Scholars documenting the international campaign to advance LGBTQ+ rights have established a narrative emphasizing transatlantic contacts between Northern Europe and North America, with significant agency vis-à-vis the global south. David Minto (2014, 2018) described a “Special Relationship” in which developments in British rights to sexual privacy influenced how U.S. homophiles implemented a similar understanding in the U.S. David S. Churchill (2009) explored how American homophile activists’ outreach to European LGBTQ+ rights campaigners deployed Cold War liberal discourses based on psychology and civil rights, and were curious about worldwide LGBTQ+ rights. Leila J. Rupp (2011) detailed how the International Committee for Sexual Equality (ICSE) established networks, strategies, and a vision that maintained alive homosexual liberation despite the homophobic context of the Cold War, adopting an “abeyance structure” that aided and abetted the emergence of modern LGBTQ+ rights organizations.

In this panel, Peter Edelberg documents how Scandinavian LGBTQ+ movements (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) intervened regionally, adopted successful strategies and policies, and presented a united front at international LGBTQ+ organizations. Although much research on transnational homophile and LGBTQ+ activism has focused on the engagement and politicking of gay males across borders, Laura Belmonte’s paper focuses on the obscured role of women activists. Belmonte explores the work of Norwegian LGBTQ+ campaigner Karen-Christine (Kim) Friele (1935-2021), a leader in national and international organizations that decriminalized consensual same-sex relations and granted legal recognition to same-sex unions. Belmonte uses Friele to explore how and why Nordic activists advanced the “homintern” cause. Víctor M. Macías-González and Alessio Ponzio fill in the historiographic gap on the interaction of homophiles in the global north and emerging activists and writers in the global south. Their work on Mexico and Italy in the 1950s is informed by the complexity of transnational networks of “broker activists” explored in Ryan R. Thoreson’s (2014) study documenting the complex “backstage” work of staff at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). Macías-González and Ponzio document how Italians and Latin Americans engaged with, consumed, and redeployed and participated in the production, translation, and distribution of homophile publications. Macías-González focuses on the linguistic, entrepreneurial, and organization skills deployed to publish and circulate—in Spanish and English—materials that were difficult to print, distribute, or import in the U.S., that flowed to U.S., Latin American and European homophiles by way of Mexican and exiled Spanish Republican publishers in Mexico. Ponzio explores the private and business correspondence of Italian and Swiss homophiles to emphasize that our understanding of transnational homophile activism as an instance of homonormativity and propriety must be adjusted in light of correspondence showing significant articulation, discussion, and circulation by homophile editors, writers, and publishers of sexually-explicit images and texts. Panelists draw on correspondence and publications of homophiles and LGBTQ+ activists and organizations in the Americas and Europe. Ponzio and Macías-González uncover how Italian and Latin American readers of homophile publications of the global north were familiar with their content, corresponded with editors, and offered feedback about news items, events, and requested erotic images and stories.