LGBT+ and even queer history has often been portrayed through the lens of ‘methodological nationalism’, i.e. taking the nation as the unreflecting framework for historical dynamics and development, with a few notable exceptions (Adams 1995, Thoreson 2014, Rupp 2019, Belmonte 2021). Actually, the framework often narrows down to a single, ever-so-prominent, city, e.g. Gay New York (Chauncey 1994), Queer London (Houlbrook 2006), Gay Berlin (Beachy 2015), or Stockholm (Söderström et al. 1999). Scholars have learned much from such a national or local study, but some dynamics disappear out of sight, especially when these frameworks are not openly acknowledged or justified.
This paper will discuss what happens when we take a transnational point of view on LGBT+ history. Using the Scandinavian LGBT+ movements from their beginning in 1948 through to the present day, I will show the pros and mostly cons of competitive metaphors: who was first? who was best? who is in front now?, versus the transnational angle that emphasizes the flow of people, ideas, magazines, forms of activism and political results.
The paper explores how activists in Denmark, Sweden and Norway actively interfered in each other’s countries, and to what ends, and also at how political successes in one Scandinavian country had the tendency to spill over into the two other (and eventually all over the Nordic region). I will also emphasize the degree to which activists in any Scandinavian country never worked alone, but in international organizations such as the I.C.S.E., the (forgotten) International Organization for the Integration of Homosexual Behavior, IGA/ILGA, the Nordic Council of Homosexuals, and today, primarily, ILGA-Europe.