Special Issue Editorial: Nordic LGBTQ Histories

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in Nordic LGBTQ histories, both in and outside academia. In Nordic media, political institutions, and civil societies, narratives about lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer people’s historical experiences circulate each year during the Pride weeks that take place throughout the region. For the most part, these narratives tell a celebratory story about grand historical transformations from social stigmatization to citizen inclusion. The Nordic countries’ world leading role in introducing lesbian and gay registered partnerships in the late 1980s and early 1990s plays a prominent role in these narratives. Alongside later citizen rights for LGBTQ people, such as rights to marriage, adoption, assisted reproduction, and legal sex change, the early introduction of registered partnerships supports a widely held image of the Nordic countries as progressive and liberal welfare states. In line with this image, supporting sexual and gender minorities’ social equality has further become a hallmark of what it means to be a citizen in the Nordic countries, at least within most constituencies. The idea regularly surfaces in contemporary discussions about integration policies, especially in relation to the social status of Muslim immigrants and minority cultures (Kehl, 2018; Nyegaard, 2021; Petersen, 2013).

Nordic book markets show a growing interest in LGBTQ histories. In the last couple of years, several publishing houses have reprinted older novels and literary texts with LGBTQ themes. For instance, in Denmark, the publishing house Ti Vilde Heste has reprinted an early lesbian novel from 1883, Nina by Otto Martin Møller (2021), and Escho recently reprinted a scandalous erotic lesbian novel, Kan Mænd undværes? (Carell, 2021) [Can One Do without Men?], originally published in 1921. More publications are on the way (e.g., Petersen, 2022). The interest has also resulted in an increasing number of activist publications that tell Nordic LGBTQ histories. Recent examples of well-received publications are Lars Henriksen and Chantal Al-Arab’s book Bøssernes Danmarkshistorie 1900–2020 [Gay Men’s History of Denmark 1900–2020] (Henriksen & Al-Arab, 2021), published in 2021, and Swedish Jonas Gardell’s book Ett lyckligare år (Gardell, 2021) [A Happier Year], also from 2021. Both books recount histories of male gay intimacy and love over the course of the twentieth century. In addition, several new lesbian and gay autobiographies have appeared. In 2020, Kristian Tofte Petersen and Ole Kongsdal Jensen published a joint memoir about their lives in the 1970s’ Danish Gay Liberation Front (Petersen og Kongsdal Jensen 2020). In 2022, the activist Vibeke Vasbo finished her memoirs about the Danish Women’s Liberation Movement and the Lesbian Movement (Vasbo, 2022). Last year, the prominent gay historian Arne Nilsson published a second volume of his memoirs about growing up and living as a gay man in Sweden during the last half of the twentieth century. The title of Nilsson’s memoir was Bög på klassresa (Nilsson, 2021) [A Gay Social Climber]. It succeeded a first volume from 2016 (Nilsson, 2016). All these examples reflect not only a growing public interest in Nordic LGBTQ histories, but also a willingness on the part of publishing houses to print publications about the topic.

Studies of LGBTQ histories are furthermore on the rise within Nordic universities. In the academic world, historical studies of sexual and gender minorities often assumed a marginal position, driven by the efforts of individual researchers while receiving relatively little recognition and financial support. In the last couple of years, however, Nordic research councils and private funds have begun to support several large research projects. Among these is NordiQueer: A Nordic Queer Revolution that conducts a comparative examination of Nordic LGBTQI activism from 1948 to 2018. The project received funding from the Swedish Research Council in 2019 and is led by Professor Jens Rydström at Lund University and Professor Tone Hellesund at the University of Bergen. At the same time, Rydström is working on the project When the State Won’t Do: AIDS and Civil Society in Sweden, 1982–2000 together with Lena Lennerhed at Södertörn University, also with funding from the Swedish Research Council. In 2020, Professor Jenny Bergenmar at the University of Gothenburg received funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation for the project QUEERLIT Database: Metadata Development and Searchability for LGBTQI Literary Heritage. The project aims to create a digital database that references all Swedish literary texts, past and present, with LGBTQ themes. In 2021, the Independent Research Fund Denmark funded two historical LGBTQ projects, New Histories of Female Same-Sex Relations 1880 to 2020, led by Professor Rikke Andreassen at Roskilde University, and The Cultural History of AIDS in Denmark, led by Associate Professor Michael Nebeling Petersen at the University of Copenhagen. In Norway, Tone Hellesund in 2022 received funding from The Research Council of Norway for the project Ordinary Lives and Marginal Intimacies in Rural Regions: Contrasting Cultural Histories of Queer Domesticities in Norway, c. 1842–1972. The project examines everyday lives of sexual and gender minorities in Norway during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Finland, Research Director Antu Sorainen is leading the project Protolesbian Life History and Nationalist Sentiment in the 1920s–30s Finland, with funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. It runs from 2019 to 2022. Finally, in Iceland in 2020, Assistant Professor Íris Ellenberger received funding from the Icelandic Research Fund for the project From Sexual Outlaws to Model Citizens: The Relations between Queer Sexualities and Nationality in Iceland 1944–2010. The project is the first large scale research project on Icelandic LGBTQ histories. It focuses on tracing how discourses on sexual and gender minorities have changed from displaying them as sexual outlaws to model citizens. The projects indicate that the study of LGBTQ histories is becoming an officially acknowledged and well-established field of research within Nordic universities.

Today, there is no doubt that knowledge about histories of Nordic sexual and gender minorities constitutes a vibrant field with far reaching potentials both in and outside of academia. With this special issue about Nordic LGBTQ histories, NORA wants to contribute to the development of the field by mapping where it currently stands and by presenting novel research. The remaining part of the introduction will establish a common framework for the special issue by providing a historiographical overview of the scholarly field, as it has evolved since the 1980s, and by pointing to possible avenues for future research.

The birth of the Nordic research field

Academic studies of Nordic LGBTQ histories first emerged in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland in the 1980s and early 1990s. A pioneer was Swedish historian Fredrik Silverstolpe. In 1981, he published En homosexuell arbetares memoarer [The Memoirs of a Homosexual Worker], which consisted of a book-length interview with working-class gay activist, Eric Thorsell (Silverstolpe, 1981). The book provided its readers with an insight into gay life in Sweden from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Denmark, sociologist Henning Bech, folklorist Karin Lützen, and historians Bente Rosenbeck and Wilhelm von Rosen soon followed in Silverstolpe’s footsteps. In the late 1980s, Lützen and Rosenbeck published books about lesbian history and the historical construction of modern femininity (Rosenbeck, 1987). Especially Lützen’s book Hvad hjertet begærer [What the Heart Desires] (Lützen, 1986), from 1986, became an important piece of work, as it examined the historical construction of lesbian desire within nineteenth and twentieth century bourgeois culture. The book was translated into Norwegian and German. In 1993, Wilhelm von Rosen defended his doctoral dissertation Månens kulør [The Colour of the Moon] at the University of Copenhagen, employing a plethora of archival sources, especially court documents, to document the history of male same-sex acts and identities in Denmark from 1628 to 1912 (von Rosen, 1993). At the time, Henning Bech had already published his book Når mænd mødes (Bech, 1987) [When Men Meet] in 1987, where he analysed the sociological foundations for male homosexuality in modern urban life. Bech’s work later won international recognition when it was translated into English in 1997 (Bech, 1997). In Finland, sociologist Kati Mustola played a prominent role in establishing historical LGBTQ studies as a research field. Among other topics, Mustola has written about the Finnish Penal Code of 1889, demonstrating how the criminalization of female same-sex acts was the result of Finnish legislators’ interest in modern theories of homosexuality. She has also studied the gay artist Tom of Finland (see Aurell & Mustola 2006; Mustola, 2000, 2007).

The academic pioneers shared certain similarities. Importantly, they all confined themselves to studying female and male same-sex desire. By adopting this focus, they supplemented the period’s existing activist literature that attempted to recount Nordic lesbians and gays’ historical sufferings and emancipation struggles (e.g., Axgil & Fogedgaard, 1985; Friele, 1985; Holm, 1981). Like their activist colleagues, the academic pioneers wanted to make visible homosexual minority histories. Therefore, they paralleled feminist historians’ writings about women’s history by establishing a history-from-below that drew attention to parts of the human population otherwise invisible within the discipline of (straight) history (Rydström, 2007a, pp. 86–87). This ambition undoubtedly reflected the fact that many of the academic pioneers had strong affiliations with the 1970s’ sexual liberation movements.

Another notable similarity was the commitment to study the history of female and male same-sex desire through a constructionist perspective. Building on the work of scholars like Foucault (1978/1976), the academic pioneers refused to see “lesbian” and “gay” as ahistorical and unchanging identity categories. Instead, they argued that such categories were socially constructed and distinctly modern phenomena. The pioneers’ commitment to such arguments partly stemmed from their participation in a series of conferences in Amsterdam during the 1980s, including the conferences Among Men, Among Women in 1983, and Homosexuality, which Homosexuality? in 1987 (Rydström, 2007a, p. 94). At the conferences, several speakers promoted Foucault’s work and advocated the idea that a homosexual identity only came into existence in the last half of the nineteenth century. Through the early pioneers’ seminal works, these ideas entered the Nordic countries where they laid a constructionist foundation for all later research on Nordic LGBTQ histories.

Years of consolidation

The late 1990s and early 2000s was a period of scholarly consolidation in several Nordic countries. In Sweden, research environments located in Stockholm and Gothenburg played a central role in furthering the academic study of lesbian and gay histories. At Stockholm University in 1999, art historian Göran Söderström completed a multiannual research project about the city’s gay subculture from 1860 to 1960 when he edited the book Sympatiens hemlighetsfulla makt [The Mysterious Power of Sympathy] (Söderström, 1999). The book was a monumental work of more than 700 pages that built on extensive archival research and included contributions from literary scholar Greger Eman, journalist Dodo Parikas, and historians Fredrik Silverstolpe and Jens Rydström. Among other topics, the book explored the highly publicized Kejne and Haiby affairs that sent shockwaves through Swedish politics in the 1950s. Another significant publication from the research project was (Eman’s 1993) study Nya himlar över en ny jord [New Skies above a New Earth], in which he investigated the historical emergence of the homosexual woman in Sweden, especially in relation to first wave feminism. In 2003, Rydström completed his PhD dissertation Sinners and Citizens, where he combined Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts with the ideas of Foucault to examine how a modern paradigm of male homosexuality gradually replaced an older paradigm of sodomy in Sweden during the first half of the twentieth century (Rydström, 2003). Finally, Stockholm University housed literary scholar Kristina Fjelkestam, whose 2002 dissertation Ungkarlsflickor, kamrathustrur och manhaftiga lesbianer (Fjelkestam, 2002) [Bachelor Girls, Wife Companions, and Mannish Lesbians] used literature to position the homosexual woman in interwar Sweden’s changing gender order, for instance, in relation to the emergence of the New Woman.

At Gothenburg University, a vibrant research environment arose around literary scholar Margareta Lindholm and sociologist Arne Nilsson. In 2002, Lindholm and Nilsson published the book En annan stad [A Different City] (Lindholm & Nilsson, 2002), where they explored how gender differences affected homosexual women and men’s life in Gothenburg from 1950 to 1980. Lindholm and Nilsson demonstrated that gender played a decisive role in the city’s homosexual subculture, as it provided women and men with different meeting opportunities and social networks. At the time, Nilsson had already published the book Såna och riktiga karlar [Men who Are “So” and Real Men] in 1998 (Nilsson, 1998). Focusing on the middle of the twentieth century, the book argued that Gothenburg’s gay subculture had not always been structured around a division between homo- and heterosexuality. Instead, the subculture had rested on a cultural demarcation between effeminate guys who were “so” and so-called “real” men. In 2006, Nilsson further completed a book about gay life on the Swedish Atlantic Ocean Liners between Gothenburg and New York (Nilsson, 2006). A third prominent researcher at Gothenburg University was literary scholar Eva Borgström. In 2002, she edited the cross-disciplinary anthology Makalösa kvinnor [Unequalled Women] (Borgström, 2002), whose six contributions explored historical examples of women who had transgressed society’s gender norms by dressing and living as men, at times even marrying other women. The anthology covered the period from the Viking Ages to the modern era.

Although Stockholm and Gothenburg were significant centres for Swedish scholarship on lesbian and gay histories, researchers located outside of these milieus also published new studies. In 2001, historian Svante Norrhem at Umeå University published the book Den hotfulla kärleken [The Threatening Love] (Norrhem, 2001), in which he examined how practices of silence and secrecy had shaped gay and lesbian life in Västerbotten, a rural region in Northern Sweden, from 1950 to 1980. The same year, at Lund University, historian Eva Helen Ulvros wrote the book Sophie Elkan (Ulvos, 2001). The book explored the love triangle that existed between the Swedish author Sophie Elkan, the suffragette Valborg Olander, and the famous Selma Lagerlöf at the turn of the twentieth century.

In Finland, the late 1990s and early 2000s also witnessed a new wave of scholarship on lesbian and gay histories. In 1999, ethnologist Jan Löfström published the book Sukupuoliero agraarikulttuurissa [Gender Difference in the Agrarian Culture] (Löfström, 1999), in which he attempted to explain the silence around male and female homosexuality that dominated nineteenth century rural Finland. Inspired by Thomas Laqueur’s ideas about a “One-Sex Model,” Löfström explained this silence by pointing to the low significance that rural culture attributed to gender differences, making questions of sexual preference largely irrelevant to definitions of aberrant and normal gender behaviour. Soon after, in 2002, the anthropologist Tuula Juvonen supplemented Löfström’s work by using oral history interviews to examine homo- and bisexual women and men’s lives in Tammerfors during the 1950s and 1960s. Juvonen presented her work in the 2002 book Varjoelämää ja julkisia salaisuuksia [Private Lives, Public Secrets] (Juvonen, 2002). Finally, in 2005, Antu Sorainen became the first Finnish researcher with a PhD in gender studies when she defended the dissertation Rikollisia sattumalta? [Accidental Criminals?] (Sorainen, 2005). The dissertation examined the legal prosecution of female homosexuality in Finland from 1889 to 1971, focusing on the surge of trials that took place in Eastern Finland in the 1950s.

Another notable event in the consolidation of the Nordic research field took place in Norway. In the 1980s and early 1990s, no Norwegian researchers made significant studies of lesbian and gay histories. The lack of research, however, came to an end in the early 2000s. Among the Norwegian pioneers was criminologist Anette Halvorsen Aarset whose 2000 book Rettslig regulering av homoseksuell praksis 1687–1902 [Juridical Regulations of Homosexual Acts 1687–1902] (Aarset 2000) focused on the legal exemption of female same-sex acts in Norway’s older penal codes. In 2003, ethnologist Tone Hellesund added to Aarset’s work with the book Kapitler fra singellivets historie [Chapters from the History of Single Life] (Hellesund, 2003). Hellesund’s book studied the history of the Norwegian spinster throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on bourgeois culture. Historian Martin Skaug Halsos studied the legal prosecution of sex between Norwegian men from 1902 to 1972 in his book §213 i almindelig borgerlig straffelov av 1902 (Halsos, 2001) [§ 213 in the Civil Penal Code from 1902]. Publishing the book in 2001, Halsos argued that Norway de facto decriminalized sex between adult men in 1902, 70 years before formal legalization, because legal authorities only deployed the country’s penal statutes to prosecute sex with minors. In 2008, anthropologist Hans Wiggo Kristiansen added new perspectives to the Norwegian research field with the book Masker og motstand [Masks and Resistance] (Kristiansen, 2008). The book examined the culture of discretion that dominated male homosexuality in Norway during the interwar period. Finally, in 2010, historian Runar Jordåen defended the PhD dissertation Inversjon og perversjon (Jordåen, 2010) [Inversion and Perversion], in which he explored the psychiatric and psychological construction of homosexuality in Norway prior to the 1960s. All these studies helped bring Norwegian research on level with scholarship in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark.

Compared to Sweden, Finland, and Norway, Danish researchers produced relatively few notable studies of lesbian and gay histories in the late 1990s (but see Søland, 1998). In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, several new studies that drew on queer theoretical perspectives began to emerge, which will be discussed below.

Many of the above-mentioned works shared notable similarities with the first studies in the research field, such as an interest in lesbian and gay histories, a desire to write minority histories from-below, and the use of a constructionist approach. In addition, the works resembled their predecessors by focusing almost exclusively on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analytical focus undoubtedly reflected the theoretical foundations of the field. By seeing the homosexual as a social figure that belonged exclusively to the modern era, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became the obvious focus points to researchers who wanted to examine this figure in a historical perspective. In the 1990s, Swedish historians Jonas Liliequist and Eva Österberg partly rectified the singular epochal focus by exploring the massive silence that surrounded practices of male sodomy in early-modern Sweden (Liliequist, 1995, 1998: Österberg, 1996). Likewise, in 2017, Swedish historian Henric Bagerius shed new light on the pre-modern era with the book Olydnadens söner [The Sons of Insubordination] (Bagerius, 2017), where he studied the political potentials of male sodomy charges in Medieval Sweden and Europe. To this day, however, studies of Nordic LGBTQ histories are heavily oriented towards the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This orientation naturally leaves space for more studies of earlier historical periods, even if these periods were unfamiliar with our modern LGBTQ identity categories.

The introduction of queer theory

Queer theory was introduced as a poststructuralist theoretical framework in the US in the early 1990s. Building on the now classical works of Butler (1990, 1993), Sedgwick (1985, 1990), Fuss (1991), and Warner (1990), much queer theoretical thinking initially attempted to deconstruct established categories of gender and sexuality, and to explore the social construction of heteronormativity. Since then, queer theory has developed in many directions. For instance, in the last two decades, researchers like Duggan (2003) have conducted critical studies of the homonormative logics that permeate contemporary lesbian and gay subcultures in the US, while Puar (2007) and Eng (2010) have examined the racialization of desire and homonational imaginaries accompanying white homosexuals’ transformation into full American citizens. Furthermore, queer theoretical thinkers have begun to show interest in affect studies (Ahmed 2004; Cvetkovich 2003; Sedgwick, 2003), just as trans studies have arisen in close dialogue with the theoretical framework (Stryker, 2004). At varying degrees of significance, all these analytical perspectives have affected the study of Nordic LGBTQ histories.

The Nordic introduction of queer theory took place in Sweden in the late 1990s. A series of conferences held at the University of Gothenburg between 1995 and 2002 played a prominent role in spreading knowledge about the theoretical framework. The organizers of the first conference, with more than 200 participants, were Margareta Lindholm, Arne Nilsson, and Eva Borgström (Rydström, 2007a, p. 95). In addition, many Nordic researchers learned about queer theory through a special issue in Lambda Nordica, edited by sociologist Don Kulick in 1996 (Rydström, 2007a, p. 95). From these starting points, queer theory slowly began to influence researchers with an interest in Nordic LGBTQ histories, including some of the researchers just mentioned (e.g., Borgström, 2002; Hellesund, 2003; Sorainen, 2005). When looking at the first decades in the new millennium, it is possible to detect several ways in which the theoretical framework has affected the Nordic research field.

One prominent intellectual development that queer theory has brought to the field is an increased interest in exploring and criticizing the heteronormative social order that has surrounded female and male homosexuality in the modern era. In the early 2000s, this interest manifested itself in a series of studies that attempted to queer the Nordic literary canons. In Denmark, literary scholar Dag Heede published the books Det umenneskelige (Heede, 2001) [The Inhuman] in 2001 and Herman Bang (Heede, 2003) in 2003, where he explored hitherto unexamined motives of gender transgression and homoerotic desire in works by the famous Danish authors Karen Blixen and Herman Bang. In 2005, he queered the national icon Hans Christian Andersen (Heede, 2005). Heede’s colleague, Mons Bissenbakker conducted similar readings of Danish authors like Johannes V. Jensen and Klaus Rifbjerg in his book Begreb om Begær (Bissenbakker, 2005) [Grasping Desire], from 2005. A common feature in Heede’s and Bissenbakker’s books was the ambition to illuminate, and challenge, dominant heteronormative readings of the canonical authors, rather than make visible sexual minority histories.

In the same vein in Sweden, theatre and gender studies scholar Tiina Rosenberg analysed queer leakages in theatre and popular culture. Her 2000 book Byxbegär (Rosenberg, 2000) [Trouser Desire] investigated the discursive meanings and erotic tensions surrounding the so-called breeches roles in theatre history, when actresses performed male characters. Two years later, in 2002, she gained national fame with her book Queerfeministisk agenda (Rosenberg, 2002) [Queer Feminist Agenda], a combined introduction to queer theory and a handbook for queer feminist action. Her 2006 book L-ordet (Rosenberg, 2006) [The L-Word] contained a comprehensive overview of lesbian history, and Bögarnas Zarah (Rosenberg, 2009) [Zarah of the Fairies], from 2009, analysed the queer attraction of the diva Zarah Leander. Others were to follow. In 2007, Swedish literary scholar Ann-Sofie Lönngren shed new light on the works of August Strindberg in her dissertation, Att röra en värld [Touching a World] (Lönngren, 2007), as she explored the male homoeroticism that infused the many love triangles in his texts. In 2008, Eva Borgström added to the critique of the heteronormative foundations of literary scholarship with the book Kärlekshistoria (Borgström, 2008) [A History of Love]. The book explored expressions of female same-sex intimacy and desire in the lives and works of several nineteenth century Swedish authors, such as Fredrika Bremer, Mathilda Roos, and August Strindberg. This effort she contined in Berättelser om det förbjudna (Borgström, 2016) [Stories of the Forbidden], from 2016.

Queer theoretical critiques of heteronormativity have also inspired a few researchers outside of literary studies to deconstruct the history of heterosexuality. A prominent example of this development is Swedish historian of ideas Pia Laskar. In 2005, Laskar published the book Heterosexualitetens historia [The History of Heterosexuality] (Laskar, 2005), in which she used sex handbooks from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to study the historical construction of modern heterosexuality. The same year, Swedish historian Sara Edenheim completed her PhD dissertation Begärets lagar (Edenheim, 2005) [The Laws of Desire]. The dissertation examined how official government reports considering legislation on homosexuality, transsexualism, and intersexualism had contributed to the construction of a cisheteronormative social order in Sweden between 1934 and 2001. Finally, in 2018, Danish historian Niels Nyegaard followed in Laskar’s and Edenheim’s footsteps with the PhD dissertation Perverse forbrydere og gode borgere [Perverse Criminals and Good Citizens] (Nyegaard, 2018). Nyegaard used early-twentieth century newspapers to explore the heteronormative foundations of modern Danish citizenship.

By uncovering histories of heterosexuality, Laskar, Edenheim, and Nyegaard have somewhat abandoned the minority focus integral to studies of Nordic LGBTQ histories. There are, however, other researchers who have used queer theoretical perspectives to explore sexual and gender minority histories. These researchers include, for instance, Danish historian Peter Edelberg, whose 2012 PhD dissertation Storbyen trækker (Edelberg, 2012) [The City Pulls] deployed queer theory’s anti-essentialist thinking to deconstruct the numerous constructions of male homosexuality that gave rise to massive moral panics in Denmark in the 1950s. Likewise, in 2013, Swedish ethnologist Ingeborg Svensson published the book Liket i garderoben (Svensson, 2013) [The Corpse in the Closet], where she studied how heterosexual norms shaped the funerals of gay men who had died of aids in the 1980s, for example, by closeting some of them in death. Finally, in 2014, Finnish historian Sandra Hagman completed the PhD dissertation Seven Queer Brothers (Hagman, 2014) that studied the legal prosecution of male same-sex acts in Finland from 1894 to 1971. Like Edelberg, Hagman used the anti-essentialist thinking inherent in queer theory to explore the multiple definitions of male homosexuality that supported the changing waves of de- and increasing police control with male same-sex acts in the last century.

A second major development related to the introduction of queer theory has been the emergence of studies exploring trans histories. The significance of this development cannot be stressed enough, since it has entailed a radical expansion of the traditional focus on lesbian and gay histories. One of the first researchers to study trans histories was Finnish political scientist, Jan Wickman. In the 2001 PhD dissertation Transgender Politics, Wickman used magazines and mailing lists from Finland’s trans communities to study how they had constructed gender in both binary and non-binary ways throughout the 1990s (Wickman, 2001). In 2017, Danish historian Sølve M. Holm made another significant contribution to the field with their PhD dissertation Fleshing out the Self. Holm (2017) analysed medical records from trans and intersex persons, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, with a particular focus on how such individuals negotiated questions of identity and cultural intelligibility with their doctors, families, and friends. Also in 2017, Swedish literary scholar Sam Holmqvist defended the PhD dissertation Transformationer (Holmqvist, 2017) [Transformations], that used Swedish novels to examine descriptions of people who shifted from and transgressed their assigned sex in the nineteenth century. Finally, a few historical trans studies have come out in Norway in 2021. In the anthology Frihet, Likhet og Mangfold [Freedom, Equality, and Diversity], edited by legal scholars Anne Hellum and Anniken Sørlie, historians Sigrid Sandal and Ketil Slagstad contributed with chapters on Norwegian doctors’ diagnoses and medical treatments of trans and intersex persons during the second half of the twentieth century (Sandal 2021) (Slagstad, 2021). Although these studies are still relatively few in comparison to the voluminous literature about lesbian and gay histories, they constitute an important expansion of the Nordic research field. Much work remains to be done on the history of trans and intersex persons.

Finally, queer theory has furthered a third notable development in the Nordic research field by making researchers more interested in the intersections between sexuality, race, and national belonging. So far, only a few researchers have pursued this analytical perspective. One is Danish gender researcher Michael Nebeling Petersen. In the 2013 PhD dissertation Somewhere, over the rainbow (Petersen, 2013), Petersen explored the homonormative politics and homonational imaginaries that had accompanied the introduction of lesbian and gay rights to marriage, adoption, and assisted reproduction in Denmark from 1989 to 2012. Petersen argued that the rights had furthered ideas about Denmark as a queer utopia while contributing to the stigmatization of non-white Muslim immigrants. A couple of years later, in 2017, American historian Andrew Shield supplemented Petersen’s work with the book Immigrants in the Sexual Revolution (Shield, 2017). The book studied how Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands and Denmark perceived and, perhaps more surprising, participated actively in the 1970s’ women’s and gay liberation movements.

Although queer theory undoubtedly has transformed the study of Nordic LGBTQ histories in several ways, the theoretical framework has also meet critique. In 2006, both Tuula Juvonen and sociologist Joanna Mizielinska published articles in the Finnish journal SQS where they criticized queer theory for not being able to capture the distinct experiences that characterize LGBTQ histories in the Nordic region (Juvonen, 2006) (Mizielinska, 2006). The problem was, according to the two scholars, that queer theory’s foundation in lesbian and gay metropolitan subcultures in the US made it difficult to apply the theoretical framework in studies of Nordic societies, because these societies had a distinct welfare state model and large, sparsely populated rural regions. Furthermore, in 2007, Swedish historian Andréaz Wasniowski defended the PhD dissertation Den korrekta avvikelsen [The Correct Deviation], in which he explicitly rejected to use queer theory for fear of analytical distortion, implying that the theoretical framework would lead his analysis to certain predefined conclusions (Wasniowski, 2007). Instead, Wasniowski chose to conduct an empirically driven study of how the Swedish lesbian and gay organization RFSL attempted to discipline and homogenize its members from 1950 to 1970. In this manner, not all Nordic researchers have greeted queer theory with equal measures of enthusiasm.

It is important to remember that not all researchers are interested in conducting their studies with an extensive use of theory. In the last two decades, there have been researchers who, like Wasniowski, have contributed to the Nordic research field through their archival research, studying hitherto unexplored empirical sources. Danish historian Karl Peder Pedersen’s 2021 biography Poul og kærligheden [Poul and Love] (Pedersen, 2021), about the late-nineteenth century homosexual intellectual and activist Poul Andræ, is a good recent example of such a contribution.

Comparisons across the Nordic countries

Despite their many mutual differences, almost all the mentioned studies have one shared characteristic: They have assumed a national perspective and studied elements of Nordic LGBTQ histories within a single country. This kind of methodological nationalism stands in contrast to another development that has taken place within the research field in recent decades, namely the emergence of studies that apply a comparative perspective across the Nordic countries.

One of the first comparative studies appeared in Danish historian Signild Vallgårda’s book Folkesundhed som politik [Public Health as Politics], from 2003 (Valgårda, 2003). Vallgårda compared public health policies in Denmark and Sweden focusing, among other historical cases, on the aids crisis in the 1980s. She demonstrated that the two countries developed quite different responses to the crisis, as Denmark formulated policies centred on voluntary testing and state cooperation with civil society, while Sweden instigated measures of forced quarantine and shutdowns of gay saunas. In addition to Vallgårda, especially Jens Rydström has been engaged in studying Nordic LGBTQ histories from a comparative perspective. In 2007, Rydström joined forces with Kati Mustola as editors of the book Criminally Queer (Rydström & Mustola, 2007). The book provided, for the very first time, a complete overview of the Nordic countries’ juridical regulations of female and male same-sex acts from 1842 to 1999. A few years later, in 2011, Rydström published another comparative study in Odd Couples (Rydström, 2011). Here, he examined the historical introduction of lesbian and gay marriage across the Nordic region.

Obviously, the emergence of these comparative studies has not made all other researchers abandon a national perspective when studying Nordic LGBTQ histories. The comparative studies have, however, played an important role in furthering scholarly discussions about similarities and differences across the region. Much future work awaits in getting to the bottom of these discussions.

Possibilities for new research

Today, academic studies of Nordic LGBTQ histories have covered several analytical themes, geographies, actors, and events. Still, as the new Nordic research projects mentioned at the beginning of this introduction indicate, many research questions remain unanswered. This naturally calls for a consideration of the topics that need further exploration.

As the historiographical overview has suggested, several topics present themselves to researchers who want to explore hitherto unexamined aspects of Nordic LGBTQ histories. We still do not have much knowledge about the pre-modern era, and comparative Nordic studies are also relatively few. More importantly, the research field is heavily oriented towards studying lesbian and gay histories, though studies of trans histories have been on the rise in recent years. There is no doubt that Nordic trans histories, to say nothing about bi and queer histories, is an area where the research field has a huge potential for growth. It is furthermore adamant that such histories become integrated into the field if it is to live up to its intension of covering the whole LGBTQ umbrella. It will be interesting to see how the research field develops in this regard in coming years.

The above-mentioned examples do not constitute a complete list of possible areas for future research. This introduction will end with presenting another theme that also needs more attention, thus setting the scene for the following articles.

So far, researchers have mostly focused on what might be called the national centres in the Nordic region: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Consequently, few studies have shed light on the region’s peripheries, including Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the Baltic countries (but see Benediktsdóttir, 2019; Rydström, 2007b; Thorvaldsdóttir, 2007). This imbalance in geographical focus is unfortunate because it impedes researchers from exploring sexual and gender minority histories across the entire Nordic region, and because knowledge of peripheral societies and histories may create a better understanding of the distinct experiences that characterize the national centres. Today’s research field needs more studies that map out the historical events, actors, and trajectories that have shaped LGBTQ histories in the peripheries of the Nordic region.

This special issue addresses the current imbalance between Nordic centres and peripheries by presenting two articles that explore LGBTQ histories from Iceland. Hereby, the issue contributes to the process of bringing knowledge about this part of the North-Atlantic periphery on level with the national centres. In addition, the special issue includes one article that focuses on Sweden, thus maintaining that new knowledge about LGBTQ histories in the Nordic centres is still needed.

Contributions

The issue opens with “Panopticon in the Urinal? The Stockholm homo-sex Commission C. 1950–1965”, in which Swedish historian Andrés Brink Pinto examines the policing of male same-sex practices in post-war Stockholm. Pinto argues that urban police control served several purposes, as it produced knowledge about homosexual identities and spaces, rendered homosexual identities and practices visible, and regulated homosexual uses of the urban landscape. Pinto’s article makes a significant contribution to the existing international research that has tended to study the historical policing of male homosexuality in Anglo-American cities.

While Pinto’s study examines a national centre in the Nordic region, Icelandic literary scholar Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir in “Sódó Reykjavík: How Homosexuality was Brought into Discourse in Early and Mid-Twentieth Century Iceland” turns her attention to the North-Atlantic periphery. Benediktsdóttir explores how homosexuality as a concept and social phenomenon gradually became part of Icelandic society in the first half of the twentieth century, and how this process was embedded in wider patterns of social modernization. Benediktsdóttir makes a significant contribution to the existing scholarship that have examined the homosexual’s historical birth in the Nordic region’s national centres.

In the third article “Into the Enclosure: Collective Memory and Queer History in the Icelandic Documentary ‘People like That’”, Icelandic historian Thorsteinn Vilhjálmsson continues the Icelandic focus by exploring a different topic. He discusses contemporary celebratory narratives about the national inclusion of Icelandic homosexuals in the 1990s by presenting new stories that foreground experiences of social disciplining and homogenization. In this manner, Vilhjálmsson problematizes Iceland’s new self-image as a queer utopia and challenges the ways in which historical LGBTQ narratives circulate in contemporary Nordic societies.

The special issue editors would like to thank the authors for sharing their important work and knowledge and, not least, the reviewers for their careful readings and constructive criticisms. Thank you!