Paradoxically, Belgium played an important role in the internationalization of homosexuality as a policy issue during the 1950s. In the wake of liberation from Nazi Germany, social disruption sparked anxiety over the moral corruption of the young. Following changes to the way prostitution was policed, rising arrest numbers led to the discovery of male homosexuality as a ‘new’ social problem. In turn, Belgian officials placed the matter on the agenda of Interpol as a phenomenon meriting attention globally. Influenced by the American Kinsey studies, the British Wolfenden report, and the postwar language of human rights, homosexuality’s partial decriminalization was officially endorsed by Interpol, the United Nations, and other international bodies by the late 1950s. Ironically, in Belgium alignment with the proposed model led to the partial criminalization of homosexual acts for the first time. However, before long the country’s peculiar culture of conflict management opened political backdoors that began the quiet osmosis of the budding gay and lesbian movement into subsidized civil society. By 1999, when Christian Democrats lost their previously tight grip on political power, a progressive coalition jumped headlong into a series of reforms, quickly turning Belgium into the global champion of LGBTQI+ rights that it remains today.

Using a sensational case of murder from 1899 as a lens, this chapter explores how little the Belgian capital’s authorities really knew about and how little they actively engaged with what they referred to as la pédérastie. It shows that the police lacked both the mandate and the means to focus on something they clearly deemed a minor nuisance. Unlike in Britain and Germany, homosexual relations between consenting adults in private were not illegal. Unlike in France, where the legal situation was similar, Belgium’s more decentralized make-up impeded the formation of effective and efficient law enforcement authorities even in big cities. No unit epitomized the growing pains of an underfinanced police force in a booming city more than the vice brigade. Policing sex in public was difficult and unrewarding. As the records of dismissed cases reveal, the police and the courts regularly found themselves instrumentalized in the settling of personal scores and they were often forced to retreat in frustration over mutual or unverifiable accusations. Most exasperating of all was the insurmountable wall of secrecy, solidarity, bribery, and obstructionism they faced when dealing with the queer world.

In many European countries, sodomy statutes institutionalized the scrutiny of homosexual acts. Magistrates’ reliance on forensic experts to explain sexual deviance in terms of criminal responsibility stimulated the emergence of a medical concept of homosexuality. Belgian courts, however, displayed no such ‘will to know’ about the nature of ‘perversion.’ A comparison of German and Belgian legal logics pertaining to indecency demonstrates how the former was preoccupied with a perpetrator’s motives, while the latter deliberately ignored them. German courts often had recourse to medical expertise to understand what drove (homo)sexual offenders, whereas the Belgian judiciary preferred to omit these hard-to-prove intricacies by stubbornly sticking to the facts of the matter. Belgian trials pertaining to homosexual acts of public indecency were therefore mostly bereft of any special interest in the psychological significance of the acts in question. Unlike elsewhere, they did not stimulate forensic physicians to account for such ‘unnatural acts’ in terms of a medico-psychiatric ‘condition.’

Whereas the rest of the book explains the remarkable discursive silence on homosexuality in Belgium compared to neighboring countries, this first chapter shows how a lively queer subculture thrived regardless in Brussels during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. It demonstrates how rapid urbanization and its modern infrastructure facilitated homosexual encounters. The Belgian capital was more representative of urban growth in Europe than were megacities such as Paris or London. In Brussels too, wage labor, migration, and mass transport fueled a bachelor culture that enabled nontraditional lifestyles, and since no laws explicitly forbade same-sex acts between consenting adults in private, foreigners from Britain, Germany, and elsewhere found opportunities in Belgium not open to them at home. In several ways, then, the country’s comparative silence on homosexuality enabled rather than precluded queer possibilities.

Building on the previous chapter, this one zooms in on the role of psychiatry in stimulating the discourse of homosexuality. Comparing developments in France to those in Belgium, it demonstrates how, in the former, a rising psychiatric profession latched onto sexual psychopathology to help establish medical control over the largely Catholic system of insane asylums in close alliance with an anticlerical state. The homosexual ‘invert’ thus served as an emblem of secularism. Belgium’s political culture, by contrast, was dominated by Catholics and laissez-faire liberals, neither of whom could support state expansion in the realm of mental health care, which the former dominated and the latter approached as a business. The country’s insane asylums would remain firmly in the hands of religious congregations and private entrepreneurs, stunting the development of an independent, confident, and militant psychiatry. Dominated by Catholics, the Belgian Society of Mental Medicine was hostile to new-fangled ideas about ‘sexual inversion.’ This is shown through the growing skepticism of its members to the work of the pioneering Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who increasingly came to see ‘contrary sexual feeling’ as an innate and morally innocent ‘condition.’

The final chapter focuses on the only Belgian who briefly pierced his country’s silence on sexual ‘inversion’ during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In 1899, the internationally acclaimed author Georges Eekhoud published the most daring queer novel of the period. A charge of indecency against his explicitly homoerotic and class-transcending love story caused an uproar among Europe’s literary community. Celebrity authors, including Émile Zola, collectively screamed blue murder over this attempt to curtail the hallowed freedom of artistic expression. The trial that followed ended in triumph and Eekhoud seemed poised to become a standard-bearer of the budding transnational movement for homosexual rights. But at home, Eekhoud soon grew isolated and unhappy as leftists and artists alike shunned him for his association with such an odious issue. While the writer’s autobiographical writings and private diary offer a rich insight into the way sexology shaped his sexual sense of self, they also reveal how Belgium’s stifling culture of bourgeois respectability still buried homosexuality in shame during the early twentieth century, while Eekhoud’s Dutch and German allies were already pushing the matter successfully onto the public agenda.

The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

The Belgian historian Jos Van Ussel’s History of Sexual Repression inspired Michel Foucault to argue that the history of sexuality was not marked by silence but by a deafening discursive explosion. Following Foucault, many historians have sought to substantiate his influential claim by documenting the strong discursive preoccupation with same-sex eroticism in ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. The unstudied case of Belgium challenges both the geography and the chronology of this vestigial grand narrative. Unlike in larger neighboring countries (Britain, France, and Germany), which commonly get to tell the story of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as a whole, Belgian intellectuals and policymakers barely broached the issue of homosexuality until the 1950s. Why this was the case, and how it complicates our understanding of queer history by breaking up the idea of a single and singular Europe from the inside out, is this book’s main subject. The Introduction also calls attention to the importance of silence and omission and to the role of religion in the history of (homo)sexualities.

The specter of demographic decline haunted many European nations as they faced mutual competition, growing geopolitical tensions, and dwindling birth rates from the late nineteenth onwards. Amid these developments, the homosexual emerged as a loathsome incarnation of decadence, effeminacy, and infertility, but it did so in some countries more than others. This chapter compares the discourse of demographic decline in France and Belgium. It shows how alarmist declinism was much more pronounced in the former following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Belgium, by contrast, was not a major geopolitical power and far less concerned with military and demographic prowess. Moreover, when the birth rate began tapering off there too, the Catholic Church rather than nationalist voices formulated the country’s response. It did so in a vocabulary specifically calibrated to avoid naming sexuality’s supposed ‘aberrations,’ including homosexuality, so as not to let the genie out of the bottle. The latter, these Catholics argued, had been the fatal mistake of countries where a scientific discourse of ‘perversion’ had been allowed to circulate freely, and where ‘perverts’ and ‘inverts’ had now begun using that very scientific vocabulary in their own defense.

This chapter analyses the utopian possibilities of the British counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural aesthetics and politics responded to contemporary crises in urban planning, ecological destruction, and fractured identities of nation and class – issues that remain pressing in the twenty-first century. Tracing the origins of post-punk utopianism, the chapter argues that the ambiguity of the British counterculture’s utopian possibilities may be explored via an excavation of its class basis. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse, the chapter analyses the 1974 BBC TV play Penda’s Fen. It suggests that Penda’s Fen contains conflicting utopian visions, reflecting the differing class factions that comprised the counterculture and anticipated the neoliberal present of twenty-first-century Britain. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this iconic TV play has lessons to teach us in the contemporary moment. Its class politics, which explores homosexual desire between working-class and middle-class characters, offers a utopian image of cross-class solidarity and sexuality set against the backdrop of a mythic vision of Britain.

Popular histories of the homosexual movement in the so-called Global North have tended to paint a picture of struggle and emancipation of a sexual minority, from the early activist decades of the twentieth century to the decriminalisation of sodomy, the legalisation of gay marriage, and gay adoption. According to this narrative, LGB history is a history of rights fought for and earnt by a politicised people. Yet, as scholars have noted, many of those victories have not resulted in a break with extant ideologies of citizenship, family, or kinship but instead strengthened them, ensuring the survival and reproduction of the body of the state. This chapter draws from theories of the body politic and immunity to argue that the purported victories of the homosexual movement marked a transformation of the state’s own immunological paradigms from immunity-as-defence to immunity-as-tolerance, offering important lessons to other contemporary identity movements.

This chapter examines how Bloomsbury and music intersected at the figure of Edward J. Dent, the Cambridge music scholar. It offers Dent as an embodiment of which Bloomsbury and early twentieth-century musical culture in England and Europe were mutually constitutive, using him as a point for comparison to gauge Bloomsbury’s musical enthusiasm and sensibility. The chapter first surveys existing musical-literary criticism within studies of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. It then explores the overlaps between Dent and Bloomsbury on issues including non-European musical cultures, sexuality, personal relationship, modernist aesthetics, music as a performing art, international politics, education, and state funding. Following a discussion of Dent’s involvement during and after the Second World War in John Maynard Keynes’ work on “national” opera, the chapter ends with Keynes by examining one of his letters to the BBC as an epitome of music’s protean role in Bloomsbury.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889), a volume of lyric poems inspired by the Ancient Greek poet Sappho. In these poems, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper respond to Henry Thornton Wharton’s Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (1885) by forging a creative-critical experiment, attempting to communicate the experience of reading Sappho by using Sapphic fragments (in Greek) as epigraphs and embedding them (in English) in original lyrics. The chapter analyses several poems from Long Ago to show how Michael Field enter into dialogue with Sappho’s voice, enabling them to express their admiration for Sappho’s work, but also to generate their own lyric voice and to forge subtle links between Hellenism and homosexuality, reflecting their own complex identity.

This chapter explores the connections between ‘queer’ theory, which emerged in the 1990s, and postmodernism. Postmodern literary practice, which glories in the ephemeral, the performative, and the fluid and the contradictory, aligns with the spirit of queer theory and its mission to liberate identities dismissed as marginal or non-normative. However, where late-twentieth-century queer writers exposed and challenged homophobic discourses that sought to demonise and deny queer desire (often in direct response to social circumstances, such as the effects of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967 and the Aids epidemic in the 1980s), the Twenty-First Century has become distinguished by an increasing ‘homonormativity’. This does not mark the end of hostile queer-eradicating discourses, but means that these are at least challenged by an empowering counter-narrative. The chapter examines a wide range of postmodern writing, including work by Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, and Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters, and Paul Magrs.

This chapter surveys recent interventions within queer studies on race in American literature to demonstrate how whiteness depends upon sexuality and gender. Queer studies scholarship on the linked history of whiteness and heterosexuality in turn-of-the-century racial science shows how whiteness draws strength through alliance with heterosexuality as normative, natural, and hegemonic. Meanwhile, the deep skepticism in queer and trans studies of heteronormativity and the biological bases of gender helps to excavate the constructedness of whiteness. Finally, recent scholarship on same-sex desire identifies how homoeroticism has affirmed whiteness across centuries of American literature. The essay further explores these approaches with three novels as case studies: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue (2019). These novels demonstrate how gender and sexuality contribute to race-making and how whiteness can conscript heterosexual romance and homoerotic desire into the project of white supremacy.

This chapter analyzes the regulation of sexual desire as one aspect of the process of progressive centralization through which the papacy affirmed its control over the Catholic Church and society across the centuries. While the accusation of homosexual behavior was increasingly associated with forms of religious and social nonconformity, the prohibition of homosexual intercourse became an instrument for encouraging ecclesiastics’ and lay people’s increasing examination of their individual consciences. The control of same-sex desire thus favored the internalization of a disciplinary attitude that hierarchically emanated from the center to the periphery. As a response to the increased visibility of sexual and gender minorities, nowadays the issue of same-sex marriage is demanding increased attention. The issue has never been discussed more thoroughly by popes as it has been in the last decades. Despite some significative epistemological shifts, however, the doctrinal approach towards this matter has remained strikingly consistent, and homosexuality is still condemned by the Catholic Church as a disordered inclination.

This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.