Transnational Homophile Organizing: The International Committee for Sexual Equality

This paper presents the history of the International Committee for Sexual Equality (ICSE), founded in Amsterdam in 1951, as what sociologists call an “abeyance structure.”  As an exclusive, centralized group that relied on the commitment of a small group of men, the group brought together national homophile organizations from Western and Northern Europe and the United States and kept alive the ideal of organizing for the rights of sexual minorities across national borders, connecting the World Congress for Sexual Reform in interwar Europe to the emergence of the contemporary transnational gay and lesbian movement.  The ICSE nurtured a transnational homophile collective identity and took up transnational activism—including requesting the United Nations to include the rights of sexual minorities in the Declaration of Human Rights—in an effort to change repressive laws and foster the notion of homosexuality as natural and acceptable.

The paper is based on the archives of the ICSE, housed in The Hague, and details a history that is little known.  The history of the group reveals continuities in transnational organizing and provides new perspective on the origins of homophile movements.