet even welcomed step to a new stage in life. Reliable ways of using fertility control, together with the normative change, made possible separating premarital relationships from the future marriage and children. In the 1960s and 1970s, the couples who would have previously been likely to quickly marry because of a pregnancy, had a better access to contraceptives and legal abortion. The higher success in premarital fertility control again supported the change in cultural norms.
The presentation focuses specifically on the Finnish public debate about the fertility control needs in premarital relationships, authorities recognizing the need for premarital postponing of childbirth, and the individual level effects of the society’s contraceptive and abortion policies. The mere emergence of new contraceptive appliances did not immediately change individual practices to systematic contraceptive use. Societal level support for reliable fertility control was not universally available. Particularly, I analyze the publications by quasi-governmental Finnish Population and Family Welfare Federation (Väestöliitto) which was the dominant expert organization in birth control questions. With the Finnish example, I aim to diversify the mainly Anglo-Saxon narrative of the 1960s’ sexual liberalization, often pictured in popular history as revolution accelerated by the fast spread of the contraceptive pill. (Show less)

Queer activists have played a leading role in the current revival of antifascism as seen at the 2017 Charlottesville and Berkeley rallies. Yet the history of queer antifascist resistance remains unexplored. Intersectional and transnational approaches are needed which examine the interconnections of sexuality, gender, race, and class in antifascist organizing.

My paper does this by looking at gay liberationists in 1970s Europe who formulated a queer antifascism. By this they meant a robust antifascist activism rooted in queerness and an analysis of an ‘everyday fascism’ imminent to capitalist society and connected to existing oppressive structures of patriarchy, racism, and compulsory heterosexuality. For these activists, queerness was necessarily antifascist and intersectional. This was a conscious challenge to dominant medical, popular, and activist discourses which constructed fascism as queer going back to the 1930s such as Stalinist interpretations of homosexuality as bourgeois decadence and William Reich’s work on the politics of sexuality.

In my paper, I will focus on the 1970s when gay liberation movements first emerged in Europe challenging structural inequalities while calling for the creation of radical queer subjectivities. These activists, especially in Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, made unique contributions to antifascist theory and praxis. While the larger antifascist movement of the late 1970s organized against formal fascist parties, queer antifascists adopted novel tactics privileging direct action and community work, and utilized an intersectional approach centering queerphobia as a constitutive aspect of fascist ideology. Rooting their activism in their lived experience as an oppressed community, these activists confronted fascism in structural terms by organizing against white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism in everyday life while also standing against explicitly fascist parties.

Due to the lack of work on these activists, my paper relies on a combination of oral histories, against-the-grain archival research, and private collections. Oral histories in particular allow me to queer canonical antifascist histories while introducing new perspectives on previously-overlooked aspects of antifascist organizing, such as the perspectives of women of color, the divisions within the antifascist movement, and the role of diverse antifascist subcultures as fundraisers and builders of queer communities.

From 1970, queer antifascists were already organizing within groups such as the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire in France and the Gay Liberation Front in the UK which viewed itself explicitly as “part of the wider movement aiming to abolish all forms of oppression” under capitalism. By the mid to late 1970s, large queer movements had emerged emphasizing antifascism as a necessary practice for all radical queers. By the early 1980s, many of these movements were folding after years of rejection from a still homophobic left. In the wake of the AIDs crisis and the shift of European governments towards the right, many queer antifascists moved towards new forms of autonomous and local organizing increasingly directed against the state. This was a restructuring rather than an endpoint. Despite formally declining, these activists left lasting legacies, namely new possibilities for radical queer subjectivities and a pioneering structural analysis of fascism which remains more relevant today than ever. (Show less)

The first Italian gay organization (FUORI) was founded in Turin in 1971. In an interview the founder of the Italian Homosexual Revolutionary Front, Angelo Pezzana, underlined how he discovered ideas and ideals of the American and British gay liberation movements through books and publications. He underlined how the decision of founding the Front was also a consequence of transnational impulses. However, before the FUORI was founded, Italians were already part of a transnational movement. In the 1950s one figure, Bernardino del Boca di Villaregia, was particularly active in searching for homophile connections. He “represented” Italy at the first conference organized by the International Committee for Sexual Equality in 1951 in Amsterdam, he built strong ties with the Swiss Der Kreis, he tried not only to found an Italian homophile group but also to create an Italian homophile periodical. His projects were a failure. But such attempts were fruit of his connection with the homophile network. Del Boca was not the only one searching for contacts. There were many “independent” Italian queers who, not having a local homophile organization and looking for "friendly" and "understanding" spaces, tried to reach out to groups abroad. In this paper I will look at the ways in which the Swiss homophile organization not only shaped Del Boca’s projects, but also attracted attentions and hopes of many isolated Italian men who, in the 1950s and early 1960s, wrote letters to Der Kreis and published personal announcements on Das Kleine Blatt – the lonely heart supplement published by the Swiss organization – trying to escape from their isolation. Transnational physical and intellectual exchanges not only favored the more or less successful implementation of ambitious projects, but they also affected the lives of many queers desiring contacts. (Show less)