Toward an Intimate Atlantic: Transnational Precursors to Postwar Homophile Activism

Who or what laid the circuits for the simultaneous rise—and strikingly transnational bent—of Western homophile activism that followed World War II? This paper offers one route through that question by delving into the transatlantic dimensions of sexual politics in the first half of the Twentieth Century. It probes overlaps between the internationalism of prewar reform movements and the border-troubling transnationalism of postwar homophile outlooks. But it also ranges more widely to consider other cultural flows and mobile social formations that helped shape this later activism.

Paul Gilroy’s evocative concept of a “Black Atlantic” provides a starting point for my own exploration of whether an “Intimate Atlantic” might prove enabling for historians of sexuality. The transatlantic circulations of the Wilde scandal, of Weimar libertinism, of Harlem’s avant-gardism, and of Lost Generation sex tourism all suggest vectors challenging national taboos. And to varying degrees each registered in the pages of postwar homophile magazines. But less well known transatlantic adventures—such as the US travels of a Hungarian exile who wrote London’s first major gay novel—also provided material for the subsequent movement, and this paper pursues these undercurrents alongside major flows.

Among my central questions is whether interwar sexual reform agitators—often following pronounced transatlantic trajectories themselves—should be considered direct forebears to organized postwar homophile activism? For decades now historians have argued that Progressive-era reformers throughout the North Atlantic pioneered distinctively internationalist networks of exchange, but such scholars have not always been attentive to the implications for sexual politics. Though others, happily, have examined the “Atlantic Crossings” of suffrage and sexology, much remains to be conceptualized in bridging the worlds either side of 1945. Emphasizing the special relationships between local marginality and distant connection, this paper’s exploration of an “Intimate Atlantic” will perform some of that work.