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Foreword - Chris Carter

As a teenager with a growing awareness of my sexual orientation, I had almost no positive gay role models with which to identify. The almost total absence of gay people in New Zealand public life meant that young men and women like me were made only too aware thathomosexuals were regarded as sick and perverted, with no place in mainstream society.

Urgency and Strategy - Bert Boelaars

A hundred years ago, openness about sexuality was unthinkable anywhere in the world, especially when it came to homosexuality. This word has been in use since 1869. The Austrian/ Hungarian writer Károly Mária Benkert (1824-1882), who wrote under the pseudonym, K.M. Kertbeny, deserves, as far as is known, credit for being the first person to use the psychiatricterm homosexual.

Act Naturally - Judith Schuyf

Thirty years ago it was still very normal to call homosexuality ‘homophilia’. It concerned a group of people you had to have ‘understanding’ and ‘acceptance’ of. But, as the above quotation indicates, homosexuality changed during that thirty-year period, from something thatonly concerned ‘other people’ to something that can actually exist in everybody.

Homosexuality as Touchstone - Rob Tielman

In the past forty years I’ve been intensively busy with the liberation of gays and lesbians. As a humanist, I often ran into resistance from christian circles. Nevertheless, there’s been much improvement. Can these experiences be useful in dealing with hostility towards homosexualityin the Netherlands, which has become increasingly visible in muslim circles?

‘For Me Both Sides are a Struggle’ - Linda Terpstra and Mariette Hermans

Gunar (26) lives with her family in a city in the west of the Netherlands. She’s a security guard working night shifts. That gives her the freedom to see her girlfriend, a woman you wouldn’t initially think was her type. She has four sisters and two brothers. Her parentsdivorced after an unhappy marriage caused by her father’s violence, drug addiction and adultery.

Of all Times, in all Cultures - Leontine Bijleveld

Even just to admire the 250 or so beautiful illustrations, Robert Aldrich’s Gay Life and Culture: A World History, is worth examining. The red boots on the cover, a detail from Rudolf Schlichter’s painting, ‘Women’s Pub’ of 1925, subtly demonstrates that ‘gay’ is a loose term that covers a range of meanings. Women and men all over the world have always felt attracted to members of the same sex emotionally and/or physically, but in the course of history there has always been a huge variety in...

Homophobia - Leontine Bijleveld

Homophobia is a phenomenon that the reader of this publication will keep encountering. Byrne Fone, US pioneer in the field of Gay Studies, has devoted an extensive book to this theme in 2000 entitled Homophobia: a History. This book begins its historical overview with the theory that few social groups escape the consequences of prejudice. Homophobia is the last accepted prejudice, at least in modern western society, where racism has been rejected,anti-Semitism condemned and women-hatred has...

Lesbian Identity and Sexual Rights in the South - Saskia Wieringa

Lesbian women, or women in same-sex relations as I commonly call them, are among the most abjected people in the South. Their histories are frequently denied them, under the pretext that lesbianism is a western invention. Their citizenship is at times virtually suspended, as in cases where it is said that homosexuality is un-African. Their sexuality is variously classified as unnatural, sick (so psychiatric treatment is prescribed) or deviant. Yet women’s same-sex relations have existed in m...

The Emancipation of Transgenders - Thomas Wormgoor

In the gay emancipation Statement released in November 2007 by the Dutch Department of Education, Culture and Science, attention has been paid to transgenders for the first time in history. COC Nederland deserves credit for this. The COC involved transgender organisations in preparing the joint advice concerning homosexual emancipation that was presented to the government after its first hundred days in office. The COC also set out to representthe interests of transgenders.

Queering Politics, Desexualizing the Mind - Robert J. Davidson

This article addresses the identity politics that serve as a base for collective action for many groups active in fighting for LGBT rights and looks at queer theory and queer politics as an alternative to identity based politics. Queer theory is discussed through the work of several prominent queer theorists, as well as in comparison with post-colonial theories. Some suggestionsare then made for undertaking a queer politics.

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