Sódó Reykjavík: How Homosexuality was Brought into Discourse in Early and Mid-Twentieth Century Iceland

ABSTRACT

This article explores how homosexuality, as a concept and phenomenon, became in the early and mid-twentieth century a part of Icelanders’ vocabulary, public discourse, and conception of the world. To use Michel Foucault’s terms, the following discussion focuses on how homosexuality was brought into discourse in Iceland and asks if that process was concurrent with the neighbouring countries or unique for Iceland, a rural island on the periphery of Europe. Building on media discourse, memoirs and personal recollections it seeks to shed light on how Icelanders’ awareness of (predominantly male) homosexuality and the existence of homosexual men became more public and vocalized, and how this new public awareness and formulation of male homosexuality was an integral part of the modernization of Icelandic society. The findings show that while it was rarely addressed in the first half of the twentieth century, public discussion of homosexuality increased significantly around 1950 and included grave concerns regarding the existence of male homosexuals in Reykjavík. This suggests that (male) homosexuality was in this period becoming a more prominent part of Icelanders’ vocabulary and conception of the world.

KEYWORDS:

• history of homosexuality
• queer history
• Iceland
• modernisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term discourse is used here, as in Foucault’s writing, not primarily as a linguistic concept but referring to “system of representations,” or the practice of representing knowledge about a particular topic. See Foucault (1998) and Hall (2001, pp. 72–73).

2. It should be noted that the results are neither definite, since not all periodicals have been added to the archive, nor infallible. The word search option on Timarit.is does not read all letters nor words that are divided between lines. Moreover, the words sometimes have other meanings than “homosexuality,” such as sódóma and sódómíti that often refer to the Bible and the city of Sodom. The results do, however, give an idea of how often homosexuality was discussed in the media and give an insight into the discourses used to described same-sex sexual acts and the people who performed them.

3. See also other important studies that have been conducted in Norway and Denmark: Jordåen (2010); Kristiansen (2008); Rosen von (1993); Edelberg (2012).

4. This article is based on the second chapter in my PhD thesis, Facing the Heartbeat of the World: Elías Mar, Queer Performativity and Queer Modernism, defended on 1 November 2019 at the University of Iceland and University College Dublin. See Benediktsdóttir (2019). I want to thank the reviewers and editors of NORA for their very helpful comments and criticism and close reading of the text.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Icelandic Centre for Research [110261-0061].