“When Will You Publish Pictures of Men with Stiff Weenies?” Swedish Straight Porn Magazines as Queer Forums, 1956–86

LGBT historiography most often focused on biographical accounts, legal contexts or LGBT movement history. Less attention has been directed to commercial initiatives and their importance for networking and identity building, sometimes in dialogue with straight but marginalized sexualities. Swedish porn publisher Kurt Hugo Nilsson (a.k.a. Curt Hson, 1924–1988) produced a number of porn magazines that were read and relished throughout Scandinavia from the 1950s into the 1980s. His targeted audience consisted mainly of straight men, but his general sex-liberationist agenda allowed him to invite a broader readership, and he was also invited to talk by young left-leaning liberals, motors of the sexual revolution in Sweden.

The flagships of his production, porn magazines Piff (1956–1986), Raff (1957–1982), and Paff (1962–1982) contained not only pornographic straight novels and erotic pictures of women. It gradually involved increasingly sexualized images of men that obviously drew the attention of gay men, who requested more advanced poses. More importantly, it provided a forum for discussion, advise and contact in their columns, attracting men and women, straight and gay, and it also served as a contact forum for the first transvestite organization in Sweden, Club Transvestia, an offspring of the U.S. organization founded by Virginia Price (1912–2009).

Combining text and visual analysis, the paper proposes to discuss 1) the gradual broadening of the magazines’ target groups; 2) developments towards more explicit sexual imagery and rougher sexual fantasies; 3) a changing legal and cultural context leading up to and beyond the release of visual pornography in Sweden in 1971.