Since the 1970s, historians have claimed that an insatiable 'will to know' has powered the growing concern with male homosexuality across Europe and the West, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards. Unwilling To Know challenges this dominant narrative by demonstrating how, unlike in neighbouring France, Germany, and Britain, a mixture of silence and code surrounded homosexuality in Belgium until well after the Second World War. Whereas over a thousand scientific monographs on homosexuality were published in wider Europe between 1898 and 1908, the lack of publishing in Belgium was combined with a marked lack of interest from the police, psychiatrists and wider society. Through internationally comparative analyses, and with particular reference to the importance of religion, Wannes Dupont complicates overly monolithic views of European developments based on a handful of familiar cases. In doing so, this study lays bare the many national, cultural, institutional, legal and religious differences that have shaped the scrutiny of homosexuality in diverging ways.

‘Wannes Dupont brilliantly challenges post-Foucauldian accounts of sexual modernity by excavating the persistent power of religion, especially Catholic doctrines of free will, to explain why Belgian authorities studiously ignored the question of homosexuality.  He also provides bracing new insights into the legal and psychiatric regulation of sexuality in Germany and France. A model of comparative history.’

George Chauncey - author of Gay New York

‘Discretion, aversion to scandal, assumptions about ‘free will,’ concern to avoid political polarization: Riddles raised by (non-)talk about sex go to the heart of what it means to be a modern society. Wannes Dupont’s ingeniously comparativist study topsy-turvies marvellously all our previous most confidently defended assumptions about the history of sexuality.’

Dagmar Herzog - author of Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History

‘In this erudite and elegant study of homosexuality in Belgium, Wannes Dupont moves effortlessly through those various regimes of knowledge that rendered queer experience legible. He offers a compelling story of how Belgium differed from its larger neighbors, challenging many assumptions about the broader history of homosexuality in modern Europe.’

Chris Waters - Williams College