Immigrants in The Sexual Revolution - Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe

Genders and Sexualities in History
Series Editors
John Arnold
King’s College, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
Sean Brady
Birkbeck College, University of London
London, UK
Joanna Bourke
Birkbeck College, University of London
London, UK
Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, aims to
accommodate and foster new approaches to historical research in the fields
of genders and sexualities. The series will promote world-class scholarship
that concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities,
religions/religiosity, civil society, class formations, politics and war.
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have often been treated as
disconnected fields, while in recent years historical analyses in these two
areas have synthesized, creating new departures in historiography. By
linking genders and sexualities with questions of religion, civil society,
politics and the contexts of war and conflict, this series will reflect recent
developments in scholarship, moving away from the previously dominant
and narrow histories of science, scientific thought and legal processes. The
result brings together scholarship from contemporary, modern, early
modern, medieval, classical and non-Western history to provide a diachro-
nic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and
sexualities in history.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15000
Andrew DJ Shield
Immigrants
in the Sexual
Revolution
Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe
Andrew DJ Shield
Roskilde University
Roskilde, Denmark
Genders and Sexualities in History

ISBN 978-3-319-49612-2 ISBN 978-3-319-49613-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49613-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941728
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover image © Emmy Verhoeff in Hardinxsveld, 1963
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Abraham Lincoln Jaffe (1884–1972), an immigrant with a dream
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Dagmar Herzog, I thank you for your ceaseless support since 2010,
when you welcomed me into your office with enthusiasm and wisdom
about politics, culture, psychoanalysis, and everything in between. You
squeeze the most into every conversation. I am truly grateful and in awe of
your rigor, and your ability to see the forest for the trees. To Jan Willem
Duyvendak, I am grateful for your generosity, your insights on immigra-
tion and social movements, and for the zeal with which you seek the
historical in the sociological, the sociological in the historical.
In Denmark: to Rikke Andreassen, who has provided tremendous
intercultural perspectives; to my network at Roskilde University; to my
classmates, Fahad and Abdel-Basset, who translated and discussed parts of
Fremmedarbejderbladet with me; to Jens Rydström, Michael Nebeling
Petersen, Peter Edelberg, Christina Hee Pedersen, Mehmet Ümit Necef,
Helle Rytkønen; and to the staff at the Danish Royal Library, Kvinfo,
LGBT Denmark, the Immigrant Museum: Mange tak for de hyggelige
tider!
In the Netherlands: to Gert Hekma, my first teacher of sexuality
studies, and Mattias Duyves; to Theo van der Meer, who arranged many
warm gatherings; to Paul Mepschen, Markus Balkenhol, Marlou Schrover;
to the librarians at IHLIA and the IISG; to Wayne Modest, Rivke Jaffe and
the Jaffe(-Klusman) family: Dank jullie zeer voor de gezellige tijden!
At the CUNY Graduate Center: to Randolph Trumbach, whose
insights on the 1700s inspired much thought about the centuries to
follow; to Julia Sneeringer, whose enthusiasm for post-war European
subcultures overflows; to David Troyansky, who stepped up to the plate
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
at the eleventh hour; to Nicholas Boston, who lives in the present; to Beth
Baron and Samira Hajj, who engaged with Middle Eastern perspectives
and Arabic texts (shukran likum!); to Julie Skurski and Talal Asad, for their
anthro-historical acumen; to Helena Rosenblatt, Andreas Killen, David
Hurewitz, Mary Gibson, Marilyn Weber; to the rising historians Megan
Brown, Chelsea Schields, and Chris Ewing; to the librarians at Mina Rees
and the NYPL: thank you all for your warmness!
Additional gratitude to Mari Jo Buhle, my mentor at Brown, who
taught me that archives are everywhere; to the remarkable historians
Todd Shepard and Judith Surkis; and to the public schools of
Lexington, Massachusetts.
The cover photo features the talented Emmy Verhoeff (b. Malang,
Dutch East Indies, 1939) on the roadside of Hardinxsveld, 1963; special
thanks to the photographer Coen Busscher, to Emmy for sharing her
collection, and to IISG in Amsterdam for providing a full-resolution
scan as part of the Migrant Photo Archive.
To my grandmother Judith Jaffe Juster, my mother Diane Juster, and
my sister Emily A.J. Shield—for more than living the histories of
Depression-era Brooklyn, Paris 1968, and mix-tapes—and to Chris,
Henry, Maya, Nora, Britt, Aage, Trinas, Zinzi, all my friends and family
around the world: I love you! To Ib: måne og sol, hummer og kanari . . .
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: “The disaster of Islamization . . . where gays

are not safe to walk the streets, women are seen as inferior”:
Pro-Gay, Anti-Immigrant Politics and the Right,
2000–2017 1
2 “There were no colored people in the classrooms”: The

Disavowal of Heterogeneity 19
Part I Perceptions
3 “Like the Great Pyramids of Egypt . . . you can’t talk about

Denmark without talking about The Danish Woman”:
Immigrant Perceptions of European Gender and Sexual
Cultures 53
4 “ . . . [I]t does not have to be because they want to get mar-

ried and have children”: Teaching Danish Sexuality and
Gender Norms to Foreign Workers, 1972 87
Part II Solidarity
ix
x CONTENTS
5 “They’re fighting for women’s rights, we’re fighting for

equal rights for Turkish people, and that’s the only
difference”: Foreign Workers Organize in the Footsteps
of the Women’s Movement, The Netherlands, 1974–1980 115
6 “All of that talk about feminism was very hard

to understand”: Immigrant Women and European
Feminism, 1974–1985 147
Part III Participation
7 “Help me, an Indonesian boy living in Holland . . . flee my

parents”: Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in European
Gay/Lesbian Contact Ads, 1960s–1980s 177
8 “I was one of the first colored gays”: Experiences of

Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Gay/Lesbian Scenes,
the Netherlands and Denmark, 1960s–80s 219
9 Epilogue: “It was a cultural evolution”: Rethinking

Immigrant Sexual Politics Since the 1980s 247
Archives and Sources 259
Bibliography 263
Index 281
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2.1 Sex, (post-)colonialism, Rock & Roll I: Indo-Rock band,

Ricky & the Rhythm Strings (1959) 31
Fig. 2.2 Sex, (post-)colonialism, Rock & Roll II: Sumé, who sang
about colonization and revolution in Greenland 32
Fig. 3.1 The cover of a 1968 issue of Al-Ghad, a journal
by and for Arabs in Denmark, depicting the iconic Little
Mermaid statue in Copenhagen 61
Fig. 3.2 Detail from Denmark’s Foreign Worker Journal 65
Fig. 3.3 Three trajectories after liberalization: A conservative turn;
a conservative turn, with retention of some liberal ideas;
and continuous liberalization 75
Fig. 4.1 “ . . . Danes behave in a peculiar fashion . . . when they stand
and kiss one another on the open street . . . or when girls ride
motorbikes . . . ” 93
Fig. 4.2 Fremmedarbejderbladet ended their July 1972 issue with
an article on “The Equality of Men and Women” in Danish,
Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and English 97
Fig. 6.1 “Danish and Foreign Workers Must Stand Together”: Two
Turkish workers, Zennure Solakli and Necla Musaoglu,
worked through their union to address the management’s
discriminatory actions toward foreign women (1978) 156
Fig. 6.2 The twenty-second issue of the Danish feminist magazine
Kvinder [Women] focused on foreign worker women (1978) 161
xi
xii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 7.1 Six schakels (links, or contact ads) in a Dutch journal, including
a German male looking to visit the Netherlands, a woman
looking for a girlfriend near Utrecht, a French hairdresser
seeking a summer job, and the young Moroccan’s post
that introduced this chapter 186
Fig. 7.2 Interview by Klaas Breunissen with “Abdou,” who came
to the Netherlands in 1978 on account of his sexuality,
“to be free.” The title means, “Far from Morocco, I feel
a stranger here”; caption to the photo: “Moroccan with
his Dutch friend” 202
Fig. 7.3 Orientalist fantasy in the gay press (1986) 206
LIST OF TABLES
Table 2.1 Rough overview of “Visible Minority” immigrants

in the Netherlands and Denmark by 1990 29
Table 3.1 Percentage of mixed marriages of Turks and Moroccans
in the Netherlands, by time period 68
Table 3.2 Moroccan population in the Netherlands, age 20–65,
by generation (1996–2009) 69
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: “The disaster

of Islamization . . . where gays are not safe
to walk the streets, women are seen
as inferior”: Pro-Gay, Anti-Immigrant
Politics and the Right, 2000–2017
In the past decade, much of Western Europe has seen a “culturalization of

citizenship”, whereby nationalist rhetoric infuses the definition of what it
means to be a true citizen with presumptions about the dominant cultural
characteristics of the nation, from women’s dress to the types of meat
served with school lunches.1 In the Netherlands—but also increasingly in
other countries with federal protections for LGBTQ people—right-wing
nationalist rhetoric also nods to gay rights.2 This chapter’s title, with its
reference to the “disaster of Islamization,” comes from a speech in the
Dutch Parliament in which a Party for Freedom (PVV) politician blamed
“mass immigration” and the “asylum tsunami” for violence against
gays and gender inequality in the Netherlands; his statement is a typical
example of pro-gay, anti-Muslim-immigrant politics.3
Those who have written about the rise of pro-gay, anti-Muslim-
immigrant politics in the Netherlands often point to its origin with the
politician Pim Fortuyn.4 Already in 2002, Fortuyn had founded an
eponymous political party that foregrounded immigration control with
the rationale of protecting supposedly Dutch values, including gay
rights. A flamboyantly gay sociologist, Fortuyn declared that Islam was
“a backward culture . . . wherever Islam rules, it’s simply ghastly” as he
© The Author(s) 2017 1

A.D.J. Shield, Immigrants in the Sexual Revolution, Genders
and Sexualities in History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49613-9_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION: “THE DISASTER OF ISLAMIZATION . . .
spoke candidly about his own sexual history and promiscuity.5 At the
zenith of his popularity, and only days before the 2002 elections,
Fortuyn was assassinated by a left-wing Dutch man, and soon after his
party received over 1.5 million votes and twenty-six Parliamentary seats
(out of 150): the Pim Fortuyn List briefly became the second largest
party and a member of a short-lived coalition government.
What had started as one peculiar “gay” perspective on immigration and
integration soon became an acceptable political view for huge swathes of the
Dutch population. Although attention to the Pim Fortuyn List dwindled by
2006, a new political actor came to the fore in the Netherlands: Geert
Wilders and his PVV, which won nine seats in the 2006 elections; by 2010,
it won twenty-four seats, and maintained 20 seats in 2017. Even more
virulently anti-Muslim than Fortuyn, Wilders—who is heterosexual—also
underscores that Europe’s Muslims are a direct threat to freedom of speech,
women’s equality, and gay rights.
Across Europe, Wilders has attempted to export this unique pro-gay,
anti-immigrant framework. In 2008, in the aftermath of international atten-
tion on Denmark for a newspaper’s publication of cartoons of the religious
figure Mohammad,6 Wilders traveled to Denmark to address Parliament
about freedom of speech. Only a few members of the right-wing and
nationalist Danish People’s Party (DF) showed up to hear Wilders, and
they reported in their member newsletter that “equality between the sexes
has come under pressure” and “violence against homosexuals . . . ha[s]
become part of daily life” in the Netherlands due to its Muslim population.7
The DF, which at the time opposed marriage and adoption rights for gay
and lesbian couples, praised Wilders’ speech overall. By the 2011 election
season, the DF incorporated a brief reference to gay rights in their anti-
Muslim campaign video, likely drawing from Wilders’ success with this
media frame.8
In Sweden in 2012, Wilders spoke to the Free Press Society, where he
argued that “everyone can express his opinion about Islam” since imams
expressed their disapproval “about our freedoms and democracy, about our
freedom of speech . . . [and] about gay men and women.”9 This rhetoric
may have influenced some members of the right-wing, nationalist party
Swedish Democrats (SD)—despite its usual dispiritedness toward LGBTQ
activism—to organize a gay pride rally in a curious location in 2015: an
immigrant-heavy suburb of Stockholm. The heterosexual organizer claimed
that the rally was not an attempt “to provoke a Muslim aggression”; how-
ever, feminist and LGBTQ activists generally disagreed.10 In the end, only
INTRODUCTION: “THE DISASTER OF ISLAMIZATION . . . 3
twenty people showed up to SD’s suburban pride festival (while a hundred

attended a nearby counter-protest organized by feminist and LGBTQ
activists).
Wilders has also attempted to export his sexual nationalism to Austria
and Germany. In Vienna, Wilders lamented: “Parts of our towns are no
longer European. They look like suburbs of Cairo, Rabat, Algiers . . . We
see women who are treated as inferior . . . homosexuals . . . are attacked.”11
In Dresden, he denounced Angela Merkel’s recognition of Islam as part of
German society, and reminded audience members that in Islam, “women,
[and] homosexuals . . . are considered inferior, humiliated, persecuted and
even murdered. That’s what we’re fighting.”12 Although LGBTQ rights
have stronger recent histories in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden
than in Austria and Germany, Wilders was confident that sexual politics
would be embraced by a constituency eager to define itself in terms of its
assumed opposite. Yet even Wilders did not attempt to export his rhetoric
to United States Republicans in 2015 when he spoke at anti-Muslim
events in California and Texas; in these speeches, he expurgated his
customary affirmation of gay rights altogether.13
The above examples—foremost from the Netherlands, Denmark, and
Sweden—demonstrate that pro-gay, anti-Muslim-immigrant viewpoints
can be appealing to populist voters, regardless of sexual orientation. This
departs slightly from Jasbir Puar’s notion of “homonationalism,” which
foremost critiques racism and nationalism among LG(BTQ)-identified
people and activists.14 Her concept has proved central for understanding
the connections between gay and lesbian conservatives, and the Nationalist
Right’s embrace of some gay rights, which is often more rhetorical than
genuine. Homonationalism stemmed from Puar’s observations after 11
September 2001, when some gay and lesbian U.S. Americans denounced
Islam (e.g. as “repressive” and “homophobic”) in an effort to win accep-
tance of gay and lesbian soldiers (assumed to be non-Muslim) as true
Americans capable of fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, if only
the government would allow them. Puar noted “counterparts” in the
Netherlands and the UK, where some LGBTQ people had also “articulated
Muslim populations as an especial threat” to their activism.15
The world-renowned philosopher Judith Butler was among those
attuned to homonationalism. Butler shocked crowds of LGBTQ people
in attendance at the 2010 Berlin pride events (“Christopher Street Day”)
by refusing to accept the Civil Courage Award, telling the crowd in
German, “Some of the organizers expressed themselves as explicitly
racist, or didn’t distance themselves from such expressions” of anti-

Muslim racism.16 Likewise in Denmark, some Danish scholars and acti-
vists have also denounced certain factions of the LGBTQ movement as
“homonationalist.”17
Yet the political rhetoric outlined in this introduction—while undeni-
ably connected to racism and nationalism espoused by some LGBTQ
spokespeople—extends far beyond those who identify as LGBTQ.
“Pinkwashing”—or praising an institution’s LG(BTQ) rights while mask-
ing its human rights offenses—is another tool for exploring media and
political frameworks about sexuality, religious diversity, and immigration
in Northwest Europe.18 As this introduction shows, pro-gay, anti-
Muslim-immigrant framing can alter international discussions about social
and border policies: in the Netherlands, pro-gay nationalism has already
shaped political campaigns and platforms, influenced public debates and
media frames, and appealed to huge constituencies regardless of sexual
orientation. It would not be farfetched to imagine that in the not-too-
distant future, plucky politicians in countries with reluctant recognition of
LGBTQ rights—Greece, Italy, Ireland, Poland, or Trump’s half of the
United States—might try their luck with pro-gay nationalism, and find
that it successfully garners support for anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim
policies.
ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book argues that in countries where the legacies of 1960s–70s
women’s and sexual liberation movements have been most effectively
integrated into laws and social norms—such as the Netherlands and
Denmark—politicians and journalists increasingly use the rights of
women and gay men to divide the so-called “native” population from
non-Western immigrants. The effect is an Orientalist binary between
“Europeans”—who respect freedom of speech, women’s equality, and
LGBTQ rights—and “immigrants” and “Muslims” in Europe, who prac-
tice a so-called backward culture steeped in unchangeable traditions like
misogyny and homophobia. However, young people in Europe today with
immigration backgrounds respond to differences in gender and sexual
norms with a variety of emotions, from confusion, to fascination, to
enthusiasm. Not surprisingly, the early generation of immigrants who
arrived into Northwest Europe during the “Sexual Revolution” also
experienced a diversity of feelings when confronted with women’s
ABOUT THIS BOOK 5
emancipation and sexual liberalness. But in the 1960s–80s, European

activists rarely viewed immigrants as the antithesis of feminism or sexual
liberation; sexual conservatism emanated from the churches, psychiatrists,
police, politicians and others within the “native” population.
Many today are eager to discuss immigrants’ perceptions of European
gender and sexual norms. In 2016 alone, debates flared in connection with
media coverage of sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the mass
shooting at a U.S. gay club, the “burkini” debates during Nice’s hot
summer, and in relation to asylum seekers fleeing destructive wars across
Syria. Yet there has never before been an historical study of immigrants’
perceptions of European gender and sexual cultures in the 1960s–80s.
Likewise, histories of the Sexual Revolution in Europe have often shied
away from asking about immigrant perceptions of, solidarity with, and
even participation in movements for women’s liberation and sexual
emancipation.
The recruitment of foreign labor boomed in the late 1960s and early
1970s, and brought some of the first populations from Muslim-majority
regions—especially from Turkey, North Africa and Pakistan—to countries
like Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and
Switzerland; this immigration history is outlined in Chapter 2. Also,
during the 1960s–70s, men and women living in (formerly) colonized
countries found other pathways to immigrate to countries like France, the
Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (see Table 2.1). Foreign workers
and post-colonial migrants arrived in Europe precisely during the years of
comprehensive legal reforms in almost every European country west of the
Iron Curtain, as social movement activism challenged laws regarding
women’s equality, contraception and abortion, homosexuality, pornogra-
phy, adultery and divorce. The Sexual Revolution, which was really a variety
of sometimes-contradictory revolutions, affected the lives and attitudes of
Western Europeans through both lived experiences and popular culture.
This book explores immigrants’ perceptions of the dramatic changes in
sexual and gender relations transforming Europe in the 1960s–80s, and
the instances of immigrant solidarity with, and participation in, networks for
social justice, women’s equality, and sexual liberation.
This book is divided into three parts: Perceptions, Solidarity, and
Participation. In Part I: Perceptions, we focus on 1965–1974 when the
majority of foreign workers in Western Europe were solo men. The first
chapter in this section (Chapter 3) explores immigrants’ first impressions
of gender and sexual norms in the Netherlands and Denmark, and takes
the readers into sexually charged spaces like dance clubs, where some
immigrant men formed relationships with European women. During
these recruitment years, European men could be overtly hostile to immi-
grant men for taking not only “their jobs” but also “their women.” With
the boom in second-wave feminist activism (directed mainly at European
patriarchy), a few feminists sought to include foreign men and women in
these debates. Thus in Chapter 4, we look at one journal published for and
partly by foreign workers—the Danish Fremmedarbejderbladet, or “The
Foreign Worker Journal”—which provided some “sexual education” in
1972, in Turkish and other foreign languages.
In Part II: Solidarity, we focus on left-wing activists and social move-
ments from 1975–1985, and the blurring of goals between anti-fascists,
feminists, gay liberationists, and those fighting for immigrant rights. Left-
leaning, politically active foreigners—such as those Turks who would be
horrified by the 1980 military coup in their homeland—were critical of
undemocratic regimes and movements worldwide. In Europe, they
admired the blurred lines of authority between citizen and state, laborer
and employer, and man and woman. The first chapter (Chapter 5) looks
at two left-wing immigrant groups in the Netherlands—one for Turkish
and one for Moroccan workers—whose activism gained strategic and
rhetorical inspiration not only from anti-fascism and anti-colonialism,
but also from the European women’s movement. After all, both feminists
and immigrants lobbied for equal pay, affirmative action, and integration
in the civic sphere, often by provoking the public and media with spectacular
actions. In Chapter 6, immigrant women take center stage, as they arrived
in large numbers through family reunification in the late 1970s. “Foreign
worker women” (both those who worked and those whose husbands were
foreign workers) first organized themselves within (predominantly male)
foreign worker groups in the 1970s, and then within (predominantly
white, European) feminist groups in the 1980s; at times, they disagreed
with European feminists who prioritized “patriarchy” as the preeminent
system of oppression. Women of color challenged white feminists to con-
sider seriously the role of ethnicity and race in the women’s movement, and
their intersections with class and migration status.
In Part III: Participation, immigrants and ethnic minorities in gay and
lesbian “scenes” (i.e. informal social circles and gay/lesbian bars) and
activist movements take center stage. Like the feminist movement, gay
and lesbian activism radicalized around 1970 in much of Northwest
Europe, where gay men and lesbians “came out” and lived openly with
WHY THE NETHERLANDS, DENMARK OR “NORTHWEST EUROPE”? 7
regard to their sexual orientation. Gay and lesbian organizations and

scenes were centered in capital cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam—
the latter of which was touted as the Gay Capital of Europe—and
extended to smaller cities and even countryside towns. Chapter 7 begins
with a unique primary source base: thousands of contact advertisements
printed in grassroots gay and lesbian periodicals from the 1960s through
1980s. When read together, these short and often intimate posts draw a
web of actors; they were a pre-digital “social media,” much like today’s
online and mobile platforms for social (and sexual) networking. Contact
ads connected readers in urban centers, in farm towns, in overseas
colonies, and in immigrant suburbs; they enabled readers to expand
their social networks, and to facilitate new friendships, romances, hous-
ing connections, and employment and travel opportunities. In
Chapter 8, we hear directly from the courageous immigrants who
“came out” in the 1960s–80s: they were among the first ethnic mino-
rities, if not the first, to navigate a white, European scene that both
welcomed them and cast them as “exotic.” Some of these men and
women visited gay/lesbian bars, and some were activists in gay/lesbian
organizations, while a few rejected the “scene” altogether for its racial
politics.
By bringing together two seemingly disparate research fields—
immigration history and sexuality history—this book complicates current
political discussions of the supposed binary between an Enlightened
Europe, always tolerant of women’s independence and LGBTQ rights,
and its international immigrants who “cannot change” their views on
gender and sexuality.
WHY THE NETHERLANDS, DENMARK

OR “NORTHWEST EUROPE”?
The Netherlands and Denmark serve as this book’s two case studies for
delving into Northwest European changes from the late 1960s through
early 1980s with regard to (1) racial, ethnic, religious and cultural diver-
sity, and (2) social mores and laws regarding gender equality and sexual
liberalness since World War II. Most scholars in these two countries do
not immediately look to the other for comparison: Dutch researchers tend
to look to Belgium and Western Europe, while Danish scholars collabo-
rate with other Scandinavian and Nordic researchers. But to compare the
countries is very easy, so let us begin lightheartedly: both the Netherlands

and Denmark are replete with fair-haired, self-avowedly tolerant people
who bike to work through rain and wind and gloom of darkness.
Omnipresent bike lanes allow parents to bike safely with their 1.7 children
in wagons, on detachable bike seats, or alongside them through rush-hour
traffic. Dutch and Danes stand taller than most people they meet in the
world, and will live relatively longer lives of modest success. Compared to
the Mediterranean countries—where many middle-class Dutch or Danes
might vacation or eventually retire—they eat a relatively early dinner,
which often includes potatoes or dark bread, butter or cheese, and pork
or salted fish. Dutch and Danes tend to have an extraordinarily high
proficiency in English, casually slipping “rest assured” and “thereafter”
into sentences while simultaneously apologizing for their English errors.
But these are not the reasons that Denmark and the Netherlands serve as
case studies for this book.
To continue this lighthearted comparison: for this book, the Netherlands
is the “gay” country, and Denmark is the “gender equal” country.
Amsterdam has been a “gay capital” since the 1950s, when police and
civil society tolerated overtly gay and lesbian bars, dance clubs, and even
leather-fetish groups; by the 1970s, the city’s police received education
about “cruising” in parks, and the need to protect—not arrest!—gay men
seeking (anonymous) outdoor sex. Denmark also has a long history of gay
rights: as early as 1989, it preceded every country in the world with its
recognition of same-sex partnerships. However, it was the Netherlands who
got the award in 2001 for being the first country to call these partnerships
“marriage.” The two countries house Europe’s first two post-World War II
homophile organizations, and some of the world’s oldest LGBTQ bars.19
With regard to gender equality, Denmark was one of the first countries
whose Parliament represented 10% women (in 1966), and again, one of the
first to reach 25% (in 1984), and 35% (in 1998), all without gender quotas.20
Since 1999, Denmark has had a federal-level Ministry for Gender Equality.
Despite comparable feminist activism in the Netherlands, there has always
been one confusing fact about gender roles and civic participation: Dutch
women still, on average, do not seek full-time work, despite the fact that
many feminists see independent wage-earning as indispensible for achieving
gender equality. More than three-quarters of employed Dutch women work
part-time, which is “by far the highest” proportion of part-time female labor
of any EU Member State.21 In some Dutch towns, elementary schools still
expect a parent—often a mother—to pick up the child in the middle of the
WHY THE NETHERLANDS, DENMARK OR “NORTHWEST EUROPE”? 9
day for lunch. Yet with regard to the history of female political participation
and access to abortion on demand, the Netherlands is also a very “gender
equal” country, and many Dutch women argue that women’s low levels of
participation in the full-time job market merely shows their ability to choose
their desired work-life balance.22
But despite these flippant designations—the “gay rights” country, and
the “gender equal” country—the Netherlands and Denmark are not treated
as contrasting case studies in this book. On the contrary, the complementary
events and actors speak to their similar socio-political climates since the
1950s. These two countries reflect general trends in labor-receiving
“Northwest Europe,” an imprecise term that for the purposes of this book
centers on the Netherlands and Scandinavia (i.e. the “Netherscands”23),
with implications for Belgium, northern (West) Germany, northern
France, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom. Much of this book is also
generalizable to other parts of “Western Europe”—as characterizedby Cold
War definitions—including Austria, Finland, southern France, Iceland,
Switzerland, and southern (West) Germany. As this book focuses on Cold
War decades, the term “Western Europe” obviously excludes the USSR,
Soviet-aligned countries, and the Balkans; but it is less customary that the
term excludes Western-aligned Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal.
Because these were labor-sending countries during the “guest worker”
boom, the “Western European” social and economic situations described
in this book are not generalizable to their contexts.
The “sex, drugs, rock-and-roll” atmosphere in Northwest Europe—
recreated in novels, coffee-table books, films, documentaries, and in
numerous public discussions—was central to many of the memories of my
interviewees from both the Netherlands and Denmark, even for—though
to a lesser extent—those living outside of cities and university towns. From
the late 1960s onwards, many experienced a loosening of attitudes toward
premarital sexual behaviors and public discussions of sexual pleasure. In
Denmark, public sexuality has been visible since the late 1960s, when
Denmark became the first country in the world to legalize most hardcore
pornography. (And even bestiality remained legal until 2015, when only
two parties—on the far left and the libertarian right—defended the right to
have sex with an animal as long as the animal was not harmed.) Both
countries have tolerated prostitution (i.e. both the selling and buying
of sex) since the 1970s, particularly when concentrated in certain neighbor-
hoods; and both countries have slowly legalized and legislated sex work
through the present. Sex in gay saunas and (in the Netherlands)
gay darkroom bars remained legal through the 1980s, despite HIV panics
worldwide that led to the forced closure of sex-friendly venues across much
of Europe and North America. In both countries, non-procreative sex
(including oral sex, anal sex) and other sexual behaviors (e.g. sex with
toys, partner-swapping, light sadomasochism, role play)—which in the
1960s–70s were mainly topics discussed by sex-lib and gay/lesbian acti-
vists—are now welcomed as utterly normal practices by subsequent gen-
erations of experimenting teenagers. It is also now common in both
countries that couples of all socio-economic backgrounds will plan a preg-
nancy without consideration of marriage.
The Netherlands famously tolerates the selling of soft drugs, mostly
marijuana and hash; and Copenhagen has tolerated the presence of the
hippie “free city” Christiania—known in part for the free use of soft drugs—
since 1971 (despite sporadic crack-downs from police, and the residents’
decision in 2016 to remove the permanent stands where soft drugs had
been sold). With regard to rock and roll: the Roskilde Festival in Denmark
has been Northern Europe’s “Woodstock” annually since 1971, and in its
first decade welcomed Bob Marley, the Kinks, Elvis Costello, the Talking
Heads, and countless local bands. The Netherlands welcomed Jefferson
Airplane and Pink Floyd to the Kralingen Music Festival in 1970, and has
continued to draw crowds to the Pinkpop festival since 1971. The U.S.
American, British, and Jamaican artists are merely listed here to illustrate
that Dutch and Danish youth were part and parcel of transnational, socio-
political music trends and youth movements in the 1970s.
Having painted the picture of two countries bubbling over with youth
protest, women’s liberation and sexual emancipation, the reader must now
be reminded of another narrative of the Dutch and Danish 1960s–70s: the
arrival of foreign workers, who woke up early to take a bus to a factory, and
after a long day took another bus back to their boarding home to sleep in
a crowded room with other immigrants. These pioneering immigrants
struggled to find the resources to learn the host language, as their “native”
neighbors and co-workers often ignored them. In the Netherlands, the
other “visible minorities” on the streets included those of African, South
Asian, East Asian and Pacific Island descent who had migrated from
former Dutch colonies; their legal and social position was often more
secure than that of the so-called “guest workers.”
Some immigrants living in smaller towns never visited urban centers or
capital regions. But slowly, many learned about burgeoning immigrant
neighborhoods, where grocers sold hard-to-find items like olive oil or
HISTORY SPEAKS TO THE PRESENT 11
Turkish candy. Many were curious to explore European cities; some

fantasized that one evening they might visit a café or a bar, and meet
someone to be a local guide, a friend, or even a lover, someone for whom
they might eventually stay in Europe. They might not have realized it
upon their arrival in the Netherlands and Denmark—small countries with
only seventeen and five million people today—but they immigrated not
only during the years that would be labeled the “Sexual Revolution,” but
also during the early decades of what would later be called “multicultural
Europe.”
HISTORY SPEAKS TO THE PRESENT

Although this book focuses on the 1960s–80s, it speaks constantly to
those forming opinions about immigrants and integration today. Too
often, spokespeople on immigration in Europe present dilemmas as
entirely new: should Europe offer courses to single male immigrants
about gender norms, and what would be in the curriculum? How can
social and civil organizations encourage immigrant women to participate?
Is it unusual that a major politician would unflinchingly link immigration
to sexual violence?
To pick on just one study that overlooks historical context: the Open
Society Initiative—financed by the billionaire philanthropist George
Soros—embarked on a massive and ambitious project around 2010, the
results of which were printed in twelve book-length reports entitled
Muslims in Europe and Muslims in . . . eleven European cities. The
Initiative gathered immigration experts from Belgium, Denmark,
Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK to analyze the
experiences of Muslims within various institutions in various European
cities. But in almost every book, references to the 1960–80s were brief,
quantitative, or without citation. For example, of the forty-four titles in
the bibliography for Muslims in Amsterdam, none was historical; and the
report’s two-paragraph “Settlement History” footnoted just two pages in
a (non-historical) study of Moroccan delinquent youth.24 In-depth his-
torical material from the 1960s–80s would have made this report stronger,
such as Annemarie Cottaar’s and Nadia Bouras’ Moroccans in the
Netherlands: The Pioneers Tell (2009, in Dutch), or the research in this
book. As a whole, these reports lacked history, which resulted in many flat
and stereotypical portraits of elderly immigrants today: they arrived for
work and stayed for work; they formed immigrant groups in order to
practice their religion; they were illiterate; and women were isolated . . .
But isn’t it true that the “guest workers” arrived for work, and
remained in Europe for economic reasons? According to Muslims in
Europe, yes: Europe’s first post-war Muslims were largely “guestworkers
[who arrived] to do unskilled or low-skilled jobs . . . during the economic
boom of the 1960s.” But economic determinism alone does not explain
the foreign worker migration process. Nearly a quarter of Turkish
migrants wanted primarily to “see Europe and learn a language” or to
get an education.25 Others were de facto refugees who could not return
home due to (right-wing) changes in the political climate. Speaking to a
researcher in Denmark in 1970, one foreign worker even said he left
Turkey because he could not be with the woman he loved ever; her parents
disapproved of him because he had been divorced.
Weren’t the first-generation immigrants poorly educated? According to
the Muslims in Europe series, yes: “most parents [of Muslims in Europe
today] were illiterate or semi-literate”; they represent an elderly class of
“semi-literate older women and men with few communicative contacts
with the surrounding society”; they lacked language abilities because
“‘guest-workers’ . . . were never asked to learn” European languages like
Dutch or Danish.26 But even those who struggled with European lan-
guages were often literate in their native languages, such as Mohammad
Bilak’hal who contributed to a 1968 Arabic-language journal with a piece
entitled “The Danish Woman” based on his positive observations of
gender equality in Denmark. There was also Tahsin Karakavukoğlu, the
Turkish editor for a foreign worker journal, who helped translate and
disseminate information to foreign workers on a variety of issues, from
job safety and union strikes, to contraception and maternity rights. And
one might smile when Habiba Bensalah recounted that her Dutch neigh-
bor knocked on her door on her very first morning in 1968 to insist they
go grocery shopping together and start learning Dutch.27
Weren’t the first immigrant organizations, as the Muslims in Europe
reports state, places for foreigners “to practice their culture and religion
among themselves”? It is true that many groups were nationally homo-
genous (e.g. for “Turkish” or “Yugoslavian” men, though these coun-
tries were not ethnically homogenous) and spaces for workers to speak
their mother tongue and celebrate their traditional holidays. Other clubs
were heterogeneous, and served as cozy weekend destinations for all
foreign workers to meet, eat, play cards, and chat. Yet other immigrant
HISTORY SPEAKS TO THE PRESENT 13
groups were highly political, and organized hunger strikes against unfair
immigration restrictions, or protested right-wing political developments
in their countries of origin. One interviewee said to me that he remem-
bered thinking in the 1970s, “We have to learn so much from the
women’s integration process, because they’re fighting for women’s
rights, we’re fighting for equal rights for Turkish people, and that’s the
only difference.”28 Far from being places for immigrants to practice
traditional customs within their small circle, some immigrant organiza-
tions worked with and alongside political parties, anti-fascist groups,
women’s organizations and even gay emancipation groups.
Isn’t it true that older immigrant women live in isolation today?
According to the Muslims in Europe series, yes; but “the isolated population
of elderly Muslim women” stood in contrast to today’s Muslim women,
who do interact with people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. The
researchers emphasized that younger women challenged the prevailing
notion “that Muslim women are most often isolated and only interact
with their own ethnic and religious group.” But social scientists would
benefit from “meeting” Necla Musaoglu and Zennure Solakli—respectively,
the spokeswoman for issues relating to foreign women, and the union
representative for female workers at their Danish factory in 1978—who
led strikes for better pay and to protest discriminatory practices against
foreign women in their workplace.29 They must also “visit” the Turkish
women’s organization in the late 1970s that creatively reached out to
isolated women by offering Dutch-language classes, discussion forums and
support groups disguised under the clandestine title “sewing classes.”30
Aren’t immigrants “homophobic,” or at best, unable to comprehend
sexual identities like gay or lesbian? This is not a question that the Muslims
in Europe series intended to address, as sexuality remained nearly absent
from all twelve volumes. In reference to the Rotterdam Citizen’s Code
of 2006—which addressed equal treatment of homosexuals—the report
wrote, “Because of this emphasis, the code is perceived to be directed at
immigrants.”31 But the report does not complicate this apparent tension
between Muslims and homosexuals: there is no mention of Abdou, a
Moroccan man who came to the Netherlands in 1978 on account of his
homosexuality and “to be free.”32 There is no mention of Sean, an Iranian
refugee who came to Denmark in 1984, and met his first boyfriend (at a
gay bar) within a year of being granted asylum.33 Historic research can
help show that there is no inherent tension in being both “immigrant” and
“gay,” “lesbian,” “feminist,” or “activist.”
The Muslims in Europe series—like so many articles, news reports,

policy statements, and comments on social media—would have benefited
from more histories of Europe’s “first generation” of postwar Muslim
immigrants. The individual stories of these pioneering foreign workers
must not be overlooked, just as the social historian E. P. Thompson—in
his enormously influential The Making of the English Working Class (1966
[1963])—sought to safeguard “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper,
the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the
deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension
of posterity.”34 Younger generations must ask their grandparents and
neighbors about the 1960s–70s. They might be surprised to learn that
aging “immigrants” shared many of the same geographies—and even
some experiences—with European activists, communards, artists, musi-
cians, feminists, gays, lesbians and squatters. Likewise, they might be
surprised to learn that the aging “hippie” participated in thriving youth
protest cultures in an environment that was already linguistically, cultu-
rally, ethnically, and religiously diverse.
NOTES
1. On “culturalization of citizenship” and “sexual nationalism” in the
Netherlands and elsewhere, see: Jan Willem Duyvendak, Peter Geschiere,
and Evelien H. Tonkens (eds.), The Culturalization of Citizenship:
Belonging and Polarization in a Globalizing World (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016); Evelien Tonkens, Menno Hurenkamp and Jan Willem
Duyvendak, Culturalization of Citizenship in the Netherlands (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam School for Social Sciences Research, 2008); Paul Mepschen, Jan
Willem Duyvendak and Evelien H. Tonkens, “Sexual Politics, Orientalism
and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands,” Sociology 44 (2010); Paul
Mepschen and Jan Willem Duyvendak, “European Sexual Nationalism: The
Culturalization of Citizenship and the Sexual Politics of Belonging and
Exclusion,” Perspectives on Europe 42:1 (Spring 2012); and Menno
Hurenkamp, Evelien H. Tonkens, and Jan Willem Duyvendak, Crafting
Citizenship: Negotiating Tensions in a Modern Society (Houndmills,
Basingstoke and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
2. A few notes on terminology:
“Immigrants” and “Muslims”: While popular discourses today often
elide immigrants and Muslims in Europe, there are millions of European
Muslims who are not immigrants, and millions of immigrants who are
NOTES 15
not Muslim. This book focuses on those who arrived as immigrants in the
late 1960s and 1970s, often from Muslim-majority countries. Many have
grandchildren in Europe today who are labeled third-generation “immi-
grants” due to racial (phenotypic) differences, names, and (presumed)
religion. There was tremendous diversity within the group of immigrants
in the 1960s–80s, as Chapter 2 shows. On “people of color” vs.
“colored,” and “visible minorities,” see note 1 in Chapters 2 and 8.
“Gay,” “Gay and Lesbian,” and “LGBTQ”: LGBTQ—an adjective
for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (or trans*), queer, and also pan-
sexual, intersex, and more—is one contemporary term for discussing
sexual minorities and gender non-conforming people in general; but
here, “gay” emphasizes that this group (often the cisgender-male “G”)
receives the most attention with regard to many mainstream political and
journalistic discourses about “homophobia” and sexual “tolerance” in
Europe. As the book focuses on the 1960s–80s, the adjectives “gay and
lesbian” more closely match the discourses at the time with regard to
activism, spaces, periodicals, and (along with bisexual) identities,
although “homo(sexual)” was and still remains a common identity in
Scandinavia and the Netherlands. In the 1950s–60s, “homophile” was
the preferred alternative to the (more clinical) homosexual; and some
gender non-conforming people used “transvestite” through the 1980s;
see Chapter 7.
“Sexual Revolution”: although this is a common phrase to denote
the liberalization of laws and social mores about sexuality and (often)
women’s equality, most historians acknowledge that the various changes
across North America and Western Europe and beyond can better be
described as collections of smaller revolutions; see for example, Gert
Hekma and Alaina Giami (eds.), Sexual Revolutions (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Dagmar Herzog, “Chapter 4: Pleasure and
Rebellion, 1965–1980,” in Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); David Allyn,
Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 2000); the primary source collection,
Jeffrey Escoffier (ed.), Sexual Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth
Press, 2003); and the dozens of related sources cited in this book.
“Right-wing” is useful but imprecise. Chapter 1 focuses on nativist,
nationalist, and/or populist discourses located within parties that gen-
erally identify or align with the political Right, such as the PVV in the
Netherlands, DF in Denmark, and SD in Sweden. However, these parties
sometimes share more economically with the left (e.g. support for high
taxes, high pensions, public education and health care) albeit for a
specific (i.e. “native”) segment of the population. In 2016, for example,
DF broke its support for the ruling right-wing party to align on some
issues with the Social-Democrats, to the criticism of many across the
political spectrum.
3. In Dutch, see Sietse Fritsma, “Speech on Immigration and Asylum,” 25
November 2014.
4. In English, see Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van
Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: Penguin, 2006); Gloria Wekker,
“Of Homo Nostalgia and (Post)Coloniality,” in White Innocence: Paradoxes
of Colonialism and Race (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). A
recent challenge to this historiography comes from David Bos, who argues
that the voices of gay, Muslim spokespeople in the 1970s–80s were also
critical in shaping this framework: David J. Bos [in Dutch], “How Gays and
Muslims Came Together: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Discourse on
Homosexuality and Islam in Dutch Newspapers, Radio and Television
Programs,” Religie en Samenleving 11:2 (September 2016): 206–248.
5. Buruma, ibid, 57.
6. For extensive analysis of the international crisis surrounding these cartoons,
see: Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons That Shook the World (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2009).
7. Karsten Holt and Kenneth Kristensen Berth [in Danish], “Necessary Talk
on Freedom of Speech,” Danske Folkeblad 12:3 (July 2008).
8. This can be seen in the Danish People’s Party’s YouTube video “Ligeværd”
[“Equal Worth”], which was uploaded 10 November 2011.
9. Gert Wilders, “Speech in Malmö” (27 October 2012).
10. Jan Sjunesson, quoted in Daniel Sallegren [in Swedish], “Organizers of
Järva Pride Want to See More Suburban Parades,” Gaybladet.se (30 July
2015).
11. Geert Wilders [in German], “Speech in Vienna” (27 March 2015).
12. Geert Wilders [in German], “Speech in Dresden” (13 April 2015).
13. See Wilders’ speech in Silicon Valley (11 August 2015) on YouTube; or
Liam Stack, “Texas Police Kill Gunmen at Exhibit Featuring Cartoons of
Muhammad,” The New York Times (3 May 2015). There have been under-
pinnings of pro-gay, anti-Muslim-immigrant politics in pockets of the
Republican party: “You know what the Muslims do to gays,” said the U.S.
conservative commentator Ann Coulter in 2010, addressing a room of gay
conservatives and thanking them for their support for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Coulter gave what the The New York Times described as “a
knowing look” when she made this comment, which represented a rare
occasion of the Republican Party winking at gay rights; see Laura M.
Holson, “Outflanked on Right, Coulter Seeks New Image,” The New
York Times (8 October 2010). Following the June 2016 murders of mostly
gay Latino men at a dance club in Orlando, Donald Trump briefly
NOTES 17
incorporated pro-gay, anti-Muslim-immigrant rhetoric into his presidential

campaign, but this framing proved short-lived: “We want to live in a country
where gay and lesbian Americans and all Americans are safe from radical
Islam, which, by the way, wants to murder and has murdered gays and they
enslave women,” cited in Kayla Epstein, “Donald Trump Makes Overtures
to LGBT Community After Orlando, But Their Response Is Mixed,” The
Washington Post (17 June 2016). The post-Orlando statements received far
less media attention than Trump’s earlier link—also an example of sexual
nationalism—between Mexican immigrants and criminals such as rapists.
14. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Jasbir Puar, “Rethinking
Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45
(2013): 336–339. See also the dozens of speeches and papers delivered at
the “Homonationalism and Pinkwashing Conference,” City University of
New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, 10–11 April 2013.
15. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (n 14), xxiv and 11.
16. Judith Butler, “Speech at CSD 2010” (uploaded to YouTube 20 June
2010), last accessed September 2015 via https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=BV9dd6r361k which is in German with English subtitles by user
“andrenarchy.”
17. Michael Nebeling Petersen [in Danish], “‘ . . . With a Rainbow Flag in
Hand’: Stories About Gay Inclusions and Homonationalism,” Lambda
Nordica 16:1 (2011): 41–68; and Mads Ted Drud-Jensen and Sune Prahl
Knudsen [in Danish], Pain in the Ass (Copenhagen: Høst, 2005).
18. Sarah Schulman, “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing,’” The New York Times (22
November 2011); and the above-cited CUNY conference in 2013.
19. Centralhjørnet in Copenhagen has been in the same location since 1917;
and Café ‘t Mandje in Amsterdam has been in the same location since 1926,
but was closed to the public from 1982 through 2007. Prior to World War
II, both bars had reputations for attracting “riffraff” (e.g. female prostitutes,
sailors) but were not explicitly “gay” or “lesbian” bars, although Café ‘t
Mandje was established by a lesbian, and the clientele in both bars likely
always included those who could be anachronistically called LGBTQ. On
the homophile organizations, see Center for Culture and Recreation (COC)
(Netherlands) and Association of 1948 (Denmark) in Part III.
20. Drude Dahlerup, “Denmark: High Representation of Women Without
Gender Quotas,” in Breaking Male Dominance in Old Democracies, ed.
Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 149.
21. Eurostat (of the European Commission), “Employment Statistics” (August
2015), last accessed February 2016 via http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/sta
tistics-explained/.
22. See e.g. Jessica Olien, “Going Dutch: Women in the Netherlands Work
Less, Have Lesser Titles and a Big Gender Pay Gap, and They Love It,”
Slate.com (15 November 2010).
23. This term was coined by my dear friend Madeleine, who was (also) surprised
to learn there was no term to discuss the Netherlands and Scandinavia
jointly.
24. Open Society Foundation, Muslims in Amsterdam (New York, NY: Open
Society Foundations, 2010), 31–32.
25. Based on a 1970 survey; see: Ahmet Akgündüz, Labour Migration from
Turkey to Western Europe: 1960–1974: A Multidisciplinary Analysis
(Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 152. See also
Chapters 2 and 3.
26. For example, Open Society Foundation, Muslims in Copenhagen (New
York, NY: Open Society Foundations, 2011), 220, 222, 223, and 236.
27. Annemarie Cottaar and Nadia Bouras, Moroccans in the Netherlands: The
Pioneers Tell (Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 2009, in Dutch), 153. For
more on women’s literacy and language-learning, see Chapter 6.
28. Interview (October 2014).
29. Christina Hee Pedersen, Geske Lilsig and Anne Houe [in Danish], “Danish
and Foreign Workers Must Stand Together,” Kvinder 22 (October/
November 1978): 3–5; see Chapter 6 of this dissertation.
30. “Evaluation of HTKB activities: 1982/1983” (1983); accessed via IISG
(HTKB collection); see Chapter 6 of this dissertation.
31. Open Society Foundation (n 24), 51.
32. Klaas Breunissen [in Dutch], “Far from Morocco, I feel a stranger here,”
SEK (August 1983).
33. Interview (January 2015).
34. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:
Knopf Doubleday, 1966 [1963]), Preface.
CHAPTER 2
“There were no colored people

in the classrooms”: The Disavowal
of Heterogeneity
The various waves of post-World War II immigrants in the Netherlands

and Denmark arrived to a contradictory logic: the white majority in the
host country insisted they belonged to a “homogeneous” state, but at
the same time acknowledged centuries of ethnic, linguistic, religious, or
cultural difference. They saw non-white citizens as part of their state’s
history, but not part of the national culture; and in some cases, they did
not see these non-white citizens at all: “If I showed you a class photo from
the 70s, you would see there were no colored1 people in the classroom,”
one white interviewee (b. 1961, Rotterdam) told me while sitting in his
living room. Feeling inspired, he fetched an album from his shelf and
flipped to a class photo from 1970, where he and a throng of other fair-
haired children surrounded their white schoolteacher; yet to his surprise, the
girl standing beside the teacher appeared to be black. He did not remember
her. He then flipped to another class photo from 1974, and pointed to two
different girls: “She was Indonesian,” he remembered, and then squinted at
another classmate: “She looks mixed.” Not only in political discussions and
school curricula, but also in lived experiences, many disregarded the legacies
of colonial and other migrations. According to migration historian Leo
Lucassen, past immigrations “left only a vague (and selective) imprint on
the collective memory” of the Dutch by the 1960s.2
The chapter uses the term “disavowal” in the psychoanalytic sense to
emphasize the simultaneous affirmation and denial of a thought. Scholars

20 2 “THERE WERE NO COLORED PEOPLE IN THE CLASSROOMS”
who have written about popular memories of Dutch and Danish migra-
tion, imperialism, and slave trade have used different terms to highlight
the simultaneous affirmation and denial of these histories. In the
Netherlands, Gloria Wekker has referred to the Dutch inability to identify
with migrants—despite centuries of immigration into the Netherlands—
as a “paradox” that cannot be separated from an “unacknowledged
reservoir of knowledge” about Dutch imperialism and slavery.3
Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving similarly remark on a Dutch rejec-
tion of “the possibility to know” the effects of these histories on the
present.4 Similarly in Denmark, the white majority has insisted that the
country was homogeneous prior to the arrival of foreign workers in the
1960s, despite Denmark’s similar histories of immigration, colonialism
and slavery.5 Rikke Andreassen and Bolette Blaagaard have referred to
these histories as “non-memories” that are “actively, or passively, repress[ed]”
in popular Danish culture.6
In both countries, one could argue that much of the population in the
1960s–80s was ignorant of the histories of heterogeneity, and thus it was
less disavowal, and more “amnesia.” In the Netherlands, the Dutch role
in slavery was absent from public school curricula prior to 1993 (or
arguably 2006), and the first public memorial recognizing the Dutch
role in the slave trade was erected in 2002.7 In Denmark, school curri-
cula ignored much imperial history and slavery through 2012, and there
are no public memorials recognizing Denmark’s sizeable role in the
Atlantic slave trade.8
The first part of this chapter presents a broad overview of several cen-
turies of heterogeneity in the Netherlands and Denmark prior to 1950, in
order to destabilize the notion of a homogeneous past, and to shed light
on why various ethnic groups were excluded from national memories by
the 1960s. This section starts with those groups that were “invisible” by the
1960s due to racial, religious, and cultural similarities—such as Christian
Germans—who were able to assimilate fully into the Netherlands or
Denmark within a generation or two. But overall, the chapter focuses on
“visible” migrants, who might today be called “non-white,” “ethnic min-
ority,” or “of color” (see fn 1). In short, the white majority disavowed these
groups for several reasons: some ethnic minorities were fully assimilated due
to generations of consensual or non-consensual interracial sex (e.g. some
Virgin Islanders in Denmark); some communities were lost due to forced
migration, imprisonment, or murder (e.g. Jews, Roma, Sinti); and some
groups were overlooked as mere “curios” (e.g. Chinese).
“THERE WERE NO COLORED PEOPLE IN THE CLASSROOMS” 21
Following this pre-1950 historical sweep, the second part of the chapter
gives an overview of the immense complexity in the composition of
“visible” migrants in the 1960s–80s in Northwest Europe. Far from
being monolithic, these post-war immigrants can be thought of within
sixteen groups:
A. Colonial and Post-Colonial Migrants:

1. Mixed-race, “European” “repatriates”.
2. Non-white spouses who “repatriated” with European families.
3. Other non-white people who chose to relocate to Europe
through colonial migration schemes.
4. Non-white people forced to relocate to Europe (e.g. after
participating in failed colonial militaries).
B. Labor Migrants (and their Families):

5. From within the European Economic Community (EEC).
6. From outside of the EEC (e.g. Turkey, Yugoslavia, Morocco,
Pakistan).
7. Who arrived through family reunification.
8. Who were born in Europe but lack European citizenship.
C. Refugees:
9. Who arrived as individuals or small groups (often persecuted
for political reasons).
10. Who arrived with extended communities (often escaping war).
D. Miscellaneous:
11. Adoptees.
12. Students.
13. Professionals.
14. Artists.
15. Spouses.
16. New groups of Roma and Sinti.
Despite centuries of international immigration, and despite these various

waves of post-World War II migrants, much Dutch and Danish scholar-
ship in the 1970s continued to disavow immigration as central to the
national culture. In 1971, the Dutch Government Report on Foreign
Workers twice stated, “The Netherlands is not a land of immigration.”9
Instead, migration researchers tended to focus on Dutch and Danish

emigration to North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Two early
scholars of immigration in the Netherlands still had to counter this pre-
vailing sentiment in 1979: Franz Bovenkerk, himself quite aware that
so-called “guest workers” were actually permanent immigrants, needed
to begin a 1979 chapter on labor migration with the statement: “The
Netherlands is known as a country of emigration rather than of immigra-
tion.”10 Also that year, Rinus Penninx had to address and counter the
prevailing notion that “the Netherlands cannot and must not become a
country of immigration” in his government report, which argued for new
policies to address the permanency of the growing foreign populations in
the Netherlands.11
HETEROGENEITY PRIOR TO THE 1950S

No state in existence today—in Europe or elsewhere—has ever been
homogeneous with regard to language or culture. It was not until the
nineteenth century that most modern nation-states attempted to stan-
dardize national languages and histories, and to construct national
anthems, costumes, foods, and colors.12 In Denmark, for example, “the
royal court spoke French, the bureaucrats and officials spoke German,
and the peasants spoke Danish” until the romantic movements of the
1800s popularized literature, songs, and widespread literacy in Danish.13
Early-modern Denmark included a vast terrain of Scandinavian peoples,
some of whom would eventually form their own nation-states (e.g.
Sweden in 1523, Norway in 1905, Iceland in 1944) and some whom
would obtain partial independence (e.g. the Faroese). But throughout the
eighteenth century, Denmark’s northernmost territories included parts of
Sápmi (which today stretches across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland,
and parts of Russia), with distinct ethno-linguistic minority groups—such
as the Sami—who were forced to convert to Lutheranism in the 1700s and
drop their mother-tongue languages. The Sami are entirely absent from
Danish national culture, in part because Denmark no longer controls
Sápmi, and in part because the Sami have been marginalized and assimi-
lated for centuries.
As a nation divided between Protestants and Catholics, the Netherlands
developed a unique system of “pillarization” to deal with internal differ-
ences within the population. From the late nineteenth century through
the 1950s (and legally through the 1983 separation of church and state),
HETEROGENEITY PRIOR TO THE 1950S 23
religious differences were institutionalized through separate state struc-

tures for Catholics and Protestants, and eventually socialists and liberals.
Each “pillar” had its own political parties, newspapers, trade unions,
television stations, sports clubs, and sometimes schools and universities.
Most Dutch men and women held a “collective identity” with one of these
pillars, so that even liberal and socialist identities came to mirror religious
identities.14 Furthermore, Dutch-speakers have dominated, but also tol-
erated, the Frisian ethno-linguistic group; similar to Dutch, Frisian is a
recognized national language.
Christian, European Immigrants

Immigrant communities in early-modern Denmark and the Netherlands
thrived, especially in port cities. Amsterdam, for example, was so diverse in
the 1600s—during its so-called “Golden Age” of investment, trade, and
artisanship—that the foreign-born population was 40% (!).15 Copenhagen
was also a bustling hub in the 1600s, during which time approximately
16–17% of the city was foreign, similar to the proportion of foreigners in
Copenhagen today.16 The majority of these immigrants were white,
Christian Europeans, and the majority of these migrations were cyclical:
young men would travel to, from, and within the Netherlands, Denmark,
Sweden, Germany, or Belgium, where they lived and worked temporarily,
before returning to their place of origin.17
There were also individuals and communities that settled permanently.
In Denmark prior to the 1849 Constitution, foreigners could only settle
with permission from the king. Some of the earliest legal immigrants were
Dutch farmers who settled on land just outside Copenhagen in the 1500s.
Then there were the French Huguenot tobacco farmers (early 1700s), the
“Potato Germans” and paid German soldiers (late 1700s), and Moravian
crafts people (late 1700s).18 With the 1849 Constitution, these groups
were eligible for Danish citizenship, and many assimilated fully.
From 1875 through 1952 in Denmark, foreigners continued to face
obstacles in settling, due to the (Danish) Alien Act (1875) that legislated
that a foreigner could be deported without the following: proof of identity
(i.e. official documents), one’s ability to support oneself (i.e. money or a
job), proof of skills, and prompt registration with the police.19 The most
prominent group that migrated during this time (other than working-class
Swedes) were Polish men and women who worked on beet farms. The
1908 “Polish laws” were the first laws concerning foreign workers’ living
and working conditions in Denmark, as most were poor farmers who

risked exploitation.20
Upon arrival, even white, Christian, European immigrants were highly
“visible” due to language and cultural differences. Some of these groups
even maintained cultural differences for generations, often by choice. The
descendants of the aforementioned Dutch farmers (outside Copenhagen)
wore traditional Dutch clothes and bonnets through the 1890s, and
tourist materials for the area still highlight this Dutch cultural history.21
In the Netherlands, Lucassen wrote that Belgian straw-hat makers and
Swiss and Italian chimney sweeps were “eye catching” additions to the
Dutch landscape of the early twentieth century.22 But like most European
Christians, they too “lost their ethnic traits” within a few generations and
became “largely invisible” within the proletariat, due to religious and
linguistic assimilation and intermarriage.23
Jews, Sinti and Roma

Jews serve as a good example of how an immigrant/minority group can
range from being highly “visible” minorities to being “invisible” and
assimilated in Dutch and Danish societies, depending on factors such as
social class and length of stay. Jews are also a useful group for understanding
minority policies—both exclusionary and welcoming—across Europe, as
Jews (and Sinti and Roma) were minorities in every European country.24
Sephardic Jews—namely the Spanish Jews expelled during the 1492
Inquisition, and the Portuguese Jews who emigrated following forced
conversions—were the first Jewish minorities in the Netherlands and
Denmark. Many chose the Netherlands due to its famed religious tolerance,
such as the ascendants of Baruch Spinoza (b. 1632, Amsterdam) who
moved there to practice Judaism.25 In Denmark, the first Sephardic Jews
were invited by the king to deal jewels to the court (late 1600s).
Even after Jews were allowed to become full citizens of the Netherlands
(1796)26 and Denmark (1814),27 many chose to remain separate from,
and thus often “visible” to, mainstream society. They self-segregated in
neighborhoods like Waterlooplein in Amsterdam, or by Adelgade in
Copenhagen, and formed their own courts, schools, cemeteries, butchers,
and synagogues. But other Jews—especially middle- and upper-class
families—assimilated into bourgeois society and became far less “visible,”
such as the Nathanson family in Copenhagen, who were the benefactors of
one of Denmark’s premier nineteenth-century painters, C.W. Eckersberg
(1783–1853), and thus the subjects of several works in the (Danish)

National Gallery.28 In one painting (1818), Mendel Levin Nathanson
(1780–1868) and his wife return home from an event with the Queen,
to find their eight children dancing and singing by the grand piano, a
symbol of their upper-middle-class assimilation.
In contrast, the tens of thousands of poor Eastern European Jews (i.e.
Ashkenazim) who crossed through the Netherlands and Denmark in the
late 1800s and early 1900s escaping massacres (pogroms), were often
highly “visible” due to their dress, language (Yiddish) and customs. As
thousands took up residence in established Jewish neighborhoods, there
were often tensions with the assimilated and middle-class Jews. Yet within
a decade or two, their religiosity also began to decline and interfaith
marriages rose. Lucassen wrote that in the Netherlands, “If it had not
been for the Nazi occupation and the ensuing Holocaust . . . assimilation
would have run its course” for these Jews as well.29
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, an astonishing
105,000 of the 140,000 Dutch Jews died in concentration camps. The
Jews of Denmark, by contrast, were the most fortunate of any who lived in
Nazi-occupied lands: less than 1% of the 8,000 were murdered, as the
majority survived in exile in Sweden.30 But even those who returned home
in 1945 often decided to migrate to the United States or Israel, due to
the loss of housing, persistent discrimination, or painful memories; those
who remained in the Netherlands and Denmark often secularized (i.e.
resigned from the synagogue).31 Thus, due to genocide, forced and
voluntary emigration, and assimilation, Jews were rather “invisible” in
the Dutch and Danish landscapes in the 1960s, despite centuries of deep
history in these countries.
Similar to Jews in some ways, Roma(ni) and Sinti populations have
been “visible” minorities in every European country, and have often
rejected assimilating to host cultures.32 Originally from South Asia but
with histories in Europe for a millennium, the Sinti and Roma have often
been the target of exclusionary laws and deportations. In the 1800s in
Denmark, Roma were routinely deported or forced to work in the royal
shipyard; the aforementioned Alien Act specifically prohibited “foreign
gypsies [sic], musicians, showmen of animals and other things, [and]
performers of tricks,”33 and resulted in the expulsion of numerous Sinti
and Roma families, including those whose residences were tolerated.34
Sinti and Roma were long overlooked not only in European national
histories, but also in the history of the Holocaust. In the Netherlands, a
famous film clip focuses on a young girl—with dark eyes and a scarf over
her head—as she peered out of a freight train door, destined for
Auschwitz. She was assumed to be Jewish; but in 1995, a Sinti survivor
of Auschwitz identified her as one of the 245 Sinti/Roma brought to a
detention camp in Westerbork (Netherlands) in May 1944 before being
transported to Auschwitz.35
In 1952, new immigration laws in Denmark made no mention of
restrictions against Sinti and Roma. Ratified in 1953, the European
Convention on Human Rights forbade expelling someone from a country
based on ethnicity. But after a century of forced deportations and mass
murders, Roma and Sinti—once highly “visible” in the Netherlands and
Denmark—were largely absent from the ethnic landscape of the 1950s.
Colonial Migrants
In Northwest Europe today, the majority of “visible minorities” with roots
in (former) European colonies arrived since the 1950s. Yet further back in
history, people of color migrated from colonies to the metropole for a
variety of reasons, including forced servitude, army service, or—particularly
for mixed, upper-class “Europeans”—university, business, or pleasure.36
These colonial migrants—similar to Jews—could be more or less “visible”
based on assimilation, class, or familial history of intermarriage.
Anthro-historian Ann Laura Stoler is one of the preeminent scholars
to research the roles of sexuality in imperial order, and much of her work
focuses on the Dutch East Indies. She has demonstrated that concubinage—
or casual relationships between Dutch men and Javanese and Sumatran
women—was central to the functioning of the Dutch East Indies
Company (VOC) from the 1600s through to the end of the 1800s. As the
VOC had a policy of hiring single men—whom they could pay lower wages
than married men—the VOC benefitted economically from concubinage:
Javanese and Sumatran women served as local liaisons between the Dutch
men and the local language and culture; they provided free domestic service,
such as cleaning, cooking; and their sexual company boosted morale and
discouraged situational homosexuality.37 Many concubinage relationships
resulted in mixed-race offspring, some of whom grew up in the East Indies
with no contact with their white fathers, but others of whom became
adopted by their fathers and lived among the Dutch sectors of society in
the Netherlands or the colonies.38 The practice of concubinage largely

stopped around 1900 alongside the rise in then-scientific, racist literature
on degeneracy.39 But although interracial relationships were less common in
the 1900s, a number of “Europeans” had distant Asian backgrounds, and
vice versa.
By the end of the Dutch colonial rule in modern-day Indonesia, colo-
nial officials estimated that there were 300,000 “Europeans” out of a
population of more than sixty million (i.e. 0.4%).40 Estimates suggest
that two-thirds of these “Europeans”—most of whom emigrated to the
Netherlands after Indonesian independence—were of mixed (“Eurasian”)
descent.41 J. M. M. van Amersfoort, an early researcher on the integration
of the Indo-Dutch in the 1970s, did not take these phenotypic differences
into consideration when noting that some were confronted with ignorant
questions like “how did one get a Dutch passport” or “where one was
born in Africa.”42
In the Dutch Caribbean, populations were extremely diverse; estimates
from Suriname in the 1950s show that 31% of the population was of
African descent (“Creole,” who were largely the descendants of slaves43),
37% were of South Asian descent (“Hindustani”44—including Hindus and
Muslims—who filled low-wage jobs after the abolishment of slavery,
often via indentured servitude, in the late 1800s and early 1900s), 15%
Javanese (who immigrated for similar reasons as the South Asians), and
the remaining group were largely European (including Jews).45 The first
Afro-Caribbean migrants to Europe were allegedly “servants,” as slavery
was not allowed on European soil. In the Netherlands, a small number of
Afro-Surinamese “servants” arrived in the 1800s, and eventually formed
settlements in Amsterdam and Middelburg.46 In Denmark, a genealogy
documentary included one white-identified women who could trace
ancestry to an Afro-Caribbean “servant” who emigrated from the Virgin
Islands in the 1800s.47
In Denmark, there is the troubling history of a man named Victor
Cornelins, who—together with a young girl, Alberta—was brought from
the Danish Virgin Islands in 1905, to be “exhibited” at the Copenhagen
Zoo. (Rikke Andreassen has documented the popularity of these
shows in venues across Berlin, Bremen, Paris, London, and Denmark;
in Copenhagen, seasonal exhibits brought “Nubians,” Australian
“Cannibals,” Sudanese “Negro Musicians,” “Sinhalese Dwarfs,” and
an entire “village” of eighty Abyssinians, among others.48) At the zoo,
Cornelins was caged—allegedly due to “bad behavior”—in order to

draw crowds. After their time at the zoo, they were sent to a children’s
home in Copenhagen, where Alberta died of illness. In a 1976 autobio-
graphy, Cornelins described his time in the zoo as “frightening,” as
people huddled around him and touched his skin and hair.49 Cornelins
stayed in Denmark until his death in 1985.50
There were some mixed-race people of Afro-Caribbean descent who
could live in the European middle classes. A famous example was Nella
Larsen (b. 1891, Chicago, U.S.A.), who contributed greatly to the
Harlem Renaissance and subsequent literature with her work on “passing”
as white.51 Larsen grew up with her white, Danish mother, but did not
know her father, who was mixed-race, part Afro-Caribbean, and born in
the Danish Virgin Islands. In her semi-autobiographical novel based on
her experiences in Copenhagen in the 1910s, Larsen showed that mixed-
race Danes could be accepted into the Danish middle classes (e.g. shop-
ping at high-end department stores, attending dinner parties, dating white
men), but could also feel like an “exotic” “decoration” (her words) in
these environments.52
Aside from Jews, Sinti and Roma, and colonial migrants of Asian,
African, and mixed descent, there were a handful of other “visible” groups
prior to World War II. In the Netherlands, Chinese sailors from Hong
Kong settled in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague, where they
accepted low-wage jobs; by the 1920s, they developed Chinatowns with
restaurants that attracted Dutch men and women from all over, and which
have traces today.53 In Denmark, the first Chinese settlers had a different
history: of the thirty-four Chinese men and women who were “exhibited”
in the Copenhagen Zoo in 1902, about half settled in the city center,
where they—in the words of a Politiken article at the time—created the
first Chinese “colony” in Denmark.54
Altogether, these various examples counter “common belief” in the
Netherlands and Denmark that the majority population “belonged to an
ethnically homogenous nation” until the arrival of post-colonial migrants,
foreign workers, and refugees in the 1960s–80s.55 (Table 2.1)
SIXTEEN GROUPS OF “VISIBLE” MIGRANTS, 1960S–80S

The easiest way to conceptualize post-war migrants is to think of three
major groups: (A) post-colonial migrants, (B) labor migrants (and their
families), and (C) refugees. However, these categories are incomplete,
SIXTEEN GROUPS OF “VISIBLE” MIGRANTS, 1960S–80S 29
Table 2.1 Rough overview of “Visible Minority” immigrants in the Netherlands

and Denmark by 1990
Rough overview of “Visible Minority” immigrants
(Post-)Colonial migrants, 1950s–80s

In The Netherlands
Afro-Caribbean* c. 300,000
Mixed-race “Europeans” from Dutch c. 200,000
East Indies (i.e. Indo-Dutch)**
South Asian-Caribbean* c. 80,000
Asian “non-Europeans” from Dutch c. 65,000
East Indies (e.g. Javanese, Moluccan)*
Mixed-race “Europeans” from Dutch c. 7,500
Caribbean*
In Denmark
Greenlandic Inuit*** c. 7,500
Mixed-race “Europeans” from Greenland unknown
Foreign workers (and Families), c. 1977
In The Netherlands
Turkey† c. 80,000
Morocco† c. 45,000
Yugoslavia† c. 13,000
Tunisia† c. 1,500
Other “non-Western” laborers†† c. 11,000
Greece, Portugal, Spain† c. 34,000
In Denmark
Turkey‡ c. 10,200
Yugoslavia‡ c. 6,700
Pakistan‡ c. 5,600
Morocco†† c. 1,700
Other “non-Western” laborers‡ c. 13,000
Greece, Portugal, Spain†† c. 5,300
Sources
*Andrea Smith (ed.), Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 32;
Wim Willems, “Why Governments Do Not Learn: Colonial Migrants and Gypsy Refugees in the NL,” in
European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies Since 1945, eds. Ohliger Rainer, Karen
Schönwälder, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos (Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2003).
**Smith, ibid, 32; Esther Captain, “Harmless Identities: Representations of Racial Consciousness Among
Three Generations Indo-Europeans” in Dutch Racism, ed. Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving
(Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2014), 53–71; Guno Jones, “Biology, Culture, ‘Postcolonial Citizenship’
and the Dutch Nation, 1945–2007” in Dutch Racism, ibid, 321.
***Rikke Andreassen, The Mass Media’s Construction of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Nationality. An
Analysis of the Danish News Media’s Communication About Visible Minorities from 1971–2004 (Ph.D.
dissertation, Toronto, Department of History, University of Toronto, 2005), 19–20.
†
W. S. Shadid, Moroccan Workers in the Netherlands (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leiden, 1979, 47.
Figures from 1977. Separate figures given for foreign workers alone, and (on p 52) for children in nursery
and primary school.
††
Shadid, ibid, 11. Figures from 1974.
‡
Poul Chr. Matthiessen, Immigration to Denmark: An Overview of the Research Carried Out from 1999 to
2006 by the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009),
12. Figures from 1978. Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco estimates subtracted from Mattiessen’s
“Other Non-Western” figure, as they were not yet part of the EEC.
Note: In the 1980s especially, additional “visible minorities” arrived as refugees, adoptees, and in other
groups not represented in this chart
and also encompass a huge range of sub-categories that should debunk

any mythical image of a monolithic group of immigrants. The follow-
ing sixteen sub-groups should provide a succinct overview of the diver-
sity of “visible” minority immigrants in much of post-war Northwest
Europe.
Colonial and Post-Colonial Migrants

Post-colonial migrants are those who traveled from the colony to the
European metropole in the years surrounding decolonization and inde-
pendence, for example of Indonesia (1949) and Suriname (1975). Post-
colonial migrants often arrived in Europe with language skills and govern-
mental assistance in finding housing, employment, and education; but
their social (and ethnic) backgrounds varied greatly. Advantages also
extended to many immigrants from overseas territories that are still part
of Dutch and Danish jurisdiction. In the Dutch Caribbean: Aruba,
Curaçao, and Sint Maarten have some autonomy within the Kingdom of
the Netherlands; whereas Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius are considered
to be the Netherlands proper. In the North Atlantic: Greenland and the
Faroe Islands have some autonomy within the Kingdom of Denmark.
Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children—including
many visible minorities—migrated from former Dutch colonies and
Dutch overseas territories in the decades after World War II; these popu-
lations are important for research on Dutch multiculturalism and attitudes
toward foreign workers in the 1960s–80s. In contrast, there were only
7,000–8,000 Greenlandic Inuits who immigrated to Denmark by the
1990s, so research on Danish multiculturalism in the 1960s–80s focuses
much more on foreign worker populations, their families, and refugees.56
Fig. 2.1 Sex, (post-)colonialism, Rock & Roll I: Indo-Rock band, Ricky &
the Rhythm Strings (1959).
In the late 1950s and 1960s, several “Indo-Rock” bands—that is, Rock & Roll
bands composed of Dutch people with Indonesian backgrounds—became popular
in the Netherlands and Germany, such as Ricky and the Rhythm Strings, led by
Rick Berger (center; b. 1941, Sukabumi, Java)
Top photo captioned via IISG, Migrant Photo Archive, Collection: “Verhoeff” (The
Hague, c. 1959); last accessed September 2016 via http://www.iisg.nl/hbm/bladeren-
op-collectie.php?collectie=3&source=indned Reprinted with permission from Emmy
Verhoeff and Rick Berger.
Among colonial and post-colonial migrants, one can consider the

following groups:
(1) The “European” “repatriates” (both white and mixed ethnicity)

from (former) colonies who readily assimilated into European
cultures despite living for one to ten generations outside of
Europe. (Fig. 2.1)
Examples: the 300,000 who “repatriated” to the Netherlands
after Indonesian independence, many of whom had some mixed/
Asian background; or the 5,000–10,000 “repatriates” to the
Fig. 2.2 Sex, (post-)colonialism, Rock & Roll II: Sumé, who sang about colo-
nization and revolution in Greenland.
With three albums in the 1970s, the rock band Sumé sang in the Greenlandic
language—often about colonization, revolution, and Inuit cultural identity—at
various concerts across Europe and Greenland
Image via Sumé—Mumisitsinerup Nipaa [“Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution”], dir. Inuk Silis
Høegh (Bullitt Film, 2014). Photo by Susanne Mertz. Used with permission from the producer.
Netherlands from Suriname and the Antilles.57 Already by the 1980s,

“repatriates” from Indonesia had integrated so quickly that most
Dutch forgot the disparaging words that described these immigrants
upon arrival (e.g. that the “Indos” were a “weak social group”).58
(2) The non-white spouses who “repatriated” with “European” families.
Examples: the Asian wives of white men, who emigrated from
the Dutch East Indies without the restrictions that most Asians
faced.
(3) Other non-white people who chose to relocate to Europe through
colonial migration schemes (sometimes temporarily; Fig 2.2).
Examples: the astonishing 200,000 Surinamese and Antilleans who
migrated to the Netherlands in the post-war decades.59
(4) Non-white people who relocated to Europe involuntarily, or under

refugee-like situations.
Examples: the 18,000 soldiers from the island of Molucca, who
fought on the side of the Royal Dutch Indonesian Army in the
1940s, and who hoped eventually for their own sovereign state,
which they never received.60
Labor Migrants and Their Families

From the 1950s onwards, foreign laborers immigrated into much of
Western Europe (e.g. Belgium, Denmark France, Germany, the
Netherlands, Sweden, the UK) in order to fill unskilled labor shortages
in mining, in booming industries (e.g. steel production, factories), and/or
in the service sector. In the Dutch and Danish context, these foreign
laborers are distinct from colonial and post-colonial migrants; but many
lived under European colonialism and migrated to Europe through colo-
nial migration schemes. Approximately 30% of Moroccan workers in the
Netherlands had lived in another European country prior to migrating to
the Netherlands (i.e. “step-migration”), especially France and Belgium,
where many had the advantage of speaking some French.61
The 1973 oil crisis prompted a hiring freeze across Europe; but despite
the poor labor market in the following years, many foreign workers
continued to remain in Europe and sent for families to immigrate through
family reunification laws. Thus the “labor migrant” category included the
following:
(5) Foreign laborers from within the European Economic Community

(EEC), who could readily move back and forth between their
country of origin and the Netherlands (from 1957) or Denmark
(from 1973).
Examples: Italians, who set the standard for “guest work” by often
returning to Italy after working. Others immigrated permanently;
and many were mocked as cultural and racial outsiders.62
(6) Foreign workers from outside of the EEC who were more hesitant
to leave the EEC due to hiring and residence restrictions.
Examples: Like Italians, there were many from southern Europe—
Spanish, Portuguese, Greeks, and Yugoslavians63—who were
racialized to different degrees. Even more “visibly” different
were those from Muslim-majority countries, most notably the

Turks (e.g. in the Netherlands and Denmark), Moroccans (espe-
cially in the Netherlands), and Pakistanis (especially in Denmark),
who all feature prominently throughout this book.
(7) Those who arrived through family reunification programs, and
often became “foreign workers” themselves.
Examples: Women who were married to men who immigrated to
Europe,64 and whose husbands paid for them and their children to
reunite in Europe; women who married single men living in
Europe, either through a familial arrangement, or after meeting
on his return trip; and sometimes the parents, in-laws, and cousins
of those working in Europe.
(8) Children of foreign workers who were born in Europe, and thus
were not “immigrants,” but who did not always qualify for
European citizenship. Yet even those with citizenship—including
some of today’s third generation—are referred to as “immigrants”
in political, legal, or popular rhetoric.65
Refugees
The third major category of post-war migration concerns asylum. There
were some general differences between those who arrived in the 1950s–
70s versus the 1980s–90s, and this difference can be summarized as:
(9) Individuals who sought asylum based on political opinions, and

who arrived with only their immediate family, if any at all.
Examples: the c. 500 refugees who came to Denmark after the
Prague Spring in 1968, or the c. 800 who came to Denmark after
the 1973 military coup in Chile; versus,
(10) Those who fled war-torn areas due to widespread political and/or
ethnic persecution, and who arrived to/with larger extended
networks.
Examples: the c. 10,000 refugees from Iran and c. 17,000 from
Iraq who came to Denmark in the 1980s surrounding
Khomeinization and the Iran-Iraq war.66
While both of these categories refer to de jure refugees, there were also
some post-colonial migrants fleeing persecution (category 4), and further,
many foreign workers (group B) were de facto refugees who could not
return to their countries of origin.67
Miscellaneous
Aside from the three major categories listed above, there were other
notable groups of “visible minorities” in the 1960s–80s, including the
following:
(11) Adopted children.

Examples: the half-African-American children born during the
Allied occupation of Germany, many of whom grew up in orpha-
nages and/or were adopted across Europe in the 1950s68; later,
the transnational adoptees from South Korea in the 1980s.69
(12) Students.
Examples: Gretty Mirdal—who is now a professor at Copenhagen
University, and cited throughout this book—traveled from
Istanbul to the U.S. for her bachelors degree (Smith College,
1965), before moving to Denmark to earn her masters degree in
psychology (Copenhagen University, 1969) and later her PhD.
Fluent in Turkish, Mirdal conducted interviews with and wrote
some of the earliest scholarly literature on Turkish immigrants in
Denmark.
(13) Diplomats, highly-skilled and/or middle-class professionals.
Examples: Murat Alpar (b. 1943, Turkey)—who wrote some
poetry in the 1970s about foreign workers—was already an estab-
lished banker in Denmark by 1971, when he helped Turkish
workers remit money to their families.70
(14) Visual and performing artists.
Examples: Not entirely distinct from group 13, there were dozens
of prominent African-American jazz musicians who settled in
Copenhagen in the 1960s–80s, and there is a neighborhood in
southern Copenhagen (Sluseholmen) with streets named after
Oscar Pettiford, Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Drew,
Thad Jones, and Ernie Wilkins.71 Several jazz choreographers
are profiled in Chapter 8, but few of the aforementioned were
“starving artists.”
(15) Spouses that Europeans met while traveling internationally, or
through contact ads.
(16) New populations of Roma or Sinti who traveled through

Europe via traditional migration patterns in the post-war
decades.72
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND ON LABOR MIGRANTS

AND THEIR FAMILIES
Foreign workers’ histories in the Netherlands and Denmark share some

similarities. In both countries, corporations and conservative political parties
favored the recruitment of so-called “guest workers” from the mid-1960s
through to the early 1970s, while left-wing parties feared that the foreign
workers would suppress wages.73 Men were the vast majority of workers
from Muslim-majority countries prior to 1973, but there were some female
workers; but most women and children arrived largely in the second half of
the 1970s through family reunification.74 The majority lived in urban areas75
such as the greater metropolitan areas of Amsterdam,76 Rotterdam,77 and
Copenhagen78; but others lived in smaller towns closer to their areas of
work. By the mid-1980s especially, as researchers and politicians finally
accepted that “guest workers” were permanent immigrants, foreign worker
communities were labeled “problem” groups that lacked integration.79
Those from Muslim-majority countries especially were highly “visible”
due not only to phenotypic differences, but also to religious differences
with regard to prayer, dress, and diet. Neither Denmark nor the
Netherlands had an infrastructure for Muslims (e.g. mosques, halal butch-
ers), and thus labor migrants had to work from below to establish immi-
grant stores, cultural groups, neighborhoods, and so forth.80 This lack of
infrastructure disappointed Turkish workers especially, who knew that in
German cities (e.g. Cologne) there were not only networks of highly
educated Turks (e.g. doctors, lawyers, translators) but also Turkish orga-
nizations, community centers, restaurants, mosques, radio stations, butch-
ers, and bakeries, which allowed Turkish workers to organize and “put
things on the government agenda” more quickly.81 Almost all Turkish
workers in Europe hoped to migrate to Germany; in fact, sociologist
Ahmet Akgündüz reported that many Turks, when signing up for labor
recruitment in Turkey, called the process “Going to Germany.”82 A 1970
study found that only two of thirty-four Turkish workers in Denmark had
actually hoped to go to Denmark specifically.
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND ON LABOR MIGRANTS AND THEIR FAMILIES 37
In the 1980s, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden were the only
countries in Europe to grant foreigners the right to vote in local elections,
which demonstrates that many Dutch and Danes (and Swedes) wanted to
get foreigners involved in “mainstream” affairs. This legal change coin-
cided with a turn towards “multicultural” politics, that some scholars have
associated with anti-racism.83 However, other scholars have emphasized
that so-called “multicultural” politics related less to European tolerance
and progressivism, and more to the continued assumptions that foreign
workers—and even some colonial and post-colonial migrants—would
return to their countries of origin, and thus integration was unnecessary.
In Denmark, for example, the government assisted with legislating halal
slaughter, but also provided tax reductions for money remitted to the
country of origin, thus discouraging savings in Denmark.84
There are some differences between foreign worker experiences in the
Netherlands and Denmark. With regard to recruitment, the Netherlands
usually selected workers in their countries of origin, and arranged for their
travel to the Netherlands though bilateral governmental treaties (e.g. with
Turkey in 1964, and Morocco in 1969) through 1973. In Denmark in the
1960s, foreigners could arrive and then find work on their own; but then
immigration was nearly halted altogether in the 1970s (except with brief
periods of employer recruitment in 1970 and 1973).
The presence of colonial and post-colonial migrants in the Netherlands
sometimes helped attract public attention to issues facing all immigrants,
such as the need for housing.85 But sometimes discussions of certain
issues—like racism—focused solely on (post-)colonial migrants and failed
to address unique types of discrimination against foreign workers.86
A third difference is the history and legacies of pillarization in the
Netherlands, which had an effect on how the country dealt with minority
groups like early foreign laborers. Despite the decline of the pillarization
system in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Dutch government incorporated
foreign workers into the Netherlands using a similar model of “living apart
together” (a phrase associated with pillariazation), whether by encouraging
early Spanish and Italian workers to join Catholic associations, or by agree-
ing to the foundation of new Muslim institutions (e.g. schools, community
centers, and briefly mosques87) as if Muslims might form a unique pillar.88
In this regard, the Minority Policy of 1983 showed the legacies of the pillar
system, as it provided additional funding for immigrants to create their own
immigrant organizations—often along ethnic lines—with the assumption
that an immigrant could “integrate while preserving one’s own identity.”89
Chapter 3 begins with a critique of economic determinism’s centrality in

research on “labor migrants” and their decisions to leave for, or remain in,
Europe. In his comparative study of Turkish foreign workers in Western
Europe, Akgündüz acknowledges that the “old” push factors—“slow
economic growth,” “high population growth,” “poverty,” and “unemploy-
ment” in Turkey—were insufficient for explaining “how and why both
urban and rural middle classes in the most developed, modernized areas
of Turkey were enticed to take up work in Western Europe.”90 Although
the urban middle classes about whom he speaks were more common in
Germany, it is still important to think about non-economic push and pull
factors, including political affiliations, and word-of-mouth communication
about Europe through social networks. Finally, cultural and personal
factors—including those related to gender and sexuality—factored also in
the push and pull factors of migration for some foreign workers and their
families.
NOTES
1. The term “person of color” is not commonly used in the Netherlands or
Denmark, and the term “colored” is generally not considered outdated or
intentionally offensive, although in both countries the term “neger”
(Negro) is seen as a problematic remnant of the twentieth century.
“Colored,” as in gekleurde (Dutch) or farvede (Danish), is commonly used
in mainstream newspapers, e.g (in Dutch) Margriet Oostveen, “Hebben
kinderboeken meer gekleurde rolmodellen nodig?” [“Do Children’s Books
Need More Colored Role Models?”], Volkskrant (7 October 2015); or (in
Danish), “Dansk filminstitut: Hvor er de farvede skuespillere?” [“Danish
Film Institute: Where are all the Colored Actors?”], Politiken (10 February
2013). Thus, these article titles could also be translated into English as “role
models of color” or “actors of color.”
In the U.S., mainstream media would only use “colored” in relation to
historic material or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). The English-language differentiation between “people of
color” and “colored people” gets lost in translation to Dutch or Danish, the
latter of which avoids the periphrastic (e.g. “history of immigration” becomes
“immigration’s-history,” immigrationshistorie). In Dutch, there is a separate
word for South African Colored, kleurling, which has apartheid connotations.
There is more discussion of self-identifying language in chapters 6 and 7.
The Netherlands often uses the (much criticized) dichotomy autochtoon
[native] and allochtoon [non-native] in political, journalistic, and popular
NOTES 39
language, while Danish statistics might use the clumsy “person with at least
one parent of non-Western origin.” Both countries also use “foreigners,”
“immigrants” or people with “non-Western” backgrounds, sometimes to
discuss children and grandchildren of immigrants, as euphemisms for people
of color, racial minorities, or “visible” minorities.
In this chapter expecially, I use the term “visible” minority, drawing from
its common use in Canadian literature on ethnicity. The term foregrounds
the ethnic and racial differences central to various minorities’ lived experi-
ences, even when cultural or class differences are small (i.e. for third-gen-
eration “immigrants” of color). The Canadian term “visible minority,”
similar to the term “[person] of color,” can be an umbrella term for “non-
white” people, often living in countries with a white-majority ruling class. As
this chapter is historic, the term “visible” also considers some groups that
stood out from the majority population due to cultural differences or
religious customs, often in tandem with social inequalities. The term “visible
minority” is not common in the Netherlands or Denmark. For more on the
use of “visible minority” in the Danish context, see Rikke Andreassen, The
Mass Media’s Construction of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Nationality. An
Analysis of the Danish News Media’s Communication About Visible
Minorities from 1971–2004 (PhD dissertation, Toronto, Department of
History, University of Toronto, 2005), 9, 17–18.
2. Leo Lucassen, “To Amsterdam: Migrations Past and Present,” in New York
and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape, ed. Nancy
Foner, Jan Rath, and Jan Willem Duyvendak (New York: New York
University Press, 2014), 66.
3. Gloria Wekker, White Innocence. Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2–7.
4. Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving (eds.), Dutch Racism (Amsterdam:
Rodopi B.V., 2014), 22–24.
5. Randi Marselis, “Descendants of Slaves: The Articulation of Mixed Racial
Ancestry in a Danish Television Documentary Series,” European Journal of
Cultural Studies 11:4 (2008): 448, 450.
6. Denmark was the seventh-largest slave trader, with the U.S. in sixth
place. Andreassen and Blaagaard contend that Danes have less collective
guilt than other European countries with regard to the legacies of slavery
and colonialism partly because Denmark—unlike England, France, the
Netherlands—did not have a strong history of migration from the colo-
nies to Europe. Bolette Blaagaard and Rikke Andreassen, “The
Disappearing Act: The Forgotten History of Colonialism, Eugenics and
Gendered Othering in Denmark,” in Teaching “Race” with a Gendered
Edge, ed. Brigitte Hipfl and Kristín Loftsdóttir (Utrecht: ATGENDER,
2012), 81–96.
Aside from the Danish Virgin Islands, there was also the Danish Gold
Coast in Africa, and a settlement in India, Tranquebar, which was sold in
1845 to the British. The Danish “Asiatic Company,” active since the 1600s,
is the reason that Danish cuisine includes curry and cardamom, and that the
iconic Royal Copenhagen porcelain is so similar to China porcelain. Danish
territories in West Africa (e.g. the Danish Gold Coast) were sold in 1850 to
the British; a 2015 Danish blockbuster, “Gold Coast” raised more aware-
ness about this territory and history, but scholars criticized it for providing a
white hero’s perspective; see Mathias Danbolt and Lene Myong,
“Guldkysten og den historiske og politiske ‘korrekthed’” [“The Gold
Coast, and Historical and Political ‘Correctness’”], peculiar.dk (27 July
2015).
7. Wekker (n 3), 12–14; and Markus Balkenhol, “Silence and the Politics of
Compassion. Commemorating Slavery in the Netherlands,” Social
Anthropology 24:3 (2016): 278–293. The Afro-European women’s organi-
zation Sophiedela initiated momentum for the monument.
8. Blaagaard and Andreassen (n 6); and Marselis (n 5). Marselis also notes that
some Danish materials about the slave trade borrow from Dutch educational
materials, such as the film Slavernij [Slavery], dir. Frank Zichem (Teleac/
NOT, 2003).
9. Cited in J. M. M. van Amersfoort, Immigration and the Formation of
Minority Groups: The Dutch Experience, 1945–1975 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 197.
10. Frank Bovenkerk, “The Netherlands,” in International Labor Migration in
Europe, ed. Ronald E. Krane (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979), 118.
11. Immigration researcher Rinus Penninx argued against this statement in his
1979 report to the government on ethnic minorities; as he wrote, “Until
now, policy on the admission of foreigners had been strongly influenced by
the consideration that the Netherlands cannot and must not become a
country of immigration.” Rinus Penninx, Ethnic Minorities (Den Haag:
Staatsuitgeverij, Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 1979),
XXXII and 54.
12. For famous studies about the making of nationhood in heterogeneous Great
Britain and France, see: Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–
1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); David A. Bell, The Cult of
the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001).
13. “Language,” in the online exhibit of the Immigrant Museum in Farum
(Denmark), last accessed October 2016 via immigrantmuseet.dk
14. In contrast to France, where the public sphere is supposedly secular (i.e.
laïcité), the Dutch public sphere during this period was pluralistic: different
ideologies had a right to practice their religion/culture both individually
NOTES 41
and collectively. Peter Van Rooden, “Longterm Religious Developments in

the Netherlands, 1750–2000,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western
Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
15. Trade related in part to the growth in overseas imperialism; the first stock
exchange in the world (1609) led the world’s financial institutions; and the
country was “tolerant” with regard to religion and press; all of this was
attractive to foreigners. For more on the economic and intellectual environ-
ment, see Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and
the Household Economy, 1650-the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment:
Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
16. Museum of Copenhagen, “Becoming a Copenhagener,” last accessed
March 2015 via copenhagen.dk/
17. Poul Chr. Matthiessen, Immigration to Denmark: An Overview of the
Research Carried Out from 1999 to 2006 by the Rockwool Foundation
Research Unit (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark,
2009),10–11.
18. See for example, “Immigrantmuseet: Indvandrings Kulturhistorie” [“The
Immigrant Museum: Immigration’s Cultural History”], part of the Furesø
Museums, Farum, Denmark. Visited in October 2013; more information
also available through immigrantmuseet.dk/ [.] Special thanks to curator
Susanne Krogh Jensen for access to additional materials not exhibited at the
museum.
19. Although the majority of the deported were Swedish (or German), there
were also a few “visible minorities.” A quick look at the police records,
including photographed portraits, of the expelled—made available through
the Genealogical Publishing House in Denmark—shows one of the expelled
was Simon Sheffield, an African-American born in the U.S. in 1856. In the
1930s, the law disproportionately affected Jewish, Roma, and Sinti immi-
grants from Europe. See: the Immigrant Museum in Farum; and the data-
base of the Genealogical Publishing House, http://genealogisk-forlag.dk/
20. By 1914, there were 14,000 Poles working in sugar beet fields. The laws
required employers to prepare contracts (i.e. pay, work hours, Catholic and
Protestant holidays, travel reimbursement, food, housing) that were to be
shared with state authorities. Via the Immigrant Museum in Farum.
21. “Becoming a Copenhagener,” The Museum of Copenhagen.
22. Lucassen (n 2), 62.
23. Lucassen (n 2), 57–58.
24. See e.g. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the
Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jakob Feldt, Transnationalism

and the Jews: Culture, History, and Prophecy (London: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2016).
25. Spinoza’s grandfather fled the Iberian Peninsula and reconverted to Judaism
in Rotterdam in 1615, when the government passed an ordinance allowing
the first synagogue. Spinoza attended a Jewish school before renouncing his
faith and being excommunicated from the Jewish community, which was
highly uncommon. On the unique intellectual climate of the Netherlands at
this time, and on Spinoza’s radical atheism, see: Israel (n 15).
26. Lucassen (n 2), 58. See also Robert Cohen, “Passage to a New World: The
Sephardi Poor of Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” in Neveh Ya’kov Jubilee
Volume Presented to Dr. Jaap Meijer, ed. Lea Dasberg and Jonathan N.
Cohen (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1982); and Katrina Sonnenberg-Stern,
Emancipation and Poverty: The Ashkenazi Jews of Amsterdam, 1796–1850
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
27. In Denmark, the king first allowed Jewish religious ceremonies in 1684; by
1833, there were approximately 1,600 Jews in Denmark; via Det Mosaiske
Troessamfund, “Et jødisk samfund bliver til” [“A Jewish Community
Comes to Be”], last accessed March 2015 via mosaiske.dk
28. Kaspar Monrad, “Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, the Nathanson Family,
1818,” last accessed October 2016 via the National Gallery’s smk.dk/
29. Lucassen (n 2), 63.
30. Due to an agreement with the Nazis, Denmark was not required to perse-
cute its Jewish population (e.g. wearing stars, deporting to camps) during
the early 1940s. When rumor spread that the tolerant policy would change
in 1943, an effort was made to transport Danish Jews to Sweden (via
numerous fishing boats). Approximately 500 Jews were deported to
Theresienstadt, but in the final months of the war, the Danish government
saved most of them. By the end of the war, “only” 50–60 Danish Jews were
killed. Via the Danish-Jewish Museum.
31. “Home: A special exhibit,” The Danish Jewish Museum (Spring 2015).
While it is true that some of the Danish survivors returned to homes that
were untouched or cared for by neighbors, more than half returned to
Denmark homeless.
32. Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar, Gypsies and Other
Itinerant Groups. A Socio-Historical Approach (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998); Hubertus Johannes Martinus Van Baar, The European Roma:
Minority Representation, Memory, and the Limits of Transnational
Governmentality (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2011).
33. Translation via the Immigrant Museum in Farum.
34. See “Familien Demeter” and “Familien Tajkon” via the Immigrant Museum
in Farum (online). In 1906, the king personally met a Romani family
NOTES 43
(Tjulga Tajkon, his wife, and 17-year-old daughter Marietta) in Elsinore,

and organized residence permits for them and the fifty other Romani with
whom they traveled. However, when the king died in 1912, these Romani
were expelled, with the exception of Marietta, who had married a Danish
citizen, and was probably the only legal resident of Roma descent in
Denmark from 1912 through to 1953.
35. The Dutch Auschwitz Committee identified her as Settela (Anna Maria)
Steinbach (1934–1944), of Roma or Sinti origin. Via “Sinti and Roma,” last
accessed September 2015 via http://www.auschwitz.nl/
36. A handful of “elite” non-Europeans fraternized with the Dutch upper-
classes in the nineteenth century, such as (Javanese elite) Raden Syarif
Bustaman Saleh, whose portrait is displayed at the Rijksmuseum.
According to the Rijksmuseum, Saleh moved to the Netherlands to study
painting in 1829, and lived there through 1851.
37. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2010);
and Ann Laura Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender,
Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan
Scott (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 209–266. On
situational homosexuality, see Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge,” ibid, 217–218.
38. Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge,” (n 37) 220, 240–241.
39. Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge,” (n 37) 223–224.
40. Estimates from 1942. In the event of a mixed relationship, the child could
take European nationality only if the European parent (often the father)
acknowledged the child; if the European parent did not acknowledge the
child, the child would be given “inlander” nationality, which sixty million
people had. A third category included the “foreign Orientals,” who were
1.2 million Chinese and 71,000 Arabs. “Europeans” also included U.S.
Americans, and after 1896, Japanese. Esther Captain, “Harmless
Identities: Representations of Racial Consciousness Among Three
Generations Indo-Europeans” in Dutch Racism (n 4), 53–71.
41. Guno Jones, “Biology, Culture, ‘Postcolonial Citizenship’ and the Dutch
Nation, 1945–2007,” in Dutch Racism (n 4), 321.
42. van Amersfoort (n 9), 85.
43. “Creoles” refers to the descendants of those brought to work on plantations
as slaves prior to the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. About 350,000–
400,000 men and women ended up in Suriname as slaves, but many died of
malnourishment and overworking. When slavery was abolished in 1863,
there were only 50,000 slaves to gain freedom. Unlike in North America,
Surinamese slaves had more agency to practice their language and culture;
on that point, see Gloria Wekker, “Mati-ism and Black Lesbianism: Two
Idealtypical Expressions of Female Homosexuality in Black Communities of
the Diaspora (1996),” in Our Caribbean: a Gathering of Lesbian and Gay

Writing from the Antilles, ed. Thomas Glave (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2008), 369–371. Also published in Esther D. Rothblum (ed.),
Classics in Lesbian Studies (New York: Harrington Park, 1997).
44. Following the abolition of slavery, there were labor gaps in Caribbean
plantation societies, and Europeans began recruiting indentured laborers
from Northern (British) India, mostly from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar en
Bengalen. Among them, 17% were Muslim (which was slightly higher
than the percentage in the regions), and the rest were Hindu. Anke
Welten, “Misleide migranten” [“Misguided Migrants”], Historisch
Nieuwsblad (online) 9 (2010); Rosemarijn Hoefte, In Place of Slavery: A
Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laborers in Suriname
(Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998).
45. All percentages from van Amersfoort (n 9), 145.
46. van Amersfoort (n 9), 138.
47. See: Slavernes Slægt [“The Descendents of Slaves”], dir. Alex Frank Larsen
(DR2, 2005). In 2005, a Danish documentary filmmaker—inspired in part
by Dutch efforts to discuss slavery and colonialism in schools—did a genea-
logical project to inform (white) Danes about their unknown black
ancestors.
48. Rikke Andreassen, Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in
Ethnic Displays (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Limited, 2015), 12–15.
49. Victor Cornelins, Fra St. Croix til Nakskov (Frimodts forlag, 1976); also
The Museum of Copenhagen, “Becoming a Copenhagener.”
50. Andreassen (n 48).
51. Nella Larsen, Passing (New York: Penguin Books, 1997; originally 1929).
52. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2006;
originally 1928), 72–74, 67. Larsen’s observations show that there were few
visible minorities on the streets; her fictionalized protagonist felt all eyes on
her, fingers pointing, and whispers of “sorte” (black) (67); but after a few
months, she began to “expect and accept admiration as her due” (91).
53. Lucassen (n 2), 64–65: they “added an extra exotic flavor to the reputation
of the capital [Amsterdam] as a cosmopolitan center.”
54. Cited in Andreassen (n 48), 159. By 1905, there was a Chinese tea room on
Østergade in Copenhagen, and the first Chinese restaurant opened on
Farvegade in 1948; Museum of Copenhagen, “Becoming a Copenhagener.”
55. Lucassen also questioned the “common belief in a relatively ethnically
homogenous city before the postwar waves” and wondered why “the idea
took root that the Dutch belonged to an ethnically homogenous nation in
which migration had made only few inroads”; Lucassen (n 2), 66 and 77.
Marselis has also sought to “challenge . . . the supposed historical homoge-
neity of Nordic nation-states” and to dispute the myth that “the Danish
NOTES 45
population . . . [was] homogeneous until the arrival of the ‘guestworkers’ in

the 1960s”; Marselis (n 5), 448 and 450.
56. At various stages in the 1950s–80s, Greenland (population c. 57,000 in
2014) became more independent from Denmark (e.g. rejecting economic
treaties, renaming the capital, creating a flag, promoting the language
Kallaaliit). But Danish statistics never considered Greenlanders as foreigners
in Denmark. Estimate via Andreassen (n 1), 19–20. It is also difficult to
ascertain data on Faroese immigrants, though most are “white” and speak
the Scandinavian language, Faroese.
57. Wim Willems, “No Sheltering Sky: Migrant Identities of Dutch Nationals
from Indonesia,” in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea Smith
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 33–59; and Andrea L.
Smith, “Introduction: Europe’s Invisible Migrants,” in Europe’s Invisible
Migrants. Figures from Smith, ibid, 32. Smith is hesitant to accept the term
“repatriates” as these terms ignore the fact that many of the families were not
“returning” to Europe. Stoler wrote about authorities’ anxieties that Dutch
children who grew up in Indonesia with “native” nannies were “too well
versed in native customs” (e.g. children’s songs, games); see Stoler, Carnal
Knowledge (n 37). In France, many were dismayed that the French
“retournées” from Algeria did not even read Le Monde(!); Pierre Nora, cited
in Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the
Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 196–197.
58. van Amersfoort (n 9), 78–80; Jones (n 41), 325.
59. Smith (n 57), 32. In the 1950s–70s, almost one-third of the population of
Suriname moved to the Netherlands, almost all of whom were “non-
European.” The majority of Surinamese moved to Amsterdam (30%),
Rotterdam (15%), and The Hague (15%); van Amersfoort (n 9).
60. The Javanese were of course angered by the Moluccan allegiance to the
Dutch colonials; about 13,000 soldiers and some of their family members
migrated to the Netherlands, where their unemployment or retirement
salaries paid for their segregated encampments. Of the Moluccans, 90%
were ethnically Ambonese and Christian. The initial migrants hoped for a
temporary stay, and that they could return to form the independent
Republik Maluku Selatan. Thus in the 1950s, both Moluccan and Dutch
leaders agreed that assimilation policies were not necessary: the Moluccans
could live in housing projects with no integration programs and no partici-
pation with Dutch society. By 1973, most had moved from camps to
residential neighborhoods. Second-generation Moluccans participated in
Dutch society to a higher extent, and most spoke better Dutch than
Malay. In 1975 and again in 1977—when they were given Dutch citizen-
ship—groups of young Moluccans hijacked trains, killing several in both
incidents, with the purpose of calling for an independent Moluccan state.
See chapter in van Amersfoort (n 9); and Jones (n 41), 323. See also section
entitled “Clarence” in Chapter 8.
Separately: in the 1960s during the transition from Sukarno to Suharto,
there were also some Indonesian refugees who fled to the Netherlands
(where they had extended social networks) amidst widespread massacres.
See e.g. The Act of Killing, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer (Det Danske
Filminstitut, 2013).
61. W. S. Shadid, Moroccan Workers in the Netherlands (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Leiden, 1979), 164–165.
62. See e.g. Sabina Bellofatto, “The acceptance and diffusion of Italian cuisine
in the face of the xenophobic violence against Italian immigrants in post-war
Switzerland.” The Second ISA Forum of Sociology (August 1–4, 2012)
(Isaconf, 2012).
63. Jonathan Matthew Schwartz, Reluctant Hosts: Denmark’s Reception of Guest
Workers (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1985). This book includes fasci-
nating ethnographic work with Yugoslav communities—including “gypsy”
Yugoslavs—in Denmark, and in a Yugoslavian labor-sending town (Lake
Prespa), see 91–130.
64. There were few (if any) cases of working women importing a husband
through family reunification in the 1970s. Of the solo working women
referenced in Chapter 6 of this book, one had a husband in Turkey but
did not mention family reunification, and another had no trouble finding a
husband from her country of origin in Europe.
65. On the legal definition of “second generation immigrants” from 1991, see:
Matthiessen (n 17) 11–13: “People born in Denmark of parents neither of
whom (or in cases where only one parent is known, that parent) is a Danish
citizen born in Denmark.”
66. Matthiessen (n 17), 203–206. See also “Denmark and Refugees after the
Second World War,” a multimedia exhibit at The Danish Jewish Museum
(Spring 2015).
67. This theme is explored more closely in chapters 3 and 5, and included “guest
workers” from Turkey, Morocco, Spain, and Greece, among others who
would not, or could not, return to their countries of origin.
68. A new book shows that thousands of half-black children were illegally
adopted in Denmark: Amalie Linde, Mathilde Hørmand-Pallesen, and
Amalie Kønigsfeldt, Børneimporten: Et Mørkt Kapitel I Fortællingen Om
Udenlandsk Adoption [“The Import of Children: A Dark Chapter in the
Story of Foreign Adoptions”] (Copenhagen: Kristeligt Dagblad, 2013).
69. Lene Myong, “Bliv dansk, bliv inkluderet: transnational adoption i et in- og
eksklusionsperspektiv” [“Be Danish, be Included: Transnational Adoption
in an in- and Exclusion Perspective”], Paedagogisk Psykologisk Tidsskrift 48:3
(2011): 268–276.
NOTES 47
70. As a banker, see the Turkish pages of the first issues of Fremmedarbejderbladet
[“The Foreign Worker Journal”] in 1971. On poetry: Murat Alpar,
Gæstearbejderen Memet [“The Guest Worker Memet”] (Copenhagen:
Gyldendal, 1978); Murat Alpar, Memet (Copenhagen: Augustinus, 1980).
71. In the 1950s especially, jazz music became popular in Copenhagen, such as
at the famous venue Montmartre; dozens of musicians chose to settle in
Copenhagen in the 1960s–80s, and several are buried in prominent ceme-
teries in Copenhagen. Although the city had welcomed American jazz
musicians before World War II (e.g. Louis Armstrong in 1933), most just
visited the city briefly. The bassist Oscar Pettiford was one of the first to
settle; he arrived in 1958, and died two years later in Copenhagen. Ben
Webster moved first to Amsterdam in 1964, and then to Copenhagen in
1969; he was in several films (as himself, a saxophonist), including Big Ben
(Netherlands, 1967) and Quiet Days in Clichy (Denmark, 1970). Dexter
Gordon lived in Paris and Copenhagen from around 1960 to around 1975,
and was featured in several Danish films in the 1960s; he has two children
who live in Denmark today. Richard Bently Boone arrived in 1970, and
stayed until his death in 1999 (and is buried in Assistens Kirkegård). Thad
Jones surprised his New York friends when he moved to Copenhagen in the
1980s to work with the Danish Radio Big Band; he married a Danish
woman, had a son, and died in 1986 (and is buried in Vestre Kirkegård).
Sahib Shihab, who performed in the Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden in
1966, also married a Danish woman. Other names include Stuff Smith,
Horace Parlan, Duke Jordan, and Ed Thigpen. See: Leonard Feather and
Ira Gitler, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
72. Wim Willems, “Why Governments Do Not Learn: Colonial Migrants and
Gypsy Refugees in the NL,” in European Encounters: Migrants, Migration
and European Societies Since 1945, eds. Ohliger Rainer, Karen
Schönwälder, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos (Aldershot, Hants, UK:
Ashgate, 2003).
73. See Chapter 4 in this book.
74. On female workers and wives of foreign workers, see Chapter 6. Gretty
Mirdal summarized regarding the Turkish female population in Denmark,
“The available sociological and anthropological literature on Turkish
women in Germany (Kudat, 1975, …) and Sweden (…) is difficult to
apply to the case of Turkish immigrants in Denmark for the following
reasons: 1) Whereas Germany received a considerable amount of single or
autonomous travelling women as guest workers, this type of migration is
unknown in Denmark, where virtually all Turkish women are the wives and/
or daughters of migrant male workers . . . ”; Gretty Mirdal, “Stress and
Distress in Migration: Problems and Resources of Turkish Women in
Denmark,” International Migration Review 18:4 Special Issue: Women in

Migration (Winter 1984): 984–985.
75. In the Netherlands, over 60% of foreign workers in the late 1970s lived in
North or South Holland (e.g. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, and the
surrounding suburbs), but about 12% lived in Noord-Brabant (e.g.
Eindhoven, Tilburg, Breda, and the surrounding suburbs), 8% in
Gelderland (e.g. Nijmegen and surrounding areas), 7% in Utrecht, and the
remaining 12% throughout the rest of the country; via Shadid (n 63), 19.
76. In Amsterdam, foreign workers often lived in old districts close to Centrum (e.
g. De Baarsjes, De Pijp) in the late 1960s and 1970s. However beginning in
the 1980s—especially with the arrival of wives and children—more of these
families moved to the western suburbs of Amsterdam (e.g. Westelijke
Tuinsteden, Slotervaart), which were built in the 1950s–60s to provide
cheap and spacious housing (with ample green spaces) for young middle-
class (Dutch) families; the introduction of immigrants from Muslim-majority
countries in the 1980s promoted a “white flight” to outer areas. By the 2000s,
many of these areas (e.g. Overtoomse Veld) are a majority “non-Western”; via
Open Society Foundation, Muslims in Amsterdam (New York, NY: Open
Society Foundations 2010), footnotes 31/32.
77. There are many parallel examples in Rotterdam, for example in the lower-
income neighborhood of Afrikaanderwijk; via Open Society Foundation,
Muslims in Rotterdam (New York, NY: Open Society Foundations 2010),
38–39. There was extensive media coverage of riots against Turkish immi-
grants in 1972.
78. In Copenhagen in the 1970s, many immigrants moved to the Nørrebro
neighborhood after developments in social housing. The area was also
known—from the 1980s through to the early 2000s—as a Danish “squat-
ter” neighborhood; Open Society Foundation, Muslims in Copenhagen
(New York, NY: Open Society Foundations 2011). On the growth of
Ishøj as an immigrant suburb of Copenhagen, see Heidi Vad Jønsson,
“Immigrant Policy Developing in Copenhagen and Ishøj in the 1970s,”
Scandinavian Journal of History 38:5 (2013) or Chapter 4 in this book.
79. Already in the early 1980s, Moroccans in the Netherlands were referred to as
a “problem” group due to a supposed lack of assimilation, poor education,
and little familiarity with Dutch language and culture; van Amersfoort (n 9),
196. See van Amersfoort’s discussion of repatriation, remittances, the
Moroccan economy and the works of his contemporaries on labor
migration.
80. Open Society Foundation, Muslims in Amsterdam (n 76); Open Society
Foundation, Muslims in Copenhagen (n 78); Open Society Foundation,
Muslims in Rotterdam (77).
81. Interview (October 2014).
NOTES 49
82. Ahmet Akgündüz, Labour Migration from Turkey to Western Europe: 1960–
1974: A Multidisciplinary Analysis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 45.
83. Essed and Hoving (n 4), 12.
84. OSI, Muslims in Copenhagen (n 78), 200.
85. See e.g. “Binnenkort stichting voor huisvesting van ‘migranten’” [“Soon a
Foundation for the Housing of ‘Migrants’”], Het Vrije Volk (15 January
1970); this article mentioned both foreign workers and Surinamese/
Antilleans.
86. See e.g. “Rassenprobleem op komst; Wie doet er wat aan?” [“Race Problem
on Arrival: Who is Doing What?”] De Telegraaf (4 September 1971), 7; this
article focused on racism and cultural differences between immigrants and
the (presumed white) Dutch, but only discusses Surinamese/Antilleans, not
those “guest workers” from Muslim-majority countries.
87. Mosques were, however, deprioritized in the 1980s, as “the process of
secularization and depillarization was in full swing”; Marlou Schrover,
“Pillarization, Multiculturalism and Cultural Freezing: Dutch Migration
History and the Enforcement of Essentialist Ideas,” BMGN: Low
Countries Historical Review 125 (2–3 January 2010).
88. “Ideas derived from pillarization made multicultural policies acceptable to the
Dutch public, but the initial idea behind multiculturalism was not emancipa-
tion via segregation, but to facilitate an easy return of guest workers to their
countries of origin. . . . Authorities felt that there was no need to encourage or
facilitate integration”; this is Schrover’s summary of an argument in
R. Rijkschroeff, J.W. Duyvendak and T. Pels, Bronnenonderzoek integratiebe-
leid [“Source Research (on) Integration Policy”] (Utrecht: Verwey–Jonker
Instituut, 2003); cited in Marlou Schrover, “Multiculturalism, Dependent
Residence Status and Honour Killings: Explaining Current Dutch Intolerance
Towards Ethnic Minorities from a Gender Perspective (1960–2000),” in
Gender, Migration and Categorisation: Making Distinctions Between
Migrants in Western Countries, 1945–2010, eds. Marlou Schrover and
Deirdre M. Moloney (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013),
234–235. Also, “When the first non-western minorities and workers arrived
in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s, the government tried to integrate
them into this system, with islam as a new pillar”; via Open Society
Foundation, Muslims in Amsterdam (n 76), 36. See also the joint works of
Jan Willem Duyvendak and Peter Scholten, for example “Deconstructing the
Dutch Multicultural Model: A Frame Perspective on Dutch Immigrant
Integration Policymaking,” Comparative European Politics 10:3 (2012):
266–282.
89. Minority Note of 1983, cited in Halleh Ghorashi, “Racism and ‘the
Ungrateful Other’ in the Netherlands,” in Dutch Racism (n 4), 104–105.
90. Akgündüz (n 82), 47–48; see “Chapter 2: Causes of Migration Pressure.”
PART I
Perceptions
CHAPTER 3
“Like the Great Pyramids of Egypt . . . you

can’t talk about Denmark without talking
about The Danish Woman”: Immigrant
Perceptions of European Gender and Sexual
Cultures
In 1969, a twenty-year-old Kurdish man named Mahmut Erdem fell

asleep on his train from Turkey, and when he woke up he wrote, “For
the first time in my life, I saw women shoveling snow. It seemed quite
unreal to me that women could shovel snow!”1 Although he was just
passing through Bulgaria, the man would witness women’s independence
as he adjusted to life in Denmark, from women’s freedom with household
decision-making to their independent wage-earning, to their autonomy
in choosing sexual partners. Having arrived in Denmark to work, Erdem
was also immediately drawn to meeting Danish women, as he wrote, “The
Danish girls were also curious to get to know us . . . Eventually many
[foreign workers] found a Danish girlfriend,” and—writing in Danish—
noted that foreigners “fell into daily life,” meaning they integrated with
Danish society. Erdem would eventually live with a Danish woman for
many years and raise three children with her, though they would later split.
This chapter takes us from early observations and curiosities about
European gender and sexual norms, to first-hand participation in hetero-
social and sexually charged environments like dance clubs, to confusion
and discomfort about open discussions of homosexuality. Overall, we see
in the recruitment years (roughly from the mid-1960s through to the oil
crisis in 1973) an initial curiosity for and then acceptance of gender

54 “LIKE THE GREAT PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT . . .
equality, a concept that was also new to many European men at the time.
The primary actors in this chapter are foreign laborers from outside
Europe (e.g. Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, and several Arab countries),
many of whom had similar experiences working in factories (and in
other “unskilled” sectors), living in boarding houses with other foreign
workers (or sometimes with European host families), adjusting to a for-
eign culture with limited language abilities, and living apart from families
(i.e. wives, children, parents, and in-laws) for many years.
In the early- to mid-1970s, there was a general liberalization of immi-
grant attitudes toward women’s socio-economic and sexual independence.
Gender roles for solo men in Europe were different for them than in their
countries of origin, especially for those who were married: relieved of their
duties as role models to the family, these solo men often curiously explored
the foreign society and engaged in behaviors more openly than they would
have in their countries of origin. But even in their countries of origin, men
could be quite autonomous; as one interviewee (a former foreign worker)
began, “Even if they are very religious, they may do anything they want.”
But, he continued, this autonomy was exacerbated in Europe:
When they came to Holland, the freedom was everywhere . . . When the first
generations [of male workers] came from Anatolia or Morocco, it was
Sodom and Gomorrah, and the influence was only positive. Their wives
were at home and they could do what[ever] they could do.2
The interviewee linked the absence of wives and children to men’s will-
ingness to seek sexual encounters in Europe without guilt.
Yet the converse was also true: with the arrival of families in the late-
1970s, many foreign men dramatically changed their behaviors and atti-
tudes. Thus at the end of the chapter, we focus on a “conservative turn”
that coincided with family reunification in the late 1970s and 1980s. With
the arrival of wives and discussions of child-rearing, some immigrant men
rejected their newly liberalized attitudes toward women’s independence;
others rejected some aspects of their private behaviors (e.g. acceptance of
inter-ethnic dating) but incorporated other new attitudes (e.g. women’s
socio-economic independence, boys and girls participating in activities
together) into their family values both immediately and over time;
and others continued to adopt liberal attitudes alongside many of their
European neighbors, gradually accepting things like pre-marital sexuality
(even for their children) and gay identities.
BEYOND ECONOMIC DETERMINISM: FREE SPEECH AND DANCE CLUBS 55
BEYOND ECONOMIC DETERMINISM: FREE SPEECH

AND DANCE CLUBS
For decades, scholars understood the “guest worker” migration boom

mainly in terms of economic determinism, such as wage-difference (i.e.
movement from countries with low wages to those with high wages) and
unemployment difference (i.e. movement from countries with high unem-
ployment to those with less); to some extent, scholars also acknowledged
the importance of social networks in labor migrations (i.e. movement due
to communication with family and friends in labor-receiving countries).3
But global markets and personal finances alone cannot explain migrants’
decision-making processes. Cultural factors, including those related to
gender and sexual systems at home and in the country of origin, and
personal factors—including desire, identity, reputation, and romance—
also undergirded some people’s decisions to leave their country of origin
and/or to remain in a host country.4
Political factors also influenced many labor migrations, as a number
of “guest-workers” were de facto refugees who left or could not return to
their countries of origin due to fears of political persecution. A Turkish
man who moved to Europe in 1969 mentioned that he received a cryptic
postcard from his parents shortly before the 1980 right-wing military
coup; his parents advised him to “stay there a little while.” Afterwards,
he learned that his house had been raided due to his connections to a
socialist club that he founded at his post-secondary school.5 Another
interviewee who initially referred to himself as the “son of a Greek guest
worker,” later clarified that his father was a political dissident and artist
who fled Greece after the 1967 military junta.6 A Tunisian man expressed
that many Arab workers he knew felt that they had more political and
social influence in Denmark than they did in their countries of origin, such
as in Tunisia where “a small group built the majority of the society and
local intellectuals had almost no political influence.”7 Annemarie Cottaar
and Nadia Bouras—who in 2009 interviewed fifty Moroccans about their
experiences as foreign workers in the 1960s-70s—found that at least two
of the men registered to work in Europe did so in order to dodge their
military obligations in Morocco.8
In describing the “lure of Europe” for Moroccans in the Netherlands,
Cottaar and Bouras asserted that some foreign workers’ quests for “personal
freedom” paralleled the ambitions of many European students and social
activists.9 Politically minded workers migrated to the Netherlands and
Denmark during an intense period of left-wing activism, when many young

people spoke out against conscription, the war in Vietnam, and nuclear
weapons. Migration scholars have warned about the pitfalls of blindly
accepting and promoting “liberation narratives”—that is, stories that rein-
force the trope of a flight from oppression and corruption in the non-
Western world, to democratic freedom in the West—as these narratives
could be exaggerated in order to achieve asylum, citizenship, or social
acceptance in Western societies.10 Yet personal freedom was undoubtedly
a recurring theme among my interviewees, such as the Pakistani man who
came to Denmark in 1970, and reflected: “I came from a very different
culture, country . . . It was very free here [in Denmark], and it was not very
free there [in Pakistan]. Everything was open here and not in my society.”11
Free speech and anti-authority were central to the first impressions of
another interviewee, the former Turkish “guest worker,” who would ask
his boss, “May I use the restroom?” but noticed that his Dutch collea-
gues would say, “Hey boss, I’m going to piss.” That type of behavior—
speaking too casually or too demandingly to a boss—could get him fired
in Turkey, he said. Soon after, he realized that any Dutch person could
criticize any authority figure, whether it be the government, the queen,
or the military; that behavior could get him imprisoned in Turkey, he
said. In general, the “individual freedom was totally different” than
he was used to in Turkey.12 It should be noted that expressions of anti-
authoritarianism and individualism—which took revolutionary forms in
European youth subcultures and social movements in the late 1960s—
were also new for many Europeans.13
Gaining cultural capital in Europe, such as improving one’s English
language skills, cannot be untied from economic motivations. And for
some, cultural motivations including education were the primary factor
behind their enrolment for work in Europe. In 1966, researchers in
Turkey interviewed 280 people who had returned from working in
Europe, and found that although 68.9% migrated primarily to save
money and return to Turkey, 19.7% had traveled to Europe primarily in
search of education or vocational training, and 6.8% sought to “see
Europe and learn a language.” When the same researchers conducted
another survey in 1970 (of 342 Turkish returnees), they found that
60.5% migrated primarily for economic reasons (i.e. to finance land,
houses, farm equipment in Turkey), while those who sought foremost to
“see Europe and learn a language” increased to 14.2% (about fifty of the
interviewees), and 8.8% hoped for education.14
BEYOND ECONOMIC DETERMINISM: FREE SPEECH AND DANCE CLUBS 57
The Denmark-based psychologist Gretty Mirdal,15 who was born in

Turkey, began her 1970 report on Turkish “guest workers” in Denmark
by citing the opinion of B.D. (b. 1944, Turkey) whose observations we
will follow throughout this chapter; he began:
The Danes think that all Turks come here for earning money, and only for
money’s sake. I find that offensive. I was doing well in Turkey. My father
owned land. . . . I didn’t come here just to make money. . . . I had always
dreamed—as had many of my friends—of traveling to Germany.16
Mirdal was ahead of her time in emphasizing that a mixture of economic

factors (e.g. personal debt) and emotional factors played a role in decisions
to migrate. Regarding those who sought to “experience Europe,” she
quoted one interviewee who sought to “see all the wonderful shops
where you can find everything you want . . . and meet people who are
friendly and smile at you when you sit next to them on the bus.”17
Most interestingly for this chapter, Mirdal’s interviews shed some light
on the idea that norms regarding marriage, family, gender, and sexuality
played a role in some migrants’ decisions to migrate. B.D. remarked that
heterosociability (and women’s sexual freedom) factored into his decision
to remain in Europe; when speaking about Danish dance clubs, he stated,
“I really like to do that, and if there wasn’t that type of entertainment,
I wouldn’t stay here.” When asked about his future plans either to stay in
or leave Denmark, he lightheartedly responded, “I can’t say that I’m
staying in Denmark for the money’s sake; nor can I say it’s for the
women’s sake. I have neither the one nor the other!”18 In other words,
his motivation to earn money in Europe was comparable to his desire to go
out dancing and to meet a Danish woman.
Another of Mirdal’s interviewees explained his decision to leave Turkey
in the late 1960s in terms of social prejudice against divorced people:
You know how [hard] it is to be divorced in Turkey . . . I was divorced one

week after the wedding. . . . Then I met the most delightful creature in the
world. She was beautiful and petite, and we wanted to get married. We were
together for five years, but her parents never liked me, since I was divorced.
She was forced to marry another. . . . So I thought it was best to move.
Mirdal acknowledged that this man’s narrative was an “extreme case” and
“not typical for the whole group.”19 But by presenting a case of a man’s
heartbreak and tarnished reputation, she provided an interesting example

of how labor migrants might justify their migration decisions in emotional
or cultural terms.
Cultural, gender, or family norms related also to some women’s push
or pull factors of migration, foremost for marriage migration or family
reunification in the second half of the 1970s. In a well-known early study
of foreign workers in the Netherlands, Hans van Amersfoort mentioned
a woman who decided to emigrate from Morocco not only to join her
husband, but also due to “conflict . . . [with] her in-laws.”20 In sum, to
understand labor migrations into Western Europe in the 1960s–70s, one
must incorporate not only political contexts and orientations into a
migrant’s economic push/pull factors, but also cultural, emotional, and
personal contexts, including factors related to family patterns, marriage
expectations, gender roles, and sexual systems.
“LIKE GREAT PYRAMIDS . . . ”: FIRST IMPRESSIONS,

THE
CURIOSITY, AND PRAISE FOR WOMEN’S SOCIO-ECONOMIC
INDEPENDENCE IN EUROPE (LATE 1960S)
“I did not know too much about Western society,” said the Pakistani man
who came to Denmark for work in 1970. “There was no Internet or
Google,” nor were there televisions in his neighborhood in the 1960s.
For many of my interviewees, their wide-eyed first impressions were broad:
from the “beautiful, clean houses and streets” and “well dressed” people,
to the neighbors who greeted them with “good morning” and “see you
later” on their way to work. Among their early complaints, several inter-
viewees focused on food, including the inability to find halal meat, the
strangeness of eating out of a lunch box instead of at a table, and the excess
of butter but dearth of olive oil (“the Dutch did not use olive oil [in the
1960s] because they thought it gave you diarrhea”21). Although many
were ignorant about European culture, they tended to feel that Europeans
were also ignorant of the cultures from which they came; “but they were
interested,” an interviewee added.
The Turkish man cited before—who excitedly observed co-workers
who formally aired demands to their employers, and former soldiers who
openly criticized the army on television without repercussion—also added
in this breath: “[And women were] talking back to the man. Openly—
not only behind doors—openly, she can argue with her husband!”
“LIKE THE GREAT PYRAMIDS . . . ” : FIRST IMPRESSIONS, CURIOSITY . . . 59
Re-enacting his initial shock for dramatic effect, he clarified that he was
aware of exceptions in Turkey (i.e. there were some Turkish “women who
could speak freely” in the 1960s), but women’s equality in partner rela-
tionships was more visible to him in the Netherlands.
A Moroccan worker moved in with a Dutch family after a few months in
a crowded pension lodging; he too contrasted women’s roles in Europe
with those in his country of origin:
I came from a family [in Morocco] where the man was boss and worked, and
the woman lived in the house, cleaned, and cared for the family. . . . Then
in the Netherlands, the woman told the man what he can do, what he may
do, and if he asks for something, maybe he gets it. That was my experience
[in the suburbs of Utrecht].22
This man commented not only on the social dynamics between some men
and women, but also their economic roles: he described a situation in
which a man might need a woman’s approval for household expenditures.
Reflecting from the present, he felt that the gender dynamics were
“strange” to him in a good way (raar); he was curious and interested.
He got along well with the family and lived with them for three years.
In terms of printed sources, a remarkable piece entitled “Denmark
and the Woman” (October 1968) was published in an Arabic-language,
Copenhagen-based literary journal entitled Al-Ghad (Arabic for
“Tomorrow”). The self-published (mimeographed) journal is an extraor-
dinary trove for understanding discussions of Danish (and Arab) culture
among some of the approximately 1,200 Arabs living in Denmark in the
late 1960s (of whom approximately 63% worked in industry and crafts,
and 25% worked in other unskilled jobs23). The journal brought together
the Arab diaspora in Denmark—Palestinians, Egyptians, refugees, archi-
tects—not only intellectually (i.e. to read and discuss the journal), but also
physically: for example, Al-Ghad advertised Copenhagen’s first Middle
Eastern restaurant in 1968 (“1001 Nights”) and welcomed readers to
come to the opening. With a feedback-loop between written content
and real-life interaction, the journal served as pre-digital “social media”
(a topic explored at length in Chapter 7).
Politically and ideologically, the journal claimed no specific point
of view.24 Their outside references were varied: from Omar Khayyam
(a twelfth-century Persian philosopher, mathematician and poet whose
writings were associated with rational science, hedonistic pleasures, and
mystical agnosticism), to Khaled Mahmoud Khaled (influential among

the religious right in the 1980s with the revival of the ideologies of
Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood), to Søren
Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It also printed
the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work a decade before he
became famous internationally. In various articles about Danish culture
and history, the dozen contributors to Al-Ghad portrayed Danes as
brave nationalists who resisted the Nazi occupation, as admirable
explorers and selfless scientists who sought to understand the world
(including the Middle East), as pragmatic designers, and as socialists
willing to pay high taxes in order to support those in need (e.g.
pregnant women).25 With a stunning image to summarize their cross-
cultural respect, the August 1968 cover of Al-Ghad featured a drawing
of two men in possibly Jordanian or Saudi Arabian attire leaving flowers
for the bare-breasted statue of the Little Mermaid, the unofficial sym-
bol of Copenhagen.26 This cover exemplifies Al-Ghad’s commitment to
connecting Denmark’s Arab immigrant communities to Danish culture.
(Fig. 3.1)
In “Denmark and the Woman,” Muhammad Bilak’hal began poetically:
“Like the Great Pyramids of Egypt, or the Maharajas of India, you cannot
talk about Denmark without talking about the [young] Danish
woman.”27 Women were the “life force” and “blood vein” in Danish
society. For the reader who might not know, he explained the life of a
typical independent Danish young woman: she left home at the age of
seventeen or so, found a job and learned to live independently. Her bicycle
was a symbol of her independence: it showed that she was “athletic, quick
in doing all things . . . and very economical.” (He cited that there were
“two million bicycles used by women” in Denmark; in other words, every
Danish woman rode a bike.)
Danish women, in his opinion, were unparalleled in “America, Japan,
or even France, despite being the same continent,” and he reflected on
women’s central role in building the economy:
According to a 1967 article in [the newspaper] BT, sixty percent of the

Danish economy was generated at the hands of women, and that’s fantastic,
if we compare even with Sweden and Norway. We don’t even need to
mention Arab countries, where we come from . . . Women’s activities in
our countries barely represent 10%, or in some cases, nothing at all.
Fig. 3.1 The cover of a 1968 issue of Al-Ghad, a journal by and for Arabs in
Denmark, depicting the iconic Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen
Al-Ghad (August 1968). Photograph of cover by self, with permission from the Danish
Royal Library’s Reading Room West.
Bilak’hal’s criticism of the position of women in Arab countries suggests

that he did not consider Danish women to be different on any funda-
mental level; it was Danish society that treated women differently. He
implicitly argued that Arab women had the same capacities as Danish
women, but that many Arab societies discouraged women from contribut-
ing meaningfully to either the state economy or political society.
Bilak’hal wrote that the independent woman would slowly “buil[d] her
nest,” so that she might eventually live “with the man she chose.” Though
it is noteworthy that he emphasized choice in partnership, some Danish
women at the time might have argued that a young woman’s indepen-
dence was not merely a preparatory period toward an inevitable cohabita-
tion with, and dependence on, the male. But this critique would not
merely have been directed at Arab men in Denmark, but to the majority
of men in Denmark who held similar assumptions about women’s inevi-
table dependency on men. Overall, Bilak’hal provided an in-depth under-
standing of how women’s self-sufficiency in 1968 shaped the Danish
economy and society.
Just as interesting as Bilak’hal’s veneration of Danish women is his
repudiation of Danish men. Throughout the article, he referred to young
Danish men as weak, lazy, selfish, and “always drinking beer”; their activities
were “almost non-existent . . . even if he is active, he is almost sleeping.” He
was wealthy enough that he did not want to work too hard. Furthermore,
the married man “probably has another girl” on the side. This virility-
taunting from an immigrant perspective is the tip of the iceberg of the
inter-male rivalry that occurred between “native” and immigrant men who
felt they were competing for jobs, women, and respect in an increasingly
multicultural and gender-equal society.28 As Mahmut Erdem wrote (in
2008): “We could definitely hear the Danish men’s reactions: ‘They stole
both our work and our girls.’”29
In the above examples—in which men from various countries reacted to
gender dynamics in Europe with surprise, curiosity, and admiration—it is
not clear if the immigrants were also aware of the novelty of the feminist
struggle for women’s rights in Europe. Interestingly, Bilak’hal used the
word “revolution” (thowrah) when asking, “Is this just bravery, or is this
a revolution that we have not seen before?” The choice of words seems
as if he anticipated the growing prominence and radicalization of the
movement for women’s independence in the coming years. But at the
time of his writing (1968), the Danish women’s movement was not yet
radical.30 From the 1920s through to the 1960s, there had been a slow
erosion of deference to men, which related not only to the growth of

(limited) women’s organizations (e.g. in churches and some political
parties), but also to women’s independence during wartime (and after-
wards, for those who lost male heads of households), the rise of the social
welfare state, and the post-World War II economic boom that introduced
more women to consumer cultures and the job market.31
In the mid-1960s, women were just beginning to express some of
the topics that would become the “second wave” of feminism. For the
literary-minded, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) were being translated into
Dutch and Danish, and women in the Netherlands and Denmark started
to voice their own radical opinions (e.g. the Dutch feminist Joke Smit’s
1967 manifesto, “The Unease of Women,” which many scholars
pinpoint as the first Dutch radical feminist tract32). In Denmark,
women achieved 10% of the Danish Parliamentary seats by 1966.33
But in both countries, the radical feminist movement took off only in
1970. Even the most progressive women’s group in the Netherlands in
the late 1960s—Man Woman Society—still held the position that men
were essential in the movement for women’s equality (as its name
reflected).
Historicizing gender equality is an important step for understanding
and accepting it. But it is not always clear whether foreign men such
as Bilak’hal viewed the women’s movement in Europe as a static
feature of the foreign culture, or as an ongoing social struggle. Yet
Muhammad Al-Khilah, another Al-Ghad contributor, provided some
historic context for gender roles in Denmark in his review of the
Open-Air Museum outside Copenhagen. Al-Khilah was drawn to the
housing structures that showcased the historical changes in Danish
society: “The Museum shows the way of life in pre-industrial villa-
ges . . . and resembles the rural setting in Arab and African countries
today,” as well as in some rural areas of Denmark in the 1960s.34 In
one farmhouse, he noted how the dining room reflected the social
positions of men and women at the time:
Next to the head of household’s seat, you find a shelf with cigarettes, spirits,
and other things he can offer his guests. The workers, or guests, will have
different chairs. On the other side of the table are spaces especially for
women. At the time, women were not allowed to sit next to men, as the
women should not sit with workers, and they needed to serve.
The way he described the position of the women—both physically at

the end of the table, and socially as the servants of the men—showed
his understanding of gender roles in the not-so-distant Danish past,
which he could contrast with his observations in the Danish capital in
1968.35 With a thick anthropological description of the historical place
setting, he demonstrated his knowledge that gender roles had changed
over time.
“THERE ARE BOTH JOBS AND GIRLS FOR EVERYONE”: WOMEN’S

SEXUAL INDEPENDENCE AND THE “GUEST WORKER” BOOM
In both the Netherlands and Denmark, the year 1970 marked the surge in
radical feminism. The Dutch group Dolle Mina (“Mad Mina,” named
after the corset-eschewing first-waver Wilhelmina Drucker) discussed sex-
ual liberation, violence against women, protecting prostitutes, and the
value of abortion.36 The Danish Redstockings (i.e. Rødstrømperne)—
which, according to feminist scholar Drude Dahlerup, admired Dutch,
British, and U.S. feminist activism—grabbed media attention with provo-
cative marches and demonstrations.37 By 1972, lesbian sub-committees
formed within both groups: the (Dutch) Purple September splintered off
from Dolle Mina, while the lesbians within the Redstockings remained
central to (and at times synonymous with) the Danish feminist movement.
Dolle Mina and the Redstockings were the dominant faces of the women’s
movement in their respective countries throughout the 1970s.
Women’s sexual freedom interested many men—immigrant and
“native”—more than many other aspects of feminist social activism. Some
merely viewed women’s sexual liberation from afar: two interviewees
remembered watching a popular Dutch television show in the 1970s
where the host (an older, bespectacled man) entertained a variety of
“naked, sexy women.”38 This was, after all, the early years after pornogra-
phy laws loosened—first in Denmark, and soon across much of Western
Europe—and erotic nudity was no longer forbidden in many public arenas.
Interviewees recalled free-spirited “mini-rockers” (i.e. hippies in mini-skirts)
who “did not wear bras [bh’s] and went topless on beaches.”39 (Fig. 3.2)
Foreign workers were often reluctant to talk about their free time
activities, as Mirdal noted in 1970. She felt that the workers’ evasiveness
was a defensive position, as the interviewees may have felt societal disap-
proval for their behaviors:
“THERE ARE BOTH JOBS AND GIRLS FOR EVERYONE ” . . . 65
Fig. 3.2 Detail from Denmark’s Foreign Worker Journal

Fremmedarbejderbladet (May 1974), back page. Thanks to the journal’s editor-in-chief in the
1970s, Ole Hammer, and photography editor, Uwe Bødewadt, for permission to use this
image. For more on the journal and these editors, see Chapter 4.
Even though interviewees were willing to answer personal questions, most

held back when asked how they spent their free time. This is partly because
of value conflicts, since many of them are doing things they would not do at
home, like going out dancing, eating out instead of saving money, etc.40
Perhaps these interviewees did not want to talk to a female sociologist

about their sexual activities; or perhaps they would not want to discuss
these topics in general. Anecdotally, a Dutch friend whose mother
worked with immigrants in the 1970s–80s said that, according to his
mother, foreign men never talked about dance clubs, dating, emotions,
or sexuality.41
Foreign men would have shared some urban spaces with sex workers; in
both Amsterdam and Copenhagen, Central Station is in close proximity to
centers for prostitution (De Wallen and Istedgade respectively).42 Several
sources described, somewhat disparagingly, central train stations as a
meeting place for foreign worker men: a Turkish man interviewed by

Mirdal in 1970 said he was “not the type that hangs out in Central
Station” in his free time,43 and Erdem noted in his autobiography that
his weekends with other foreign workers progressed from initially “gath-
ering at the Central Station” to meeting at cafés. Only one interviewee
mentioned sex work, euphemistically, when he said that he knew foreign
workers who “went to the women” in their solo years. But foreign workers
inevitably observed sex workers, pornography stores, and other commer-
cial sex venues (e.g. cinemas, peep shows, even live sex shows) when
traversing urban geographies. For example, anyone wishing to go to
Copenhagen’s burgeoning mecca for Arab and Muslim commerce,
Viktoriagade—which the Turkish poet Murat Alpar described in 1978 as
“ . . . familiar and homey /And known most and best by /The workers
from the East” with shops like the Tariq Boutique, the Muslim Butcher,
and the Shams Provision Stores44—needed to traverse Istedgade from
Central Station.
Some immigrant men did speak openly about going to dance clubs,
which were one of the few places where foreign workers interacted with
European women, and vice versa. Previously mentioned, B.D. cited dan-
cing at nightclubs as one of the reasons he stayed in Denmark. Erdem
noted in his biography that he looked forward to the weekends, when he
would visit dance halls and discos. Although Erdem believed that going to
dance clubs and meeting European women helped some foreigners inte-
grate within European society, a Turkish interviewee disagreed: “[The
foreign workers] were just after some adventure, one-night stands. Not
more than that.” When asked if the men would learn European songs or
dances, he opined that most “had no idea about Dutch music. It was only
going out, and beer, and maybe if you’re lucky you meet a girl or a
woman.”45 Yet he agreed that these spaces became one of the most visible
points of interaction for foreigners and Europeans outside of the work-
place: “Besides those who went to discos and bars, there was no contact
with society” in the early years.46
Several Copenhagen dance clubs were hot spots for foreign workers in
the early 1970s, including Exalon (a large nightclub on the main pedes-
trian street, Strøget) and Prater (in the multicultural neighborhood,
Nørrebro).47 Foreign workers went to these venues to relax, and “of
course, to come into contact with Danish girls,” as the Foreign Worker
Journal (Fremmedarbejderbladet) commented in an article about the
venues. Some foreign workers went in groups, and some preferred to go
“THERE ARE BOTH JOBS AND GIRLS FOR EVERYONE ” . . . 67
alone: “I always go alone,” a Turk in his mid-twenties told the paper,

“because if I come with friends, there is always trouble.” Mustafa from
Turkey did not like Exalon because “so many hippies go there,” but he
enjoyed Prater.48 Azam picked up on subtle social cues that aided his
chances for meeting a woman: he told the journal’s readers to start with
“eye contact or something else” before asking her to dance; “then there is
less chance of being turned down.”49
It is a myth that foreign workers with Muslim backgrounds did not
drink. Wasif Shadid’s 1979 survey of 280 Moroccan men in the
Netherlands found that half of his respondents attended bars or dance
halls in the Netherlands. And although only one in six (17.1%) already
drank alcohol in Morocco, this percentage increased to 51% by the end of
the 1970s.50 One man from Turkey estimated that 80% of the Turkish
men he knew drank, and also some women (particularly Alevis).51
Some foreign workers faced rejection from European women in dance
clubs, and others even experienced racist discrimination from club owners
and bouncers.52 The Turkish worker B.D.’s scenario shows the embarrass-
ment that many foreigners likely felt when they ventured into mixed dance
clubs in 1970:
If you go out dancing and find a girl who really wants to dance with you, it
can happen that a Dane whispers something to the girl, and then she goes
away. You feel suddenly so stupid and totally alone. I don’t know what they
say to the girls, but it must be something about how she should watch out,
because we are Turks, or something like that.53
But other foreign men had better luck connecting with European women.
Mahmut Erdem found that when he and his friends flirted with Danish
women, “there was no difficulty with communication, even though we
could not speak each others’ language.”54 Erdem, like many of his friends
and co-workers, dated a “sweet” Danish girl who brought him home to
meet her parents, who watched television programming about Turkey with
him. To summarize the interplay between positive cultural experiences and
economic pull factors: Erdem’s friend from Izmir felt that he had “value” in
Denmark, where “there are both jobs and girls for everyone.”55
Contact between foreign men and native women might have been
challenging, but in some cases they resulted in marriage. The motives
for marrying a Danish woman ranged from loneliness, to love, to legal
protections. Regarding loneliness, one Turkish man expressed in 1970:
Table 3.1 Percentage of mixed marriages of Turks and Moroccans in the

Netherlands, by time period
1965–69 1970–74 1975–79 1980–84 1985–89 1990–94 1995–99
Turkish men 29 13.5 2.8 2.5 2.5 3.4 6

Turkish 1.3 2.5 4.7
women
Moroccan men 12 8.5 6.3 4.6 3.2 3.9 6.5
Moroccan 1.3 2.3 4.4
women
Source: Leo Lucassen and Charlotte Laarman, “Immigration, Intermarriage and the Changing Face of
Europe in the Post Ear Period,” History of the Family 14 (2009): 65 (Table 9).
Original data source: CBS, Structuurtelling, 2000.
“One cannot find a creature in this world who can live without care and
love. Plants die, if one doesn’t care for them. Even dogs need love . . . I’m
not a damned machine, I’m a man. I want to live, speak, smile, work,
love . . . ”56 Culturally, some men preferred the European family system to
that in their countries of origin, as he was not (for example) compelled to
have close contact with a European wife’s extended family in the same way
as he was in Morocco.57
Shadid’s survey found that Moroccans tended to feel that marrying
a Dutch woman and applying for Dutch citizenship was best if it was
“purely instrumental.” Otherwise, some disapproved of mixed marriages,
just as many Europeans did at the time. A Danish political cartoon shows a
large, blonde woman standing at the wedding altar with a shorter man
with a black mustache. With an angry face, the official marrying them
barks, “And why do you take this woman who stands beside you to be your
lawfully wedded wife, if I might ask?!”58
As Table 3.1 shows, in the Netherlands in the period between 1965 and
69—before the boom in family reunification—29% of Turkish men’s
marriages and 12% of Moroccan men’s marriages were to Dutch women,
and these numbers were still relatively high from 1970 to 74, at 13.5% and
8.5%. In the late 1970s, the proportion of foreign men’s marriages to
Dutch women then decreased significantly, with the influx of female
immigrants from Turkey and Morocco, and did not rise again until the
1990s. (Data on Turkish/Moroccan women’s mixed marriages only start
in the late 1980s, but also show an increase in the 1990s.)59
“ANOTHER KIND OF WOMAN, THE SEXUALLY LIBERATED WOMAN ” . . . 69
Table 3.2 Moroccan population in the Netherlands, age 20–65, by generation

(1996–2009)
Year First generation Second generation
Total One parent born Both parents born
abroad abroad
1996 112,148 3,855 1,133 2,722

2000 130,165 10,902 1,737 9,165
2005 146,953 26,588 2,795 23,793
2009 145,342 41,785 3,769 38,016
Source: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek: Population, generation, sex, age and origin.60
Table 3.2 shows that tens of thousands of Dutch-born “Moroccans”

reached adulthood in the 2000s; although there were about 7,000 chil-
dren born to at least one Moroccan parent from 1976 to 1980, the real
baby boom came in the 1980s. Among those born in the Netherlands
before 1976 (i.e. who were over the age of twenty in 1996), almost one-
third (29.3%) had one Moroccan parent and one Dutch-born (likely
“white” Dutch) parent. Yet after 1976, when the percentage of intermar-
riages decreased, so did the percentage of children born into mixed house-
holds. Among all Dutch-born “Moroccans” who were over twenty in
2009 (i.e. born before 1989), only 9.0% had one Moroccan parent and
Dutch-born parent. To summarize, Tables 3.1 and 3.2 show that prior to
1975, foreign worker men entered into mixed marriages and bore children
with Dutch women at a higher rate than in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
when foreign worker men were more likely to marry and raise children
with women from their countries of origin.
“ANOTHER KIND OF WOMAN, THE SEXUALLY LIBERATED

WOMAN”: IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVES
Foreign workers who married European women were not always single,
and thus they sought divorce (or perhaps polygyny). One Pakistani lamen-
ted, “I abandoned my wife and two children in West Pakistan” for a
Danish girlfriend, even though she eventually “refused me company.”61
Shalid’s 1979 survey found that of the 210 married Moroccan men he
interviewed, twenty-five had divorced their Moroccan wives after migrat-
ing to the Netherlands (and two were divorced prior to migrating).62
Even B.D., who initially presented his desire to meet a Danish woman in
terms of utter loneliness (“It’s hard for a guy to live totally alone for so
many years”), later clarified his marital status:
It’s hard to find a Danish girl, when you’re married. It’s a pity for her,
because I know that I cannot take her with me, when I return back [to
Turkey]. I wouldn’t have anything against taking her with me, but usually
Danish girls don’t want that. Sometimes I don’t understand at all why I’m
staying here.
It is not clear from this statement what B.D.’s ideal relationship would be:
a casual Danish girlfriend for the duration of his time in Denmark, a
polygynous relationship with a Danish woman who would return to
Turkey and live with his current wife and children, or a Danish wife to
start anew with in Denmark or Turkey after separating from his wife.
Wives of foreign workers who lived in the country of origin were anxious
about cheating husbands, as one Turkish-language cartoon shows. In one
panel of the cartoon, the woman (in Turkey) nervously imagines that her
husband is drinking a beer with a blonde woman; the panel is captioned (in
Turkish), “Working under superhuman conditions, [the men] lose them-
selves to lives of entertainment and corruption.” In the penultimate panel,
the woman arrives in Europe by train and gasps as she sees her husband
standing on the platform with a blonde woman: is this his new lover? But in
the final panel, the husband steps away from the European woman—who is
a stranger after all—and embraces his wife and family.63
According to a 1984 study by Gretty Mirdal, Turkish women in
Denmark—most of whom arrived as wives (i.e. not as recruited workers)
in 1979–1980—did indeed experience anxiety during their years of
separation. Further, they felt an “uprootedness” when arriving in Europe:
Turkish women, who left their pre-industrialized Muslim villages one day
and found themselves in what can be regarded as one of the most advanced,
sexually free countries in the world the next day, have been especially
exposed to stress due to the lack of predictability of their new environment
and due to not knowing the implicit structure of society, [or] the rules of
behavior64
Part of the culture shock that many foreign women faced in Europe
related to the dramatic changes in sexual cultures.
“ANOTHER KIND OF WOMAN, THE SEXUALLY LIBERATED WOMAN ” . . . 71
Some foreign women living in Europe were aware of their husbands’

affairs, resulting in either jealous tolerance or divorce. Rose Labarca, a
Chilean refugee who arrived in Denmark in 1974 with her husband who
was fleeing political persecution after Pinochet came to power, spoke
candidly on the topic of men’s affairs. (One should contextualize
Labarca’s tone—rather unsympathetic to the men who had just fled
harassment or torture—with the printed source: a 1980 issue of Kvinder
[Women], published by the Danish Redstockings, which often focused on
feminist debates on sexuality and gender relations.) Shortly after their
arrival in Europe, Labarca observed that her husband “was totally crazy
with Danish girls.” In contrast to the women from Chile—who Labarca
contended were “very passive, also sexually”—Chilean men tended to see
“in the Danish woman another kind of woman, the sexually liberated
woman.” But even if the Chilean husband began to have affairs, he did
not necessarily seek a divorce:
[He is] also afraid, and so a situation arises where he doesn’t want to leave
home, because his Chilean wife understands him better than the Danish
woman. That way he can play the role as the man who has a mistress, a role
he knows from Latin America, and we [the Chilean women] also know. And
that is okay, all things considered.65
Men’s affairs could be an open secret in Chile; thus some Chilean women
in Europe resigned themselves to the idea that “the man will have some-
thing on the side, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” But Labarca was
so frustrated with her husband’s affairs—which could be “so open” and
“humiliating”—that she chose divorce, an uncommon solution in Chile.
Labarca also put some blame on European women for encouraging
foreign men to have affairs. If a Chilean man was “at a certain party with
a certain woman,” the Chilean woman could not help but think, “‘Why
doesn’t she stay away from him, or do it a little more cleverly?’” She then
continued with a fascinating rant about beauty ideals:
Women from Latin America don’t have the same chances as Danish
women to find a man . . . One feels outside the competition because the
picture we have in Chile of what “the beautiful woman” looks like, you
see that everyday on the street here. All the girls here are gorgeous, slim,
tall, fair-haired with blue eyes. We are short, dark, and have to say,
“Ok, I’m outside the competition. I cannot compete with her. She has
everything.”66
With regard to talking openly about sexuality, Labarca felt that she—like
many foreign women—was unaccustomed to talking about their sexual
feelings with either her husband or girlfriends; it was “too intimate.” She
contrasted this with Danish women, whose economic, political, and cul-
tural environment allowed them more possibilities, “also sexually.”
“HOW DARE YOU GO ON THE TELEVISION AND SAY YOU’RE

A GAY”: EARLY IMPRESSIONS ON GAY EMANCIPATION
As with sex work, there are few sources that discuss immigrants’ early
impressions on homosexuality or the gay liberation movement in the
1960s–70s, but one can imagine that foreigners observed open homo-
sexuality on television, in street actions, passing by sex shops or gay bars,
or when meeting an openly gay neighbor. Like radical feminism, the year
1970 marks the start of the radical turn in the gay and lesbian emancipa-
tion movement in both the Netherlands and Denmark. Prior to 1970,
both countries allowed groups for “homophiles” (the preferred term in
the 1940s–60s) with innocuous names like “Shakespeare Club” (founded
in 1946 in the Netherlands), which changed names to the “Center for
Culture and Leisure” (or COC in 1949), and “The Association of 1948”
(or F1948, founded in 1948 in Denmark); incidentally, these were
Europe’s first two post-war homosexual organizations, and both still
exist in the present day. In the 1950s–60s, both groups thrived in private:
the police tolerated their covert bars and dance-halls, especially since most
of these establishments had no (or small) windows, and had to be entered
through a side door and/or with a buzzer.
Around 1970, radical movements in both countries pushed for homo-
sexuals to “come out” and declare their identity as gay men and lesbians,
and to challenge society to accept them in the public sphere. The COC
radicalized and changed its name in 1971 to the unambiguous “Dutch
Association for Integration of Homosexuality COC,” and sometimes
worked with Purple September and Lesbian Nation, which grew from the
new women’s movement. In Denmark in 1971, the Gay Liberation Front
(BBF) split from the Foundation of 1948, and found a new headquarters in
the burgeoning hippie “free town” of Christiania; it worked both with and
separately from lesbian factions of the Redstockings.
“HOW DARE YOU GO ON THE TELEVISION AND SAY YOU’RE A GAY ” . . . 73
An interviewee from Turkey remembered watching television one day,

when a man came on the program and said something that really made an
impression on him:
[In 1969 or 1970, during] a discussion on TV, a well-known artist, for the
first time on the television, said that he was a gay. I said, “What a world is
this, Holland? How dare you go on the television and say you’re a gay!”
At the time, he was confused as to why a man would speak publicly about
(seemingly private) sexual behaviors.
In some ways, the mainstream attitude toward homosexuality was not
so different in Turkey and the Netherlands in the 1950s and early 1960s:
someone might be famous for their effeminate or flamboyant style or
personality, but they would never talk openly about their homosexuality.
In Turkey, for example, there was the actor and singer Zeki Müren
(1931–1996), who wore make-up, heavy jewelry, and colored his hair,
yet never discussed his sexual or gender identity; another Turkish inter-
viewee referred to him as the “Liberace” of Turkey, an effeminate and
treasured icon who never identified as gay or transgender. Admired for his
blend of classical and popular sounds, Müren was “not something to
protect children from . . . My parents took me to Istanbul for a concert.”
He also mentioned Darío Moreno (1921–1968), a Turkish-Jewish singer
and musician who was also “probably gay but hid it.”67
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many European men and women
would have shared the Turkish man’s initial opinion that the gay liberation
movement was confusing, unnecessary, and perhaps an embarrassment. In
this historic moment, it was unthinkable that a man would disclose his
homosexuality to an interviewer and television audience, even though
many Europeans were aware that homosexuality was practiced behind
closed doors. Sex was a deeply private matter; but the reasons behind
this privacy varied greatly. For some men (foreign or “native”), sex was
shameful; discussing it would make them feel vulnerable. For other men
(foreign or “native”), sex was a male privilege; men were allowed to
engage in various behaviors (like going to dance clubs, peep shows,
prostitutes) because sex was not openly discussed. For them, public dis-
cussions of sex—especially pre-marital, extramarital, and homosexual—
might have brought scrutiny to their own (private) behaviors.
It was one thing to reject the gay movement when seeing its spokesman
on television; but it was harder to reject a gay or lesbian individual who
offered help; a surprising anecdote from a 2010 Dutch study about

homosexuality and ethnic communities showed that some immigrant
men in the 1960s–70s had positive relationships with gay men. In an
interview with researcher David Bos, one Moroccan man cited his friend-
ship with a Dutch gay man who assisted with paperwork in the 1970s. The
Moroccan explained that many gay men helped labor migrants with
applications, insurance and even money, then curiously added, “and
not just for intercourse [gemeenschap] . . . [but] because they too were a
minority then.”68 I spoke with Bos, who agreed that it was surprising how
casually the interviewee referred to sexual relations between Dutch gay
men and Moroccan foreign workers. Regardless of sex, this quotation was
a remarkable piece of evidence that some foreign worker men had positive
experiences with openly gay men in their early years.
Returning to the first interviewee’s shock in 1969 or so: he, like many
other immigrants he knew, could not understand why there was a move-
ment for people who wanted to live openly as homosexuals. However—
speaking from his current-day perspective where his attitudes about being
gay or lesbian have changed—he re-evaluated the man’s open declaration
of homosexuality on television as an act of defiance, which—like a soldier
speaking out against nuclear weapons—showed courage.69
THREE TRAJECTORIES AFTER LIBERALIZATION

This chapter established that during the early years of the “guest worker”
migrations, solo men from Turkey, Pakistan, North Africa and the
Middle East experienced a period of liberalization with regard to their
attitudes toward (European) women’s socio-economic independence,
(European) women’s sexual independence, and their own sexual liberal-
ity. With family reunification, new marriages to women from countries of
origin, and new children in Europe, many of these men modified their
liberalized attitudes and opinions. (Fig. 3.3)
A Conservative Turn
This chapter started with a Turkish interviewee’s reflection that the
men he knew in the 1970s in Europe experimented more freely with
sexuality because “their wives were at home.” Elaborating on this idea
of a “conservative turn” with family reunification, he said:
THREE TRAJECTORIES AFTER LIBERALIZATION 75
ation
beraliz
uous li
Contin
Con
reten servativ
tion e
som turn wit
e libe h
ral id
eas
Liberalization
Co
ns
er
va
tiv
et
ur
n
Recruitment years Family reunification years

(mid- 1960s–1973) (1963–1980s)
Fig. 3.3 Three trajectories after liberalization: A conservative turn; a conservative

turn, with retention of some liberal ideas; and continuous liberalization
But then there was a confrontation when the families came, and it changed
totally. In the late 70s and 80s, they had to protect their children against
that sin, going on in the streets and everywhere. I think it was a cultural clash
in the minds of people, individually. . . . [Those who were initially drinking
and dancing,] twenty years later, they’re leading a mosque, they’re very
religious, everything has changed.70
The “sin” to which he refers—likely a variety of activities associated

with European sexual liberalness—is vague; but the statement shows a
helpful periodization for understanding the mid-1960s through to the
mid-1970s as a period of liberalization in attitudes toward gender and
sexual norms, and the mid-1970s through 1980s as the conservative
turn.
This conservative turn may have also related to some immigrants’
attitudes toward homosexuality. The 2010 Dutch study (cited earlier)
on immigrant attitudes towards homosexuality summarized in its

conclusion:
Dutch citizens of Moroccan and Turkish background, for example, attach

much more importance to family and religion today than they did in the
1960s and 70s, when the first generation of “guest workers” settled in the
Netherlands; this shift in values has a negative effect on acceptance of
homosexuality.71
This “shift in values” implies that immigrant attitudes also grew more
conservative in other areas of sexuality, such as premarital sex or interfaith
dating.
Another interviewee who supported the claim about a conservative turn
was C.T. (b. 1969, Morocco). C.T.’s father was recruited to work in the
Netherlands, where he lived for several years by himself before sending for his
wife and C.T. to join him in 1974. Looking at his father’s old photographs
from the 1970s, C.T. remarked that his father and his friends dressed “hip”
and recalled that they were “very modern and liberated” at the time. But their
liberal attitudes changed “suddenly . . . when they got their wives over here.”72
Mo (b. 1976) was born in Belgium as the grandson of two Moroccan workers
who were recruited to work in Belgian mines in the 1960s, and who brought
their teenage children soon after. As some of the earliest Moroccan workers in
Belgium, they “tried to adjust” to Belgian culture, Mo said. But with the
arrival of more Moroccans in the early 1970s, “there was a pressure to con-
form, to change their way of living” and “to be more Muslim.”73
This conservative turn among immigrants is a key argument and
motivation for this entire book. Some additional reasons behind these
changes are explored in Chapter 5, namely the rise of religious and/or
right-wing organizations that appealed to some Turkish and Moroccan
foreign workers in the mid- to late-1970s, as well as the demographic
changes within the immigrant groups: earlier recruits might have been
those more mobile and/or oriented towards Europe, and later recruits
might have come from rural and remote regions of the country and who
only later heard about opportunities in Europe via word-of-mouth.
However, this conservative turn did not occur for all immigrants, nor
did it occur on all topics related to gender and sexuality. It is important
to explore a few examples of foreign men’s progressive attitudes toward
gender and sexuality that persisted even after their “confrontation” with
their families.
A Conservative Turn, With Retention of Liberal Ideas

With the arrival of wives and children, many foreign men retained some
liberalized ideas—such as the conviction that women should work outside
the home, or that women could choose “European style” clothing—while
rejecting other aspects of the gender and sexual systems they witnessed in
Europe, such as the idea that women should be equal in household
decision-making, or that unmarried couples could have sex.
In 1976, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an article,
“Nothing Possible, Going Nowhere, Illiteracy and Submissivness,” which
profiled several women from Muslim-majority countries, and portrayed
them as isolated.74 The article is one of the earlier European sources to
blame immigrant culture for women’s isolation; according to the article, it
was Muslim men who forbade women from getting jobs, and not the
combination of women’s lack of language abilities and training, and
racism/sexism on the job market. The tone of this piece reflected the
(middle-class) feminist discourse of the mid-1970s, whereby women were
encouraged to work outside of the home and earn an income, which—
even if they remained married—freed them from their economic and
emotional dependence on men. Yet even at the time, working-class
women in Europe responded that the breadwinner-homemaker model
was a middle-class luxury, and not their reality; working outside the
house was a necessity not a privilege. For the working wives of foreign
laborers, working outside the home could have been both liberating and a
basic need.
Indeed, foreign worker men from every background found jobs for
their wives upon their arrival in Europe. In one issue of the Foreign Worker
Journal in 1974, five foreign workers in Denmark (of Turkish, Arab,
Indian, and Yugoslavian origin) expressed frustration that their wives
could not get work permits due to the hiring freeze on foreign labor in
1973. After the restrictions on labor permits were lifted, women indeed
worked in a variety of fields, including in hospitals and hotels. A Pakistani
interviewee explained that he helped get his wife her first job (as a sorter
and packer of bananas) for a supermarket chain in the late 1970s; she did
not enjoy the work there, so after a month, he found her another job at his
factory.75
In a 1984 study of (seventy-five) Turkish women in Denmark, Gretty
Mirdal reported that a majority had been on the job market at some point
in Denmark; only 37% had never worked, and she cited reasons such as
“considering oneself too old or ill, having young children, feeling disor-
iented and incapable of working” or simply not finding a job. It is
noteworthy that Mirdal did not entertain the idea that Turkish husbands
forbade wives to work. Mirdal then cited three different studies (1976–77)
that suggested that Turkish women became “emancipated” in Western
Europe due to their potential economic independence. In sum, they said
that “some women, who were previously economically oppressed and
totally dependent on their husbands, might have gained more freedom
and self-confidence through working outside the home.”76
But Mirdal knew that women’s gains in terms of gender equality in the
household related not (only) to the feminist movement or economic
independence in Europe, but also to the period of separation from their
husbands during which they adopted new “masculine” duties. She cited
two German studies (from 1976 and 1980) of Turkish wives of foreign
workers who—during their years of separation from their husbands—
acted as heads of household, interacted more with the outside world
(including social institutions) than before, and assumed new economic
responsibilities. The German studies argued that this period of separation
had a “liberating effect . . . an emancipation” for/of the women. However
Mirdal was skeptical to conclude that separation was a universally emanci-
patory experience, as she found that many of her interviewees grew
anxious about the “superficial and sporadic” contact with their husbands
(as the prior cartoon suggested).77 Nevertheless, it is interesting to con-
sider that for some of the immigrant women who joined their husbands in
Europe after years of separation, they arrived with a newfound indepen-
dence that their husbands might have tried (unsuccessfully) to reverse. An
immediate parallel comes to mind regarding European women’s indepen-
dence when their husbands fought in World War I or II, arguably leading
to gains in women’s suffrage in various countries after the wars.78
For Labarca (from Chile), working outside the home was certainly
emancipatory: Latin American women’s “hourly wage [in Denmark
was] . . . a positive experience for them,”79 and even women who were
cleaning houses experienced a newfound economic independence. In
their countries of origin, she said, Latin American women needed to run
all expenses past their husbands for approval, not only to ensure that the
family had the budget, but also to check that the man liked whatever she
picked out. But in Denmark, the Latin American woman bought things
for herself, for her children, or for the home without consulting her
husband.
Mirdal, however, would not agree that these experiences paralleled those
in Denmark’s Turkish community; when she asked Turkish women, “Who
makes the final decision in important matters?” she found that although
most respondents answered “both my husband and I do,” that, “Upon
further probing and on the basis of specific examples, we found that it was
almost always the husband who got his will in cases of disagreement on
serious matters.”80
In his 1979 survey of male Moroccan laborers in the Netherlands, Shadid
attempted to measure participants’ attitudes towards “the emancipation of
women,” which he measured through ten questions; he concluded that 40%
of the surveyed men had attitudes favoring women’s emancipation prior to
emigration from Morocco, and an additional 38.8% changed their position
in favorable ways after living in the Netherlands. Among the ten measures of
women’s emancipation, he noted that it was easiest for most men to agree
with the statement, “In general I do not object to Moroccan women
participating in the labour process side by side with men.”81 (But again,
heterosocial work is not necessarily emancipatory.)
Further, he found that many men accepted “Moroccan women wearing
European style clothing.” Looking at the Migrant Photo Archive, one sees
many examples of Turkish and Moroccan households that accepted
“European style clothing.”82 Shadid also noted that 19.3% of Moroccan
men changed their views from being in favor to being against polygyny,
adding, “those who now disapprove of it consider it as impractical and
unwise in the modern world.”83 (He did not say how many Moroccans
disapproved of polygyny prior to migration.)
On the other end of the spectrum, it was hardest for men to agree with
the statement, “In general I have no objection to a Moroccan girl marry-
ing a Dutch man.” Shadid related objections to intermarriage to general
uneasiness with the idea of changing one’s nationality (i.e. from Moroccan
to Dutch); both were a denial of an Arab and/or Muslim identity.
Interestingly, more men agreed with the statement that Moroccan
women should have “the same rights as men” than agreed with the
statement that they should have “the same rights as Dutch women.”
Reading this within the context of the conservative turn and men’s
increased “protective” role with the arrival of families, one could infer
that men felt the need to disapprove of (some) European women’s beha-
viors in the context of their own homes and communities.84
With the (immigrant) baby boom in the late 1970s and 1980s, many
families with immigration backgrounds took root in Europe, where
they continued to adopt new attitudes and perspectives on gender and

sexuality. Regarding the second generation: Shadid was interested in
Moroccan reactions to heterosocial (i.e. co-educational) environments,
which he presumed were new to many of the men, and would also
influence the first generation’s views on child-rearing in Europe. Shadid
reported that 53.2% of the surveyed men changed their views on (and now
favored) “contact between boys and girls” in social or educational envir-
onments. In the ensuing decades, these families would send their boys and
girls to numerous heterosocial environments, from public schools to
swimming pools to birthday parties.
Perhaps even more dramatic is that 63.9% of Shadid’s interviewees
changed their opinion regarding (and now favored) an “introductory
period before marriage.”85 With a conservative reading of the phrase,
this “introductory period” could have meant the acceptance of a pre-
marital acquaintance between two partners whom the parents arranged
to be wed. With a more liberal reading of this phrase, Shadid’s question
could have related to pre-marital dating, and the replacement of parental
selection with ideals of a partnership based on “romantic love” and
choice. With an even more radical reading of “introductory period,”
one could also infer that the phrase referred to pre-martial co-habitation
and/or sex.
Continuous Liberalization
As some immigrants participated in movements for women’s or gay/
lesbian liberation in the 1960s–70s, or even came to identify with labels
like “feminist,” “lesbian” or “gay”—addressed throughout Chapters 6, 7,
and 8—there are indeed some who did not have a conservative turn, and
who continued to challenge (European and immigrant) norms about
gender and sexuality (e.g. gay-identified immigrants).
Although some of these immigrants did not reunite with spouses from
their countries of origin—and thus did not have the same catalyst for a
conservative turn—one should not overemphasize the role of the immi-
grant family in changing social attitudes. Many white, “native” Europeans
adopted conservative views in the 1980s, regardless of any prior commit-
ment to anti-authoritarian agitations in the previous two decades. Further,
there are no precise measures of “attitudes toward gender and sexuality”—
especially longitudinally—nor can everyone agree on what constitutes
liberal or conservative attitudes. Thus one could also consider that some
NOTES 81
immigrants—even those who altered their behaviors and attitudes with the
arrival of partners and children—continued to support and develop their
ideas about women’s equality, for example, by learning to historicize the
women’s movement.
One interviewee remarked that he remembered being surprised to learn
how recent some gains in gender equality were; he learned that in the
1950s, European women generally lost their jobs when they got married:
“She’s fired. Just because if she’s married, she has to be at home.” But, he
added, “That changed in the 1960s.” A Moroccan interviewee also
learned to historicize women’s social equality: “It was new for the
Moroccan people, but now I can say it was also new for the Dutch
people.”86 In other words, he initially thought that gender equality was
a cultural difference, and with time, he contextualized women’s indepen-
dence with regard to both the time period (the late 1960s) and his urban
location (in Utrecht), and incorporated many of his new perspectives as he
and his wife raised two daughters in the Netherlands.
A Turkish interviewee also showed that he continued to historicize
gender equality through the present. He reflected that during his early
years, “We thought that it [women’s equality] was all the same” across the
Netherlands and perhaps even Europe. However:
We didn’t realize that in Staphorst [a small town], people today still don’t get
vaccinations for their children because of their religion [Orthodox
Protestantism]. Or that there was still a political party, the Christian Union,
that didn’t allow women [as leaders] until this year. You learned that after.87
Like many of the observations we read in this chapter, this quotation

demonstrates what historian Dipesh Chakrabarty might call “provincializing
Europe,” in that he complicated the connections between industrialized
Europe, socio-political modernity, and secularity.88 By demonstrating that
women’s equality continued to remain an uneven and unstable value in the
Netherlands, he also showed a commitment to critiquing gender politics in
various local and national settings.
NOTES
1. Mahmut Erdem and Ole Hammer, Folket med de trætte okser [“The People
with the Tired Oxen”] (Copenhagen: Underskoven, 2008), 62.
2. Anonymous interview (October 2014).
3. Two examples from the 1970s include Jan Hjarnø, Fremmedarbejdere: En

Etnologisk Undersdgelse af Arbejdskrafteksportens virkningeri Tyrkiet
[“Foreign Workers: An Ethnological Study of the Effects of Labor Export
in Turkey”] (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, 1971); and J. Lucassen,
R. Pennix, L. van Velzen, and A. Zwinkels, Trekarbeid van de
Middellandse Zeegebieden naar West-Europa [“Pull-Labor from the
Mediterranean Regions to Western Europe”] (Nijmegen: Sunschrift 84,
1974). But economic determinism is also the main factor in this oft-cited
book: Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration:
International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York:
Guilford, 1993).
4. On LGBTQ-idenities (an adjective for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
(or trans*), queer, and also pansexual, and intersex) and migrations to the
U.S., see Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú, Queer Migrations: Sexuality,
U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2005).
8. Annemarie Cottaar and Nadia Bouras, Marokkanen in Nederland: de pio-
niers vertellen [“Moroccans in the Netherlands: The Pioneers Tell”]
(Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 2009), 60–61.
9. Cottaar and Bouras, ibid, 60.
10. Luibhéid and Cantú (n 4), xvi–xxv.
11. Z.H. interview (October 2014).
13. Mineke Bosch, “The Meaning of a Kiss: Different Historiographical
Approaches to the Sixties in the Netherlands,” L’Homme 20:2 (2009):
56–57.
14. Source: Six surveys (1963–1974) cited in Ahmet Akgündüz, Labour
Migration from Turkey to Western Europe: 1960–1974: A Multidisciplinary
Analysis (Farnham, U.K. and Burlington, V.T.: Ashgate, 2008), 152 (also
42–43).
15. For this first publication, she used the name Gretty Mizrahi Sirazi, but I refer
to her as Mirdal for consistency, as she has published under the latter name
through to the present day. Born in Istanbul, Mirdal is a professor of
psychology at the University of Copenhagen.
16. Gretty Mizrahi Sirazi (Mirdal), “Tyrkerne” [The Turks], in Gæstearbejder I
København: en undersøgelse [“Guest Workers in Copenhagen: An
Investigation”], ed. Eggert Petersen (Copenhagen: Mellemfolkeligt
Samvirke, 1970), 25. Mirdal’s chapter is one of three in Eggert Petersen’s
book about Turks, Greeks, and Brits working in Denmark in 1970. For
NOTES 83
international praise of this research, see: Steven Sampson, “Book Reviews,”

review of Gæstearbejder i København by Eggert Petersen, American
Anthropologist 76 (1974): 583–584.
17. Mirdal (Mizrahi Sirazi), ibid, 25. She interviewed thirty-four Turks: nine in
1969, and twenty-five in 1970.
18. Mirdal (Mizrahi Sirazi), ibid, 25.
19. Mirdal (Mizrahi Sirazi), ibid, 27.
20. Hans van Amersfoort, Immigration and the Formation of Minority Groups:
The Dutch Experience, 1945–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 197.
23. Fremmedarbejderbladet (Henceforth: FAB) (6 August 1971), 2.
24. For example, Al-Ghad 6 (August 1968), English page 2; Al-Ghad
7 (September 1968), English page 3.
25. Al-Ghad 5 (July 1968), 5; Al-Ghad 7 (September 1968), 9; Al Ghad
(1968).
26. Al-Ghad 6 (August 1968), cover.
27. Muhammad Bilak’hal, “The Danish Woman,” Al-Ghad 8 (October 1968).
No page numbers.
28. I expand on the connections between virility-taunting and sexually Orientalizing
politics in a forthcoming article in Sexualities (special issue: “Sexotic”).
29. Erdem and Hammer (n 1), 65.
30. Drude Dahlerup, “Denmark: High Representation of Women Without
Gender Quotas,” in Breaking Male Dominance in Old Democracies, ed.
Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
31. However, the post-World War II political climate did not necessarily foment
sexual liberation. After the War, many men and women fixated on the topic
of “female faithlessness” (often in sexual terms) during World War II; in the
context of men’s and women’s desire to return to normalcy after the sexual
chaos, the 1950s often saw “more conservative sexual mores, and especially
toward renewed restrictions on women’s sexual freedoms”; via Dagmar
Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 98.
32. Joke Kool-Smit, “Het onbehagen bij de vrouw” [“The Unease of Women”]
originally published in The Guide 130: 9/10 (November 1967), 267–281.
Among those who cite this source: Pieternel Onderwater, “Wij zijn geen
‘zielige vrouwtjes’! Een onderzoek naar de houding van de Turkse vrou-
wenbeweging in Nederland ten opzichte van het seksedebat tussen 1970 en
2008” [“We are not ‘Pathetic Females’! A Study of the Attitude of the
Turkish Women’s Movement in the Netherlands Regarding the Sex Debate,
1970–2008”] (Masters thesis, Utrecht, Utrecht University, 2008); Vilan

van de Loo, De vrouw beslist: de tweede feministische golf in Nederland [“The
Woman Decides, the Second Feminist Wave in the Netherlands”] (Wormer,
NL: Inmerc, 2005), especially 182–197.
33. Dahlerup (n 31), 149–153.
34. Dahlerup (n 31), 149–153.
35. Al-Ghad 7 (September 1968), 9.
36. Joyce Outshoorn, “The Feminist Movement and Abortion Policy in the
Netherlands,” in The New Women’s Movement: Feminism and Political
Power in Europe and the USA, ed. Drude Dahlerup (London: Sage
Publications, 1986), 65.
37. Dahlerup, The New Women’s Movement, ibid, 221.
40. Mirdal (Mizrahi Sirazi) (n 16), 33.
41. Conversations with WD, October 2014.
42. Jeffrey Escoffier, Bigger than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from
Beefcake to Hardcore (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009), 125.
43. Mirdal (Mizrahi Sirazi) (n 16). “Hangs out” was translated from går en tur.
44. Murat Alpar, “Viktoriagade,” Gæstearbejderen Memet [“The Guest Worker
Memet”] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1978), 31–32. Also published in
English: Murat Alpar, Memet (Copenhagen: Augustinus, 1980).
47. Hanne, “Visit to a Dance Restaurant: ‘Foreigners are too Fresh,’” FAB
(16 April 1973).
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. W. S. Shadid, Moroccan Workers in the Netherlands (Ph.D. dissertation,
Leiden, University of Leiden, 1979), 210–212.
51. Alevism is a minority Muslim sect concentrated mainly in Turkey. On
drinking in general, see images in the IISG Migrant Photo Archive, e.g.
Collection Yozgatlı (Amsterdam, 1973 [on website] or 1975 [on photo]),
last accessed October 2016 via http://www.iisg.nl/hbm/toonfoto.php?
onderdeel=1&collectie=46&foto=2&source=turken
52. Rup, “No Admittance for Foreign Workers,” FAB (10 June 1973). See also
Chapter 4, and forthcoming article in Sexualities. When racism was dis-
cussed in the Netherlands, it often focused on Afro-Caribbean communities,
and not those from “guest worker” countries, e.g. “Rassenprobleem op
komst; Wie doet er wat aan?” [“Race Problem on Arrival: Who is Doing
What?”] De Telegraaf (4 September 1971), 7.
53. Mirdal (Mizrahi Sirazi) (n 16).
NOTES 85

56. Mirdal (Mizrahi Sirazi) (n 16).
57. Amal Rassam, “Women and Domestic Power in Morocco,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 12:2 (September, 1980): 171–179. See the
(male) discussion of bridewealth (sdaq) and Moroccan vs. European
traditions.
58. Karen Andersen, Gæstearbejder Udlænding Indvandrer Dansker! Migration til
Danmark i 1968–78 [“Guest-worker, Alien, Immigrant, Dane! Migration to
Denmark, 1968–78”] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979), 48; see also 57.
59. Leo Lucassen and Charlotte Laarman, “Immigration, Intermarriage and the
Changing Face of Europe in the Post War Period,” History of the Family 14
(2009): 65.
60. Self-collected data via http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/ in May 2010
61. FAB, “A Pakistani Charged,” FAB (10 August 1972). The context,
explained more in Chapter 4, was that the man told this to the press after
being charged for the murder of the Danish woman.
62. Shadid (n 52), 156–157. On the relatively high divorce rate in Morocco, see
Rassam (n 59).
63. Unattributed, undated cartoon [in Turkish]; IISG, HTIB Collection,
Folder 573 (Pieces of and on the HTKB 1976–1989).
64. Gretty Mirdal, “Stress and Distress in Migration,” International Migration
Review 18:4 (1984): 984–1003; here, 993.
65. C.S. [Camilla Skousen], “Most Choose to Divorce!” [Interview with Rosa
Labarca], Kvinder 32 (June/July 1980), 16–18.
66. Ibid.
67. Interview M.U. (April 2015).
68. David Bos, “Gewurgd door taboes” [“Strangled by Taboos”], in Steeds
gewoner, nooit gewoon, [Increasingly common, never ordinary] ed. Saskia
Keuzenkamp (Den Haag: Sociaal and Cultureel Planbureau, June 2010).
Interviews conducted and transcribed by Naïma Bouchtaoui.
71. Saskia Keuzenkamp (ed.), Steeds gewoner, nooit gewoon [Increasingly com-
mon, never ordinary] (Den Haag: Sociaal and Cultureel Planbureau, June
2010), 362.
74. Vera Illes, “Niets Mogen, Nergens Heen, Analfabetisme, Onderworpenheid”
[“Nothing possible, Going Nowhere, Illiteracy and Submissivness”], NRC
Handelsblad (21 February 1976); via IISG, HTKB Collection, Folder 573
(Pieces of and on the HTKB, 1976–1989).

76. M. Kiray, “The Family of the Immigrant Worker,” in Turkish Workers in
Europe, ed. N. Abadan-Unat et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1976); G. Kosack,
“Migrant Women: The Move to Western Europe—A Step Towards
Emancipation?” Race & Class 17 (1976); and A. Kudat, “Structural
Change in the Migrant Turkish Family,” in Manpower Mobility Across
Cultural Boundaries, ed. R. E. Krane (Leiden: Brill, 1975); all cited in
Mirdal (n 66).
77. Mirdal (n 66), 990.
78. Herzog (n 32).
79. “Labarca,” Kvinder (n 67).
80. Mirdal (n 66), 997.
81. Shadid (n 52), 214–218.
82. See e.g. IISG, Migrant Photo Archive, Collection: Öcal-Altay (Zaandam,
1970), last accessed October 2016 via http://www.iisg.nl/hbm/toonfoto.
php?onderdeel=1&collectie=43&foto=4&source=turken
83. Shadid (n 52).
84. Shadid (n 52), 214–218.
85. Arranged marriages were customary at the time in many of the cultures from
which immigrants arrived (e.g. Morocco, Pakistan). See Rassam (n 59), 174.
88. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
CHAPTER 4
“ . . . [I]t does not have to be because they

want to get married and have children”:
Teaching Danish Sexuality and Gender
Norms to Foreign Workers, 1972
Chapter 3 established that in the early years of foreign labor immigration

to Denmark (late 1960s–1973), foreign men interacted with Danish
women in environments like bars and dance clubs, and that short- and
long-term romantic or sexual relationships resulted. This chapter provides
a closer look at how a group of Danes and some immigrants sought to
tackle potential misunderstandings in foreign men’s relationships with
Danish women. The Fremmedarbejderbladet (henceforth FAB, the
Foreign Worker Journal) served as the primary media outlet for many
foreign workers in the 1970s, particularly those who could read Turkish,
Serbo-Croatian, Urdu or Arabic.1 This chapter centers on four articles
published in the two issues of FAB in the Summer of 1972: on maternity
rights, abortion laws, contraceptive practices, and gender equality in
Demark. These articles show that the leftist Danes and foreign editors at
FAB were both anxious about the precariousness of women’s equality in
Denmark, and were eager to invite foreigners to embrace the gender
system that feminists were in the process of pushing forward. Although
the journal did not publish further “sexual education” in its later years
(until 1977), FAB remained an ally for foreign workers, and defended
them during various media frenzies.
Two important actors for this monthly journal—both of whom agreed
to be interviewed for this chapter—were Ole Hammer (b. 1946,
Denmark), FAB’s editor-in-chief for its duration (1971–1977), and Uwe

88 4 “ . . . IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO GET MARRIED . . .
Bødewadt, FAB’s photo editor and perhaps the most prominent photo-
grapher of foreign workers in Denmark in the 1970s. Since the 1970s,
Hammer has published numerous books on immigration- and refugee-
related matters. Bødewadt only worked with immigrants in the 1970s, but
continues to be a professional photographer today.
The seeds for FAB were sewn during discussions of foreign workers’
rights in 1970. Beginning that year, foreign workers had to secure a work
permit before coming into the country (whereas in the 1960s, they could
find work after migration). Despite this requirement, there was an
upswing in immigration in 1970, leading to the formation of the Danish
Federation of Unskilled Laborers and Specialist Workers (henceforth
DASF2) supported especially by the Social Democrats, this union called
for a hiring freeze. The right-wing government agreed, and approved the
hiring freeze in November 1970.3 In arguing for the freeze, DASF and
left-wing politicians expressed concern that foreign labor would depress
Danish wages, but DASF also feared for the welfare of the foreign workers.
To address both concerns, DASF delivered a report entitled “Same
Conditions” (1970), which sought to ensure that those foreign workers
who were in the country had the same opportunities as Danish workers.
Equal wages were a priority, as were good relationships with employers
and assistance with finding housing; but DASF’s report also highlighted
support for foreign workers during their free time, and advocated for
foreign worker groups, language lessons, lecture evenings, cultural activ-
ities, support at libraries, and newspapers for foreign workers in their
respective languages.4 With widespread popular support for “same condi-
tions,”5 Parliament immediately addressed equal wages, but did not
prioritize support for foreigners’ cultural and free-time activities; after
all, most politicians—especially on the right—still assumed that so-called
“guest workers” would return to their countries of origin, and thus it was
unnecessary to address issues like language barriers and cultural isolation.6
According to Hammer, a group of left-wing advocates for foreign
workers proposed the idea of a foreign worker journal in 1970; they
were all Danes “concerned with justice and social equality” but foreign
workers were not initially part of the group.7 When Hammer applied to be
the first editor-in-chief of FAB, he was first vetted by the trade unions
which wanted to make sure he shared their politics: “The trade unions
were very much concerned with what we were writing,” Hammer said in
our interview. After all, FAB would become the primary information
source to foreign workers in their native languages, and would connect
“ . . . [I]T DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO GET MARRIED . . . 89
foreign workers to trade unions and advisory officers. The unions were
impressed with Hammer’s experience: first, he began his education in
Danish literature at Copenhagen University in 1966, and then he became
a social activist in 1968. While he did not graduate from Copenhagen
University, he “was educated in student movements, and that wasn’t a bad
education at that time.” Writing first for the student newspaper, and then
for an alternative, left-wing paper, Hammer made his name as a local
journalist.8 Hammer was hired, and held the position as editor-in-chief
for the entire duration of FAB’s six-year print.
FAB received funding from a variety of sources, including the Danish
Employers Association (henceforth DA), the Danish Trade Union
Congress (henceforth LO), the DASF, and the Ministry of Labor. After
the first year of FAB’s success, these groups renewed their support for
monthly issues: the Ministry and DASF each pledged 4,000 kroner/issue;
LO and DA each pledged 2,000 kroner/issue; the Danish Association for
International Co-operation (MS9), and the Danish Smith and Machine
Workers Association also pledged money, and the rest of FAB’s budget
came from advertisements and subscriptions.10
From its first issue in August 1971, FAB positioned itself as an ally with
foreign workers. Its first article lamented that while the Danish unemploy-
ment rate was 2.4%, the rate amongst foreign workers (their preferred
term over “guest worker”) was 8.5%.11 (These unemployment statistics
were one example of how the trade unions assisted FAB: the unions
continuously provided FAB with unemployment rates amongst Danes
versus foreign workers.) The paper gave advice for unemployed indivi-
duals, such as how to apply for financial support, and possibilities for
renewing one’s residence permit. The journal encouraged readers to join
unions, discussed health and safety on the job, and informed readers how
to reserve Turkish books from the library. While readers could request
government information by writing to FAB—namely pamphlets on tax
laws, nutrition, etc.—FAB also criticized these pamphlets for representing
the lack of real communication between Danes and foreign workers. In
retrospect, Hammer said that FAB was doing much of the work that
integration programs would address in the later 1970s. But at the time,
he saw the journal as promoting cooperation between Danes and foreign
workers:
We wanted to play a role in the solidarity campaign between the immigrants

and Danish society. We had the opportunity because we knew many things
about the groups and sub-groups [of immigrants] and what was going on in
the private area [of their lives].12
By promoting worker solidarity and introducing readers to various aspects

of Danish society, FAB bridged gaps between Danes and foreign workers,
and forged new connections between immigrant ethnic groups.
Among the foreign worker community, the paper “had status . . . we
were more or less famous,” Hammer said. Several historians have demon-
strated the importance of FAB, such as Jørgen Würtz Sørensen who used
the source in the 1980s to augment his analyses of mainstream media and
immigration in Denmark13; or Heidi Vad Jønsson, whose 2013 article on
immigrant policies in Ishøj (a suburb of Copenhagen) argues that Ishøj
became ethnically diverse largely due to housing “advertisements directed
explicitly at guest workers” in FAB.14 (In September 1972, the public-
housing association published one full-page, cheerful, illustrated adver-
tisement in FAB for an open house at an Ishøj apartment complex, with
family activities, coffee, beer, and a color television broadcasting the
Summer Olympics.15 Jøhnsson says that it was no coincidence that by
1974, Ishøj had 1,400 new foreign residents [mainly Turkish and
Pakistani], who represented 10% of the suburb’s population.16 Today,
Ishøj—population 22,000—remains an “immigrant suburb” that is 20%
“foreign,” with over 3,500 Turkish residents, among other groups.17)
FAB’s editorial team included staff of various ethnicities; the non-
Danish editors were primarily responsible for (1) translating multi-lingual
articles from Danish to Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, Urdu, or Arabic, and (2)
managing the articles on “their” page (e.g. the Turkish page, the Serbo-
Croatian page). A typical paper would have twelve pages of multi-lingual
articles—in Danish and all foreign languages—followed by the language-
specific pages. Danish editors and staff wrote a majority of the articles on
the first twelve (multi-lingual) pages, but foreign editors could also con-
tribute. As Hammer said: “Everybody had the possibility to come with
proposals. The immigrants were our links to the communities.”
The masthead in the early years included S. Jabiri (or on the Arabic
page, Shakr Al-Jabiri) as editor of the Arabic page; Tahsin Karakavuk (or
on the Turkish page, Karakavukoğlu) and P. Alyanak as editors of the
Turkish page; M. Rashid Malik as editor of the Pakistani page; Izeta
Hjorth and Hadzic Soto as editors of the Serbo-Croatian page; and staff
contributors Zuhair Hannoun, Masood Razak, Dipak Das, and A. Rauf
Khan. Danish staff included the administrative editor, Per S. Grove-
“ . . . [I]T DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO GET MARRIED . . . 91
Stephensen, as well as contributors Harry Rasmussen and Carl Stuhr,

although other men and women contributed to various issues.18 Staff
were compensated to a small extent.19 According to Hammer, the foreign
editors were not all “foreign workers” in the typical sense of the word. For
example, the two Yugoslavians were translators: Hjorth (female) was
married to a Danish man, and translated public documents, and Soto
was also a professional who happened to live in Denmark just prior to
the Yugoslavian migration boom. But many foreign staff members were
factory workers and active in trade unions. Their educational backgrounds
and proficiency in Danish varied, but all knew some Danish. After the
paper, several of the other editors also went on to become professional
translators.20
Hammer described three main difficulties with working in multiple
languages and with foreign staff. The first was minor: writers needed to
keep stories short, in order to fit four or five languages per page. Second,
writers needed to write about complicated subjects (i.e. labor market
legislation) in an understandable way, and foreign editors had difficulties
translating technical or esoteric terms. As Hammer remembered, “[The
foreign editors] would say, ‘You can’t say that in Urdu,’ or ‘It can’t be
translated into Turkish.’” A third issue came when the Danish editors
asked the foreign editors to provide a short Danish-language summary in
the corner of their language pages, in order for Danes and other non-
speakers to engage with the sub-group’s discussions. Some foreign editors
protested, arguing that these pages were a space for discussion of issues
specific to their ethnic community.21
A final difficulty was how to balance FAB’s overwhelmingly serious
content with entertainment. An example of a humorous piece was a
poem about Danish culture from an outsider’s perspective. The poem
serves as a transition to the next section, an overview of the socio-political
context in Denmark with regard to immigration, gender, and sexuality.
The poem stated:
Some people say that Danes behave in a peculiar fashion—others say they are
ridiculously funny.
for example, when they stand and kiss one another on the open street . . .
or when girls ride motorbikes
or when a canary is buried in a graveyard . . .
or when they behave like Danes do22
The poem and its accompanying photographs—a (heterosexual) couple

holding each other on a busy sidewalk, a woman on a motorcycle, a man
walking a dog in a dog-jacket—were meant to seem ludicrous or excessive
to an outsider, but mundane to a Dane. This is just one example of how
FAB addressed cultural norms frankly—including those related to gender
and sexuality—and provided entertainment that captured foreign readers’
attention for six years (Fig. 4.1).
“THEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO HAVE A SEX LIFE”:

CONTEXTUALIZING DANISH VIEWS ON IMMIGRANTS IN 1972
In the summer of 1972, conversations about integration into Danish society
were still uncommon, as most Danes continued to assume that “guest
workers” would return to their countries of origin.23 Gender did factor
into some media and political conversations in 1970–72—including those
about housing, crime, wage suppression and cultural difference—but
usually only to a minor extent. While left-wing politicians tended to disfavor
the import of foreign labor and to push for immigration freezes, they also
supported the construction of decent housing for immigrants, and most
importantly, equal wages, which would prevent salary suppression for
Danish workers. When debating the first hiring freeze (in November
1970), the leader of one left-wing party objected to the (right-wing)
government’s claim that importing foreign labor was necessary, especially
with the growth of the service sector and increases in wages; inevitably, he
said, more Danish women would be part of the workforce, so Denmark
would not need foreign labor.24 In other words, some felt that working
Danish women were preferable to welcoming more foreign workers.25
(Foreign workers in these debates were almost always assumed to be solo
men, without wives or children in Denmark.) Across the political spectrum,
housing was a major concern and everyone agreed that Denmark should
avoid ghetto-formations by providing decent housing spread throughout
cities and suburbs.26 One employer feared that immigrant ghettoes would
“lead to theft, rape, murder and violent conflicts, to an extent which bears
comparison with U.S. cities”27; as the author did not address foreign
women, his fear-mongering about “rape” served to depict immigrant men
as hypersexual and a threat to Danish women.
The construction of (infamous28) housing projects in Avedøre, a suburb
of Copenhagen, raised different questions regarding immigrant sexuality.
“THEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO HAVE A SEX LIFE” . . . 93
Fig. 4.1 “ . . . Danes behave in a peculiar fashion . . . when they stand and kiss one
another on the open street . . . or when girls ride motorbikes . . . ”
Ibid. Photographs by Uwe Bødewadt and Per Nørgård; permission to re-print from Uwe
Bødewadt and Ole Hammer. For other humorous imagery related to sexuality, see FAB
(13 May 1975), and FAB (12 August 1975).
The housing project was controversial because Avedøre was isolated, and
the housing project risked turning into a ghetto and slum. To avoid over-
crowding, tenants were given regulations, including that each room could
only be occupied by one person, which ruled out the possibility for men to
live with wives or other family members. However, the regulation stipulated
that having “a girl overnight” was allowed, which the tabloid Ekstra Bladet
highlighted in a headline, “They Should be Allowed to Have a Sex Life.”29
The tabloid was correct to sexualize this regulation, which explicitly
addressed one-night stands—implicitly with Danish women—and discour-
aged men from building long-term relationships while they lived in the
neighborhood.
With economics and housing at the center of debates about immigrants,
there was little discussion of immigrant culture, with some exceptions.30
The Nordic Cable and Wire Manufacturing Company—which had hired a
few hundred foreign workers in 1969, mostly Turkish—reported that the
relationship between Danes and foreign workers in the company had been
“almost perfect” in its first year:
There are ripples here and there, but that could also happen amongst Danish
workers. The different living customs play a role. Turks for example don’t
bathe without clothes. Mohammedans [sic] don’t each pork. But those
problems can be solved . . . All in all, we’re very satisfied.31
It was not uncommon for Muslim immigrants in Denmark to express

frustration that their non-Muslim roommates cooked pork in their kitch-
ens, or that Danish acquaintances ignorantly served them non-halal meat;
but it was unusual for the company to mention men’s bathing habits as a
“ripple” between Danish and foreign workers. Casual nudity was a minor
cultural difference, not (yet) a clash of values between Christians and
Muslims in Denmark.32
Public attitudes toward immigrants were mixed, according to an
Observa poll published in the Jutland-based Jyllands-Posten in October
1970. Regarding foreign workers, Danes’ (or perhaps more specifically,
Jutlanders’) opinions broke down in the following manner: 25% very
positive, 29% somewhat positive, 21% neutral, 15% somewhat negative,
and 10% negative. Although three in four Danes held positive or neutral
opinions about foreign workers, the group ranked below Swedes,
Norwegians, Greenlanders, and Jews (though fell above alcoholics). But
the 1970 survey revealed a far greater menace to Danish society: the youth
“THEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO HAVE A SEX LIFE” . . . 95
movement. Ranked below foreign workers and alcoholics were the groups
that garnered the most public disapproval: demonstrators; longhaired
military objectors; and women’s libbers, referred to as Rødstrømperne.33
The Danish Rødstrømperne—henceforth Redstockings—formed in
1970, and was directly modeled on the left-wing feminist group by the
same name in New York City (f. 1969) as well as contemporaneous
movements in the Netherlands and Great Britain.34 They generally held
socialist viewpoints, promoted equality for men and women, and fought
oppressive stereotypes about women (whether in politics, the job market,
or the bedroom). In their early years, the movement attracted media and
public attention with provocations (influenced by the 1968 student move-
ments), and chose unusual spaces for their protests, including beauty
pageants, university orientation weeks, and public buses. Like second-
wave feminists across Western Europe and North America, they
demanded, “The private is political” and brought taboo sexual issues
into public discussion, including “incest, battered wives, rape, women’s
neuroses, men’s domination of sexuality, and the unequal distribution of
housework.”35 Additionally, they challenged norms about toplessness,
hung their bras around Central Station, and organized a women’s festival
with the African-American feminist prominent Angela Davis (b. 1949).
Feminist historian Drude Dahlerup referred to 1970–1974 as “phase
one of the new women’s movement” in Denmark, when the Redstockings
were the central actors, and street protests took priority. Their efforts in
these years were invaluable for securing abortion rights into law (1975),
creating the Gender Equality Council (ligestillingsrådet) (1975), and
passing comprehensive equal pay laws (1976—though the beginnings of
this can be seen in the 1973 strike resolution). By 1978, the Redstockings
had offices in Copenhagen and Odense, and satellite groups in thirty-five
towns. The Copenhagen base was the Women’s House (Kvindehuset),
which still operates in its original location as a women’s-only space. In the
1970s, the Women’s House hosted special meetings for lesbians, women
over 40, and alcoholics, among others, and ran a hotline for women
subjected to domestic violence.36
In the summer of 1972, the Redstockings were focused on three poli-
tical-legal topics: equal pay protection, abortion laws, and the campaign
against the European Economic Community (EEC).37 Historians have
tended to focus on the Redstockings’ success with equal pay and abortion
laws, as the Danish public voted to join the EEC in October 1972. But in
summarizing the Redstockings’ position against the EEC, Dahlerup wrote
(in 1986) that the group feared, “[H]armonizing legislation within the
EEC . . . would . . . drag Danish legislation down to southern European
standards.”38 As the most prominent southern European country in the
EEC at the time, Italy apparently represented sexist laws; and cooperating
with Italian representatives could jeopardize feminist struggles in Denmark.
Dahlerup’s statement does not suggest that the Redstockings feared the
free movement of Italians to Denmark; but it hints that some feminists
believed foreign worker men—from southern Europe or elsewhere—
brought a sexism with them that could harm gender politics in Denmark.
It is within the context of feminists’ precarious political influence in
Denmark—in tandem with the knowledge that foreign men were engaging
in physical relationships with Danish women (Chapter 3)—that FAB pub-
lished their 1972 articles about gender and sexuality.
SEX “EDUCATION” IN FREMMEDARBEJDERBLADET,

SUMMER 1972
“There is a great difference between family life in this country [Denmark]
and that in those countries from where a great deal of foreign workers
come,” one article from July 1972 began. “The main difference is the
women’s marital status.” The article, entitled “The Equality of Men and
Women,” cautioned foreign workers interested in Danish women that
men did not have the same rights or roles in Denmark as the foreigner
might expect: he could not choose whether his partner would work or stay
at home, even if they had children; “nor can he prevent her from going to
a party alone.” If a couple with children separated, the mother almost
always got custody, the father needed to pay child support, and the Danish
authorities would need to approve of any international travel the father
sought with his biological child. “When beginning a relationship with a
Danish man or woman, one must realize the social and religious
differences . . . Danes’ moral views are completely different in many ways
from those of foreign workers” (Fig 4.2).39
The following month, an article entitled, “Only Wanted Children:
Woman can Decide Herself Whether She Wants to be Pregnant,” detailed
Danish legal policies and social attitudes on contraception and abortion.40
The article encouraged readers to postpone or avoid having a child,
particularly if the foreign worker or his partner “lives in bad conditions,
has already many [children] and no money, has just given birth, etc.”
SEX “EDUCATION” IN FREMMEDARBEJDERBLADET, SUMMER 1972 97
Fig. 4.2 Fremmedarbejderbladet ended their July 1972 issue with an article on “The
Equality of Men and Women” in Danish, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and English
FAB (10 July 1972), back page. Photographs by Uwe Bødewadt; permission to re-print from Uwe
Bødewadt and Ole Hammer. At this point in 1972, the paper addressed its Pakistani readers in
English. The top photograph appears to show two foreign workers seated with two Danish
women. The bottom photograph shows a “new” woman sitting with some distance from an
“old” man.
The article then introduced the service Mødrehjælpen—the national orga-

nization to counsel and support distressed and single mothers41—which
could assist with the family planning process. The pill, an intrauterine
device (IUD or coil), and abortion were suggested methods, and the
article provided details about the circumstances and cost of abortion (i.e.
free for those with Danish health insurance). The reference to abortion is
noteworthy, as Denmark’s abortion laws were being challenged and
debated by feminists who sought to loosen them (though Denmark’s
laws were already some of the most liberal in the world). The article also
gave information—mainly to those married to Danes, but also to “women
who have worked and lived in Denmark for a longer period of time”—
about maternity allowance (799 kroner to every new Danish mother), and
childbirth allowance (i.e. maternity leave, up to 106 kroner/day for four-
teen weeks).
A third article, “The Pill and Paternity,” began with a nod to the sexual
revolution: “When Danish men and women go to bed with each other, it
does not have to be because they want to get married and have children.”
Consequently, men were advised to use a condom if they wanted to avoid
“venereal diseases which, perhaps, the woman does not even know she
has,” but more, to avoid unwanted pregnancies. The author convinced the
reader to avoid getting a Danish woman pregnant: his paternity would be
documented via blood tests, he would have to pay child support, the
police would “try to find him” if he left the country, and “it can be a
quite expensive affair for the father.” In summary, the advice was: “not all
Danish women use the Pill or other kinds of contraceptives” so “remem-
ber to use a condom.”42
The fourth article, from August 1972, restated social norms and laws
about women, sexuality, and the family in Denmark. In “Citizenship and
Religion,” the author defined the nationality of a child of mixed relation-
ships as “an essential problem”: if a female foreign worker had a child with
a Dane, the child would usually be Danish; but if a male foreign worker
had a child with a Dane, the child might inherit the father’s nationality,
due to the paternity rules in the worker’s country of origin. The article
informed readers that upon marrying, both parties must sign a document
agreeing to the potential child’s religion. The author reminded readers,
yet again, that unmarried mothers had full custody of children, and fathers
must pay child support in the event of separation.43
Hammer identified the author of two of the articles, “Bms,” as the left-wing
political activist Bente Møller Sørensen (1949–2014, Birkerød, Denmark). An
SEX “EDUCATION” IN FREMMEDARBEJDERBLADET, SUMMER 1972 99
obituary referred to her as a “former Redstocking” (“rødstrømpe (fhv.)”),

editor, translator, and mother.44 From 1973 onwards, she worked in the
publishing world, translated dozens of books into Danish, and authored
several of her own, including a book on young immigrant parents in
Denmark, their partner-selection processes, conflicts, and dual identities.45
Neither Hammer nor Bødewadt could identify the other author, “Vtg.”
With regard to an earlier point—that foreign editors had difficulties trans-
lating certain concepts—it would be interesting to analyze the Turkish and
Serbo-Croatian terms for “gender equality” (ligestilling), parental custody,
biological children, child support, maternity leave, venereal disease, abortion,
contraception, the coil, condoms, the birth-control pill, and so forth.
When asked about the editorial conversations leading to these articles
about sexuality and gender equality in Denmark, neither Hammer nor
Bødewadt recalled why FAB decided to tackle these issues in 1972; but in
retrospect, they were not surprised. In Hammer’s words:
We wanted to inform them [the foreign workers] of their situation—not

morally, that was very far from us with our background in’68—but it was
important to tell them about modern Danish society. That [sexual/gender
activism] was a part of modern Danish society . . . so we had to introduce
them to that debate.
Educating on topics like gender and sexuality from a non-moralizing

perspective was a new imperative for many left-wingers.
However, the catalysts for FAB’s articles about women’s equality,
maternity rights, and sexual liberalism were likely two incidents that FAB
also covered that summer. The first case involved a Turkish man who
abducted the child he had fathered with his Danish girlfriend. The foreign
worker had moved to Denmark from Turkey in 1970, started dating a
Danish girl, but did not marry her. They were together long enough to
have a child, but when the child was five months old, the couple decided
to split. During one of his visits with the ex-girlfriend, he hit her, and she
reported the incident to the police, that subsequently forbade him to
contact her again. One evening he snuck into her building and kidnapped
the child. Hoping to go to Turkey, but limited by money, he hitchhiked;
he made it to the German border before the police picked him up. After a
trial in Denmark, he received two years with suspended sentence—mean-
ing he did not need to serve his jail time—with the Foreign Ministry’s
provision that he must leave the country.46
When Tahsin Karakavukoğlu—the Turkish editor for FAB—wrote

about the case, he added his personal connection to the defendant: he
served as his translator. Karakavukoğlu did not think that the Turkish man
was prosecuted wrongly; in fact, he described the trial as “completely fair.”
However, Karakavukoğlu was obviously affected by the events, as he
ended his summary of the trial with the sympathetic questions: “Did
anyone think of the man’s future in Turkey? Did anyone consider the
fact that he would never see his child again?”47 Frustrated that this man’s
fate related to his ignorance of Danish law, Karakavukoğlu likely sup-
ported the editorial decision to print the Summer 1972 articles on parental
rights, or perhaps even suggested them.
A second media flare—from July 1972—dealt with a Pakistani man who
was arrested on charges of attempted murder (with a hammer to the heads)
of his ex-girlfriend, aged twenty-four, and her brother, aged twenty-one.
The couple had lived together since December 1970, but then she asked
him to move out. Incidentally, he had a wife and two children in (Lyallpur)
Pakistan. Here the FAB also reported on this case, but without editorializ-
ing, other than describing the case as “vengeance of hurt feelings.”48
Foreign writers and editors demonstrated their agreement with the
Summer 1972 articles in contemporaneous and subsequent writing.
Karakavukoğlu rearticulated the centrality of gender equality in Danish
culture in his article about the (Turkish) kidnapping, in which he
described the unfortunate event as taking place “in this beautiful country
where men and women have equal rights.”49 This sounds like a paraphrase
of Vtg’s article in the same issue, which Karakavukoğlu would have trans-
lated into Turkish.
In another example from the following May, a Yugoslavian writer
named Mirko Todorovic wrote an article about mixed marriages, and
reminded FAB’s readership:
for the Danes, marriage is a cooperation between two completely equal

persons without any conditions about losing one’s individuality. The ques-
tion of who is “master of the house” is never raised. Compromises between a
married couple are always possible. Most Danish women go out to work,
and this places them on equal footing with their husbands so that house-
work, child-minding and the like become not only a woman’s duties.50
This language of “cooperation,” “individuality,” and of “equal” persons,

footing and rights seems directly influenced from earlier FAB articles. The
“[THEY HAVE] SETTLED IN TOO NICELY AMONG THE GIRLS OF THE CITY” . . . 101
author of this article demonstrated cultural observation, introspection,

and critique of his own personal biases and those of his immediate com-
munity, as he continued with a comparison to the gender norms in foreign
workers’ countries of origin:
A Pakistani, Turk or Yugoslav have quite a different approach to

marriage. . . . It has been handed down from generation to generation that
the woman to a certain extent was an inferior being, whose rights did not
extend any further than to housework, having children. . . . The husband
was quite definitely the master of the house.51
Although Yugoslavian guest workers in Europe would have the most

equal gender ratio of any foreign worker group,52 Todorovic painted a
picture of Yugoslavian men opposed to women’s independent work. He
assumed that Turkish and Pakistani men shared this view, though many
would later have wives who would work in Denmark. Regardless of his
oversimplification of foreign workers’ attitudes toward gender equality,
this editorial provides evidence that foreign workers agreed with FAB’s
frank presentation of Denmark’s gender norms.
“[THEY HAVE] SETTLED IN TOO NICELY AMONG

THE GIRLS OF THE CITY”: CONFLICTS CONTINUE, 1973–75
Despite evidence that foreign workers—initially surprised by the feminist
influence in Denmark—agreed with changing Danish gender norms by
1972–73, there continued to be incidents between foreign men and
Danish women, or at least the media and public continued to frame
conflicts in these terms. In general, FAB defended foreign workers who
were judged unfairly. For example, in an article from April 1973 about
immigrant men at dance clubs, one young woman told FAB, “We won’t
dance with foreign workers because they soon start getting fresh—we
always say no.” But FAB offered another explanation for some women’s
hesitance: perhaps young women who danced with foreign men were
looked down upon by their peers.53 Yet despite this defense, FAB still
printed the woman’s negative opinion as its headline—“Foreigners are too
Fresh”—perhaps to spark new dialogue about sexuality and flirting in
dance clubs.
Similarly, FAB also provoked reader introspection on sexual appropri-

ateness in May 1973, when it printed a letter from a Danish woman
(“U.P.”), who wrote:
I feel that the foreign worker clubs must consider it their duty to inform
their members of how things are in Denmark, also with regard to relation-
ships between the sexes, and correct the belief that I have heard exists, that
Denmark is supposed to be an “erotic paradise,” where you can do whatever
you like with whomever you like.54
Prior to this complaint, U.P. explained her reasoned anger: she had
offered help to a foreign couple while the (foreign) wife was pregnant.
U.P. agreed to meet the couple one evening to discuss Mødrehjælpen, and
other services for new mothers. But when she answered the door, she
noticed that the husband arrived alone, at which point “he enquired
whether he might stay the night—(incidentally, his wife was in the mater-
nity ward!).” Understandably upset, the woman lamented the lack of
gratitude and respect she received, and concluded that if misunderstand-
ings like this continued, “no Dane will feel like meeting a foreign worker.”
U.P. did not allude to similar incidents before with this man—nor to
similar experiences her friends had with immigrants—but nevertheless
concluded that this event was representative of a general epidemic of
foreigner sexism in Denmark.
Tensions between Danes and foreign workers flared in May 1973 when a
popular men’s magazine, Ugens Rapport—similar to Playboy in that it
offered (light) reading alongside soft-core pornography55—published an
exposé smearing Turks for their supposed murderous tempers.56 In the
article (in Danish) “Crime Report: Blood Revenge has Now Come to
Denmark,” the magazine claimed that Turks were jealous lovers, and willing
to take murderous revenge on anyone who insulted the women they loved.
Aside from citing charges of domestic violence against Turks in Denmark,
the magazine also “interviewed” two Turkish foreign workers on the topic,
one of whom they identified by name and in a photograph.57
FAB immediately defended the two Turkish workers in question, as one
“doesn’t understand Danish at all,” and the other, “is not especially good
at it either,” so their interview was superficial, and they did not understand
the leading questions; thus they were “victims” of “smearing.”58FAB also
defended Turks in general, calling Ugens Rapport’s depiction of Turkish
men “a downright lie” as “Turks are honest and sensible people.” The
paper turned the tables on the statistics about violence by reminding

readers of the “countless crimes of passion which regularly take place in
Danish homes,” which were equally inexcusable, and which were the
impetus for the Redstockings’ efforts to establish women’s shelters across
Denmark.59 By writing this slanderous piece, Ugens Rapport had involved
all Turks in Denmark in this “dirty affair . . . without reason”; if and when
Ugens Rapport retracted the piece, “it’ll almost be far too kind of the
Turks to accept an apology.”60
In June 1973, a major confrontation in Helsingør (about one hour north
of Copenhagen) began with an incident that incited national conversations
about foreign men as sources of conflict in Denmark. A Turkish worker and
a Danish member of the “777” motorcycle gang got into an argument at a
hotel restaurant, allegedly over a Danish girl; they began to fight, and the
Turk took out a knife, stabbed the Dane, and killed him.61 Even though the
man was soon arrested in his home, the gang decided to take revenge on
“Turks” in Helsingør, but this extended to many of the estimated 2,000
foreign workers living in the city at the time. According to Ekstra Bladet,
anyone with “brown skin” was a target for the gang members, who roamed
the streets and attacked several (Turkish, Pakistani and Yugoslavian) men.
“Hooligans” reportedly launched Molotov cocktails that burned two
policemen (one severely), before the police called for back-up in
Copenhagen, Hillerød, and Lyngby.62
“A passing guest-worker was dragged out of his car and beaten up,”
one journalist reported, “His car was overturned and set on fire.”63 One
headline described the street-fighting as a “lynching atmosphere,” during
which fourteen Danes were arrested. Some of the foreign workers, such as
those with families, took the ferry over to Sweden for safety, and in Ekstra
Bladet’s words, “The bravest have barricaded themselves in their apart-
ments,” unwilling to accept persecution solely because “one of theirs” was
brandishing the knife.64
In one article from Jutland—far away from the tumult in Helsingør—
one journalist almost seemed sympathetic with the Danish thugs, by
linking their anger to the murder of a young Dane in 1970, committed
by “a Yugoslavian guest-worker” who was later convicted of murder. By
reminding the reader of this foreign worker—from another country and
probably with a different motive—the paper perpetuated an image of the
foreign man as embodying murderous rage. Additionally, the newspaper
gave voice to the thugs’ belief that “guest workers” had “settled in too
nicely among the girls of the city,” which almost served to legitimize their
motive for the riots, or at least contributed to the media framing of inter-
ethnic relationships as a cause of unrest in Denmark.65
In a column for a left-wing newspaper, Ole Hammer expressed his
disappointment with the media’s tone while covering the Helsingør con-
flicts: news outlets insufficiently contextualized the violent attacks against
foreigners, he argued. Entitled “A Hot Summer,” Hammer criticized the
media’s sensational coverage of the riots, and argued that the media was
primarily “interest[ed] in the drama and not the background of the fight-
ing.”66 The background to which Hammer referred was the growing
hatred and discrimination of foreigners in Danish society, where there
had already been “countless” issues of discrimination. Just two weeks
before, a Turkish family was harassed by a group of Danes over something
as small as a borrowed chair. And in another incident from Helsingør—
which FAB had covered shortly before the street fighting began—the
owner of a popular nightclub asked the bouncer to deny entry to
“Turks” (i.e. foreign workers).67 In his column to Aktuelt, Hammer also
opined that it was not sufficient to deal with the treatment of foreign
workers in the workplace alone, when there was fighting and hatred in the
streets. It was imperative for all sectors of Danish society to condemn
harassment of foreigners and promote tolerance.
Over the coming months, Danes continued to link conflicts with
immigrants to gender and sexuality, though usually more subtly. When
Parliament agreed to reopen Denmark for labor migration in mid-1973,
readers’ letters spilled into newspapers and rehashed old arguments about
Danish unemployment, ghetto formation, and crime; but one reader letter
also addressed gender ratios:
When you give the green light for thousands of new foreign workers, is it
unreasonable [to ask] that half of them are women? That would solve a lot of
the problems foreign workers have now with finding themselves a girl . . . I
don’t mean that male/female foreign workers should stick to themselves as a
group, but they certainly want to form families and . . . [this way] they will
slide into society in a more natural way than those young men we see going
around uselessly today.68
The reader claims to have no issue with mixed-race couples, yet the letter
still frames immigrant men’s sexual frustrations as the source of greater
societal problems: foreign men would be better off dating or marrying
within their ethnic group.
The trope of the failed inter-racial couple recurred in Danish media—

for example, as the theme of an award-winning young adult novel69—and
the immigrant press. In 1974 and 1975, the Urdu pages of FAB con-
tinuously reported cases of failed romantic relationships among
Pakistanis and Danes. In one case, a Pakistani man killed the new
Danish boyfriend of the Danish woman he used to date; in a second
case, it was the Danish woman who killed her Pakistani boyfriend due to
a fight about his wife in Pakistan70; and in a third case, a Pakistani man
allegedly killed himself during a period of depression following his break-
up with a Danish woman. Perhaps the Pakistani editors felt it was their
duty to report these deaths and arrests to their community, who would
have been disproportionately affected by the incidents; but it is also
possible that these Urdu-speaking editors did want to reinforce the
trope of the doomed inter-ethnic relationship, so as to encourage men
to stay faithful to their Pakistani wives during this period of family
separation, or to find Pakistani wives during this period of increased
self-organization along ethnic lines.
Although working-class men could have been foreign workers’ closest
allies—as both shared an interest in improving wages, benefits, and work-
ing conditions—Danish workers expressed animosity and fear that foreign
men took “their” jobs, and often “their” women too.71 Evidence of the
former can be found in union papers and Parliamentary discussions lead-
ing up to the 1970 immigration freeze: one Danish worker wrote into
Fagbladet (his union paper) to express his difficulty in feeling solidarity
with foreigners: “Call it discrimination or racial hatred, I don’t care, first
and foremost I feel solidarity with my fellow countryman, Hansen and
Pedersen [i.e. generic Danes].”72 The head of the Communist Party,
Hanne Reintoft, clarified this sentiment in Parliament: “It is indefensible
to reduce the Danish worker’s fear of [losing their] daily bread into a
question of intolerance, much less racism.”73 But while trade unions and
politicians seriously addressed fears of unemployment and wage mainte-
nance, there were a few who seriously addressed the complaint than
foreigners “took” Danish women, even if many agreed that this was
both true and a source of animosity (i.e. in framing the catalyst for the
Helsingør street violence).
FAB was one of the few outlets capable of tackling the fear that
foreigners were “taking” Danish women, initially from the standpoint
of educating foreign workers about gender and sexuality, and later, by
educating all readers about discrimination and media slant. FAB’s
articles from the summer of 1972—as well as subsequent articles that

drew on these themes—encouraged foreigners to be curious and to
feel comfortable asking questions about gender equality, extramarital
sex, sexual appropriateness, and parental rights. The journal presented
these issues as important aspects of Danish society, and hoped that
reaching out to foreigners on these issues might relieve tensions with
Danish men and women. These articles were the result of conversa-
tions between editors who were Danish and foreign, male and female,
working-class, student, and professional. These editors made the deci-
sion to translate and print these articles so as to educate workers about
the new norms being challenged by those in the women’s and sexual
liberation movements. The foreign worker journal FAB—with its
multi-ethnic editors and unique angles—is a microcosm in which to
study the complex interplay between European opinions on immi-
grants, immigrants’ lived experiences in Europe, media frames, and
immigration policies.
In 1976 or so, the leader of LO (the organization of trade unions)
sent a letter to FAB declaring that foreign workers had been in
Denmark long enough; the foreigners needed to learn Danish, and
FAB was a crutch.74 As Danish politicians and union leaders began to
more seriously address integration, FAB lost its funding. And while in
1971, FAB’s staff was supposed to teach foreigners about Denmark,
by 1976 or so, institutions asked FAB’s staff to teach Denmark about
its foreigners: “We became more and more an information center
to Denmark . . . I got [calls] every single day. I became an expert,”
Hammer recalled.
In the mid- and late-1970s, foreign workers increasingly organized not
only social clubs, but also political groups (e.g. for left-wing Turkish
workers), which had a lot of interaction with Danish left-wing organiza-
tions. Many of the politically active workers would have read FAB in the
early 1970s, and would have been influenced by its pro-union slant, even if
they had had negative relationships with their Danish co-workers.
Furthermore, they would have been influenced by FAB’s implicit and
explicit support of the women’s movement and its “equality” politics.
Disenchanted by the workers’ movement, but still interested in leftist
politics, foreign workers would have looked elsewhere for activist inspira-
tion. Thus, Chapter 5 illuminates examples of when left-wing foreign
worker organizations took inspiration from feminists, their politics, and
their activism.
NOTES 107
NOTES
1. The paper was published in Danish, Turkish and Serbo-Croatian for its
entire duration. The paper mainly catered to Pakistanis in Urdu, but used
English from May 1972 to June 1973. Arabic articles only appeared from
August 1971 to January 1972.
2. DASF stood for Dansk Arbejdsmands- og Specialarbejderforbund, and origi-
nated with a similar name in the 1890s; it exists today as SiD
(Specialarbejderforbundet i Danmark).
3. This first freeze lasted through 1973; the restrictions were removed briefly
in 1973, but a second freeze came at the end of that year from the oil crisis.
4. Carl Damsted Andersen, Kaj Buch, and John Mølgaard, “Samme Vilkår”
[“Same Conditions”]; cited in Jan Hjarnø, Torben Lundbæk og Sven
Skovmand, eds. Fremmedarbejderpolitik—en bog om fremmedarbejderproble-
matikken [“Foreign Worker Policy—a Book about Foreign Worker Issues”]
(Denmark: Dansk Reklame Produktion, 1973); also cited in Jørgen Würtz
Sørensen, “Velkommen Mustafa? Debatten om gæstearbejderne og det
danske samfund i starten af 1970‘erne” [“Welcome Mustafa? The Debate
about Guest-workers and Danish Society at the Start of the 1970s”]
(Working paper for the Center for Culture Research, Aarhus University,
August 1988), 28–29.
5. An October 1970 Gallup poll for Berlingske Tidende about “same condi-
tions” found overwhelming popular support: when asked if foreign and
Danish workers should have the “same conditions,” 80% said yes, likely
due to fear of wage suppression, and only 9% said no. On other questions,
the population was more divided: in response to the question, “Do you
think it’s an advantage or not an advantage for the country that we import
foreign labor,” 46% said it was not an advantage, 34% said advantage, and
20% had no answer; in response to whether Denmark should keep importing
labor, 52% said no, and 27% said yes.
6. Sørensen (n 4), 28–29.
7. Ole Hammer Interview (June 2015).
8. O.H. Interview.
9. Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (MS) was initially founded in the 1940s as a
Danish organization that aimed to help rebuild war-torn Europe. In 1973,
Hammer published one of the first reports on foreign workers entitled “The
New Danes” (De nye dansker) through MS. In 1974, the organization
became an open member organization and is still active today.
10. “Regular Publishing is Ensured,” FAB (10 May 1972).
11. “Unreasonably High Unemployment,” FAB (6 August 1971), 1.
12. O.H. Interview.
13. Sørensen (n 4).
14. Heidi Vad Jønsson, “Immigrant Policy Developing in Copenhagen and

Ishøj in the 1970s,” Scandinavian Journal of History 35:4 (2013). There
were other push/pull factors as well, including the shortage of (cheap)
rental housing in Copenhagen, and Ishøj’s low rents and deposits compared
to Copenhagen’s.
15. FAB (10 September 1972), 8.
16. Jønsson (n 14), 600.
17. Population data from 31 December 2015, via UrbiStat, “Ishøj,” last accessed
September 2016 via labs.urbistat.it/AdminStat/en/dk/demografia/popola-
zione/ish-j/20368464/4; Turkish population figure via: “Mange indvan-
drere på samme sted er godt for beskæftigelsen” [“Many Immigrants in the
Same Place is Good for Jobs”], Politiken (6 January 2015), last accessed
September 2016 via politiken.dk/indland/ECE2502262/mange-indvan-
drere-paa-samme-sted-er-godt-for-beskaeftigelsen/.
18. FAB (6 August 1971), 3.
19. O.H. interview.
20. O.H. interview.
21. When reviewing the Pakistani pages with an Urdu-speaker, he noticed
some inconsistencies between the Urdu text and the Danish synopsis.
One summary claimed that an article gave “tips on how to perform in
Danish culture,” but the corresponding article discussed ethics and citi-
zenship in general, with no reference to Denmark. Elsewhere on the page,
the editor Malik criticized Danish pedagogues for not teaching according
to students’ individual needs, but this was not listed in the synopsis;
M. Rashid Malik, FAB (10 December 1973), Urdu page. Translated by
Fahad Mukhtar.
22. FAB 11 (10 March 1973), back page. Hammer could not recall who wrote
the anonymous poem, but guessed it was a self-reflexive Dane.
23. E.g. Parliamentary debates in 1970 across the spectrum, cited in Sørensen
(n 4), 28–34.
24. Kjær Rasmussen of the (now defunct) Left Socialists, Folketingstidende, 122
(1970–71) I. sp. 2635ff, cited in Sørensen (n 4), 33. Folketingstidende is the
Parliament’s paper.
25. Jens Fisker, “Velkommen Mustafa?” featured article in Arbejdsgiveren 6
(20 March 1970), 34–35. Cited in Sørensen (n 4), 4–5. Arbejdsgiveren,
meaning “The Employer,” was the member paper of DA, the employers’
organization.
26. E.g. “Gæstearbejdernes boligproblemer” Arbejdsgiveren 8 (20 April 1970),
cited in Sørensen (n 4), 6. Note that “ghetto” is the same word in Danish.
27. Fisker in Sørensen (n 26).
28. At its peak, the Avedøre projects only filled 100 of its 700 units, and
closed within two years; Ekstra Bladet referred to the projects as “the
NOTES 109
VKR [right-wing] government’s biggest building scandal, the unused ghetto

city . . . that until today has cost taxpayers between fourteen and fifteen million
kroner. Ekstra Bladet (22 January 1973), cited in Sørensen (n 4), 46.
29. “They should be allowed to have a sex life” [in Danish], Ekstra Bladet
(7 June 1971), cited in Sørensen (n 4), 43.
30. Sørensen wrote that Muslim immigrants encountered problems when trying
to practice religion—“partly problems with food, partly problems with the
perception of gender relations”—but only went into detail about the lack of
religious spaces (e.g. mosques), and Muslim foreigners’ requests to use
churches for worship, based on the argument that they too paid the church
tax. See articles in Ekstra Bladet (8 February, 24 February, 4 March 1971),
cited in Sørensen (n 4), 35–36.
31. Article about Nordic Cable and Wire, Arbejdsgiveren 11 (5 June 1970),
22–25; cited in Sørensen (n 4), 12. “Living customs” is livsvaner.
32. More recent news stories about communal bathing sometimes present the
issue as a clash of cultures. In a 2003 article, “Muslim Students Get Special
Washroom,” a (male) school official said, “For me, communal bathing after
sports is a very Danish phenomenon,” but supported the new (“special”)
changing room; at another school, a (female) official said that the idea of
adding shower curtains to their communal showers was “nonsense.” Morten
Mikkelsen, “Muslimske elever får særlige badeforhold,” Kristeligt Dagbladet
(11 August 2003).
33. Jyllands-Posten (11 October 1970), cited in Sørensen (n 4), 26.
34. Drude Dahlerup, “Is the New Women’s Movement Dead? Decline or
Change of the Danish Movement,” in The New Women’s Movement:
Feminism and Political Power in Europe and the USA, ed. Drude
Dahlerup (London: Sage Publications, 1986), 221 and 219.
35. Ibid, 224.
36. For locations and addresses, see any issue of Kvinder (“Women”) published
by the Redstockings from 1975–1984.
37. Dahlperup (n 35), 226.
38. Dahlerup (n 35), 228.
39. Vtg, “The Equality of Men and Women,” FAB (10 July 1972).
40. Bms, “Only Wanted Children,” FAB (10 August 1972).
41. Literally “Mothers Help,” Mødrehjælpen had roots in two organizations
from 1905–06 and exists today with the same name.
42. Bms, “The Pill and Paternity,” FAB (10 August 1972).
43. Vtg, “Citizenship and Religion,” FAB (10 August 1972).
44. “Mindeord om journalist Bente Møller Sørensen” [“In Memory of
Journalist . . . ”], Rudersdal Avis (8 August 2014); last accessed September
2015 via rudersdal.lokalavisen.dk/mindeord-om-journalist-bente-moeller-
soerensen-/20140408/artikler/704088769.
45. Bente Møller Sørensen, Unge indvandrerforældre, pleje og opdragelse i

brændpunktet mellem to kulturer [“Young Immigrant Parents: Care and
Upbringing at the Focal Point between the Two Cultures”] (Copenhagen:
Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke, 1991).
46. K, “A Father’s Tragedy,” FAB (10 July 1972).
47. Ibid.
48. FAB, “A Pakistani Charged,” FAB (10 August 1972). FAB printed the ex-
girlfriend’s full name.
49. K, “A father’s tragedy” (n 48).
50. Mirko Todorovic, “Mixed Marriages,” FAB (15 May 1973).
51. Ibid.
52. Ayse Kudat and Mine Sabuncuoglu. “The Changing Composition of Europe’s
Guestworker Population,” Monthly Labor Review (October 1980), 12.
53. Hanne, “Visit to a Dance Restaurant: ‘Foreigners are too fresh,’” FAB
(16 April 1973).
54. U.P., “Ingratitude is the Way of the World,” FAB (16 April 1973).
Although she mentioned being a “liaison” to the couple, it is not clear if
she volunteered through an official channel, or if she was merely their
neighbor.
55. Ugens Rapport [“The Week’s Report”] was published from 1972 through
to 2010. The target audience was heterosexual men, and the magazine was
very much a byproduct of liberalized pornography laws and loosened socie-
tal attitudes towards sexuality in general. In the 1990s, the magazine chan-
ged its name to Classic Report. See Søren Anker Madsen, Historien om
Ugens Rapport [“The History of Ugens Rapport”] (Copenhagen: Gads
Forlag, 2010).
56. “Crime Report: Blood Revenge Has Now Come to Denmark” [in Danish],
Ugens rapport 20 (14–20 May 1973); cited in FAB (10 June 1973).
57. Ibid.
58. Mong, “A Whole Nation Denounced,” FAB (10 June 1973).
59. Dahlerup (n 35), 233; though these shelters opened mainly in the early
1980s.
60. Mong (n 60).
61. For the initial event, see also (all in Danish): “Killed by a Knife Wound,”
Bornholms Tidende (8 June 1973), and “Stabbed During Fight,” Aarhus
Stifts-Tidende (8 June 1973). As of 9 June, the “background/reasoning
behind the murder was unknown”; see “Can’t Remember Anything about
Stabbing-murder,” Aarhuus Stiftstidende (9 June 1973), 18.
62. Aktuelt (9 June 1973), Ekstra Bladet (9 June 1973), Ekstra Bladet (11 June
1973), cited in Sørensen (n 4), 54–56.
63. B.B., “Young Hooligans Went Crazy—Officer Burned” [in Danish],
Aarhuus Stiftstidende (10 June 1973), 11.
NOTES 111
64. Aktuelt (9 June 1973), Ekstra Bladet (9 June 1973), Ekstra Bladet (11 June
1973), cited in Sørensen (n 4) 54–56.
65. B.B (n 63). Translation from “faldt for godt til blandt byens piger.” The
journalist did, however, emphasize the Danes’ indiscriminate violence, and
even cited FAB as a source for better understanding discrimination faced by
Turks in Denmark.
66. Ole Hammer, “Hot Summer,” Aktuelt (20 June 1973), cited in Sørensen
(n 4), 56–57.
67. See: Rup, “No Admittance for Foreign Workers,” FAB (10 June 1973).
One evening, the bouncer allowed a Danish couple to enter the club, but
excluded their Turkish friends; all parties went directly to the police to
complain. The police sided with the patrons, and confirmed that the
Turkish men were “neither drunk, nor unsuitably dressed,” and that the
bar had violated discrimination laws passed several years prior. The owner
claimed she did not want foreigners because they did not buy enough
drinks. FAB added that there were no regulations in Denmark regarding
how much one must drink while at a bar. Eventually, the bar got off with a
small fine.
68. Reader letters, Ekstra Bladet (29 June 1973), cited in Sørensen (n 4), 58.
69. See discussion of the young adult novel Fremmed [“Estranged”] by Leif
Esper Andersen from 1975, in Rikke Andreassen, “Diversity and Intimacy in
Denmark: Regulations, Celebrations and Condemnations,” in New
Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society, eds. Ursula
Lindqvist and Jenny Björklund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2016).
70. Urdu pages of various issues of FAB, 1974–75, translated by and read with
Fahad Mukhtar. I have attempted to locate these events in the mainstream
press, and found the second case: “Jealousy Killing of a Guest-Worker,”
Aarhuus Stifts-Tidende (1 January 1974), 7; the article names neither the
forty-year-old Pakistani man (who had worked in Denmark for “a few years”
and had a wife at home), nor the thirty-year-old Danish girlfriend (who
allegedly killed him because he telephoned his wife).
71. See Chapter 3.
72. Fagbladet 3 (10 February 1970), 84, cited in Sørensen (n 4), 9.
73. Folketingstidende, Forhandlingerne [“Negotiations”], 122 (1970–71) I. sp.
2644f, cited in Sørensen (n 4), 34.
74. O.H. Interview.
PART II
Solidarity
CHAPTER 5
“They’re fighting for women’s rights, we’re

fighting for equal rights for Turkish people,
and that’s the only difference”: Foreign
Workers Organize in the Footsteps of the
Women’s Movement, The Netherlands,
1974–1980
Immigrants founded workers-rights-based organizations in the immediate

footsteps of feminist agitations, and often borrowed rhetorical and prac-
tical strategies from the women’s movement. Aware of and contributing
to discussions led by feminist activists, immigrant groups addressed equal
pay for equal work, affirmative action, and education opportunities,
sometimes with spectacular actions that garnered media attention. While
foreign worker organizations found their closest allies with trade unions,
left-wing parties, and international anti-fascist groups, they also accepted
support from women’s, feminist, and (ambivalently) gay/lesbian libera-
tion groups. Anti-authoritarianism and equality discourses united these
groups, as all agreed that the state (and society) favored and supported the
interests of some, but oppressed or punished others unfairly.
It would be an exaggeration to say that all foreign-worker groups felt a
strong sense of solidarity with movements for women’s and gay/lesbian
liberation in the 1970s, and yet it is true that some immigrant organiza-
tions were aware of and welcomed support from these groups. This
chapter begins by outlining the solidarities (and tensions) between worker
organizations and left-wing groups in general in the 1970s. The majority
of the chapter then looks in-depth at two left-wing foreign worker

116 5 “THEY’RE FIGHTING FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS . . .
organizations in the Netherlands and how these groups’ actions and goals
developed in relation to and with support from coexisting left-wing move-
ments in the Netherlands. These groups are the Komitee Marokkaanse
Arbeiders in Nederland (KMAN: Committee for Moroccan Workers in
the Netherlands [in Dutch]) and Hollanda Türkiyeli Isçiler Birligi
(HTIB: Turkish Worker Association in the Netherlands [in Turkish]),
for which extensive primary material is available through the International
Institute for Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam. Additionally, I inter-
viewed two participants active in these groups, whom I met at the recom-
mendation of a Dutch woman who used to work with them at the Stichting
Buitenlandse Werknemers (SBW: Foundation for Foreign Workers) in
Utrecht.1 Both men arrived in the Netherlands in the 1960s through
“guest worker” recruitment schemes.
In the early decades of the “guest worker” boom, the state did not
support immigrant groups directly. In the early 1960s, it was church groups
that addressed the needs of foreign workers, who were often solo men from
Italy, Spain, and Greece; these church groups received some funding from
companies with large numbers of guest workers. Beginning in 1964, the
Dutch Ministry of Social Work began funding Dutch organizations that
assisted newcomers, such as the aforementioned SBW in Utrecht, which
was founded that year.2 From the mid-1960s and through the 1970s, the
Ministry supported numerous local branches of SBW (and similar groups)
across the country, while foreign workers volunteered their time to form
additional groups, like KMAN and HTIB. Although immigrant men domi-
nated these organizations in the 1970s, some immigrant women also
participated in foreign worker groups (both Dutch-run and self-organized);
immigrant women’s actions in the 1970s–80s are explored in Chapter 6.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Dutch national policies (as well as academics)
tended to ignore immigrant organizations, partly because most “guest
workers” (as well as some immigrants from the former and current colo-
nies) were seen as temporary residents who would return to their countries
of origin. In Migrants and Cities: The Accommodation of Migrant
Organizations in Europe, Margit Fauser compared national policies
regarding migrant organizations in Germany, the Netherlands, and the
United Kingdom, and found a common trend: officials in all countries
tended to view foreign workers as apolitical and passive in these decades.
Immigrant organizations consisted mostly of social and leisure clubs, with
some religious organizations, Fauser found. In the mid- and late-1970s,
the spectrum of organizations diversified to include groups that focused
UNDERSTANDING “SOLIDARITY” 117
on sports, media, and special interests; and especially in the late 1970s,
new groups catered to women and children. However, this chapter shows
that there were also political groups in the 1970s that focused both on
immigrants’ rights in Europe, and on political issues in immigrants’ coun-
tries of origin.
Fauser’s themes of “ethnic paradox” and “transnational paradox” pro-
vide interesting theories for thinking about immigrant self-organizations
in the Netherlands in the 1970s. With regard to the “ethnic paradox,”
Fauser explained that “although migrant organizations are frequently an
expression of ethnic identity different from the mainstream receiving
society, they nevertheless contribute to migrants’ integration into this
society”; this description is applicable to the organizations highlighted in
this chapter.
With regard to the “transnational paradox” (a discussion with a longer
history), Fauser summarized and asserted the following: an ethnic organi-
zation that focuses on communities or politics in their country of origin
(which is seen as having a negative effect on integration) still contributes
to the host society through their activism. This concept too is helpful
for analyzing the foreign worker organizations in the Netherlands and
Denmark in the 1970s, as many immigrants organized along ethnic lines,
and these organizations were often oriented towards (yet also very critical
of) their countries of origin.3 Cottaar and Bouras suggested another
important transnational influence: links between foreign worker groups
across Europe, such as those between Moroccan workers in France and
Netherlands, which also aided in the organizational process. Some
Moroccan activists in the Netherlands, for example, had social networks
and prior organizational experience with Moroccan workers and groups in
France, Belgium, and Morocco.
UNDERSTANDING “SOLIDARITY”
The year 1968 marked a revolutionary period for student movements and
radicals across Western Europe and North America, and scholarship on
this cultural revolution has focused on student protest, political activism,
lifestyle radicalism, rock music, new socialist parties, new waves of litera-
ture and art, drug subcultures, the legalization of pornography, the eco-
movement, feminism, and sexual politics.4 While some historians argued
that a fragmentation of social issues led to the decline of the cultural
revolution in the 1970s, they emphasized the simultaneous growth and
successes of movements that agitated for feminism, gay/lesbian liberation,

and Third World solidarity in this decade.5
The social movements associated with the “New Left” in the 1960s–70s
extended beyond the “Old Left” actors, which were the trade unions, the
traditional working-class, and left-wing political parties. The New Left
included a variety of related—though often conflicting—movements:
women’s and feminist groups; anti-war activists, including those opposed
to nuclear weapons; environmentalists; race-based civil rights groups
(though much more in the United States in these decades); anti-colonial
and immigrant rights groups; and the variety of movements and trends
associated with sexual liberation, such as those that sought greater discus-
sion and freedom regarding women’s sexuality, premarital sex, sex educa-
tion, pornography and erotic art, public nudity, partner swapping, and gay
and lesbian liberation.6 Urban niches such as Vondelpark and Dam Square
in Amsterdam served as meeting-points for tens of thousands of New Left
activists; these were sites for positive interaction and cooperation between
sex reformers, feminists, socialists, students, and importantly but often
overlooked, immigrants.7
Across Europe, many of the lasting effects of 1968 were cultural; but
particularly in the Netherlands and Denmark, the youth revolts also
directly affected political institutions, laws and general societal mores.8
According to Dutch-American historian James Kennedy, the cultural
revolution of the “long 1960s” in the Netherlands was relatively non-
violent compared to other European and North American movements,
and the rift between the protest generation and “the Establishment” was
often “no deeper than a trench.”9 (He even suggested that Queen Juliana
had sympathy for the Provo movement.) In an historiography of Danish
movements and politics in 1968, Anette Warring noted that there was
such a large social base of politically active leftists, that even when a radical
faction split from a New Left party, both parties still had enough support
to secure Parliament representation (unlike other small revolutionary
parties in Europe that were less influential in national politics).10
According to women’s historian Joyce Ousthoorn, Dolle Mina, the
radical group that came to dominate Dutch feminist activism in the
1970s, “almost became a generic term for ‘liberated women’” in
the 1970s, much like the term “Redstockings” (Rødstrømpe) in
Denmark.11 Inspired by the Dutch Provo movement’s “imaginative
confrontations” of the late 1960s, both Dolle Mina and the
Redstockings helped bring attention to feminist issues with marvelous
UNDERSTANDING “SOLIDARITY” 119
demonstrations.12 Dolle Mina was also particularly influential with

regard to changing the terms of debate on abortion—from a medical/
ethical/expert issue, to a woman’s/individual issue—and popularized
slogans such as “Boss of my own body.”13
Women’s organizations and foreign worker organizations often stood
in solidarity with traditional Old Left actors, both practically—meaning
that the groups worked together to plan protests or publish tracts—and
rhetorically, meaning that one group pledged its support for the goals,
actions, or situation of the other group. Trade unions and foreign worker
organizations, for example, both fought to ensure fair and timely payment
of salaries, to secure safety regulations, to negotiate pay, and to strike.14
But on an individual level especially, solidarity between foreign and
“native” workers was often tenuous (e.g. due to Danish fears of wage
suppression), as was the solidarity between feminists and socialist men
(e.g. due to the persistence of traditional sexism in many trade unions,
political parties, and activist groups). Thus, some feminists aligned fore-
most with Communist groups (that were predominantly run by men),
while others created women-only spaces (e.g. lesbian separatists).15
Indeed, conflict was also common within a movement: for example
among “sex liberation activists,” there was conflict on how the state
should prosecute rape allegations; and those who pushed to legalize
pornography had the support of some activists, but faced severe condem-
nation from others.16 There are similar contradictions amongst foreign
worker organizations: some groups sought to represent all foreign work-
ers, regardless of country of origin; other groups created spaces where
members could speak their native languages and practice various customs
with others from their home country.
“Scenes” or sub-cultures are another concept with which to understand
how young men and women organized in the late 1960s and 1970s. Gay
and lesbian social movements in the 1970s included the (radicalized) Center
for Culture and Leisure (COC) in the Netherlands and the (newly formed)
Gay Liberation Front in Denmark. Whereas gay and lesbian scenes could
include bars, cafés and other establishments that catered to gay men and
lesbians, in addition to neighborhoods, friendship circles, motorcycle
groups, networks of those with a specific fetish (e.g. leather), or public
spaces with reputations for cruising. Music scenes (e.g. jazz, rock and roll)17
and drug scenes (e.g. networks of those experimenting with marijuana or
hallucinogens) could also be considered part of the youth movement, in that
the informal scenes augmented the movement’s call for anti-
authoritarianism. A similar distinction could be made between the afore-

mentioned immigrant movements/organizations (e.g. workers’ rights
groups, foreign worker subcommittees in trade unions) and scenes (e.g.
flourishing immigrant neighborhoods, cafés where foreign workers
attended, social networks stemming from one’s first boarding home).
“A GROUP OF FOREIGNERS ALONE CANNOT ACHIEVE GOOD

RESULTS . . . ”: KMAN AND THE DUTCH LEFT, 1975–78
In 1975, a group of Moroccan (and some Dutch) volunteers founded
KMAN as the professional association of Moroccan migrant workers in the
Netherlands. First headquartered in Amsterdam, KMAN petitioned for
the rights of Moroccan workers in the Netherlands, for human rights in
Morocco, and against the Moroccan government’s interference with
Moroccans in the Netherlands. From 1975–78, KMAN garnered media
attention and popular support for three hunger strikes and a church
occupation against the deportation of undocumented or illegal
Moroccan workers. Also in its first years, KMAN disseminated pamphlets,
organized discussions, and held demonstrations on topics such as racism in
the Netherlands, the colonization of the Western Sahara by the Moroccan
state, fascist tendencies among foreign workers in Europe, and laws that
unfairly targeted foreign workers.18
KMAN did not have “members” or membership dues, in part so the
group could claim to represent the interests of all Moroccan workers in the
Netherlands. Instead, KMAN gathered volunteers in each of their local
chapters across the Netherlands; there were about 300–400 active volun-
teers—with at least ten in every chapter—in the 1970s.19 Though it was a
left-wing organization, KMAN downplayed direct political affiliations, also
to bolster its claim to represent all Moroccans in the Netherlands.
According to Cottaar and Bouras, the “echoes of the 1968 revolution”
could still be felt when KMAN’s founder, Abdou Menebhi (b. 1952,
Larache), first became active with trade unions in Europe. In 1970, after
having finished his technical education and having worked in a textile
factory in Casablanca, he moved to Paris, where he became active in
trade unions and the Moroccan Association, and participated in actions
against poor living situations for immigrants in pension houses, against
racism, and against colonialism. Critical of the government in his country
of origin, Menebhi feared punishment if he returned to Morocco, so after
“A GROUP OF FOREIGNERS ALONE CANNOT ACHIEVE GOOD RESULTS . . . 121
his residence permit expired in France, he moved to the Netherlands. He

had visited Amsterdam before, and admired its “spirit of solidarity and
openness” (in Cottaar’s/Bouras’ words). With help from some Dutch
volunteers, he immediately set up a meeting with Moroccans in a squatted
space, and in September 1975 he founded KMAN in the presence of 150
sympathizers, mostly Moroccan.20
I conducted an interview with one early active volunteer, A.H.
(b. 1950, Morocco), who spoke to me about KMAN’s involvement in
the Dutch activist scene in the 1970s. A.H. arrived in the Netherlands in
1965, at the age of fifteen, by circumventing age restrictions with a false
passport. Due in part to his young age, he became acquainted with the
Dutch language much quicker than many others in his cohort. Our con-
versation began on the topic of solidarity and cooperation with Dutch
organizations, and A.H. emphasized the importance of work with Dutch
trade unions:
If trade unions had an action, KMAN joined and asked their volunteers to
join the action too. So if it was the other way around, if KMAN had an
action, then there was solidarity from the trade unions; the trade unions
would join KMAN with their members.21
Then, unprompted by any questions about women’s rights or gay liberation,

A.H. continued by saying that “all the actions from KMAN were supported
by . . . feminist groups,” and that “especially in Amsterdam, the [gay rights
group] C.O.C. . . . supported immigrants.” In sum, KMAN found allies
with “all progressive . . . organizations and anti-discrimination groups.”22
Although KMAN claimed to represent all Moroccan workers, they
had one competitor in doing so: the Amicales, a group that catalyzed
the formation of KMAN. In 1974, the Moroccan embassy—and by
extension, the Moroccan government in Rabat—held a gathering for
hundreds of Moroccan workers in Utrecht, in which they introduced
the Amicales, a group with several aims: to assist Moroccan workers
traveling home to Morocco for holidays, to provide (especially religious
and cultural) education to Moroccan children in the Netherlands, and to
build a mosque. Cottaar and Bouras spoke with some Moroccan men
who fondly remembered their introduction to the Amicales, but other
interviewees remembered being skeptical: “I only attended the event to
show others that I was not opposed to the Amicales,” one interviewee
told them. “Those who were critical could be blacklisted.”23
Volunteers joined KMAN in direct response to the embassy-funded

Amicales. To KMAN, the Amicales represented the long arm of the
oppressive Moroccan regime into the Netherlands; as A.H. summarized,
“Amicales was set up by the Moroccan government to control the immi-
grants in the Netherlands or other countries” such as France.24 A.H. said
that the two groups were “enemies”; Cottaar and Bouras described the
two groups as “fierce opponents,” but also added that the divide was,
“For some, a tremendous rift that, even now, is not something to be
proud of.”25 In one Amicales participant’s words, KMAN’s highly critical
actions and speeches against Morocco were equivalent to “airing your
dirty laundry in public.”26
Immediately after KMAN was established, the group held its first
campaign, a hunger strike that saved more than two hundred Moroccans
from deportation from the Netherlands.27 This first hunger strike in
October 1975 was directed against Morocco and the Moroccan embassy
in the Netherlands, which refused to issue valid passports to people like A.
H. (now twenty-five) who had entered the Netherlands under age with
false passports. The thirty hunger-strikers who gathered in De Duif church
in Amsterdam (Prinsegracht) garnered so much publicity and support that
Morocco felt compelled to meet their demands for valid passports, thus
allowing (many of) them to stay in the Netherlands. In the words of
Cottaar and Bouras, KMAN’s first action “fit perfectly into the political
climate of the time” with concurrent demonstrations against atomic
weapons or the war in Vietnam.28
But a valid passport was not the only obstacle preventing Moroccans
from deportation: Dutch policy also demanded that in order to get resi-
dency, immigrants must have entered the Netherlands prior to 1973, and
that they must have housing and employment, among other require-
ments.29 Thus, KMAN’s “longest and most visible” action, in A.H.’s
words, began at the end of 1975. Starting with a hunger strike—this time
directed at the Dutch government—100 Moroccans occupied the Moses
and Aaron Church in Amsterdam; shortly after, fellow Moroccans in
Utrecht and The Hague also joined the strikers, bringing the total to
182. The occupied church in Amsterdam grew into a new home base for
KMAN, and its volunteers organized events. Those in solidarity with the
“Action 182” included a huge spectrum of Dutch organizations that
sought to ensure that Moroccans were neither arrested nor deported
until the hunger strikers’ demands were met. Political groups, trade
unions, the Council of the Churches, and Amnesty International were
“A GROUP OF FOREIGNERS ALONE CANNOT ACHIEVE GOOD RESULTS . . . 123
among the earliest supporters.30 Despite ongoing negotiations with the

Minister of Justice (which ended the hunger strike after a few months),
the struggle against deportations and the church occupation continued
through October 1978. In the meantime, KMAN became a visible
organization in Dutch society with a broad support network that even
stretched into some circles in France.31
In June 1976, a number of the Dutch organizations mentioned above
formed a “National Solidarity Committee 182” and planned demonstrations
in at least ten towns and cities, with slogans such as “182 stay, Amicales
away!” About 800 other “illegal” foreigners joined in the struggle.32 In
writing about the Moroccans, the support committee began to use a lan-
guage that portrayed them not as “guest workers” but as asylum seekers:
Moroccan workers, like all foreign workers, did not leave their country for
pleasure. They were forced out by the situation in Morocco, where the
country is in the hands of a few large landowners and where the industry
is kept deliberately underdeveloped . . . by powerful foreign interests who
support the Moroccan bourgeoisie and the reactionary Moroccan regime.33
It is not surprising that the struggle of the Moroccans in the Netherlands

appealed to left-wing political parties: KMAN’s attention to workers’
rights in the Netherlands (i.e. exploitation, affordable housing) over-
lapped with left-wing parties’ goals for the working class, and KMAN’s
actions against Morocco showed their commitment to democracy. The
Action 182 soon received support from at least thirteen chapters of SBW
(the aforementioned Foundation for Foreign Workers), the Action
Committee for Guest Workers, and a Dutch support committee for for-
eign women (the Foreign Women Consultation Utrecht). Self-organized
foreign worker groups also supported the Moroccan hunger strikes, such
as the Turkish workers’ group HTIB and its Turkish Women’s Support
Committee (HTKB), the Turkish Worker Movement of Twente, the
Pakistani Welfare Organization, the Italian and Yugoslavian Center in
Utrecht, six other Italian groups, and some organizations of Surinamese
and Antilleans.34
At the end of July 1978, and “with the threat of immediate expulsion,”35
KMAN called its final hunger strike, which caught media attention across
the Netherlands36 as well as in France.37 With this final hunger strike,
KMAN could show fourteen pages of support groups, including several
women’s, feminist, and gay rights groups. Their supporters included the
Dutch Women’s Movement38 (NVB: Nederlandse vrouwenbeweging, a

socialist/workers’ group founded in 1946 and strongly related to the
Communist Party of the Netherlands); the Dutch Women’s Union; the
Women’s Union within the (national trade union) NVV; the Communist
Women’s Movement; the Feminist Theologians of the Free University
Amsterdam; and likely a few other groups listed only by acronym.
Furthermore, KMAN’s circular included support from two divisions
of the gay/lesbian liberation group COC—in both Amsterdam and
Zaanstad/Waterland (just north of Amsterdam)—and published the
unambiguous and full name of their organization at the time: “The
Dutch Association for the Integration of Homosexuality COC” along-
side its headquarters’ address.39
After the strike ended in KMAN’s favor in October 1978, several
supporting groups evaluated the demonstration and the role of Dutch
solidarity organizations. The Dutch Federation of Trade Unions (FNV)
concluded:
This action has proved that a group of foreigners alone cannot achieve
good results with actions that are conducted exclusively by and for
foreigners. The good results of this “Action 182” are due to the fact
that the victims [of the immigration regulations] had the conviction that
only in close cooperation with Dutch organizations could the Dutch
public opinion be influenced positively . . . [and could the Dutch govern-
ment be pressured so] that victory was achieved.40
The Pacifist Socialist Party concluded similarly: while it was always up to

the Moroccans to decide whether to stop or continue their action, it was
the “breadth of the solidarity movement”—which, as this chapter shows,
included women’s and gay emancipation groups—that swayed the public
and governmental opinion “to the positive side.”41
“DON’T GIVE FASCISM A CHANCE!”:HTIB, KMAN,

AND DUTCH ANTI-FASCISM, 1976–1980
The Turkish Worker Association in the Netherlands, HTIB, was the first
Turkish organization in the Netherlands, and had no direct connection
to Turkey. HTIB formed in the summer of 1974 with two aims: to assist
Turks in the Netherlands with their rights (i.e. employment and resi-
dence permits), and to involve diasporic Turks in the efforts to promote
“DON’T GIVE FASCISM A CHANCE!” . . . 125
democracy in Turkey. HTIB shared many similarities with KMAN: it

never had “members,” but rather welcomed “volunteers” (of which
there were “a few hundred”) and thus it claimed to represent the inter-
ests of all Turkish workers in the Netherlands.42 Although left-wing and
socialist, HTIB did not officially state a political position so as to claim
more of a support base.
HTIB was founded in Utrecht, and within four years, there were
departments across the Netherlands: in Enschede, Nijmegen, Rotterdam
(1975); Delft, The Hague (1976); Venlo (1977); Eindhoven, Amsterdam
(where the headquarters moved) (1978); and Leiden (1979). Many of
those active in the early years had participated in socialist or student
movements in Turkey in the 1960s, and/or supported the Turkish
Communist Party; further, many had close contacts in similar Turkish
groups in West Germany, Belgium, and England.43 HTIB celebrated its
fortieth anniversary in 2014 with many of its earliest volunteers. One such
participant, I.N., agreed to meet with me for an extended interview
about HTIB’s activities and its collaboration with other Dutch activists
and groups in the 1970s. Like KMAN, HTIB was visible within the
greater Dutch labor movement: “If there was a factory strike, HTIB was
there,” I.N. began, “or our name was there.”
A radical right-wing Turkish group called the Grey Wolves also built a
support base of Turks in the Netherlands in the 1970s. The group first
arrived in Rotterdam in 1976 from West Germany.44 In 1978, the Grey
Wolves in West Germany formed an official group, and continued to
recruit members in Belgium and the Netherlands. In Turkey, the Grey
Wolves were the youth base of the right-wing, nationalist party Milliyetçi
Hareket Partisi (MHP: National Movement Party), which was founded
in Turkey in 1969. In the 1977 Turkish general elections, MHP rose to
prominence, from three seats (after the 1973 elections) to the fourth
largest party with sixteen seats (out of 450). From 1976 though 1980,
the Grey Wolves in Turkey violently attacked and/or murdered hundreds
of left-wing and liberal activists, university students, and Alevis.45
The points of disagreement between HTIB and the Grey Wolves in the
Netherlands mirrored political divisions in Turkey at the time; they also
mirrored some of the disagreements between KMAN and the Amicales.
Thus, HTIB held discussions to address and criticize the Grey Wolves’
attempts to build a support base in Europe. First in Turkish and later in
Dutch, these discussions garnered the Dutch public’s crucial support for
HTIB.46 In April 1976, HTIB sent out a pack of information—including
the story “Watch out for the Grey Wolves”—to various daily and weekly
newspapers, radio and TV stations, trade unions, and programs for foreign
workers. The pack also included the news story “Turkish Fascists Attacked
Progressive Workers in Rotterdam,” which reported that that month, a
group of a dozen Turkish men attacked two HTIB leaders who were on
their way home from a planning meeting for the 1 May (International
Workers’ Day) rally, and from collecting signatures for a campaign to fight
a Dutch law regarding foreign workers. One of the victims was hospita-
lized. The police arrested only two of the attackers.47
HTIB soon combined its efforts with KMAN to jointly combat the
right-wing Amicales and the Grey Wolves, and it enlisted support from
Dutch organizations under the umbrella of “anti-fascism.” The following
sections outline how KMAN and HTIB successfully collaborated with
numerous Dutch and foreign worker groups to become integral members
of the Amsterdam Anti-Fascism Committee, which planned the
“Demonstration against Fascism, Racism, and Anti-Semitism” in 1980.
In December 1976 in the eastern region of Twente, the “Anti Amicales /
Grey Wolves Committee” warned the mayor and council members from
Enschede, Hengelo, and Almelo about “the worrying development” of the
Grey Wolves in Rotterdam, and requested that local authorities deny any
requests from the Grey Wolves (e.g. for gathering permits). This committee
brought together various local groups: the Twente Workers Union; the
SBW in Twente; the Federation for Spaniards in Twente; and the
Enschede division of left-wing parties, among others.48 This is an early
example of how KMAN and HTIB worked together at the local level, and
attracted other Dutch (and immigrant) organizations and political groups
to their common cause. That same month, the Anne Frank Foundation, a
group committed to fighting racism and anti-Semitism, sent a letter of
support to HTIB Amsterdam for its efforts to combat the Grey Wolves’
“intolerable intimidation and terror practices.”49
One year later, KMAN and HTIB invited the Dutch Federation of
Trade Unions (FNV) to a meeting about “fascist tendencies within the
worker movement.”50 While the FNV deliberated on its position regard-
ing Amicales and the Grey Wolves, KMAN and HTIB continued to
organize with other Dutch groups; in March 1978, they formed the first
Anti-Fascism Committee Amsterdam with the support of five left-wing
parties.51 By May of that year, the FNV had taken a stand on the matter:
the Amicales and the Grey Wolves had no place in the Netherlands, and
“DON’T GIVE FASCISM A CHANCE!” . . . 127
FNV would urge the Minister of Justice to ban the groups; FNV’s strong
statement attracted media attention.52
KMAN and HTIB also aligned with committees for international and
Third World solidarity; in September 1979, volunteers attended the
National Chile Demonstration, which brought attention to those who
were murdered, imprisoned, or exiled after Pinochet’s coup in 1973,
including some refugees in the Netherlands.53 As A.H. said, KMAN
fought for human rights “anywhere in the world . . . South Africa, South
America,” and in turn, KMAN received support from these action groups:
“if there was something KMAN organized—for example, an action for the
liberation of political prisoners in Morocco—they asked other groups to
support them. And vice versa.”54 The anti-fascism committee also received
support from the anti-Franco committee “Free Spain.” Other immigrant
groups also came to support the committee, including National Action
Committee for Foreign Laborers (LAKWAB, f. 1976), the Platform for
Foreign Worker Organizations (a.k.a. The Platform, f. 1979),55 as well as
the group “Our Suriname.”56
In September 1979, HTIB helped arrange the “Symposium Against the
Fascist Grey Wolves” in Nijmegen, and provided a seventeen-page infor-
mation pack (in Dutch) to ensure that their grievances reached a wider
audience. The pack referred to the Grey Wolves as “fascist” more than
twenty times (as well as “extreme-right” and “fanatical”) and discussed the
Grey Wolves’ connection to neo-Nazi groups in Germany.57
If HTIB had not attracted the attention of Dutch feminists yet, they
would at the symposium. The information pack took the firm stance that
boys and girls must be given equal opportunities with regard to education,
free-time activities and dress. HTIB feared that if Islamic Cultural Centers
like those established by the Grey Wolves in West Germany would come to
the Netherlands, gender equality in the Netherlands would be disturbed.
This was reflected in the first five or six grievances about the Islamic
Cultural Centers in West Germany; as HTIB wrote:
The following things have been inculcated in the children of Koranic

schools . . .
1. Girls and women must wear headscarves.

2. Girls and women must wear both a skirt and trousers.
3. Girls and boys cannot sit next to each other on a bench/couch.
4. For girls, school attendance and learning to write Turkish and

German is unsuitable.
5. Swimming, sports, ballgames and dancing are absolutely forbidden
for girls.
6. Turkish children must not befriend German children, as they are
Christian, eat pork, go out dancing, and do not wear headscarves.58
Following these gender-related grievances (which later referred to other

practices that underscored the “second-class status of women”), HTIB
also accused the Grey Wolves community centers for promoting the
notion that “Islam will conquer the world,” for forbidding the Social-
Democratic and Communist parties, and for eschewing European televi-
sion and radio.
By 1980, the list of organizations and institutions that supported the
“Amsterdam Initiative against Fascism, Racism, and Anti-Semitism” and
that agreed to promote their rally on Sunday, 14 December grew. Among
the supporters were a number of the aforementioned groups: the Anne
Frank Foundation (along with various other organizations to combat anti-
Semitism); the Amsterdam (and youth) divisions of numerous political
parties (i.e. CPN, D’66, PvdA, PPR, PSP, VVD); and the Amsterdam
division of the national trade union FNV. Among the new supporters were
the HTKB, the Dutch Women’s Movement (NVB, who also supported
KMAN), and the gay rights group, “C.O.C.—Amsterdam.”59
Reflecting on the December 1980 rally, one Dutch volunteer who
was active with KMAN recalled: “Jewish and immigrant organizations
marched together” among the 15,000 people who gathered at de
Dokwerker—a statue to commemorate the February 1941 strike against
the Nazi occupation—and marched four kilometers to a large ice rink and
concert venue.60 Dutch supporters included not only those in solidarity
with KMAN in its fight against the Amicales, or with HTIB in its fight
against the Grey Wolves, but also those who feared both the extreme-right
Dutch People’s Union (NVU), which peaked in popularity in the late
1970s, and the Center Party, a nationalist and anti-immigrant party that
formed in 1980.
The Amsterdam Initiative against Fascism, Racism, and Anti-Semitism
held subsequent rallies, and published an eighty-seven-page booklet in
1982 entitled (in Dutch), “Don’t give Fascism a Chance!: Discussions
over the Many Faces of Contemporary Racism.” Contributions came from
Mohammed Rebbae—an activist of Moroccan origin who opposed the
“THEY’RE FIGHTING FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS . . . 129
Amicales—on behalf of the National Action Committee for Foreign

Laborers (LAKWAB); Rob Pistor—a leader of the Association for the
Integration of Homosexuality COC—on behalf of the gay/lesbian move-
ment; and representatives from the Surinamese community, from an
organization for victims of the war and the Dutch resistance movement,
from the Amsterdam Initiative, and for youth.61
“THEY’RE FIGHTING FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS, WE’RE FIGHTING

FOR EQUAL RIGHTS FOR TURKISH PEOPLE, AND THAT’S
THE ONLY DIFFERENCE”: INSPIRATIONS FROM THE DUTCH
WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
KMAN’s and HTIB’s anti-fascism demonstration and KMAN’s church
action were just two examples of events that attracted the support of
the Dutch women’s movement and gay/lesbian organizations. But
feminist groups also influenced KMAN with regard to their advocacy
and strategy. When HTIB was founded in 1974, some immigrants
were already aware of the women’s movement’s ongoing revolutionary
actions; as I.N. recalled during our interview:
We always said, “We have to learn so much from the women’s integration
process, because they’re fighting for women’s rights, we’re fighting for equal
rights for Turkish people, and that’s the only difference.” [With regard to]
the way of acting in society in general, it was the same aim: to get people a
much better position in society . . . We have learned many things from the
women’s movement.
The archives of KMAN, HTIB and similar Danish immigrant groups show
at least five areas of overlapping strategy between immigrant organizations
(during these male-dominated years) and European women’s groups in
the 1970s. As this argument is key to the book, I will provide examples of
these five points from not only the Netherlands, but also Denmark, for
comparison.
In the following list, “both movements” refer on the one hand to
KMAN, HTIB and similar Dutch/Danish immigrant organizations, and
on the other hand, to various women’s organizations in the 1970s:
1. Both movements discussed “equal rights,” foremost the topic of

“equal pay for equal work.”
2. Both movements had the goal of penetrating predominantly male or
“ethnic”-Dutch institutions—like trade unions, local councils—in
the short-term through affirmative actions, quotas, or special posi-
tions for minorities.
3. Both movements sought to penetrate other institutions—like
Parliaments, or corporate boards of directors—in the long-term
through civic participation and higher education, particularly of
the younger generation.
4. Both movements relied on provocative actions to garner visibility
within the “mainstream” press and society.
5. Both groups actively encouraged the participation of women.
Importantly, feminist agitations were not necessarily a “European” con-

cept in the eyes of all foreign workers. Some Turks might have been
familiar with “first-wave” feminism in Turkey, when the Turkish
Women’s Union (like women’s movements in other “Western” countries
in the early twentieth century) agitated for suffrage and the right to run
for office. Women gained those rights in Atatürk’s Republic in 1935;
however, as the new Republic became an authoritarian, single-party
system, the Women’s Union was shut down in 1935, as Atatürk claimed
that women had achieved full equal status with men.62 Thus, most Turkish
workers would have been unfamiliar with “second-wave” feminism, which
mostly proliferated in Turkey after 1975 with the founding of the
Progressive Women’s Organization (PWO). While some Western scholars
noted an “emancipation of women” in Morocco as early as the 1950s—
during which time a highly elite woman “drove her own car, rode horses
bareheaded and astride, showed up frequently at the public beach in Rabat
in an abbreviated bathing suit” and benefitted from women’s suffrage in
1963—the vast majority of Moroccans in the Netherlands (who came
from lower classes in Morocco) would not have had first-hand experience
of feminist activism.63
In the Netherlands
The first similarity amongst foreign worker and women’s movements was
the call for “equal pay for equal work,” which was a phrase that Dolle Mina
used as one of its five main goals in 1973, just before KMAN and HTIB
were founded.64 According to I.N., women’s conversations on this issue

came “much earlier than HTIB” and influenced foreign workers’ positions.
On the second point—affirmative action, or what is in Dutch called
positive discrimination—I.N. said: “The concept [of affirmative action]
was already there. Now we asked for it for the migrants.”65 HTIB felt
that a withdrawn or isolated Turkish community was “dangerous,”
I.N. said; thus, “[HTIB] stimulated individuals to participate in general
society . . . [such as] labor unions and school boards, and not to isolate
themselves.”66 Regarding affirmative action: minutes from a board meet-
ing with SBW (the Foundation for Foreign Workers) from 1975 show that
HTIB and KMAN volunteers helped lead a push to integrate SBW’s board
of directors. As a Dutch organization, most of the board was also Dutch;
but in 1975, the participants agreed that the presence of foreigners at
the board’s monthly meetings “would bridge a communication-vacuum
between the board and its constituents.” Elected to represent all foreign
workers in the Netherlands, the first four foreign board members hailed
from Tunisia, Spain, Morocco, and Greece.67
But the penetration of civil society could only go so far without
European language fluency and literacy, or higher education, which many
first-generation immigrants lacked. Thus KMAN and HTIB emphasized
education—both public and supplementary through their organizations—
for the burgeoning second-generation, which translated into more job
opportunities and integration in the public sphere. As mentioned earlier,
HTIB emphasized equal education opportunities for Turkish boys and girls.
Similar to women’s equality groups, HTIB hoped to see a new generation
who were educated with the possibility to become, in I.N.’s words, “parlia-
ment members, lawyers, doctors,” civil servants and active community
members who could effect change with their social influence.68
Fourth, the provocative and visible actions of KMAN and HTIB, which
were instrumental in garnering media attention and popular support, drew
inspiration from concurrent feminist actions. Historian Mineke Bosch wrote
that Dolle Mina’s “playful and media-adapted protest cultures . . . loom
large in the collective Dutch memory.”69 Dolle Mina surpassed its prede-
cessor second-wave group, the Man Woman Society, due in part to its
provocations: the “Dolle Mina movement snapped up the media with
their captivating actions such as claiming public toilets for women, picketing
at marriage ceremonies in the city hall, or disturbing the elections for a Miss
Holland.”70 These 1970s provocations were of course inspired by youth
and Provo actions, including the student occupation of the Maagdenhuis
(1968), or the artist occupation of the “Nightwatch” room in the

Rijksmuseum (1969). But the Provo movement’s actions had subsided by
the 1970s, when women’s actions started to capture more media atten-
tion.71 For those activists in KMAN and HTIB who paid attention to social
provocations in the 1970s, Dolle Mina’s actions were among the most
visible and influential. Aside from the hunger strikes, marches, and church
occupations described in this chapter, KMAN also occupied the large and
well-known music venue, Paradiso, in 1980 and organized speeches, musi-
cal acts and art in order to bring public attention to the Moroccan occupa-
tion of Western Sahara in 1979.
Finally, KMAN and HTIB encouraged women—both foreign and
Dutch—to participate in the movement. With regard to foreign
women: after first organizing in male-dominated organizations,
Turkish and Moroccan women formed their own organizations in the
later 1970s (Chapter 6).72 As for Dutch women, they—and indeed all
Dutch volunteers—were also crucial for the success of KMAN, HTIB,
and support groups like SBW. While KMAN and HTIB kept their inter-
nal documents in Arabic or Turkish (e.g. meeting notes, newsletters),
much of their external work was in Dutch (e.g. annual reports, posters
advertising protests), and these Dutch-language communiqués were
central in garnering media attention in the 1970s. As A.H. remembered:
[The Dutch volunteers] had contact with the press, media. The Moroccan
people were not that good at writing and speaking Dutch, so they had a
Dutch group of volunteers, who supported the Moroccan people, to tell
them what to do and how to do it, and they made contacts with the
media . . . A lot were students, lawyers, [members of] political organizations,
squatters . . . [and those in] feminist groups.73
In addition to media work, KMAN and HTIB relied on language assis-

tance for banners, signs, leaflets, and bureaucratic paperwork like protest
permits.
One such volunteer was Ineke van der Valk (b. 1953, Netherlands), an
original organizing member of KMAN in 1975, who was featured in
Cottaar’s and Bouras’ chapter on KMAN and who the authors describe
as a twenty-two-year-old who got caught up “in the exciting world of
migrants.” Having studied social science and with an interest in the
developing world, van der Valk was one of KMAN’s initial volunteers,
and she helped plan talks, meetings, and language lessons, and promoted
the group within the greater Dutch community. As she said in her inter-
view with Cottaar and Bouras: “We walked to all the coffeehouses in the
Jordaan,” the Amsterdam neighborhood surrounding the first KMAN
office, “to share pamphlets that announced our actions to local residents.”
After 1978, she led the Morocco Committee, a group of mostly Dutch
activists that supported human rights in Morocco, opposed the occupa-
tion of the Western Sahara, and opposed the Amicales in Europe.74
KMAN’s participants welcomed van der Valke to serve as a liaison to the
Dutch-speaking community.
Yet not all Dutch volunteers had positive experiences working with
these groups: some expressed frustration that the foreigners had side
conversations in Arabic or Turkish that they did not translate; others felt
pressured to agree to jobs that they had no interest in doing, or were
chastised as “bourgeois” for attending a birthday party instead of a meet-
ing or rally.75 Barbara Wessel was a women’s studies student who volun-
teered with KMAN in 1981–82 (just before the women of KMAN split to
form their own organization, MVVN). Wessel began her ethnographic
paper from 1982 with the strong statement that KMAN had a “discrimi-
natory attitude against [not only] its own Moroccan women, but also
against the Dutch women.”76 But overall her argument was sympathetic
to the male foreign worker—with whom she said she felt solidarity—and
she questioned if moments of sexism could be excused by “cultural
difference.”77 Furthermore, she continually highlighted patriarchy in
Dutch society, so that any conclusions she had about patriarchal structures
or sexism in KMAN were not to be contrasted with Dutch society at large.
She witnessed sexist jokes, and some physicality that she avoided by saying
she had a boyfriend, which “suggested that sexual harassment exists [in
KMAN], and is oppressive, but certainly no more than in any other Dutch
men’s organization.”78 There were several examples of Dutch politicians
who had made sexist jokes or remarks in the preceding years, she noted.
Wessel also underscored tensions between foreign and Dutch workers,
and cited an instance when Dutch workers and trade unions failed to
participate in a rally supported by both foreign workers and Dutch
women (the Demonstration Against Discrimination and Gag Laws—i.e.
laws that limit free speech, knevelwetten—in January 1981). The Dutch
Action Committee for the Foreign Workers Employment Act, which
organized the event, had contacted and anticipated support from various
workers’ organizations such as the Interest Group for the Unemployed,
and the group for those on work Disability Insurance (WAO), both of
which were listed on the flier as supporters. Yet one week prior, the
organizers learned that the trade union leadership had chosen the exact
same day for a major demonstration in Amsterdam on employment rights,
which detracted from the attention and turn-out of their event.79 The
poster for the event showed several laws that the committee for foreign
workers sought to “sweep up” (with dustpan imagery): the visa require-
ments (visum plicht) that affected foreign workers unfairly, some laws that
restricted wages and benefits (loonmaatregel), and surprisingly, a proposed
abortion law that most feminists rejected.80
Parallels in Denmark
“Equal Pay for Equal Work, Regardless of Age or Sex” was a headline in a
1971 article in the (Danish) Foreign Worker Journal (Fremmedarbejder-
bladet, see Chapter 4), penned by the editor-in-chief Ole Hammer and
Arabic-community editor Shakr Al-Jabiri, and based on an interview with
an Algerian man named Abdelkader Alliche, who was the first foreign worker
to serve as a union representative for the Danish Paper Warehouse.81 Alliche
said that workers must eschew “wage differences based on sex or age; and
since one can’t bring wages any lower, that means a raise for the lowest-
paid. . . . ” With their headline, Hammer and Al-Jabiri seized the opportunity
to highlight solidarity in the parallel calls for equal wages between men and
women, and between native and foreign workers.
Danish feminists were indeed making the claim about income inequality:
in May 1970, for example, a group of Redstockings grabbed media
attention when they refused to pay more than 80% of their bus fare,
since women only received 80% of the salary of men. Later, they refused
to pay more than 80% of their penalty fine.82 Thus, the two Foreign
Worker Journal editors reminded readers, “At the moment there is more
than one kroner difference [10–20 cents] in the lowest wage for women
and men” for the same job. They added that “even if equal pay is
introduced, there can still, in practice, be a difference—namely if
women, also in the future, get in general the worst paid jobs.”83 Too
often women and foreign workers filled these worst paid, unattractive,
unskilled positions, the journal argued.
“Equal pay” issues for women and immigrants came to the fore in March
1973, when a major conflict broke out between the Danish Employers
Association (DA) and the Danish Trade Union Congress (LO) over their
next two-year contract. The strike affected 559 employers and 450,000
workers, including (for the first time in Denmark) a large number of foreign
workers.84 The Foreign Worker Journal educated foreign workers on the
terms of the strike, and by April, many foreign workers helped approve
“same wages for same kind of work irrespective of sex.” The resolution also
established an education fund, paid for by employers, which supported
foreign workers who sought language lessons.85 The general wage agree-
ment was the first space to call for “equal pay for equal work,” and by 1976,
the equal pay law passed at the national level.86 The 1973 strike resolution
was a success for the workers of Denmark, particularly working women and
foreigners.87
Second, the need to penetrate trade union leadership through affirma-
tive action was also central to the aforementioned Foreign Worker Journal
article. Alliche felt that “foreign workers must have their own representa-
tive” because “a Danish union representative seldom knows foreign work-
ers’ special problems.”88 Alliche’s emphasis on the “special problems”
shows parallels with calls from the Danish women’s movement. And
similar to the Netherlands, foreign workers in Denmark also focused on
the importance of educating the second generation to become more active
leaders in Danish civil society.
Next, both women and foreign worker movements relied on demonstra-
tions to capture the media’s attention. In the early 1970s, the Redstockings
chose many creative locations for their demonstrations: they interrupted
beauty pageants to criticize the objectification of women by men; they
posed outside the University of Copenhagen as “living statues of . . . the
cleaning woman, the mother, the secretary, the mistress, the Muse” to bring
attention to the limited archetypes of/for women; and so forth.89 These
actions would have been visible to those foreign workers who were the most
politically engaged, such as those who would establish the (left-wing)
Forbundet af Arbejdere fra Tyrkiet (FAT: the Association of Workers from
Turkey [in Danish]), a group which (for example) arranged a hunger strike
in front of the Turkish embassy in 1976 to raise awareness of the harassment
and imprisonment of left-wing politicians and union leaders in Turkey, and
which in 1981, gathered 2,000 Turks, Kurds, and Danes in the Forum
concert hall in Copenhagen for speeches on the one-year anniversary of the
military coup in Turkey.90
According to Ole Hammer, the left-wing group of Kurdish refugees
(de jure and de facto) from Turkey which established KOMKAR-DK were
perhaps the most influenced by the women’s movement,91 as “there was a
lot of interaction between them and Danish political groups on the left.”92
Like HTIB in the Netherlands, FAT and KOMKAR in Denmark spoke

out against the Grey Wolves; according to Hammer, many foreign workers
denounced the “brutal methods” of the Grey Wolves, and “their connec-
tions to Turkey,” and they were “nervous to meet them” in Denmark.93
The Grey Wolves never established a support base in Denmark.
Lastly, immigrant groups actively welcomed help from volunteers,
men and women, who could serve as liaisons to the Danish community.
“Marianne” was a famous figure among the foreign workers of Denmark,
as she ran a club at Enghave Church in Copenhagen, which was open
on weekends primarily for Turkish workers to relax, play cards, and buy
food and drinks.94 Even when the Ministry of Social Welfare and
Copenhagen Municipality withdrew their funding of foreign worker
clubs in 1972, Marianne enlisted friends and her parents to help run the
club, which also provided tax help and other practical services.95 As in
the Netherlands, foreign worker organizations depended on Danish
volunteers for communications in Danish; in doing so, they were able to
successfully petition for tax-deductions (i.e. of payments to support
families in their country of origin); recognition of foreign marriage certi-
ficates; halal slaughterhouses; and a foreign worker council.96 Foreign
worker women and the wives of foreign workers were also active in social
clubs, language and culture programming, and trade unions.
AMBIVALENT SOLIDARITY WITH GAY LIBERATION

(IN THE NETHERLANDS)
Reflecting on HTIB’s occasional cooperation with the COC in the
Netherlands, I.N. concluded:
HTIB has always been for equal rights for everybody. Against war, against
discrimination, against racism. If you say that, everywhere, you have to stand
for it for everyone. . . . [It’s] the first amendment of the Dutch constitution.
However, while KMAN and HTIB accepted and published the COC’s
support, it was not without discussion. As Chapter 3 explored, some
Turkish workers could not understand the purpose of a gay movement;
but there were many in Europe who also could not comprehend public
declarations of sexual orientation. I.N. recalled that some HTIB parti-
cipants expressed the desire not to participate in a rally that included
gay activists; others voiced that they would only participate if HTIB
AMBIVALENT SOLIDARITY WITH GAY LIBERATION (IN THE NETHERLANDS) 137
kept its distance from the gay and lesbian activists.97 HTIB’s “cultural
evolution” that led its official pro-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
(or trans*), queer (LGBTQ) stance in the early 2000s is outlined in
Chapter 9.
Likewise, it was not obvious that gay activists would support orga-
nizations for immigrant rights. In October 1977, the COC periodical
SEK reported that the COC Breda was expelled from a community
space (“IN-COM”) administered by the West Brabant SBW. The SBW
expelled the COC without any consultation because, as one board
member told them, “In most countries where our foreign visitors
come from, homosexuality is a taboo” and thus the groups should
not share a space. The COC responded that it was “a disservice” to
deny the immigrant workers the possibility of “integration” with Dutch
groups like the COC.98 I spoke with one member of the Amsterdam
COC who was active in the 1970s, who recalled similar incidents in
other parts of the country; however, he said that as the COC grew more
political in the mid-1970s, especially in Amsterdam and in student-
heavy towns like Groningen and Utrecht, many gay activists would
have espoused pro-immigrant opinions, regardless of incidents like
that in Breda.99
While it is true that some HTIB and KMAN volunteers were
reluctant to embrace support from gay people and organizations, one
sees similar ambivalence from those on the mainstream Left.100 Even
though many gay and lesbian activists—like feminists—defined their
goals in socialist and Marxist terms, conceptualized utopian revolu-
tions, and denounced bourgeois morality (which, by their definition,
oppressed sexual possibilities), gay and lesbian activists often did not
share the same notion of utopia as other (heterosexual-dominated)
socialist groups, many of which drew a distinction between the public
sphere and the private sphere, the latter of which was reserved for
sexuality, and preferably monogamous heterosexuality.101 As a group
of scholars, including several from the Netherlands, explored the rea-
sons why the Left often refused support from gay men (and lesbians)
across Western Europe in the 1960s–80s, they compellingly argued
among other points:
Socialists have repeatedly ascribed homosexuality to the “class enemy,”

contrasting the “manly” vigor and putative purity of the working-class
with the emasculated degeneracy and moral turpitude of the aristocratic and
haute bourgeoisie.102
It would be a gross oversimplification to say that an activist’s cultural

background (i.e. Turkish, Moroccan, Dutch) determined his or her will-
ingness to work with radical gay and lesbian groups in the 1970s.
ACTIONS SUBSIDE
In the 1980s, A.H. and I.N. both felt that their organizations’ most
dramatic actions were over, and that political lobbying became more
effective than street actions. This transition could be due to several
reasons: first, by this time, many immigrants had successfully integrated
into local trade unions and found less use for separate foreign worker
organizations. Second, the Netherlands and Denmark (and Sweden)
were unique in that, by the 1980s, they provided immigrants with the
right to vote in local elections: people of immigrant background served
as candidates for political parties across the spectrum at the local (and
eventually the national) levels in both the Netherlands and Denmark.103
Thus as immigrants felt more incorporated into Dutch/Danish politics,
they might have moved away from their immigrant organizations. Third
(and regarding the Netherlands), the 1983 Minorities Report, with its
shift in funding for immigrant groups, allowed for more organizations
relating to the social welfare of immigrants to thrive, making KMAN and
HTIB (and arguably Amicales and the Grey Wolves) less important.104
That being said, both KMAN and HTIB continue to lead programs
in 2017.
Despite the decline in street protests, KMAN and HTIB did participate
in rallies and demonstrations in the 1980s. Menebhi marched in protests
against the exploitation of foreign workers (c. 1983); other volunteers
participated in a national demonstration in Utrecht with the motto, “Stop
Deporting Foreign Youth: For Flexible Residence Permits”105; still others
participated in a “Bike Tour Against Racism.”106 In June 1982, members
from KMAN attended an “Atomic-free!” rally in Juliana Park in Utrecht,
where the world music/dance venue RASA (still in existence) gave the
stage to a group of young Moroccan musicians.107 A new generation of
radical activists oriented toward Morocco showed solidarity with the
student riots in Casablanca (1981) and with the mass demonstrations in
the Rif (1984).108 At the same time, the 1980s were also a strong time for
NOTES 139
women’s political activism, especially for immigrant women’s issues.

HTIB and KMAN remained committed to women’s issues in the 1980s,
even as women’s groups split from them.109
NOTES
1. Interviews with A.H. and I.N., conducted at their homes outside of
Utrecht, October 2014.
2. For information on early immigrant organizations, including the church
group Commissie Bijstand Buitenlandse Werknemers (“The Committee for
the Assistance of Foreign Workers”), see the online exhibit 50 Jaar
Gastarbeiders in de Stad Utrecht [“50 Years of Guest Workers in the City
of Utrecht”], 50jaargastarbeidersutrecht.nl/
3. Margit Fauser, Migrants and Cities: The Accommodation of Migrant
Organizations in Europe (Farnham, England and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2012), 4.
4. e.g. For a literature review and histiographic analysis of literature on 1968 in
the Netherlands, see Mineke Bosch, “The Meaning of a Kiss: Different
Historiographical Approaches to the Sixties in the Netherlands,”
L’Homme 20:2 (2009); for Denmark, see Anette Warring, “Around
1968 – Danish Historiography,” Scandinavian Journal of History 33:4
(December 2008). See also Arthur Marwick, The Sixties. Cultural
Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c.1974
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); James C. Kennedy, Nieuw
Babylon in aanbouw. Nederland in de jaren zestig [“New Babylon under
Construction. Netherlands in the Sixties”] (Amsterdam: Mepper, 1995);
and Morten Bendix Anderson and Niklas Olsen (eds.), 1968: dengang og nu
[“1968: Then and Now”] (Copenhagen: Copenhagen University, 2004).
5. e.g. Marwick, Warring, Bosch, ibid.
6. Warring (n 4).
7. “Hoe het twaalf jaar geleden begon – Zomer 1967” [“How it began 12
Years Ago, Summer 1967”], Homologie 2:1 (September 1979).
8. On Denmark: Poul Villaume, Lavvækst og frontdannelser 1970-1985 [“Slow
Growth & Movement Development, 1970-1985”] (Copenhagen:
Gyldendal & Politiken, 2005), cited in Warring (n 4), 357.
9. Kennedy, cited in Bosch (n 4).
10. i.e. When the radical Leftist Socialists (now defunct) split from the Socialist
People’s Party (SF, est. 1959, which came from the Communist Party, with
representation today); Warring (n 4), 354.
12. Ibid, 66 and 75.
13. From 1971 through to 1981, two private groups provided abortions on
demand in the Netherlands, even though the law technically forbade it;
these groups, which were supported by Dolle Mina, were Stimezo
(Foundation for Responsible Medical Abortion) and NVSH (Dutch
Society for Sexual Reform). Feminists helped postpone politicians from
passing a new abortion law, as the Dutch authorities tolerated abortion on
demand while debating a new law, which was eventually passed in 1981.
This led to the “paradoxical situation that the Netherlands had a most
restrictive statute until 1981, but probably had the most liberal and easily
available abortion situation except for perhaps Sweden and Denmark.”
Outshoorn (n 11), 69.
14. i.e. Chapter 4 of this book.
15. K.L. interview (March 2014); Vilan van de Loo, De vrouw beslist: de tweede
feministische golf in Nederland [“The Woman Decides, the Second Feminist
Wave in the Netherlands”] (Wormer, NL: Inmerc, 2005), 89.
16. Sarah Højgaard Cawood and Anette Dina Sørensen, “Pornoens legaliser-
ing” [“Pornography’s Legalization”] in 1968 – Dengang og nu [“1968:
Then and Now”], ed. Morten Bendix Andersen and Niklas Olsen
(Copenhagen: Museums Tusculanums Forlag, 2004); Warring (n 4), 359.
For feminist/gay male tensions in France in the 1970s, see: Julian Bourg,
“‘Your Sexual Revolution Is Not Ours’: French Feminist ‘Moralism’ and the
Limits of Desire” in Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics
in the Cultural Imagination, eds. Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
17. Detlef Siegfried, “Music and Protest in 1960s Europe,” 1968 in Europe. A
History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim
Scharloth (New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008), 57–70; Julia Sneeringer,
“Meeting The Beatles: What Beatlemania Can Tell us about West Germany
in the 1960s,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 6:2
(2013).
18. For example, the Foreign Workers Employment Act; IISG, KMAN
Collection, Finding Aid, “History.”
19. The statistic is an estimate from A.H.
(Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 2009), 221–22.
21. A.H. interview.
22. Ibid.
23. Dris El Boujoufi, cited in Cottaar and Bouras (n 20), 211.
NOTES 141
24. A.H. interview.

25. Cottaar and Bouras (n 20).
26. Their interviewee Abdellaoui was speaking directly about KMAN’s protests
against Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara; Cottaar and Bouras
(n 20), 233.
27. IISG, KMAN collection, Folders 304–05 (Hunger Strike of 182 Illegal
Moroccans, 1978), “Chronologies Overzicht.”
28. Cottaar and Bouras (n 20), 225.
29. e.g. proof that one did not have tuberculosis; Cottaar and Bouras (n 20),
224.
30. IISG (n 27).
31. “Pour avoir le droit de rester 182 Marocains en grève de la faim illimitée”
[“182 Moroccans go on Indefinite Hunger Strike for the Right to Stay”],
Liberation (26 September 1978). “128 Marocains en bus à travers la
Hollande” [“128 Moroccans on Bus across Holland”], Rouge (1 October
1978). Both accessed via IISG, KMAN collection, Folders 304-5.
Liberation was a far-left daily newspaper founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul
Sartre and Serge July; Rouge was a weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary
Community League.
32. National Solidarity Committee for the 182, “History of the 182,” IISG
(n 27).
33. IISG (n 27), “Why do we support the actions of the 182?” (July 1978).
34. “List of Solidarity Groups” [in Dutch], 11–12; via IISG (n 27).
35. Pacifistisch Socialistische Partij (PSP), “Evaluatie” [“Evaluation”]; via IISG,
KMAN collection, Folders 304–05.
36. “Ambassade Marokko vraagt persbreidel,” De Waarheid (15 September
1978); accessed via IISG, KMAN collection, Folders 304–05.
37. Liberation and Rouge articles (cited above); Cottaar and Bouras (n 20), 221
and 225.
38. See Pieternel Onderwater, “Wij zijn geen ‘zielige vrouwtjes’! Een onder-
zoek naar de houding van de Turkse vrouwenbeweging in Nederland ten
opzichte van het seksedebat tussen 1970 en 2008” [“We are not ‘Pathetic
Females’! A Study of the Attitude of the Turkish Women’s Movement in the
Netherlands Regarding the Sex Debate, 1970–2008”] (Masters thesis,
Utrecht University, 2008); on NVB, see part 3.2.
39. i.e. Frederiksplein 14, Postbus 542; via “List of Solidarity Groups,” 13.
40. Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging, “Aan ‘Actie 182‘” [On “Action
182”]; via IISG, KMAN collection, Folders 304–05.
41. PSP Evaluation (n 35).
42. I.N. interview.
43. IISG, HTIB Collection, Finding Aid, “History.”
44. Ibid.
45. Semih Idiz, “Turkey’s Ultra-Nationalists Playing With Fire,” Al-Monitor

(29 March 2013).
46. IISG, HTIB collection, Folders 297-302 (Minutes of meetings, correspon-
dence, and other documents relating to the campaign against the Grey
Wolves, 1976–81).
47. Irfan Inçeboz, “Watch Out For . . . ” and “Turkish Fascists . . . ” (April
1976); via IISG, HTIB collection, Folders 297–302.
48. “Letter to Mayor and Council Members from Anti Amicales/Grey Wolf
Committee,” 13 December 1976; via IISG, HTIB collection, Folders
297–302.
49. Anne Frank Foundation, 17 December 1976; via IISG, HTIB collection,
Folders 297–302.
50. Letter from FNV to HTIB and KMAN, 6 December 1977; via IISG, HTIB
collection, Folders 297–302.
51. PvdA, CPN, PSP, PPR, IKB, and CVS (Christians for Socialism), which was
a group within the CPN.
52. “FNV wants to Forbid Amicales and Grey Wolves,” Het Binnenhof (13 May
1978); via IISG, HTIB collection, Folders 297–302.
53. IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 262 (Documents concerning the participa-
tion in the national Chile Demonstration in 1979).
54. A.H. interview.
55. IISG, HTIB Collection, Finding Aid, “History.”
56. IISG archives, HTIB collection, Box 231 (Minutes of board meetings and
other documents concerning the activities of the Hague department.
C. 1977–1986.)
57. HTIB, “T.b.v. de informatiemap voor het Symposium tegen de fascistische
Grijze Wolven, te houden in Nijmegen op 22 September 1979”
[“Information Packet for the Symposium against the Fascist Grey Wolves,
to be Held in Nijmegen, 22 September 1979”]; via IISG. HTIB collection,
Folder 303 (Evidence regarding the Grey Wolves Symposium).
58. Ibid. The quotation [in Dutch] is a summary of a report by the Association
of Turkish Teachers in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
59. “Amsterdams initiatief tegen fascism, racism en antisemitisme”
[“Amsterdam’s Initiative against Fascism, Racism and Anti-Semitism”]; via
IISG. HTIB collection, Folders 297–302 (Minutes of meetings, correspon-
dence, and other documents relating to the campaign against the Grey
Wolves, 1976–81).
60. Ineke van der Valk, “Over racisme en antiracism” [“On Racism and Anti-
racism”] (1 November 2013), accessed July 2015 via http://sargasso.nl/
racisme-en-antiracisme/
61. Amsterdams Initiatief tegen Fascisme, Racisme en Antisemitisme, “Geef
fascisme geen kans!: diskussies over de vele gezichten van het
NOTES 143
hedendaagse fascisme” [“Don’t Give Fascism a Chance!: Discussions/

Disputes on the many Faces of Contemporary Fascism”] (Amsterdam:
SUA, 1982).
62. Sirin Tekeli, “The Turkish Women’s Movement: A Brief History of
Success,” Quaderns de la Mediterrània (14: 2010): 119–123. See also:
Sirin Tekeli, “Women in Turkish Politics,” in Women in Turkish Society,
ed. Nermin Abadan-Unat (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 293–311.
63. Henry M. Muller, “Morocco in Transition,” Social Science 35 (January
1960): 51; on the “emancipation of women,” Muller makes reference to
Time (11 November1957), 32. On the persistent gender inequality among
the lower classes in the 1970s, see Susan E. Marshall, “Politics and Female
Status in North Africa: A Reconsideration of Development Theory,”
Economic Development and Cultural Change 32 (April 1984).
64. Dolle Mina, “Werkende Wijven Plan” [“The Workin’ Babes Plan”] (1 May
1973), printed in van de Loo (n 15), 88.
65. I.N. interview.
66. Ibid.
67. IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 573 (Pieces of and on the HTKB 1976–1989).
68. I.N. interview.
69. Bosch (n 4), 53.
70. Bosch (n 4), 60.
71. Bosch (n 40), 58.
72. Vera Illes, “Niets Mogen, Nergens Heen, Analfabetisme,
Onderworpenheid” [“Nothing Possible, Going Nowhere, Illiteracy and
Submissivness”], NRC Handelsblad (21 February 1976); via IISG, HTKB
Collection, Folder 573 (Pieces of and on the HTKB, 1976–1989).
73. A.H. interview.
74. Cottaar and Bouras (n 20), 220–21, 234.
75. Barbara Wessel, “Het MAN in KMAN” [“The MAN in KMAN”] (June
1982), Part 7; IISG, KMAN Collection, Folder 601 (Pieces of the
Moroccan Women’s Association Netherlands [MVVN], with pieces from
other women’s movements, 1982–1996).
76. Wessel, ibid, Part 1.
77. Wessel, “9b. Cultureel of sexisme?” [“9b. Cultural or Sexism? Under “9.
Problems as a Member of the Support Committee”].
78. Wessel (n 75), Part 9.
79. Wessel (n 75), Part 9.
80. “31 januari: Dag tegen diskriminatie en knevelwetten” [“Day Against
Discrimination and Gag Laws”] (31 January 1981), last accessed
September 2015 via geheugenvannederland.nl.
81. Skak and oh [Shakr Al-Jabiri and Ole Hammer], “Foreign Union
Representative: Equal Pay for Equal Work Regardless of Age or Sex,”
FAB (22 November 1971), 6.
Dahlerup (London: Sage Publications, 1986), 226. The Redstockings also
interrupted a May Day speech (on live television) earlier that month to call
for equal pay.
83. Shak and oh (n 81).
84. “CONFLICT,” Special Issue of Fremmedarbejderbladet [henceforth FAB]
(22 March 1973).
85. FAB (22 March 1973); FAB (16 April 1973). The approved ballot also
increased minimum and standard wages, assured forty hour work weeks
(reduced from forty-one and three quarter hours), increased overtime sal-
aries, increased the cost of living allowances, and assured longer holidays.
86. Dahlerup (n 82), 228, 241.
87. FAB (16 April 2 1973).
88. Ibid.
89. Dahlerup (n 82), 226.
90. Mahmut Erdem and Ole Hammer, Folket med de trætte okser [“The People
with the Tired Oxen”] (Copenhagen: Underskoven, 2008), 43.
91. O.H. interview (June 2015), and Liza Mügge, Beyond Dutch Borders
Transnational Politics among Colonial Migrants, Guest Workers and the
Second Generation (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 114–15.
92. e.g. Venstresocialisterne (VS: Left Socialists), Socialistisk Folkeparti (SF: the
Socialist People’s Party), Kommunisterne (DKP: Denmark’s Communist
Party), and to some extent, Socialdemokraterne (S: Social Democrats).
93. O.H. interview.
94. Oh [Ole Hammer], “Many People know Marianne,” FAB (1973).
95. St, “Financial Support to Clubs Stopped: Copenhagen Commune Closes its
Cash-box,” FAB (10 August 1972), 1.
96. i.e. Gæstearbejdes fællesråd (The Guest Worker Community Council,
f. 1975–76).
97. I.N. interview.
98. “Taboe” [“Taboo”], SEK (October 1977), 3. The full name for this group
was the Foundation for Assistance to Foreign Workers (West Brabant).
99. Conversations with T.M., July 2015.
100. Gert Hekma, Harry Oosterhuis, and James D. Steakley, Gay Men and the
Sexual History of the Political Left (New York: Harrington Park, 1995).
NOTES 145
101. Ibid, 8–15.

102. Ibid, 8, and 25.
103. I.N. interview; Z.H. interview (October 2014).
104. In the 1980s, government and local councils provided subsidies to strengthen
immigrant self-organization (often along ethnic lines), especially for those
groups whose agendas overlapped with then-current notions about cultural
identity, difference, and emancipation. See: Fauser (n 3): 15, 142–143, 148.
Also Marlou Schrover, “Multiculturalism, Dependent Residence Status and
Honour Killings: Explaining Current Dutch Intolerance towards Ethnic
Minorities from a Gender Perspective (1960–2000),” in Gender, Migration
and Categorisation: Making Distinctions between Migrants in Western
Countries, 1945-2010, eds. Marlou Schrover and Deirdre M. Moloney
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 233; and Cottaar and
Bouras (n 20), 235–36.
105. Cottaar and Bouras (n 20), 234–35.
106. “KMAN Annual Report 1983-1984”; via IISG, KMAN Collection, Folder
580 (Annual reports, work and policies of the KMAN. 1977–1994).
109. e.g. “KMAN Annual Report 1983-1984” and other 1980s annual reports,
which refer to programming by/for women; via IISG, KMAN Collection,
Folder 580 (Annual reports, work and policies of the KMAN. 1977–1994).
CHAPTER 6
“All of that talk about feminism was very

hard to understand”: Immigrant Women
and European Feminism, 1974–1985
In the 1970s, some Dutch feminists of color—with roots in (former)

Dutch colonies—participated in primarily white, middle-class women’s
organizations, where issues related to race were rarely taken seriously.1
Gloria Wekker (b. 1950, Paramaribo, Suriname), now professor emeritus
in gender and ethnicity studies at Utrecht University, grew up in a mostly
white environment, and came to identify as a lesbian feminist.2 Reflecting
on her “sexually coming-of-age in Amsterdam” in the 1970s, Wekker
observed two models for how to be a self-empowered woman who loved
women:
There was a dominant model, mostly engaged in by white, middle-class

women, in which the rhetoric of “political choice,” feminist chauvinism . . .
[and] childlessness, played central parts. And there was a subjugated
model . . . lived by working-class Afro-Surinamese women, who . . . typically
had children, and apparently maintained their ties with men.3
Wekker began seriously to consider how dominant European notions of

feminism and lesbianism affected the ways that she constructed her own
gender and sexual identity. Frustrated that these issues were not discussed
in primarily white groups, Wekker and other black feminists co-founded
a group for black lesbians in the 1980s, and also became active in organi-
zations, reading groups, and libraries for black, migrant, and refugee
women.

148 6 “ALL OF THAT TALK ABOUT FEMINISM WAS VERY HARD” . . .
The trajectory for women in foreign worker communities—e.g.

Turkish, Moroccan, Pakistani—was different than Wekker’s. From about
1973, these immigrant women self-organized first within predominantly
male foreign worker organizations—e.g. Hollanda Türkiyeli Isçiler Birligi
(HTIB: Turkish Worker Association) and Komitee Marokkaanse Arbeiders
in Nederland (KMAN: Committee for Moroccan Workers) in the
Netherlands, the Pakistani Worker’s Club in Denmark—and not within
predominantly white women’s groups. One reason could be that Dutch
women’s organizations in the 1970s “rarely emphasised what united
immigrant and non-immigrant women. . . . [and] did little to include
immigrant women in their organisations and activities,” as historian
Marlou Schrover has suggested.4 In the 1980s, however, women from
foreign worker communities began to collaborate with European feminist
groups. And while few in these foreign worker groups identified as lesbians
in the 1970–80s, many women faced a struggle parallel to the one
described by Wekker: whether to embrace a definition of “self-empowered
woman” defined by mostly white, middle-class, European feminists, who
emphasized patriarchal oppression of women; or to espouse new models
of womanhood that aligned more closely with the cultures and struggles
of their working-class immigrant communities.
Unfortunately, collaboration between immigrant women and European
feminists in the 1980s sometimes had unintended detrimental results, as
historians Schrover (for the Netherlands) and Rita Chin (for West
Germany) have shown. European feminists in both countries—in their
efforts to bring mainstream media attention to foreign women’s issues,
and patriarchy in general—unintentionally established a media trope of
the culturally oppressed migrant woman. In all labor-receiving European
countries, the most important legal issue affecting the foreign wives of labor
migrants was their residency status. Since women often came to Europe on
the basis of family reunification, their visa depended on their marriage;
divorced women lost their residency and risked deportation. While immi-
grant women had criticized these rules for years, European feminists joined
the struggle in 1979, and sought to bring media attention to the residency
laws and how these laws could make life unbearable for some women and
children.5
In the Netherlands, a women’s committee led by Dutch feminists
brought media attention to these residency restrictions by highlighting
the case of a Turkish woman in an abusive relationship, and by tracing her
hypothetical trajectory: if she got divorced, she would return to Turkey,
“ALL OF THAT TALK ABOUT FEMINISM WAS VERY HARD . . . 149
and would be harassed for bringing shame on her family. The campaign
succeeded in winning residency for the woman on humanitarian grounds,
but no laws changed. So in a second campaign, the committee presented
two more Turkish women in abusive relationships, one of whom had been
hospitalized twice. The media spun the residency issue as one of religious
culture, and conflated these Turkish women’s experiences with those of
all Turkish and Moroccan women in the Netherlands.6 By 1983, a minor
policy change was enacted—women could apply for independent resi-
dency after one year of living in the Netherlands, but still needed three
years of marriage—and thus, Shrover concluded, the campaigns proved
less effective in protecting vulnerable women, and succeeded more in
“present[ing] Turkish culture as backward” and presenting Turkish
women as “dependent and vulnerable,” which “in the long run disadvan-
taged Turkish women in the Netherlands.”7 Ironically, it was the Dutch
law itself that was patriarchal—as it tied women’s residency to a fixed
position as dependent wife—and not a so-called backward culture that
limited immigrant women’s independence.8
Similarly, Chin observed that in the 1980s, “West German feminists
had a somewhat surprising hand in facilitating” the media trope that
Turkish women represented the “incommensurable cultural difference
between Turks and Germans,”9 or between “feminist practice and unre-
formed patriarchy.”10 In Denmark, Rikke Andreassen has shown that the
media has recurrently relied on the “trope of female racial and ethnic
minorities as victims of domestic violence, arranged and forced marriages,
and honour killings” since the 1980s, but historians have not linked this
trope to feminist campaigns (which is not the intention of this chapter).11
This chapter begins with a look into the early self-organizing of immi-
grant women from 1973 (through to about 1979), when immigrant
women organized courses and created women’s-only spaces to facilitate
immigrant social networks, and when working (foreign) women benefited
from independent wages, elected foreign worker union representatives,
and even organized strikes. The chapter continues by looking at European
feminists’ outreach to immigrant women (c. 1975–1985), inspired partly
by U.N. conferences about/for women around the world, and partly by
the broad appeal of women’s organizations and sub-cultures in the 1980s,
and changes in government funding that promoted “multicultural”
cooperation.12 Finally, the chapter ends with several examples of frictions
between European and immigrant activists centering on definitions of
womanhood, oppression, feminism, and patriarchy. European feminists
sometimes criticized foreign women for not emphasizing patriarchy and

oppression in their immigrant communities and households (which white
feminists knew existed in Danish/Dutch society as well). While it is true
that immigrant women did not often speak about “patriarchy” and “male
oppression” in the household or immigrant community, immigrant
women activists did focus on systemic oppression with regard to class,
migration status, race/ethnicity, and global economic equality. In this
regard, their strategic goals aligned with many European socialists, left-
wing foreign worker men, and also white feminists.
Building on the argument in Chapter 5—that male-dominated immi-
grant organizations borrowed rhetorical and strategic tools from European
feminism—this chapter ultimately shows that despite some tensions with
European feminists, much of immigrant women’s activism and goals
aligned closely with European feminists in the 1970s–80s.
“ALL THE WOMEN ARE WHITE . . . ”: RACE

AND EUROPEAN FEMINISM
From its debut in 1967, the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) captivated
the attention of many left-wing viewers by connecting sexual liberation and
feminism—embodied in the main character Lena—with socialism, anti-
Francoism, and anti-nuclear activism, as well as with yoga, grassroots
demonstrations and homemade leaflets. The film includes original content
with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who inspires much of Lena’s non-violent
resistance and civil disobedience strategies. The film does not, however,
address racism or the position of foreign laborers in Scandinavia in the late
1960s, despite its extensive focus on Swedish workers’ rights.13
The African-American Civil Rights Movement—particularly from the
late 1950s through to the late 1960s—inspired much of the youth protests
and feminist activism of the 1970s. But even in the United States, white
feminists did not always consider race as central to women’s experiences
and forced limitations. An edited volume by black feminists proclaimed in
1982, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us
are Brave,14 a sentiment that Kimberlé Crenshaw echoed in 1989 in her
germinal text on the “intersectionality” of race and sex in the law.15
Dutch feminists of color had similar conversations throughout the
1980s. In 1983, at the Winter University for Women’s Studies in
Nijmegen, a feminist activist of Moluccan descent named Julia Da Lima
“ALL THE WOMEN ARE WHITE . . . ”: RACE AND EUROPEAN FEMINISM 151
gave a talk that brought ethnicity to the center stage of Dutch feminism.16
She pointed out what all the women of color had noticed immediately: the
talks relating to race and migration in the Netherlands were categorized
under “non-Western cultures” and given their own track, and were thus
excluded from the other thematic areas: education, maternity, sexuality,
and labor. A paper on Turkish women in the labor market, for example,
was not a “labor” paper, but a “non-Western” paper. De Lima and the
black, migrant, and refugee women at the conference utilized this separate
track to create their own space for the discussion of race in the Dutch
feminist movement. One Dutch feminist historian referred to De Lima’s
talk as the catalyst of the “last wave” of Dutch second-wave feminism
(after the radical wave, the lesbian wave, etc.); “it was eerily clear that
although the women’s movement was supposed to be ‘general,’ it con-
sisted mainly of white women.”17 With the formation of organizations by
and for women of color, some white Dutch feminists were concerned with
the division, or did not understand that ethnicity was something for white
feminists to discuss also. But other white feminists began to discuss
seriously issues such as whiteness, post-colonialism, internalized racism,
and why they used terms like buitenlanders and allochtoon to refer to
ethnic minorities.
The mid-1980s saw the founding of several Dutch feminist groups for
black and migrant women. In 1984, Tania Leon, Tieneke Sumter, José
Maas and the aforementioned Wekker formed a group for black lesbians,
Sister Outsider, named after the anthology by Audre Lorde.18 In 1985,
several black women (including Tania Leon from Sister Outsider and Cisca
Pattipilohy) helped open Flamboyant, the National Center for Black and
Migrant Women (in Amsterdam) as an activity and meeting center, library,
and archive. The group discussed, among other things, racism, residence
permit problems, dependence on the husband, arranged marriages, and
language deficiency. Filipina, Molucccan, Pakistani, Moroccan, Indian,
Indonesian, and other women’s groups met in Flamboyant.19
Yet despite black, migrant, and refugee women’s inroads into European
feminism, their contributions were absent from a 1984 volume by four
leading Dutch feminists, as a U.S. American feminist, Wendy Chapkis,
noticed. In her review of the Dutch volume, Chapkis criticzed the
(English-language) book for its lack of attention to women of color,
since Chapkis had spent much of her time in the Netherlands and admired
the “remarkable range of feminist periodicals” published there, including
a black women’s paper.20 Yet two white European feminists wrote the
volume’s chapter “Women’s Struggle in the Third World,” based mostly on

U.S. American sources, and thus provided “the American reader third-hand
access to the experience of women of color” in the Netherlands. Chapkis
lamented that no women from Indonesian, Surinamese, Moroccan, or
Turkish communities contributed to the chapter, which would have made
a unique contribution to feminist studies in the Netherlands and abroad.
Furthermore, she was troubled by their sloppy conclusion that European
feminists should not only give women in the Third World sympathy and
commitment, but should also provide criticism and should demand more
of these women. Chapkis wondered if these white feminists were “oblivious
to the tension” between “Western” and “Third World” feminists, and
between white women and women of color.
A similar critique could have been made of Drude Dahlerup’s English-
language chapter on the Redstockings in a 1986 feminist anthology. Despite
writing that the Redstockings were influenced by international feminist
discussions, including those in the U.S., U.K., and the Netherlands, she
never mentioned discussions of race or migration.21She described the var-
ious sub-groups of the Redstockings, with no attention to collaborations
with migrant women’s groups. Dahlerup even invoked “the ‘Black is beau-
tiful’ of the militant black movement” merely as an analogy for how Danish
feminists sought to boost self-esteem and collective strength, but with no
consideration for the campaign’s focus on white supremacy.
But by the early 1980s, some white, European feminists did indeed
conjoin feminism, socialism, immigrant rights, and anti-racism, citing for
example Shulamith Firestone’s connections between (white) feminism
and (black) anti-racism in North America, in order to argue that
European and migrant women could join in “solidarity of fighting the
same oppressor,” namely the “ruling class . . . composed of men.”22 Yet
foreign worker women—many of whom had organized women’s groups
and actions in their own immigrant communities—were not always eager
to contribute to predominantly white, feminist actions.
IMMIGRANT WOMEN ORGANIZE ALONG ETHNIC

LINES, 1973–79
The term “foreign worker women” could apply to the wives of foreign
worker men—some of whom worked, and some of whom did not—
who mostly immigrated in the latter part of the 1970s through family
IMMIGRANT WOMEN ORGANIZE ALONG ETHNIC LINES, 1973–79 153
reunification; and it could apply to the (fewer) women who arrived solo
to work in Europe. By 1976 in the Netherlands, Yugoslavians had the
most balanced gender ratio; but the actual numbers of Moroccan and
Turkish women were higher.23 Some of these women were recruited
through official channels, which Ayse Kudat and Mine Sabuncuoglu
noted “r[an] counter to the popular view that women play a predomi-
nantly dependent role in migration.”24 Immigrant women were likely to
work in fields like the health services, domestic work, and textiles.25 The
narrative of one of these working women follows:
Drissia Benaich (b. 1950, Meknes, Morocco) traveled to the
Netherlands in 1969 at the age of eighteen to work at a hotel in
Zandvoort. It was unusual for single Moroccan women to work in the
Netherlands at this time, but Benaich was hired for her knowledge of
French. Both Benaich and her male cousin—who had also received a
position in the Netherlands—had worked hard to convince her parents
that she would be safe in the Netherlands, and they finally agreed to let her
go. Benaich remembered that she was the only woman in a group of fifty-
five Moroccans who flew together to Paris, and she had to borrow a jacket
because she only “had a miniskirt [minirokje] on” when she landed in
chilly Europe. Upon arriving in Rotterdam, she departed with her cousin
and the others, and traveled solo to the hotel, where she shared a room
with another Moroccan woman.26
Not knowing Dutch was a major obstacle in the first year, not least
because she was lonely. But worse, her Dutch colleagues exploited her
inability to understand Dutch: their boss would assign the women jobs, in
Dutch, and afterwards her co-workers would re-assign the jobs to her and
the other Moroccan woman. But after learning a little Dutch, she and the
other Moroccan woman were empowered to “speak back to the other
girls,” and to say, “No, if there’s something that must be done, then the
boss has to say it to us, no one else.”27 Benaich had no access to language
classes when she arrived in 1969; but if she did, they would have provided
her with the language skills she needed to defend herself at work, and
would have connected her to other immigrants in the surrounding areas.
Language Classes and “Sewing Classes”

Women’s language classes within (predominantly male) immigrant spaces
empowered women in the public and private spheres: like reading and
discussion groups in European feminist circles, these classes were also
political, as they created a women-only space for discussion. For many

women, these classes provided the opportunity to voice problems they
faced in the new society, or in their relationships at home. For some, these
classes were the first formal literacy education they received. Language
classes were an opportunity for foreign women to discuss their socio-
political situation in the host country, and to imagine new employment,
educational, and activist opportunities.
In Denmark, women organized language classes within the Pakistani
Club as early as 1972, when they would meet on Saturdays at the Centre
for Pakistani Workers for women’s-only Danish language lessons.
Writing for the Pakistani page of Fremmedarbejderbladet (FAB: The
Foreign Worker Journal), one man wrote that these classes were bene-
ficial for women’s “common daily life, such as shopping, [and] children’s
affairs.” But these classes had further implications for women’s
independence:
Some of the Pakistani ladies want to utilize their basic education by working
in different kinds of social and education institutions here in this country,
which is only possible by learning the Danish language.28
The Pakistani women in the class not only formed social networks, but
also began to plan new activities, such as a badminton club, which showed
that they “want[ed] to share in the activities of the Centre fully, just as
Pakistani men.” Similar activities occurred in Aarhus, on Jutland, in
1972.29
In the Netherlands, Turkish women self-organized almost immediately
within the left-wing Turkish worker’s group HTIB (Chapter 5), and as
early as 1974 formed their own organization, Hollanda Türkiyeli
Kadınlar Birliği (henceforth HTKB: Turkish Women’s Group of the
Netherlands [in Turkish]).30 The group was co-founded and first run by
Maviye Karaman Ince, the wife of the founder of HTIB (Nihat Karaman);
at its height, the women’s group had 600 volunteers in seven Dutch
cities.31 HTKB organized Turkish women across the Netherlands so
they could support each other, discuss common interests and problems,
and follow the situation of women in Turkey. Within a few years, there
were HTKB braches in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, Nijmegen
and Eindhoven. Although some Dutch women volunteered with the
group, HTKB found its closest allies in HTIB.
From their early years, HTKB offered language courses, not only for
those who desired learning Dutch, but also for those illiterate women who
did not know how to read or write in Turkish. They also offered lessons in
learning how to ride a bike, or how to swim.32 But perhaps most inge-
niously, they offered “sewing courses” as well.
Sewing classes centered on sewing skills, and women were allowed to
bring their children. Even among more conservative families, they were
uncontroversial: no husband would object to a woman improving her
sewing skills, especially if she brought the children with her. But during
the classes, leaders would bring up social and political topics, and would
encourage women to talk about their everyday problems. Women were
also encouraged to join Dutch language or Turkish literacy classes.33
Some may have lied to their husbands and claimed to take sewing courses,
but instead participated in other activities.
Similarly, Moroccan women began to self-organize as the “Moroccan
women of KMAN” in the 1970s (and by 1982 were the Moroccan
Women’s Union of the Netherlands, MVVN: Marokkanse Vrouwen
Vereniging Nederland) [in Dutch]. The group also offered “sewing
courses” (in the 1980s but perhaps also in the 1970s).34
By creating safe, women’s-only spaces for immigrant women to discuss
issues they might not otherwise voice, the women of HTKB and the
Moroccan women’s group were likely inspired by some European activism
at the time. The “Women’s House” in Amsterdam (1972) and
Copenhagen (1978), as well as in other Dutch and Danish cities, also
brought attention to the power of women’s-only spaces.35 Additionally, at
least five women’s shelters opened in Denmark from 1979–1985 as a
result of feminist activism.36 In this regard, the “sewing classes” were
a proactive strategy to reach out to women who risked isolation and
possible abuse.
Turkish Women’s Factory Strike in Denmark, 1978

Necla Musaoglu (b. 1956, Turkey) worked in the Frederiksberg Metal
Goods Factory until 1978, when she was fired after having led strikes for
better working conditions and pay.37 Her co-worker, Zennure Solakli
(b. 1949, Turkey) also helped lead these strikes, but she was fortunate
enough to retain her job.38 The two women had been respectively elected
to positions as spokeswoman for issues relating to foreign women, and
union representative for female workers at the factory. Their experiences
Fig. 6.1 “Danish and Foreign Workers Must Stand Together”: Two Turkish
workers, Zennure Solakli and Necla Musaoglu, worked through their union to
address the management’s discriminatory actions toward foreign women (1978)
Pedersen et al., ibid, 3. Printed with permission from Signe Arnfred, Anne Houe, and Litten
Hansen.
give further insight into why some foreign worker women found their
closest allies with men in their immigrant community, and not European
women. Yet despite clashes with Danish women at the factory, the two
Turkish women gave an interview later that year with Kvinder [Women],
the journal of the Redstockings. According to the Kvinder article, the
strike that Musaoglu and Solakli led was the “first time foreign workers in
Denmark went on strike together against the crude exploitation they
face,” and added that “most trade unions” failed to “inform them of
their rights.”39
In early 1978, a group of Turkish women at the factory began to
discuss differential treatment. According to Musaoglu, “ . . . I could see
that Danes didn’t have to deal with any nonsense to get their sick leave
paid out after they came back from an illness”; in contrast, the Turkish
women received pushback when they asked for a sick day, received threats
that they would be fired if they took sick days, and were often not paid out
at all after having taken a sick day. Further, they noticed a discrepancy in
salary.
It was a Danish female co-worker who first inspired them to strike;
according to Solakli:
She said, ‘You all work so much and the salary you get doesn’t match the
work you do. . . . ’ She told us to go together to the boss and demand more
salary. We did that [at first, before striking] . . . One could certainly say she
gave us the idea to demand a better position.
When the Turkish women made their demands, the management threa-
tened to fire—and even to contact the immigration police regarding—any
worker who questioned working conditions at the factory.
Several weeks later, the Turkish women formally delivered their five
demands: (1) changing the practice for being paid for sick days, and
getting back pay; (2) getting fixed wage agreements every third month;
(3) receiving a salary increase of 2.60 kroners per hour for both contract
and part-time workers; (4) making the work environment safer; and
(5) having regulated breaks. They delivered the demands to the employer
and announced a strike if the demands were not met; the following day,
the strike was a reality and the workers contacted their trade union, who
led the negotiations. In the end, all their demands except for the salary
increase were met. The women soon noticed that ventilation systems were
installed, which alleviated the frequent nosebleeds they got after working
all day with a certain powder. The women factory workers held an elec-
tion, and chose the two Turkish women as their new union representative
and spokeswoman; this election showed recognition for the work that
Solakli and Musaoglu did during the strike.
But before they could celebrate their successes, the management reta-
liated: first, they announced that seven workers would be fired, and cited a
dubious “decline in production,” even as they asked others to work over-
time. Second, the management refused to acknowledge the two Turkish
women as union representatives, since they did not speak Danish and
necessitated a translator at meetings, which the factory could not accom-
modate. Appalled by the threat of being fired, the Turkish women tried to
lead another strike. The employers took the case to the Labor Court.
Outside the meetings, the foreign workers demonstrated with signs that
read: “No to Political Firings—Rights are not something one gets; they
are something one takes. Danish and foreign workers must stand together
in solidarity.”40
But the Danish workers did not stand in solidarity; to the contrary, they
disapproved of these strikes. Solakli said: “Even those with whom we had
a good relationship before the strikes would no longer greet us.”
Meanwhile, the Employers Union (DA) and the umbrella organization
of trade unions (LO) met at the Labor Court without any of the workers’
representatives. LO trusted the claim of the “decline in production” and
agreed to the firings. Musaoglu, despite having been elected a union
representative, was among those fired. The Turkish women responded in
a leaflet, “Our colleagues were fired by DA and LO. A good trade union
does not support or resolve anything that the workers are against.” But
they did not receive strong support from their unions, or even the Women
Workers Union, and accepted their losses.
For the Kvinder article, at least three Redstockings—Christina Hee
Pedersen, Geske Lisling, and Anne House—showed their solidarity with
the Turkish factory workers. Even though their story did not have a happy
ending, Kvinder tried to put a positive spin on the story by emphasizing
the solidarity among the Turkish women, as well as the support that the
women received by the men’s division of the factory, many of whom were
relatives or acquaintances from their villages in Turkey: “The women’s and
men’s divisions spoke a lot with each other . . . There was great unity and
solidarity between us,” Solakli ended.
Foreign worker women did not find immediate allies in their Danish
female colleagues, as the discrimination they faced related foremost to migra-
tion status, not sex. The trade unions helped during their first strike, but not
their second. The foreign worker women self-organized to bring attention to
their position primarily as immigrants, not women, and found their closest
allies in the foreign workers in the factory’s men’s division.(Fig 6.1)
Turkish Women’s Transnational Solidarity

Turkish women in the Netherlands and Denmark also followed the activism
of Turkish women in Turkey, where a second-wave feminist movement
thrived from 1975–80, called the Progressive Women’s Organization
(PWO, or IKD in Turkish). The group had its origins in 1965, when
Bakiye Beria Onger—a middle-class graduate of Ankara University,
1941—founded a small group with secular and progressive women; the
group focused on poor and working-class women’s difficult living condi-
tions. From 1975–1980, an estimated 10,000 women belonged to the
group and read its periodical, the Women’s Voice: For Equality, Social
Progress and Peace, which was published out of Istanbul.41 The periodical
decried women’s illiteracy, unemployment, unequal retirement pensions,
and the need for daycare and female trade unions; but in its final years, it
focused mainly on female political prisoners. In 1980, as the military coup
crushed most leftist organizations, PWO and Women’s Voice were shut
down.42
The PWO was exiled to Europe, where it eventually found an office in
Copenhagen.43 It continued to send mailings to women’s groups across
Europe—including diasporic Turkish groups like HTIB and HTKB in the
Netherlands—bringing attention to female political prisoners and human
rights abuses in Turkey.44 A PWO newsletter from 1983 encouraged
Turkish women in the diaspora to initiate signature campaigns to free
female political prisoners in Turkey, to rally against foreign troops in
Turkey, and at the same time, to lead discussions about divided identities
(i.e. as women, foreigners, and workers) in Europe.45 HTKB printed
updates on the PWO and included photos from their demonstrations in
Turkey in 1979.46 The PWO in exile, and other diasporic Turkish
women’s activists, likely kept in touch with a small group of feminists in
Istanbul, who continued to meet in the 1980s in “awareness-raising
groups that had discovered the famous slogan of Western feminists: ‘The
private is political,’” and criticized “paternalist” and “patriarchal” struc-
tures in Turkey.47
In the 1980s, HTKB continued to find close allies with the Turkish men
in HTIB, particularly when working within the peace movement to bring
attention to human rights abuses in Turkey. HTKB and HTIB helped host
the 1982 International Anti-Nuclear Conference in Amsterdam, and orga-
nized for a Turkish man to deliver a key speech (in English) about how
NATO weapons were being used for undemocratic purposes, such as to
quell a factory strike in Izmit.48 After, HTKB began to work closely with
Dutch women’s groups in the peace movement, such as the Amsterdam-
based group [Women] Together Against Atomic Weapons,49 and the
international groups Women Against Nuclear Weapons, and Women for
Peace. HTKB also founded the Committee for Women’s Freedom in
Turkey (1983–1987).50
“YOU WANTED TO UNDERSTAND PATERNAL STRUCTURES.

YOU WANTED TO CHANGE THE WORLD”: EUROPEAN FEMINISTS
REACH OUT, 1975–1985
After the first U.N. World Conference on Women in Mexico (1975),
feminist committees in North America and Western Europe incorporated
more discussion of international women’s solidarity and sometimes pro-
vided aid to women in the developing, or “Third,” world. In Denmark,
the group that supported women in the developing world was the
Women’s Committee on Developing Countries (henceforth KULU,
founded 1976), a collaborative group of various women’s organizations,
from the Redstockings to church groups.51 In 1980, the second U.N.
World Conference on Women met in Copenhagen, one year after the
U.N. General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women; KULU played a key role in
hosting the world event.
Within this context, some Danish feminists paid attention not only to
women internationally, but also to immigrant women in Europe. Hence
the Kvinder article about the Turkish women’s factory strike was part of a
larger special issue in 1978, “Foreign worker women [in Denmark],” and
a 1980 issue was devoted to “Women in the Developing World.”52 In the
Letter from the Editors in the 1978 issue, the staff—all thirty of whom had
Scandinavian names—wrote, “We stand as Danes with a large responsi-
bility to our foreign fellow-citizens [medborgere]” who were “three-times
oppressed”: as working-class, as foreigners, and as women.53 (Fig. 6.2)
In the Netherlands, Dutch feminists used the same language of “triple
oppression” when writing about foreign worker women. One Dutch volun-
teer with KMAN tied this triple oppression—as working-class, foreign, and
female—to the context of the “growing racism in the Dutch population”
(i.e. with regard to conversations largely focusing on Afro-Caribbean immi-
grants).54 The volunteer was also aware of Orientalizing tendencies among
“YOU WANTED TO UNDERSTAND PATERNAL STRUCTURES 161
Fig. 6.2 The twenty-second issue of the Danish feminist magazine Kvinder
[Women] focused on foreign worker women (1978)
Kvinder 22 (October/November 1978). Printed with permission from Signe Arnfred, Anne
Houe, and Litten Hansen.
European feminists, as she also quoted the Egyptian feminist Nawal El

Saadawi, whose book, The Veiled Eve, was translated into Dutch in
1980.55 Saadawi warned European and North American feminists that by
overemphasizing certain gendered issues in the “non-Western” world—
such as female genital mutilation, which Saadawi herself also opposed—
Western feminists detracted from topics like socioeconomic inequality, and
imbued Western feminists with a “superior sense of humanity . . . [in] the
daily struggle for women’s emancipation.”56
Similarly in Denmark, some feminists were aware of Orientalizing
tendencies among white feminists. Christina Hee Pedersen—one of the
Redstockings who interviewed the Turkish women for Kvinder in 1978—
took a job at a factory in the 1970s, in part to connect with working-class
and immigrant women. She also recalled attending the Feminist School
(Kvindehøjskolen, f. 1978)—an adult education retreat on Jutland—with a
Turkish woman who reached out to the Redstockings for protection, as
her family planned to send her to Turkey to be married against her will.
Reflecting on her and other Redstockings’ attitudes towards immigrant
women, Pedersen clarified:
It would be a mistake to frame the feminist position as, “Turkish women are
victims and Danish women are not,” because it was complex. The under-
standing was more, “I don’t know about your country; tell me how you do
it.” There was no Internet, and long-distance phone-calls were expensive.
But you were curious. You wanted to understand paternal structures. You
wanted to change the world.57
Pedersen’s point should resonate with idealistic readers, despite the retro-
spective knowledge that European feminists (at least in the Netherlands
and West Germany) inadvertently contributed to the mainstream media’s
Orientalist motif of the oppressed and vulnerable immigrant woman. Her
statement should also help clarify the international and multicultural
activities of European feminist groups during these years.
Multicultural feminist activities thrived in the Netherlands during this
period. In 1981, the Congress for Foreign Women brought together
Surinamese, Greek, Moroccan, Spanish, Portuguese, Palestinian,
Yugoslavian, Cape Verdean, Italian, Antillean, Latin American, Moluccan,
Turkish and Dutch women.58 In 1982, a Nijmegen committee called the
“Women for Friendship, Cooperation, and Solidarity between Cultural
Minorities and the Dutch,” organized an event for International Women’s
“ . . . [N]OT A WORD ABOUT THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN . . . 163
Day (8 March) in Nijmegen that brought together Moroccan, Surinamese,

Antillean, Moluccan, Papuan, Hindustani, Yugoslav, Turkish, Lakshmi,
Tamurika, and Dutch women for a full day of speeches, slideshows, dances,
children’s activities (and babysitting), and food.59 In 1983, HTKB was
invited to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s
conference in Brussels, with the theme of religious diversity; participants
included the Gandhi Center, Japanese Buddhists, and a Zurich-based
Chilean women’s group.60 These events should be understood not only in
the contexts of the U.N. World Conferences on Women, and of the con-
troversial 1983 Winter School in Nijmegen, but also in the context of the
new Dutch subsidies to support minority groups (e.g. the 1983 “Minorities
Bill”). Additionally, as most feminists were satisfied with the 1981 abortion
law—which culminated from a decade of debates—they could focus on new
topics, such as foreign women’s positions in the Netherlands.61
“ . . . [N]OT A WORD ABOUT THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN

BY MEN”: TENSIONS PRIORITIZING PATRIARCHY
For International Women’s Day in 1982, the Moroccan women’s group

within KMAN (soon to be MVVN) spoke at a Dutch event about
“oppression, repression, fascism, [and] imperialism” around the world.62
Like European feminists, they emphasized their solidarity with those living
in repressive governments—especially women—and lamented the “condi-
tions of mothers in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Turkey, Morocco, and
Palestine” and South Africa, whose “children are falling under the fire of
dictatorship, fascism, colonialism . . . imperialism” and apartheid.63 In
reflecting on the speech, however, at least one Dutch feminist expressed
disappointment that there was “not a word about the oppression of
women by men.”64
In planning for International Women’s Day 1983, these tensions
became more apparent, as HTKB participated on the Dutch organizing
committee. Dutch women pushed for the theme of “breadwinner” (kost-
winnerschap), a topic closely related to patriarchy and (especially middle-
class) gender dynamics in the Netherlands; but HTKB pushed for the
topical theme of international women’s solidarity. The majority (of Dutch
women) voted for the breadwinner theme; disappointed, HTKB dropped
out from participating in Women’s Day for the next few years.65 As
Schrover summarized: “Left-wing and strongly orientated towards
Turkey, . . . HTKB saw itself as an organisation fighting a class struggle or

fighting racism, and less as an organisation fighting for women’s rights.”
In Denmark, Rosa Labarca (Rosa Inés Labarca Olmos, b. 1952, Chile),
who was part of the Chilean refugee community in Denmark after 1973,
also recalled tensions with European feminists about prioritizing patriar-
chy. As part of the Danish/Latin American Support Committee (f. 1977),
Labarca provided “practical solidarity work” to fight the oppression of
women in Latin America, focusing on female political prisoners and
children’s nutrition. In her 1980 interview for Kvinder’s issue on the
developing world, Labarca revealed that her class politics initially clashed
with some Danish feminists:
Here in Denmark they say that women have the same problems, no matter
if they are worker women or bourgeois women . . . but in Latin America, the
social- and class-related differences between women are enormously
large. . . . In Denmark, one speaks about violence in connection with men
beating their wives. But violence . . . we see daily on the streets in Chile:
hungry children going around from trashcan to trashcan to find food. Hell,
that’s violence too.66
Here Labarca demonstrated that her primary sympathies were with the
socialist struggle, which is not surprising considering that Chilean refugees
in Europe were political supporters of Allende, the Marxist-oriented
President of Chile through the 1973 coup. Radical feminism was not
strong in Chile at the time, so Labarca associated “feminism” with con-
servative, anti-Allende women. Further, Labarca was sometimes over-
whelmed with the cultural differences in talking about women and
gender: “I think it’s very hard, especially when one comes from a foreign
land and doesn’t know the society . . . all of that talk about feminism was
very hard to understand, and sometimes I thought that it was totally crazy
[flippet].” But she appreciated that Danish feminists highlighted “normal
daily problems, workplace problems, childcare problems” which also
affected working-class and immigrant women. And despite all of her
criticisms, Labarca was committed to understanding the Danish women’s
movement, and sought to encourage women in Latin America to address
women’s issues.
European feminists would have been sensitive to the issue of prioritiz-
ing patriarchy, as it was a common discussion topic among socialist and
communist men and women. In-fighting about class struggle and
“ . . . [N]OT A WORD ABOUT THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN . . . 165
patriarchy had historical roots, as Drude Dahlerup wrote: “The women’s

sections [e.g. of the Social Democratic party], which started in the 1920s,
were constantly being accused of ‘splitting the working class’ and the party
leadership warned them against cooperation with bourgeois women’s
organizations.”67 By the 1970s, most on the Left accepted the
Redstockings’ slogan, “No women’s struggle without class struggle”;
but many men and some women objected to the second line, “No class
struggle without women’s struggle.”68 Pedersen summarized the
Redstockings’ position: “Yes, the working-class salary oppresses her, but
it’s not just that; it’s her [male] boss and her husband too.”69
Similarly in the Netherlands, the socialist/labor Dutch Women’s
Movement (NVB, f. 1946) initially defined “oppression” only in terms
of capitalist structures; only in the 1980s, after a decade of debate, did
NVB incorporate women’s oppression by men (i.e. patriarchy) into their
mission. But what was new in the 1980s in Denmark and the Netherlands
was that some immigrant women’s groups wanted to prioritize not only
class inequality, but also foreigner-specific issues into discussions about
feminism.
Consequently, immigrant women started to find close allies with other
immigrant women. Labarca recalls that in 1986, there was an umbrella group
called the Immigrant Association (IndSam: Indvandrernessammenslutning),
which avoided using the label “feminist,” and which organized the first—and
in Labarca’s memory, the only—women’s conference on migration and
gender:
We had workshops [at Copenhagen University] in Urdu, Arabic, Spanish,

Persian, English, French, etc., where we tried to develop a political program
on the subject [of migration and gender], which we would send further to
various political institutions in Denmark.70
Labarca said that even though they invited all Danish women’s groups to
attend, only immigrant women’s groups participated in the activities.
Surrounding the Third U.N. World Conferences on Women (in
Nairobi, 1985), women’s groups in Europe continued to focus on inter-
national women’s solidarity. And immigrant women continued to work
with European women’s groups, with other black and migrant women’s
groups,71 and with the male-dominated immigrant groups from which
many of their organizations sprouted.72 But the late 1980s also repre-
sented a downturn in women’s activism.73
Yet, despite stagnating feminist activism, Europe continued to welcome

new immigrants, some of whom were attracted to European communities
that organized around women’s and sexual liberation. When Frescia
Carrasco (b. 1950s, Peru) visited Denmark for the first time in 1985 to
attend the Feminist School’s summer program, she knew that “it was not
the highest point of the movement.” As a lesbian feminist activist in Peru,
Frescia was already familiar with many of the conversations that Danish
women were having at the time: about violence against women, human
trafficking, and sexism in advertising. As Frescia participated in a schedule
that balanced political activities (i.e. anti-war, international feminism) and
personal activities (i.e. yoga, meditation), she could feel “the impact of the
[1970s] movement was there.” Over the next years, Frescia presented at
KULU events in Denmark about feminism in Peru, became active with
trans-Atlantic projects, and moved to Denmark in 1990.74 Lesbian
women in particular were central to the Danish women’s movement in
the 1970–80s and contributed greatly to the “collaborative atmosphere”
at the Feminist School and in other activities. Part III focuses on other
immigrants and people of color in Europe who identified as lesbian and
gay in the 1960–80s, and their contributions to and experiences in social
and political spheres.
NOTES
1. Gloria Wekker, “What’s Identity Got to Do with It? Rethinking Identity in
Light of the Mati Work in Suriname,” in Female Desires, eds. Evelyn
Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999). See also the works of gender scholar Saskia E. Wieringa in this
anthology. Additionally: Pieternel Onderwater, “Wij zijn geen ‘zielige
vrouwtjes’! Een onderzoek naar de houding van de Turkse vrouwenbewe-
ging in Nederland ten opzichte van het seksedebat tussen 1970 en 2008”
[“We are not ‘Pathetic Females’! A Study of the Attitude of the Turkish
Women’s Movement in the Netherlands Regarding the Sex Debate,
1970–2008”], (Masters thesis, Utrecht University, 2008); Vilan van de
Loo, De vrouw beslist: de tweede feministische golf in Nederland [“The
Woman Decides, the Second Feminist Wave in the Netherlands”],
(Wormer, NL: Inmerc, 2005), especially 182–197.
2. Wekker, ibid. See also Ellis Jonker, “Embodying Otherness While Teaching
Race and Gender at White European Universities,” in Teaching “Race” with
a Gendered Edge, eds. Brigitte Hipfl and Kristín Loftsdóttir (Utrecht:
ATGENDER, 2012), 63–68.
NOTES 167
3. Wekker (n 1), 121–122. She also contrasts “conformity between partners”

(i.e. socioeconomic, age) with the age-structured system among Afro-
Surinamese women who love women (mati).
4. Marlou Schrover, “Multiculturalism, Dependent Residence Status and
Honour Killings: Explaining Current Dutch Intolerance Towards Ethnic
Minorities from a Gender Perspective (1960–2000),” in Gender, Migration
and Categorisation: Making Distinctions Between Migrants in Western
Countries, 1945–2010, eds. Marlou Schrover and Deirdre M. Moloney
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 235.
5. “The Report of the Workgroup for Legal Rights and Government Policies”
(undated); IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 367 (Documents concerning the
HTKB, 1974–1988).
6. Trouw, 10 March 1981, p. 9. Cited in Schrover (n 4), 238.
7. Schrover (n 4), 239.
8. Historian Judith Surkis—who has written about gender and law in France and
in (former) French colonies—has emphasized the hypocritical ways that
Europeans have criticized “Muslims” in Europe for supposed backwardness.
For instance, many French people reacted severely to a case of a Muslim
couple who sought an annulment on the grounds that the woman lied about
being a virgin at marriage. Even though both agreed that this was an accep-
table way to dissolve their marriage, they were met with accusations that they
had displayed non-European customs regarding chastity. But ironically, the
annulment law was based on French Catholic traditions, not Islam. Thus, in
this case of the residence permits, Surkis would highlight the “sociohistorical
and juridical contexts” of the laws, and those who challenged the laws
demonstrated the “critical and uneasy boundary between . . . citizenship and
foreign nationality, secular and religious law, and colonial and postcolonial”
history. Judith Surkis, “Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and French
Sovereignty,” Public Cultures 22:3 (2010): 535.
9. Rita Chin, “Turkish Women, West German Feminists, and the Gendered
Discourse on Muslim Cultural Difference,” Public Cultures 22:3 (2010): 558.
10. Ibid, 567.
11. Rikke Andreassen, The Mass Media’s Construction of Gender, Race, Sexuality
and Nationality. An Analysis of the Danish News Media’s Communication
About Visible Minorities from 1971–2004 (PhD dissertation, Toronto,
Department of History, University of Toronto, 2005).
12. “Multiculturalism” as an ideology and policy for managing cultural diversity
and immigration affected both the Netherlands and Denmark in the 1980s.
Policies passed in Amsterdam in 1981, but the national “Minorities Bill”
passed in 1983. These new minority policies granted subsidies to strengthen
immigrant organizations, often along ethnic lines. For a European perspec-
tive, see Margit Fauser, Migrants and Cities: The Accommodation of Migrant
Organizations in Europe (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate,

2012), 15; especially “Chapter 5: Migrant Organizations in Established
Immigration Contexts.” Dutch subsidies “specifically target[ed] women’s
immigrant organisations, of which [the Dutch government] felt there were
too few”; Marlou Schrover, “Pillarization, Multiculturalism and Cultural
Freezing: Dutch Migration History and the Enforcement of Essentialist
Ideas,” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 125 (2–3 January 2010):
343–345; and Schrover (n 4), 234–235. One could also argue that Dutch
“multicultural” policies were actually an extension of pillarization, that is,
they encouraged groups to live apart, together; see the penultimate para-
graph of Chapter 2.
13. I Am Curious (Yellow), 1968, directed by Vilgot Sjoöman (Grove, 1967).
14. Gloria T. Hull, et al. (eds.) (New York: The Feminist Press at the City
University of New York, 1982).
15. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and
Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine,
Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal
Forum, 140 (1989): 139–167. Although initially a legal term, “inter-
sectionality” was soon adapted by scholars in many disciplines; for an
early historical study of intersectionality, see Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the
Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17:2 (Winter 1992): 251–274. For an
early example of “intersectionality” to a European audience, see—ori-
ginally in German—Manuela Thurner, “Subject to Change: Theories
and Paradigms of U.S. Feminist History,” Journal of Women’s History
9:2 (1997): 122–146.
16. van de Loo (n 1), 182–197. Also cited in van de Loo: Kongresbundel
winteruniversiteit vrouwenstudies [“Conference Papers of the Women’s
Studies Winter University”], (Nijmegen zj, 1983); Troetje Loewenthal,
“De witte toren van vrouwenstudies” [“The White Tower of Women’s
Studies”], Tijdschrift voor Vrouwenstudies 4 (1984): 5–17; Maayke
Botman, Nancy Jouwe en Gloria Wekker (eds.), Caleidoscopische visies. De
zwarte, migranten- en vluchtelingen-vrouwenbeweging in Nederland
[“Kaleidoscopic Visions: The Black, Migrant and Refugee Women’s
Movement in the Netherlands”] (Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de
Tropen Publishers, 2001).
17. van de Loo (n 1), 182.
18. van de Loo (n 1), For more on Sister Outsider, see “Er ontbreekt altijd een
stuk van de puzzel. Een inclusief curriculum gewenst” [“There is Always a
Missing Piece of the Puzzle: An Inclusive Curriculum Desired”] in Botman,
Jouwe and Wekker (n 16).
NOTES 169
19. van de Loo (n 1), 193. The Center was located at Singel 260, but closed in
1990; Stichting ZAMI filled some of the void. The Black Women’s
Bibliography is now filed under “Pattipilohy Project” at the (Dutch)
International Archive and Information Center for the Women’s
Movement (IIAV).
20. Wendy Chapkis, “Review: Dutch Perspective,” The Women’s Review of Books
2:7 (April 1985): 13. She reviewed the following: Anja Meulenbelt, Joyce
Outshoorn, Selma Sevenhuijsen and Petra de Vries (eds.), A Creative
Tension: Key Issues of Socialist-Feminism, an International Perspective from
Activist Dutch Women (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984).
Dahlerup (London: Sage Publications, 1986), 217–245. Quote from page
221; see also 219.
22. (Student paper) Barbara Wessel, “Het MAN in KMAN” [“The MAN in
KMAN”] (June 1982); via IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 601 (Pieces of
the Moroccan Women’s Association Netherlands [MVVN], with pieces
from other women’s movements, 1982–1996).
23. Ayse Kudat and Mine Sabuncuoglu, “The Changing Composition of
Europe’s Guestworker Population,” Monthly Labor Review (October
1980). Data on Dutch immigrant sex ratios adopted from “Fact Sheet on
the Netherlands,” Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Recreation and Social
Welfare, the Netherlands, 1979, via Kudat and Sabuncuoglu, ibid, 12–13.
They report that the Yugoslavian community was 45% female out of a total
of 13,800; the Turkish population was 35% female, out of a total of 76,500;
the Moroccan population was 22% female, out of a total of 42,200; and the
Tunisian population was 20% female, out of a total of 1,500.
24. Kudat and Sabuncuoglu, ibid, 8.
25. Data on women’s dominance in Swiss employment fields via Annuaire
Statistique de la Suisse, 1978; via Kudat and Sabuncuoglu, ibid, 12–13.
Also, immigrant women were likely to work in the clothing industry and
leather crafts.
(Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 2009), 27.
27. Cottaar and Bouras, ibid, 107. In the 1970s, Benaich worked for a medical
company, met and married her husband (another Moroccan whom she met
on the street in Zandvoort), moved to a house, and gave birth to three
children. Cottaar and Bouras admitted that it was unfortunate that
Benaich’s was the only working woman’s narrative they included, but that
there were other Moroccan women in her position: Cottaar and Bouras,
ibid, 267.
28. Zm [Zafar Malik], “Danish Language and Pakistani Ladies,” FAB (10
October 1972), 11. The Centre was located in Gladsaxe, outside
Copenhagen. At this time, the Pakistani page was in English.
29. “ . . . In order that women can also become enlightened on what is important
to know when living and working in a country where you do not understand
the language”; via “Danes on Foreign Workers—Odds and Ends,” FAB (10
December 1972).
30. There is some inconsistency with when HTKB officially formed. According
to the IISG finding aid, HTKB was established in 1974: IISG, “Finding aid
to HTKB Archives,” last accessed October 2016 via http://www.archive
sportaleurope.net/ead-display/-/ead/pl/aicode/NL-AmISG/type/fa/
id/http_COLON__SLASH__SLASH_hdl.handle.net_SLASH_10622_
SLASH_ARCH02025#sthash.wZSGS5I6.dpuf.
31. Schrover (n 4), 235
32. Schrover (n 4), 236.
33. “Sewing Classes” in HTKB Report. “HTKB: Turkse Vrouwen Verening in
Nederland” (undated, Winter 1982–1983), 4; via IISG, HTIB Collection,
Folder 573 (Pieces of and on the HTKB, 1976–1989). See also “Evaluation
of HTKB activities: 1982/1983” (1983); IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder
367 (Documents concerning the HTKB, 1974–1988).
34. “KMAN Annual Report 1983–1984”; via IISG, KMAN Collection, Folder
580 (Annual reports, work and policies of the KMAN. 1977–1994).
35. Onderwater (n 1), Chapter 3.
36. Women squatted a large building in Copenhagen in 1979, and opened
Danner House for battered women that year; crisis centers then emerged
in five or six other Danish towns by 1985. Dahlerup (n 21), 233–234.
37. She moved to Germany in 1970 as a teenager, worked as a cashier, and
eventually moved to Denmark and worked for a vacuum cleaner company.
She was married with two children in Denmark. Her title, in Danish, was
talskvinde.
38. She was already married and had a child in Turkey, but lived solo in
Denmark, where she had been since 1973. Her title, in Danish, was tillidsk-
vinde for de kvindelige arbejdere.
39. CHP, GL, AH [Christina Hee Pedersen, Geske Lilsig and Anne Houe],
“Danish and Foreign Workers Must Stand Together,” Kvinder 22
(October/November 1978), 3–5.
40. Pedersen et al., ibid, 3–5.
41. Piril Kazancı, Fragen Project: Analysis of Turkish Feminist Texts (Amsterdam:
ATRIA, the Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History, 2013),
32–35.
NOTES 171
42. Sirin Tekeli, “The Turkish Women’s Movement: A Brief History of

Success,” Quaderns de la Mediterrània 14 (2010): 119–123. See also:
Sirin Tekeli, “Women in Turkish Politics,” in Women in Turkish Society,
ed. Nermin Abadan-Unat (Leiden, Brill, 1981), 293–311.
43. IKD/PWO, “8th of March Statement” (1 March 1983), via IISG, HTIB
Collection, Folder 367 (Documents concerning the HTKB, 1974–1988).
“Office Abroad: Elmegade 10, 4th—DK 2200 Copenhagen N.”
44. Kenan Evren (PWO President), “On this 8th of March . . . ” (signature
campaign); via IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 367 (Documents concerning
the HTKB, 1974–1988).
45. Progressive Women’s Organization, “8th of March Statement” (1 March
1983); via IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 367 (Documents concerning the
HTKB, 1974–1988).
46. “IKD Demonstration, July 1979” in HTKB Report. “HTKB: Turkse Vrouwen
Verening in Nederland” (undated, Winter 1982–1983), 10; via IISG, HTIB
Collection, Folder 573 (Pieces of and on the HTKB, 1976–1989).
47. Tekeli, “The Turkish Women’s Movement” (n 43), 120–121.
48. Metin Denizmen, “Dear friends . . . ” (cover letter for dissemination of
speech at the International Anti-Nuclear Conference, Amsterdam,
February 1982); via IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 367 (Documents con-
cerning the HTKB, 1974–1988): “The army came with armored cars and
helicopters” to occupy the factory, before putting three-hundred workers
into detention. He reiterated the purpose of labor strikes: “Turkish workers,
peasants, and employees want[ed] to improve their lives, freedom and
democracy,” but instead they faced military brutality.
49. Samen Tegen Atoom Raketten (STAR), (Amsterdam, 27 February 1983);
via IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 367 (Documents concerning the HTKB,
1974–1988).
51. Kvindernes U-landsudvalg (KULU), “History,” last accessed September
2016 via http://www.kulu.dk/. KULU worked with the Ministry for
Foreign Affairs’ development organization, Danida.
52. Kvinder 32 (June/July 1980), 16–18. Translation of U-landskvinder
53. The issue shows several areas where Danish women and foreign worker
women might collaborate: from working conditions (and labor unions), to
schools (and child-raising) to stress (and mental health), to adult education.
The magazine ends with a cartoon, “A Day in the Life of a Pakistani
Interpreter,” which shows her balancing work and family and helping
foreign worker women who are less integrated than she; Kvinder 22
(October/November 1978).
54. Wessel (n 22), “2. Positie van de buitenlandse arbeider in Nederland (grove
schets)” [“2. Position of the Foreign Worker in the Netherlands”].
55. Wessel (n 22). Wessel’s essay has no page numbers.

56. Cited in Wessel (n 22).
57. Christina Hee Pedersen interview (March 2014).
59. Vrouwen voor Vriendschap, Samenwerking en Solidariteit tussen Kulturele
Minderheden en Nederlanders [“Women for Friendship, Cooperation, and
Solidarity between Cultural Minorities and the Dutch”], “Internationale
Vrouwendag 7 Maart 1982” [“Schedule for International Women’s Day 7
March 1982”]; IISG, KMAN Collection, Folder 601 (Pieces of the
60. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, “Statement” (7
February 1983); via IISG, HTIB Collection, Folder 367 (Documents con-
cerning the HTKB, 1974–1988).
62. The poster—in Arabic and Dutch—calls for “Equal rights for women in all
socio-cultural and political spheres,” and “an independent residence [per-
mit] for Moroccan women.” KMAN Collection, Folder 601 (Pieces of the
63. Women of KMAN Workgroup, “Rabea’s Speech,” and “Speech on the
occasion of international women’s day, 8 March 1982”; via IISG, KMAN
Collection, Folder 601 (Pieces of the Moroccan Women’s Association
Netherlands [MVVN], with pieces from other women’s movements,
1982–1996).
64. Wessel (n 22).
Labarca], Kvinder 32 (June/July 1980), 16–18. The quotation begins, “In
Chile they’ve done cleaning work their whole lives without getting paid for
it. Here they get an hourly wage, and that is a positive experience for them.”
67. Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar, Breaking Male Dominance in Old
Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 152.
68. e.g. CHP interview; A.M. interview (September 2014); K.L. interview
(March 2014).
69. CHP interview.
70. Rosa Inés Labarca Olmos interview (August 2015).
NOTES 173
71. “Analyse van HTIB, MVVN, ST. ZAMI”; IISG, KMAN Collection, Folder
601 (Pieces of the Moroccan Women’s Association Netherlands [MVVN],
with pieces from other women’s movements, 1982–1996).
72. “KMAN Annual Report 1983–1984”; via IISG, KMAN Collection, Folder
580 (Annual reports, work and policies of the KMAN, 1977–1994).
73. Schrover argued that the (local and national) governments’ role in funding
certain women’s groups led to infighting and sometimes the end of an
organization; this was the case for HTKB in 1995, though the Amsterdam
branch (ATKB) remained. Labarca conveyed to me that there was a down-
turn in women’s activities, and “also for immigrant groups . . . [and]
women’s groups spread out.” Dahlerup in 1986 questioned if the “the
new women’s movement was dead”; Dahlerup (n 21), 234–235.
74. Frescia Carrasco interview (August 2015).
PART III
Participation
CHAPTER 7
“Help me, an Indonesian boy living

in Holland . . . flee my parents”: Immigrants
and Ethnic Minorities in European
Gay/Lesbian Contact Ads, 1960s–1980s
During the years of the “sexual revolution” in Western Europe, many

men and women eagerly flipped to the back pages of their favorite
periodicals to read the contact advertisements. For those who read the
periodicals associated with burgeoning homophile or gay/lesbian libera-
tion groups, these ads were a means of not only finding romance, but
also corresponding with others who identified as lesbian, gay, bi, trans,
or curious.1 As the following demonstrate, those who read and posted
ads in Dutch and Danish gay/lesbian periodicals came not only from
across Europe, but indeed across the world:
[in French, 1970] SANTPOORT, NL: Help me, an Indonesian boy living
in Holland, find work in Paris so that I can perfect my French and flee from
my parents. Speaks English, German, Dutch (fluently) and some knowledge
of French.2
[In English, 1972] EUROPE/KENYA: Afro-arab, 21/168/60 black and
golden brown, wants to get in touch with friend of good will for assistance
in travelling to Europe and getting settled there. Good looking, pleasant
personality, fluent English, experience in hotels and restaurants. Meeting
also in Kenya if possible.3
[In Dutch, 1976] SURINAME: Seeking a lonely, lesbian friend for corre-
spondence. I am a nurse, 24 years old, quite cheerful in character and can be
very sweet. Hobbies reading and writing.4

178 7 “HELP ME, AN INDONESIAN BOY LIVING IN HOLLAND . . .
[In Dutch, 1977] Moroccan, 22 years old, hobbies: soccer, music, reading,
swimming, seeks correspondence-friends for lasting friendship. Languages:
French, Spanish and Arabic.5
Some posts came from those who—formerly, or currently—lived under

imperial rule, whether Dutch (e.g. in Indonesia, Suriname) or another
Western power (i.e. in Kenya, Morocco). Those who posted these ads—
including recent or potential immigrants—sought new social connections,
and also jobs and housing. In addition to (post)colonial immigrants, there
were foreign students, curious tourists, and perhaps some of those
recruited as so-called “guest workers” in the late 1960s and early 1970s
who posted on these pages. As “native” Dutch and Danes welcomed
relationships with immigrants and ethnic minorities, some used phrases
such as “skin color not important” when describing their ideal match.
This chapter focuses on the personal ads placed by three main groups:
those who identified as ethnic minorities or immigrants from non-
European countries living in Europe; men and women who posted from
outside the “West”; and “native” Dutch and Danes who specifically
sought contact with people of color and/or immigrants. Though there
are only a few hundred of these ads, they are of scholarly significance: one
finds them neither in the histories of the Dutch/Danish gay/lesbian
movements of the 1960s and 1970s, nor in the histories of immigration
into the Netherlands and Denmark during this period. Linking these two
ostensibly distinct histories—of gay/lesbian liberation and immigration in
the late 1960s and 1970s—complicates current-day political discussions
about a supposed clash between immigrant and “native” European cul-
tures with regard to sexual tolerance. In historical research as in contem-
porary politics, the categories “homosexual” and “immigrant” must not
be constructed as mutually exclusive.6
CONTACT ADS AS “SOCIAL MEDIA”

In Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column, British historian
H. G. Cocks began that “the personal ad (and its modern cousin the
internet profile) has become one of the defining features of modern
social life and contemporary romance.” In charting the rise of the ads
in the twentieth century, he noted that the personal column was parti-
cularly attractive to “those on the edges of law and morality, such as
gay men and women” who sought not only romance but to create
CONTACT ADS AS “SOCIAL MEDIA” 179
“a community when homosexuality was still illegal.”7 In Gaydar

Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age
(2010), Sharif Mowlabocus argued that when gay men communicate
on digital dating sites, “physical interaction between users is the primary
motivation.”8 Rather than using online platforms to escape from offline
problems (a popular notion among internet scholars in the 1990s and
early 2000s), Mowlabocus said that gay men used “digital culture” (e.g.
dating profile sites, chat sites, smartphone applications) not only as
alternatives to gay bars, clubs, and cruising areas, but also as sites that
shared some similarities with them (i.e. the potential to make new
friends or sexual partners).9 These arguments can easily be extended
back to—as Cocks called it—the “cousin” of the internet profile: the
contact ad.10
Gay/lesbian contact advertisements are a useful primary source for
researching not only the history of sexuality, but also the history of
ethnicity and immigration. Although readers of gay and lesbian period-
icals in the 1960–70s could not interact with physical journals as dyna-
mically as users of online “social media,” these readers did indeed make
new social connections via the media. By printing contact ads—and also
letters to the editor, op-eds, and event announcements—that allowed for
direct communications between readers, the staff of these niche publica-
tions facilitated a form of pre-digital “social media” that gay men and
lesbians especially, craved.
This chapter links the histories of gay/lesbian emancipation and
immigration in the Netherlands and Denmark through an analysis of
contact advertisements in gay and lesbian periodicals, including those
published by official activist organizations in these countries as well as
some independent periodicals. The term “activist periodicals” for the
purposes of the Dutch research in this chapter refers to publications
associated with the first homophile organization in the post-war years,
the Center for Culture and Recreation (COC); the COC’s periodicals
changed names several times in the period of study: from 1954 to 1966,
it was Schakel [Link]; from 1967 to 1968, Schakelkrant; from 1969 to
1971, Seq; from 1971 to 1973, Sec; and from 1974 to 1979, SEK. The
lesbian group Paarse September distributed an eponymous magazine
from 1972 to 1974, but it did not include contact ads. This chapter
analyzes 500 contact advertisements (out of an estimated 2,500) taken
from (when available) one Spring and one Fall issue of these COC
periodicals from 1965 to –1979 (Fig. 7.1).11
For Denmark, the main “activist periodical” for this chapter refers
to Pan or Panblad, which was published by the country’s first homophile
group after World War II, the Association of 1948 (F1948).12 This
chapter analyzes 250 contact advertisements (out of an estimated 1,000
ads) from (when available) one Spring and one Fall issue from 1971to 77,
the period when the journal published contact ads.13 For additional
analysis, I have also looked at several independent publications from
the 1960s–70s, including—for Denmark—selected issues of Vennen (a
pan-Scandinavian homophile periodical), Coq (which was mainly porno-
graphic), and some issues of Eos (which by 1970 boasted the “world’s
largest collection of gay contact ads” with about 350 ads per issue). For
the Netherlands, the additional analysis includes one issue of the
Amsterdam Gayzette (1975–76). At the end of the chapter, I extend
the analysis to the 1980s with analysis from Gay Amsterdam and De
Gay Krant, neither of which was related to the COC.
In terms of identity labels, almost all men posted as a man looking
for another man, or used “homo” (in the Netherlands), “homo(fil)” (in
Denmark), and rarely “gay” (sometimes in English-language posts).14
Most women posted as a woman looking for another woman, or for a
lesbian friend (“lesbische/lesbiese vriendin” in Dutch). Some readers
identified as bi/bisexual (“biseksueel/biseks” in Dutch, “bifil” in
Danish), but only a handful as trans, typically as transvestite (“travestie”
in Dutch, “transvestit” in Danish).15 Posters reported their ages between
eighteen and sixty-nine (with one post from a seventeen-year-old). Prior
to 1971 the Dutch paper could not legally publish ads from those
under twenty-one. While many readers were self-identified activists—
for example, a “member” of F1948 or a “COC-er”16—many others
listed activities removed from gay activism: hiking, gardening, classical
music, staying “cozy” at home. Indeed, contact ads perhaps show a bias
toward those less active in urban gay networks, including some of those
who were “discreet” about their sexuality.
Despite the limited empirical information in this chapter, these ads
unlock hidden histories about the readers of gay and lesbian periodicals
in the 1960s–70s, including those with immigrant backgrounds, by pro-
viding qualitative and some quantitative data about sexual and ethnic
identities, employment goals, desired relationships, and possible push/
pull factors for migration. Chapter 8 relies on oral histories to show more
thorough personal narratives from ethnic minorities in the Dutch and
Danish gay communities in the 1960s–80s.
BACKGROUND: HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE NETHERLANDS . . . 181
BACKGROUND: HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE NETHERLANDS

AND DENMARK, PRE-1980
For this chapter’s analysis of contact ads in the 1960s–80s, the reader may
skip to the next section. This section (1) begins with an overview of
homosexual practices and subcultures in the eighteenth, nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, and the making of the modern homo/hetero
binary. It continues with (2) a look at post-World War II “homophile”
movements from 1946 through to the end of the 1960s, followed by (3)
an overview of their radicalization in the 1970s.
The vast majority of same-sex acts in early modern Europe were not
associated with homosexual identities or communities; that being said,
historians have found unique traces of male homosexual subcultures in
eighteenth century Netherlands, paralleled perhaps only in Great Britain
and France.17 In Dutch cities, same-sex-desiring men exchanged com-
mon signals (e.g. gestures, dress, slang) in both informal gathering places
(e.g. parks, toilets) and some formal establishments (e.g. “The Little
Dolphin Inn” in The Hague), as historian Theo van der Meer has
shown. While Danish historians argued that homosexual subcultures
did not exist before the early 1900s, there is evidence that men began
regularly meeting other men for sex in Copenhagen in 1856, when the
old city walls surrounding Copenhagen were abandoned by the military,
and the un-patrolled land became a cruising ground.18 Male homosexu-
ality was illegal in Denmark through 1933; but Dutch homosexuals also
feared arrest for public indecency, among other related crimes.
The majority of men who engaged in sodomy—despite risking arrest—
did not see the behavior as abnormal, as male-male interactions fit within a
sexual system that tolerated certain homosexual behaviors.19 British histor-
ian Randolph Trumbach argues that compulsory heterosexuality was first
adopted among the upper classes of Northwest Europe only in the eight-
eenth century, alongside new models for “companionate marriage” that
among other things eschewed casual homosexuality.20 The strong Dutch
middle-class adopted this marriage model quickly, as they organized increas-
ingly with a “breadwinner-homemaker” division of household labor, but
working-class men were much slower to adopt this sexual/gender model.21
In 1911, the Netherlands (and later Denmark) passed laws to shield under-
twenty-one-year-olds from “seduction” into homosexuality.22
Robert Aldrich has argued that overseas colonies provided new outlets
for European men to engage in casual and long-term homosexual
relationships outside of prudish Europe; for centuries, Dutch colonial offi-

cials turned a blind eye on homosexual activities, or even tolerated notable
homosexuals.23 Ann Stoler suggested that Dutch East Indies officials
encouraged concubinage (i.e. informal cohabitation between white Dutch
men and Javanese/Sumatran women) partly to redirect homosexual
behaviors.24 However, this tolerance was disrupted in 1938–39, when
two Dutch colonial newspapers in the East Indies reported scandals in
which over 200 Europeans and locals were arrested in Batavia, Bandung,
Surabaya, Palembang, Medan and Bali for sex with under-twenty-one-year-
olds, mostly local street youth, but also some Dutch sailors. The names and
professions of those arrested were published, and three committed suicide,
which sent the message that homosexual sex tarnished Dutch prestige and
undermined colonial authority.25
In Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, however, some of the
boldest subcultures, bars, organizations, and journals blossomed by, for,
and about homosexuals; key spokespeople like (German physician)
Magnus Hirshfield—who co-organized the first meeting of the World
League for Sexual Reform in Copenhagen in 1928—inspired sexual
reforms across Europe, bringing the “heyday of sex reform organization”
to the Netherlands and Scandinavia.26 By 1940, a Dutch homosexual
group was empowered to publish the first issue of their journal,
Levensrecht. But with the rise of Nazism, homosexuals in Germany were
persecuted and their subcultures eradicated; and with the Nazi occupation
of the Netherlands and Denmark, visible homosexual communities also
disappeared.
After the War, the Netherlands was the first country to create (or
resurrect) a “homophile” organization, under the innocuous names
“Shakespeare club” (in 1946) and three years later the “Center for
Culture and Recreation” (Cultuur- en Ontspanningscentrum, henceforth
COC). Denmark was the second country to create a post-war homophile
group, which also chose an inoffensive name, the “Association of 1948”
(Forbundet af 1948, henceforth F1948). Its leader, Axel Madsen (a.k.a.
Axil Axgil) kept tabs on the Dutch organization, led by Niek Engelschman
(a.k.a. Bob Angelo), and also on the Swiss group Der Kreis, which was the
only homophile organization to survive World War II in Europe.
Although the Netherlands and Denmark were the first two countries to
form homophile organizations after World War II, homosexuals contin-
ued to be the targets of unfair laws throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and
to be condemned by many psychiatrists, politicians, and policemen.
BACKGROUND: HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE NETHERLANDS . . . 183
Although some Dutch medical authorities worked with self-identified

homosexuals, few doctors ameliorated the social position of homosexual
men and women; rather, most continued to fixate on the supposed psy-
chological immaturity of homosexuals. Into the 1960s, homosexual men
were subjected to castration, severe medication, and other violent inter-
ventions alongside therapy in both the Netherlands and Denmark.27
Heterosexual gender roles in the 1950s and early 1960s grew more
rigid,28 but also were challenged by some women who were inspired by
their independence during wartime,29 increased individualism (catalyzed
by new consumer habits30 and mass media), and/or secularism (which
in the Netherlands related to the decline of the unique “pillarization”
system).31 The slow erosion of gender roles—in tandem with these other
sociocultural changes—created room for public discussion of sexual norms
and behaviors, including homosexuality for men and women.
In this context, some “homophile” organizations and individuals grew
bolder, and Amsterdam replaced (pre-war) Berlin as the “gay capital” of
Europe.32 Aside from distributing periodicals, the COC also hosted inter-
national conferences on “Sexual Equality,” reconvening on topics
addressed by the pre-war World League for Sexual Reform. By the end
of the 1950s, some COC members argued for the psycho-social normality
of homosexuality, and encouraged homosexual men and women to
“accept” themselves. But even in the 1960s, homosexual men in particular
continued to be targeted for arrest in both countries: sex with under-
twenty-one-year-olds was illegal (also in Denmark), and journals could be
charged under vague obscenity laws.33 But other groups relating to the
burgeoning youth and sexual liberal movements—such as the Dutch
Society for Sexual Reformation (NVSH, f. 1967)—helped challenge laws
about homosexuality and pornography, as well as prostitution, divorce,
contraception and abortion.34 Denmark was the first country to legalize
almost all forms of pornography, and homosexual periodicals specialized
and proliferated.
There was no “Stonewall” event to catalyze the gay and lesbian “libera-
tion” movement in Denmark or the Netherlands; however it is not inac-
curate (and it is convenient) that the period of radicalization began in
1970 in both countries.35 Gay and lesbian “liberation” or “emancipation”
differed from the earlier homophile activism, in part by the movement’s
calls for gay men and lesbians to “come out” and live openly about their
sexuality so as to integrate homosexuality into the public sphere. Within
the movement, certain pockets also discussed sexual pleasure, gender
fluidity, sadomasochism, lesbian separatism, toys, and polymorphous per-

versity, among other topics.36
In 1971, the COC—whose name had included “homophile” since
1964—now changed its name to the more confrontational and assertive
“Dutch Association for Integration of Homosexuality COC,” and suc-
cessfully petitioned for the repeal of the unequal age-of-consent laws.37
The lesbian group Paarse September, the precursor to Lesbian Nation,
brought some of the first pride celebrations to the Netherlands. In
Denmark, 1971 was the year that the “Gay Liberation Front” (Bøssernes
Befrielsesfront, henceforth BBF) splintered from the F1948, and among
other things popularized the term “bøsse” (literally: shaker) to replace
homophile, and the former is still used by many gay men today. The
Lesbian Movement formed in 1974, with ties closer to the feminist
Redstockings than to BBF.38
Gay/lesbian liberation coincided with the radicalization of second-
wave feminism (also in 1970 in both countries), and shared spaces with
left-wing immigrant organizations and workers’ rights groups, though not
without conflict (see Chapter 5). That being said, many in the COC
emphasized solidarity, as one 1971 issue of Seq began:
. . . [E]veryone can join the COC, in other words, membership is not

limited by sexual orientation or age. Indeed, within the COC there are
he[terosexual]s, ho[mosexual]s, bi[sexual]s, a[sexual]s, guest-workers,
blacks, red-heads, left-handeds, unwed mothers, concubines, commu-
nards, long-haired hippies [werkschuwen], Jews, artists, Icelanders, to
name a few . . . 39
Although intended to be lighthearted, this letter from the editors sup-

ports the claim that the COC’s gay and lesbian activists felt solidarity
with many on the left, including foreign worker and colonial immigrants.
This letter from the editors also represented the COC’s newly developed
“five-year plan” (published the month prior), which began by acknowl-
edging that the “discrimination of homosexuals did not stand on its own,
but was connected to the discrimination of other groups in our society,
such as women, Surinamese, guest-workers, etc.”40
Gay men and lesbians made successful strides in changing the poli-
tical and social attitude toward homosexuality. In 1974, Dutch policy
changed to allow gays and lesbians into the military. Police received
training on gay issues, including tolerating and even protecting cruising
CONTACT ADS IN THE 1960S 185
in parks. In 1976, Danish gay men achieved legal parity regarding age-
of-consent laws. The acceptance of homosexuals in the Netherlands
and Denmark in the 1970s was a radical break from the post-war
gender and sexual norms—norms which themselves took centuries to
build—and socio-political gains in the 1970s had a lasting impact on
the decades that followed.
As this brief history shows, European sexual (and gender) norms have
never been static and must be understood in relation to long histories of
industrialization, imperialism, psychiatry and secularization. Those who
invoke “tolerance” as a feature of a national character must historicize
gay/lesbian (and women’s) emancipation in relation to the periodic out-
bursts of police, church, medical, middle-class, and colonial official disdain
for sexual (and gender) non-conformity.
CONTACT ADS IN THE 1960S

“White” People’s Contact Ads
Beyond references to blue eyes or blond hair, the vast majority of
“ethnic Dutch” and “ethnic Danes” did not include any reference to
racial background or skin color, beyond the occasional reference to
dark or fair coloring. Unlike their contemporaries in the United
States,41 Dutch and Danish men and women did not (yet) identify
“white” skin color as a basic identifying characteristic. Men and
women referred to themselves as “dark” (donker in Dutch, mørk in
Danish), but this was not (yet) a euphemism for having a “non-white”
background. Those who identified their nationality were usually for-
eigners from Western Europe (e.g. Germans, Brits, French, Swedes,
Norwegians). Identifying one’s national background was synonymous
with being a foreigner, and not usually with having a minority ethnic
background.
Dutch men and women occasionally made reference to religion in the
1960s (though not Danes): a small handful identified as “prot.”42
(Protestant), “r.k.”43 (Roman Catholic), or Jewish.44 There was even
one “prac[ticing] prot[estant]” who sought a “pract[icing] r[oman].
c[atholic]” man who shared his interest in church music and culture.45
Yet overall, religious/pillar identification in contact ads was uncommon in
the 1960s, during this period of rapid secularization.
Fig. 7.1 Six schakels (links, or contact ads) in a Dutch journal, including a
German male looking to visit the Netherlands, a woman looking for a girlfriend
near Utrecht, a French hairdresser seeking a summer job, and the young
Moroccan’s post that introduced this chapter
SEK (May 1977). Permission to reprint the image from the COC Nederland and the
International Gay and Lesbian Information Center (IHLIA), Amsterdam.
Posts by and for Ethnic Minorities

Despite labor migration booms, there were very few (if any) posts from
Moroccans, Turks, or Pakistanis in the 1960s. However, there were a small
handful of ethnic minorities and non-“Western” immigrants posting in both
the Netherlands and Denmark, even in the 1960s. Indonesian/Indo-Dutch
were the most prominent ethnic minority groups in Dutch (and even some
Danish) homophile periodicals. While most of them probably had origins in
Indonesia or the Netherlands, they showed mobility—or the desire to move—
throughout Western Europe. Although many “repatriates” from Indonesia
were “white,” most had some mixed background (Chapter 2); the fact that the
men in the following ads identified as “indische” (roughly “Indonesian” or
“Indo-Dutch”) and Indonesian (in English) likely meant that they were
“visible minorities” in European settings. Consider the following ads:
[in English, 1966] THE HAGUE, HOLLAND: Indonesian boy living in

Holland seeks a masculine friend for true and honest relationship.46
[in Dutch, 1967] Indonesian young man, 31 years, seeks friend in southeast
Netherlands, under 45 years old.47
[in Danish, 1965] Indonesian, now living in Berlin . . . wishes to meet with
young men from Scandinavia/Germany, first for correspondence and maybe
later a lasting friendship . . . Write in English or German. . . . 48
From The Hague to (perhaps) Limburg to Berlin, these three posts show
that Indonesian men acquired various homophile periodicals across the
continent.49 While the 1967 post came from a COC periodical, the 1966
and 1965 posts were in two different independent Danish periodicals. The
1965 post was surprisingly in Danish, but he asked for correspondence in
English or German; thus, he likely had a Danish contact translate his ad for
him, as other international posts were generally in English.
Post-colonial migrants in the Netherlands often had vibrant commu-
nities in big cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. Yet
the 1967 post came from the Southeast Netherlands, an area more often
associated with Catholic traditions than with multiethnic communities.
The man, born in 1935 or 1936, was either among the 300,000 who
immigrated to the Netherlands after the Indonesian National Revolution,
or was born into a family that immigrated prior to World War II, and thus
he was raised entirely in the Netherlands.
In the 1960s, some “ethnic” Dutch and Danes sought to identify
themselves as open-minded regarding the race or ethnicity of their
partner. Some of this influence may have come from reading ads by those
who lived in more multicultural areas or outside of the “West,” such as the
Englishman in Thailand who wrote, “Any country, any race welcome.”50
Other readers might have noticed the scattered posts from Indonesians
and other ethnic minorities in Western Europe, and wanted to show their
openness, such as the Dutchman in the small eastern town of Borculo in
1967 who emphasized that “religion or race [was] unimportant”51 or the
Dane who wrote in 1964 that “race/skin color not important, prefer
handicapped.”52
One of the few 1960s ads in which a Dutchman used the term white
(blank) was in order to emphasize his openness to (or interest in) people of
color, for example:
[in Dutch, 1967] SOUTH-LIMBURGER: Sporty young man, seeking

smooth friend, white or brown, 21–30 years, to build a friendship
together.53
Here he addressed “brown” readers in general, and likely used the term as
an umbrella for people of color. But much more often, Dutch readers
posted their preference for non-white partners with specific nationalities,
which showed their knowledge of the various immigrant communities in
the Netherlands at the time. Consider the following five examples (all in
Dutch):
[1967] What Moroccan, Spaniard, Turk, or Negro would like a sincere

friendship with a Netherlander? Every letter will be answered. In the south
of the country.54
[1967] . . . Surinamese also welcome.55
[1969] . . . Surinamese preferred.56
[1969] . . . seeking darker type (e.g. Indo) . . . 57
[1969] 40s . . . vacant housing . . . Turkish, Surinamese, black perfectly
acceptable . . . prefer to live together.58
The first Dutchmen’s references to specific “guest worker” nationalities—

Moroccan, Spanish, Turkish—shows familiarity with the labor-sending
countries from which the Netherlands was recruiting. Gay men were
curious to get to know their new neighbors, and hoped that some might
be reading the gay journal, even if their Dutch language abilities were
poor. (Elsewhere, two men posted for Spanish lessons, perhaps also
hoping for a foreign worker’s response.59) The references to (post)colo-

nial nationalities—Indo(nesian), Surinamese—also shows a knowledge of
and interest in specific immigrant communities.
Yet, although these posts show that reference to nationality was the
common way to convey racial difference, a few posts used non-nationality
terms. In both the Netherlands and Denmark, some used the term “neger”
(Negro). This term, when used in a Dutch-language post, probably tar-
geted Surinamese and Antillean readers; but in Denmark, the term might
have targeted tourists. Elsewhere in the 1960s, Danes also spoke generally
about their interest in “coloured”60 men or “foreigners”,61 in general
without reference to specific nationalities.
But it is unwise to lump together those who portrayed themselves as
unbiased with regard to race and desire, and those who specifically eroti-
cized a member of another racial/national group. For the former, people
of color served as fellow activists; but for the latter, they may have served as
“exotic” figures of fantasy. For some, it was both: the Dutchman who, in
1967, sought a Moroccan, Spanish, Turkish, or black partner might have
felt a solidarity with immigrant struggles, in addition to an erotic attrac-
tion founded in the fantasy of an exotic other. His reference to Moroccan
and Turkish men showed his awareness of guest worker communities in
the Netherlands; yet the post as a whole illustrates his general fantasy for
sex with a foreign-born, brown-skinned lover, regardless of their particular
struggles in the Netherlands. Scholars who seek to elaborate on Orientalist
fantasy using theories of Edward Said or Joseph Massad would conclude
that racial fetishization does little to hinder structural inequality.62
Gay men’s depictions of the “exotic” racial Other are a bit awkward
to unpack; throughout many of these gay publications, one finds erotic
photos and stories depicting African, African-American, Arab, and East
Asian men, among others, with various stereotypes associated with
their sexual personalities, positions, or endowments (see Fig. 7.3 later
in this chapter). These sexualized depictions of the racial Other are not
unique to gay men: in Part I, we saw various depictions of the Other,
whether the “cheap blonde women” of Europe, or the “fresh for-
eigner” at the dance club. But since many gay publications elided
their “travel stories” with pornography, the discussions and depictions
of “non-Western” men (and/or men of color in the “West”) can be
read as highly objectifying and problematic. The simultaneous erotifi-
cation and exotification of the racial/cultural Other—what some his-
torians have called the “sexotic”—can become a popular trope that
negatively affects the lived experiences of people of color and immi-

grants in Europe regardless of sexual orientation.63
The men of color who modeled for these 1960s publications were almost
always photographed by French, British, or American agencies that then
distributed the prints worldwide, according to the photo credits. The Danish
publication Coq interviewed French pornographer Jean Daniel Cadinot,
from whom they purchased photographs, and Cadinot remarked that two
of his most recent films featured black men. Cadinot scouted these models
and others “on my trips in France and internationally, on the streets, in clubs,
at train stations. I speak with them . . . most are not shocked.”64 Yet in the
magazines, many of the photo sets show the men alone, so there is no
indication that the men engaged in sex with other men, on or off camera.
In Denmark, there were fewer ethnic minorities in gay/lesbian circles
in the 1960s. The sporadic “non-white” people who posted in Danish
periodicals in the 1960s tended to be (potential) tourists, such as the
following two examples:
[in English, 1966] USA: American negro, 36, ex-army lightweight prize-
fighting, visiting Scandinavia every summer, likes docile Danes and shy
Swedes, would like to hear from more. Object: correspondence in winter,
meetings in summer. Age not important, enjoyment of life is. Please write
with photo.65
[in English, 1967] Japanese boy, 22 years . . . planning to visit Scandinavia
and Germany . . . recently I became deaf. Aspiring to contact with gentle
man over 45 in Europe who is physically handicapped and understands
me.66
The man from the U.S. identified by nationality and race (American
negro), as was customary among U.S.-based gays and lesbians; the
Japanese writer identified by nationality, as was common amongst foreign
Europeans as well. Both of these posts asked not only for correspondence,
but also to meet with their Scandinavian contacts during an upcoming visit
to Europe. The American implied that he sought not only a sexual con-
tact, but also a short-term relationship with someone with whom he might
even reside for the summer. The young Japanese man implied that he
sought an emotional bond, and perhaps desired to relocate permanently
for the right Dane. International correspondence via gay/lesbian contact
ads likely resulted in numerous short- and long-term relationships and
residences in the Netherlands, Denmark, and across the world; these two
posts blurred the lines between platonic, romantic/erotic, and logistical,

and illustrated how “social media” could be used for international corre-
spondence, travel, and even migration.
Blurred Lines: Romance, Housing, Employment, and Immigration

Around 30% of the COC contact advertisements related to housing or
employment: half offering, half seeking; and in Panblad, these ads were
closer to 20%.67 Sometimes the ads blurred housing/employment and
prolonged relationships, especially when older men offered free housing to
younger men who were willing to help with housework.68 Consider the
following ads that offered jobs and/or housing:
[in Dutch, 1965] Single woman, 27 years old, seeks a GIRLFRIEND. I am

working inside at a snackbar. Who is inclined to work with me and to build a
future? Cozy home in the south of the country.69
[in Dutch, 1966] What petite, darker young man will write to a man in his
50s, quiet and domestic, with vacant housing [vrije woning] with garden in
Scheveningen? Eventually living together.70
The Dutch woman here offers not only employment at a snack bar, but
also the possibility of building a stable and loving relationship; the
Dutch man offers not only vacant housing—perhaps at no cost to the
younger, darker man—but also the possibility of a romantic attach-
ment. Although these housing and employment offers were not secure
(i.e. they might have ended when the romance ended), and although
the power dynamic between partners was unequal, these opportunities
were not necessarily more unattractive than more traditional job or
housing prospects.
Those seeking jobs also posted ads that implied migration: a man in
Germany posted for “work in Rotterdam,”71 and a Dutchman asked for
employment leads “in and out of the country.”72 These show that
employment ads not only blurred with romance, but also facilitated inter-
nal and international migration.
Finally, men and women were also willing to open their homes to tourists:
“We aren’t a hotel, but have a sleep location on Utrechtsedwarsstraat,”
one Dutch post began.73 These posts would have attracted international
readers—such as the aforementioned men from the U.S. and Japan—who
sought contacts abroad before travel. Across the world, we have several
examples: a man in the Faroe Islands offered to host “young men who want
to see the N[orth] Atlantic”74; an Englishman in Spain asked readers to visit
him “whenever you want”75; a man in Turkey said that those who were
interested in bondage and uniforms were welcome “to come and live with
me here on the mediterranean as soon as you can”;76 and an Italian couple
desired to meet “men, also negroes” who were welcome to “be our guest
when visiting Rome.”77
Related, Dutch/Danish men and women also posted contact ads
looking for travel companions, most often to Mediteranean countries
like Spain,78 Morocco or North Africa in general,79 Turkey,80 and
Greece.81 In sum: it was not uncommon for one post to seek/offer a
mix of friendship, romance/sex, and/or logistics (e.g. employment, lod-
ging, agenda-planning) to those seeking to travel, and perhaps even
recolate, internationally.
CONTACT ADS IN THE 1970S

Regarding ethnic/racial identification, there were many continuities with
the language of the 1960s: white men and women in Denmark and the
Netherlands continued to omit references to their own race, religion, or
ethnic background, as they felt that Caucasian, Christian, secular, Dutch
or Danish were redundant when posting in Dutch or Danish in these
publications. But there were some changes to the types of ads overall: the
introduction of legal hardcore pornographic magazines meant that some
periodicals (and their contact ads) were now geared mainly to gay/bi men
and not lesbian women. In the Danish magazine Coq especially, new
sexual terms and identities were printed: pervert, sex slave, rubber slave,
“brutal cock with cockring,” and so forth.
For this analysis, a notable difference between contact ads from the
1960s and the 1970s is the increase in the number of ads by and for ethnic
minorities in Western Europe, and by and for readers living outside the
“Western” world. According to my database of 500 contact ads from
COC publications, about 2% of the men who posted “romance” ads
from within the Netherlands were ethnic minorities; and about 5% of
Dutch men posted specifically for men of color, or specified, “skin color
not important.”82 According to my database of 250 contact ads from
Panblad, three men and one woman showed an openness to, or preference
for, ethnic minorities (i.e. about 2% of “romance” ads); and at least one
post came from a “non-white” immigrant living in Denmark in the 1970s.
In both the Netherlands and Denmark, men were much more likely than
women to post with reference to their own ethnicity, skin color, or nation-
ality. However, there were a small handful of women who posted from
outside “the West” (e.g. Suriname83) or who said that characteristics like
“nationality” were unimportant.84 Further research should uncover more
examples of international and interracial relationships among women seek-
ing women, and among trans and gender non-conforming people.
Posts by Ethnic Minorities in the Netherlands, Denmark,

and the (Former) Dutch Colonies
In the 1970s, Indonesian men continued to be prominent contributors to
various gay periodicals in and outside of the Netherlands. Some of these
posts were quite short, such as the following:
[in Dutch, 1976] Indon[esian]. y[ou]ng m[ale]. seeks acquaintance w[ith]

man 25–60, s[end]. w[ith]. ph[oto].85
However, in the post that became this chapter’s title—written in French,

and posted in a Danish journal in 1970—the young Indonesian provided
more personal information, in the hope that an extended social network of
gay men—specifically readers of the Danish erotic magazine Eos—could
help him relocate from his small village (Santpoort) to France.
Some posts came from those still living in the former Dutch colony;
thus their posts must be contextualized within not only the history of
homo-emancipation, but also the history of post-colonial migration. In
1971, a young man living in Indonesia posted in Dutch for correspon-
dence friends in the Netherlands.86 It might first seem unusual that this
Indonesian would still have close connections to the Netherlands in 1971,
as Indonesians eligible to migrate to the Netherlands did so mostly in the
late 1940s. But this man’s potential migration should be contextualized
with the regime changes of the late 1960s, including the mass murders of
Indonesian communists, and the rise to power of Suharto. In this period,
Indonesians who had extended social networks in the Netherlands may
have looked there as a place to seek protection. Also, later in the decade,
we find the following:
[in English, 1979] Indonesia, boy 25 student, likes to get some friends
17–28. Hobbys: stamps, postcards, sports, music, film, letter- writing,
reading, learning about other countries and foreign languages and sex and
pornography.87
It is curious how these two young men would have got hold of the COC
periodical: either through a network in Indonesia of gay-identified men, or
through Dutch tourists who identified as gay and introduced them to the
“liberation” movement in the Netherlands. They used the COC periodical
to correspond with its readers in the hope of expanding their international
network.
The following men and women in the Dutch Caribbean placed ads in
COC periodicals during a period of intense migration to the Netherlands:
[in Dutch, 1971; repeated in 1972] 20 year old guy in Paramaribo,

Suriname, would like to corresponded with peers around the same age in
the Netherlands.88
[in Dutch, 1974] Young woman, studying at the pedagogical academy [ped.
akademie] in Aruba seeks a correspondence [girl]friend [vriendin].89
[in Dutch, 1976] Suriname: seeking a lonely, lesbian friend for correspon-
dence. I am a nurse, 24 years old, quite cheerful in character and can be very
sweet. Hobbies reading and writing.
The young man knew that the Netherlands was one country to which he
could legally and relatively easily migrate; he also knew about the imminent
regime change in Suriname, which many Surinamese people feared. The
nurse merely stated that she wanted correspondence, but she also knew that
the Netherlands was a place where many of her peers and family were
moving, a country that boasted education and job opportunities. In order
to acquire copies of the COC periodical, all three relied on international
social networks: they became acquainted with someone from Suriname/
Aruba (or the Netherlands) with whom they could share their sexual
inclinations, someone who had connections to the homo-emancipation
movement in the Netherlands. They expanded their social networks of
gay/lesbian-identified peers, so as to be welcomed to the Netherlands.
Some who posted with their ethnicity/nationality did not list their loca-
tion, so it is impossible to ascertain if they posted from the Netherlands or
elsewhere:
[in Dutch, 1975] Young man, 26 years old, Surinamese seeks an effeminate
correspondence friend between the ages of 26–36 years . . . 90
Also ambiguous were those ads by men who identified as being of a “darker
type,”91 as having a “darker appearance,” or—in at least one case—as a
“black-haired, exotic type.”92 There was also in the Netherlands an “Italian
Gay, studying medicine, 21 years old” who might have had “guest worker”
connections.93 Also, a few Jewish men and women posted in COC period-
icals, as in the 1960s.94
In Denmark, there were fewer posts from immigrants; but this
young man posted in 1970, with the relatively common descriptor of
“lonely”:
[in English, 1970] COPENHAGEN, DK: Lonely young man from Asia,
slim, discret [sic] and sincere, resident in Copenhagen, seeks good-looking
friends in Europe. Correspondence also welcomed. Replies assured. Photos
please. Would also like weekend job for pasttime, perhaps as model. Have
good face and profile.95
Though finding a new source of financial support was not crucial for his
residence in Denmark, he hoped that the Danish publication could link
him to an employer. But more than money, he desired a friend to placate
his loneliness, or perhaps some free portraits to launch a modeling career.
Also from Denmark was this peculiar ad:
[in transliteration from Hebrew, 1977] Israeli men in their twenties can stay
with me for a few days. Write and attach photo.96
This man had either immigrated from Israel, was part of Denmark’s small
Jewish post-war community, or just had an academic interest in Hebrew
and desired to communicate with Israelis. Whatever his background, he
placed this ad in a pornographic journal that was otherwise entirely written
in Danish in the hope that it might be exported to Israel or otherwise
distributed to Hebrew speakers. Indeed, it was not a far-fetched idea that
copies of this Danish gay magazine would have reached Israel, as the next
sections show.
Other Posts by Men of Color in and Outside of Northwest Europe

Although Dutch and Danish periodicals were generally published in their
native languages, which very few non-native readers could understand
(outside of BeNeLux, Scandinavia, and their former or current overseas
territories), international readers managed to get a hold of these period-

icals from across the world, and used them to correspond with gay men
and lesbians in the Netherlands and Denmark. While most posts in the
COC/F1948 periodicals came from “locals,” approximately 10% of the
COC’s advertisements (1965–1979) were submitted by someone living
outside the Netherlands, and approximately 16% of the F1948’s adver-
tisements (1971–1977) came from someone outside of Scandinavia. In
the more pornographic journal Eos, over half of the (hundreds of) contact
ads were placed from outside Scandinavia, though most often from West
Germany. As in the 1960s, international readers sought correspondence,
and often someone with whom to visit and stay around the world.
International tourism was indeed popular among the Dutch and Danes
of means, and travel guides geared specifically at gay men and lesbians
proliferated in the 1970s in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the
United States.97 Posts discussing international travel continued to
abound. It is perhaps due to this international tourism that so many
contact ads came from outside “the West” despite being printed in
Dutch- and Danish-language journals. These gay- and lesbian-identified
tourists spread knowledge about European gay/lesbian movements, cul-
tures, lifestyles, and periodicals, albeit discreetly, to those they met in
public spaces, or to those who served them in hotels and cafés. We will
start with some correspondence ads “post marked” from the multicultural
U.K. and U.S.:
[in English, 1970] ENGLAND: Young coloured male 23 seeks mascu-

line friend, wealthy perhaps, for permanent companion[;] genuine, sin-
cere replies please. Will travel after six months to live in country of his
choice.98
[in English, 1977] ENGLAND: I am a flipine [sic] student in London and I
am 25 years old, 6 ft and I have plans to travel to Scandinavia. I am looking
for someone who would like to correspond with me.99
[in English, 1979] Attractive young, 26 Iranian guy seeks young good
looking guys, for friendship and hot meetings in New York or
Amsterdam/Copenhagen in March 1980. Please write with photo, descrip-
tion to: Ali, [full address], New York, 10003 USA.100
All of the men sought someone to meet when visiting Europe. But the
first man, like the man whose post follows, sought someone with
whom he might eventually live and/or move:
[in English, 1972] LOS ANGELES: If you are coming to L.A. this year, a
passive black male 26 wants to meet you . . . and wants a permanent relation-
ship with one person. Write: MORY, [full address], Los Angeles, California—
90059, USA.101
Both of the U.S. Americans above—like men and women elsewhere102—

included their full addresses in the United States, which showed their trust
in the readership of these gay periodicals. These ads also show a variety of
ways that people of color self-identified in other heterogeneous contexts,
including by nationality (i.e. Filipino, Iranian) and by race (i.e. coloured,
black). And of course, some ethnic minorities eschewed references to
nationality, race, or skin color altogether.
While a majority of international posts came from Western Europe and
North America, there were also posts from “non-Western” countries that
did not have colonial ties to the Netherlands or Denmark. Posts in various
Danish periodicals came from (Lyubljana) Yugoslavia,103 Ceylon,104
Brazil (with full name and full address),105 and many other places, includ-
ing Kenya:
[in English, 1972] EUROPE/KENYA: Afro-arab, 21/168/60 black and

golden brown, wants to get in touch with friend of good will for assistance
in travelling to Europe and getting settled there. Good looking, pleasant
personality, fluent English, experience in hotels and restaurants. Meeting
also in Kenya if possible.106
In 1972 and 1973, this Kenyan man posted at least three other ads in the
Danish journal Panblad,107 so perhaps he did not have much luck finding
an ideal match; he may have also been the man who posted an ad from
Kenya in a Dutch publication in 1975.108 But his post is a great example
of the “blurred line” between a post for international correspondence,
friendship/romance, and logistics, including help with job seeking,
finances, and ultimately migration. He was more explicit with his desire
to come to Europe than the Yugoslavian and Brazilian, who merely hinted
at their interest in “traveling.”
Posts in Dutch periodicals also beg questions as to how the readers got
hold of the obscure gay/lesbian publication:
[in Dutch, 1971] Lawrence [last name and address removed] and Stewart
[last name and address removed] in Singapore—respectively 22 and 29 years
old—would like to correspond with Dutch men between 20 and 45 years

old. Send letters in English svp [please] with photo.109
Dutch tourists traveling to Singapore must have engaged with these men,
sexually or otherwise, and introduced the COC and its publication.
Lawrence and Stewart relied on their Dutch acquaintances to translate (or
even submit) their personal ads, with the hope of expanding their social
network to gay-identified men in the Netherlands. It is also possible that
Lawrence was the twenty-two-year-old who posted in a Danish magazine
that same year (in English) offering “his escort services to tourists” travel-
ling to “romantic Singapore,” where “a swinging good time awaits you.”110
Contact ads like these show that same-sex-desiring men and women
internationally looked to gay capitals like Amsterdam and Copenhagen to
find gay/lesbian social networks that could serve the practical purpose of
assisting recent arrivals with integrating into the host society. For these
immigrants, practical details of migration overlapped with romance,
desire, and sexuality. Finally, it should be noted that few (if any) contact
ads in the 1960s–70s in the Netherlands or Denmark discouraged inter-
national correspondence.
Posts for Ethnic Minorities

In the 1970s, there continued to be posts by those who welcomed people
of color as potential lovers and/or fellow activists. In the Netherlands,
(mostly) men used phrases like “skin color not important.”111 In
Denmark, men and women used phrases such as “race is secondary,”112
“color is secondary”,113 or “nationality is secondary”114 to other charac-
teristics, as well as “nationality, race irrelevant.”115 Other examples of
“open-minded” readers include the following:
[in Danish, 1970] COPENHAGEN: 29 year old boy, who can give you
everything you’re seeking . . . Regardless of nationality or skin color, pick up
the pen [and write] . . . 116
[in English, 1971] COPENHAGEN, DK: Students from abroad and guest
workers wanted by a Dane in his mid thirties, as penpals and friends.117
The first post, in Danish, acknowledged that the readership of the

Scandinavian-language journal might have included people of color. The
second post, in English, targeted new immigrants to Denmark who might

have got hold of the magazine and sought new contacts.
But some posts for men of color read more as a tendency toward a
“sexotic” association between the racial/cultural Other, and presumed
sexual characteristics, such as the following:
[in English, 1974] SEALAND: I am a 18 year old boy, who wants sincere
friendship with a negro. I am honest and reliable, 180 tall, slim, dark blond
hair. You should not be tough and smart but be tender and a bit romantic.
Please enclose photo. Meet you in Copenhagen?118
[in English, 1976] COPENHAGEN: Two business men, 53 and 56, look-
ing for friendship with two japanese boys (good looking), rather a bit
heavy . . . 119
The presumption that the “negro” reader might be “tough and smart”
(i.e. rude) seems a bit problematic, but these personality traits might not
relate to the desired man’s race. In the second ad, the older men seem
to associate Japanese men with age-structured relationships. As men-
tioned before, these associations cannot be untied from the erotic
imagery of men of color that proliferated in some of these journals,
including exotic (and likely fictionalized) “travel reports” about global
sexual cultures.
Finally, it should be noted that few (if any) contact ads in the 1960s–70s
in the Netherlands or Denmark discouraged correspondence from people of
specific ethnic/racial backgrounds.
Blurred Lines, Continued

A potential immigrant’s ability to enter another country and integrate
into its society cannot be untied from economic opportunities and avail-
able housing in the host country, and often a local social network. The
1970s contact advertisements continued to illustrate that gay and lesbian
social networks could be used to secure jobs and housing. We have
already seen that the young Indonesian man in the Netherlands hoped
that a Danish reader might find him a job in Paris so that he could flee his
parents, or that the Asian newcomer in Copenhagen sought part-time
work while in Denmark. There are several other examples: in 1975, a
Mexican teacher in Lancashire (England) wrote to Panblad hoping that a
Dane could find him a job120; in 1976, a Portuguese director of a gay
rights group posted (in Danish) on behalf of a twenty-one-year-old

“with bartender and pharmacy experience, who would like a job in
Denmark.”121 In addition, the following two men in the Netherlands
posted on behalf of men abroad who wanted help immigrating to
Europe:
[in Dutch, 1974] Cuban artist (dancer-painter) wants to come to Europe,

but it is impossible with Cuban money. Who is willing to help?
Correspondence in Spanish or English. He asks for utmost discretion . . . 122
[in Dutch, 1977] My African friend wants to come to Amsterdam. I have
searched for a job for him, without result. He must support his family. He
speaks English, French, and a bit of Dutch. Education level MAVO/HAVO
[i.e. secondary123]. Who can offer or help me find a job?124
These ads suggest that some men and women relied on international gay/
lesbian social networks for logistical assistance with the goal of interna-
tional migration. But the following post adds an extra element:
[In English, 1977] Homoboy, 22, very nice, now living in France but wants
to live in Holland, speaks French and English very well. Looks for somebody
very nice, blond . . . to give him a job (touristic, pub. relation F.I.) and to
share lonely moments physically and spiritually.125
In this final case, the young man explicitly expressed a willingness to blur
the lines between a logistical and sexual contact, who would ultimately
assist with his international migration.
As for housing, Dutch and Danes continued to offer housing, often as
paid rentals, but sometimes for free. For potential migrants (also including
rural-to-urban migrants within the country), ads like these would be
particularly enticing:
[in English, 1971] Copenhagen Area, DK. Holidays near Copenhagen in

my house in beautiful nature offered to slender men from any country and of
any colour. I am a portrait painter. Would you like to have your own
portrait? I am tall, slender and very masculine.126
[in Dutch, 1971] Which Indonesian [indische] or Surinamese young man
wants to be my steady boyfriend? I will be honest and sincere to you. I’ll give
you all the love and be faithful. Want potentially to have a house
together.127
Although citizenship rights did not extend to bi-national, same-sex

couples in the 1960s and 1970s,128 potentially free housing and eco-
nomic support were appealing to those looking to relocate. In the
Dutch post, the man desired not only to act on an erotic desire for a
sex partner from a former Dutch colony, but also sought a long-term
emotional connection with this man. Separately, it is also noteworthy
that this man—and many others—expressed his desire for a durable
relationship during this “radical” decade.
Additionally, a few international ads offered jobs and/or housing; most
notably, one man in Beirut, Lebanon, sought a young man to “collabo-
rate” with the management of his “selective” nightclub and to “live with”
him.129
On (the Absence of) Foreign Workers

It is statistically likely that the young Moroccan man whose post intro-
duced this chapter represented a member of the “guest worker” group.130
Born in 1954 or early 1955, this man would have been on the younger
end of those recruited prior to 1973. He could have entered the
Netherlands at the age of eighteen with an industrial work contract, and
lived in immigrant housing or with a host family. Or he could have been
the child of a labor recruit who reunited with his family in the Netherlands
as a teenager, and was thus on the older end of “generation 1.5.” Like the
two men in Singapore, he posted in Dutch, but asked for correspondence
in another language (French, Spanish, Arabic); thus, he had Dutch
acquaintances who helped translate and submit his post.
Although personal ads are the central source for this analysis, one
COC issue contained an interview with “Abdou,” a young Moroccan
who had migrated to the Netherlands in 1978 on account of his homo-
sexuality; he knew he could have married a woman, but he expressed that
this was not the life he desired.131 He met his first Dutch boyfriend
almost immediately upon arrival in Amsterdam; Abdou lived with him
for a few months, used his car, and met his friends before ultimately
feeling an emotional coldness that he attributed to cultural difference.
Abdou, like the man who wrote to the COC in 1977, interacted with
various people who were active within the Dutch gay “scene” and/or
liberation movement, and sought to expand his network with both
romantic and platonic relationships. (Fig. 7.2)
Fig. 7.2 Interview by Klaas Breunissen with “Abdou,” who came to the
Netherlands in 1978 on account of his sexuality, “to be free.” The title means,
“Far from Morocco, I feel a stranger here”; caption to the photo: “Moroccan with
his Dutch friend”
Permission to reprint the image from the COC Nederland and the International Gay and
Lesbian Information Center (IHLIA), Amsterdam.132
CONTACT ADS FROM THE 1980S: OBSERVATIONS

FROM DE GAY KRANT
The first section on the 1960s established some contact-ad social practices
related to migration and ethnicity: the blurring of (platonic, romantic,
sexual, and logistical) posts, the modes of self-identification as a (poten-
tial) immigrant or person of color, and the various (and at times proble-
matic) ways of addressing racial-sexual preferences. The second section on
the 1970s looked at these practices in-depth, during a decade when gay/
lesbian (and women’s) liberation activism radicalized, the possibilities for
inter-ethnic relationships increased, and international correspondence
blossomed. This final section looks briefly at the increasingly multicultural
CONTACT ADS FROM THE 1980S: OBSERVATIONS FROM DE GAY KRANT 203
1980s, and focuses on a particular newspaper geared largely (but not

exclusively) at gay men in the Netherlands, De Gay Krant, which was
not linked to an activist organization.133 Though this section focuses only
on men-seeking-men in the Netherlands, it briefly addresses some conti-
nuities and differences with the ads discussed previously.
In the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in Western Europe, the
content of gay/lesbian personal ads changed most noticeably with regard
to the language of “safe sex” and “monogamous relationships,” which
stood out compared to the occasional posts for those seeking complete
fidelity in the 1970s.134 Alongside contact ads in 1986, one started to see
announcements geared at “sero-positive” (i.e. HIV+) people, such as
meeting groups and helplines.135 By 1989, nearly one-third of men’s
romance ads in the De Gay Krant specified safe sex (i.e. “safe fun,”
“100% safe,” “sex with condom or massage”) or monogamy.136 A few
men disclosed their status as HIV-positive. Among the miscellaneous ads,
one man advertised his services as an “AIDS speaker,” and a gay bar on
Kerkstraat announced the party “Amsterdam Jacks,” a mutual masturba-
tion (i.e. safe sex) party.137
With regard to ethnic diversity, the 1980s contact ads showed not only
an increase in the volume of posts by ethnic minorities in the Netherlands,
but also a greater variety of immigrant backgrounds. Indonesian/Indo-
Dutch men continued to be the most prominent ethnic minority to post,
and they identified with a variety of terms: “Indisch type,” “indonesische,138
“Indonesian [in English],”139 “from Indonesia,140 “Indischman”,141
“Ch. Ind.”142 (i.e. Chinese Indonesian), and “Ind.”.143 The Indonesian
men in these posts ranged in age from twenty-one to fifty, and posted from
within and around the greater metropolitan areas of Amsterdam, Haarlem,
and The Hague. One young man was a student at the University of
Amsterdam, and (writing in English) offered his services with “Bahasa
Indonesia courses,” (i.e. courses in Indonesia’s official language), transla-
tion, and rijstaffel (i.e. traditional Indonesian-Dutch) cooking. A fifty-year-
old (b. circa 1935) described himself as a “homo socius” with broad social
and cultural interests, and sought a “soortgenoot,” i.e. someone of his same
cultural “species.”
The 1980s also showed an increase in posts from immigrants from
Suriname and the Antilles, including the following: a young “Antillean”
man near The Hague who sought friends and “safe sex”144; an “Aruban/
Dutch” couple, age thirty-five/thirty-seven in the Rotterdam area, who
sought to increase their circle of friends145; a “Surinamese Hindustani”
near The Hague who sought acquaintances146; and a “Hindustani” man

with a curiosity for mud-wrestling.147 Additionally, several Chinese men
posted in Dutch, and could also have had colonial connections, whether to
Indonesia, Suriname, or the Antilles.148 One young Chinese man, who
sought a job in 1983, advertised not only his experience working in
restaurants and offices, but also his completion of the VWO matriculation
exam (which meant he had a high secondary diploma, and usually that he
was also fluent in Dutch).149
Yet while people with ethnic minority backgrounds used a variety of
markers to identify as such, people of white European descent remained
the unmarked norm. Only one “white” man (“in a sweatband”—it was
the’80s after all) posted for his missed connection, a “dark” man “with a
mustache” who he apparently met briefly in Amsterdam. Many contin-
ued to emphasize that “color,” “skin color/nationality,” “skin color or
disability,”150 “skin color and appearance,”151 and “skin color and age”
were unimportant.152 The 1980s also showed a proliferation of (prob-
ably white) men with preference for specific nationalities: one sought a
monogamous relationship with a “Thai, Indo, or Surinamese”153;
another sought “two Surinamese or Moroccans for a threesome”154;
and others sought “a nice Surinamese or Antillean”155; “a young man,
also Surinamese”156; a “manly friend, pref. Indo.”157; “Indonesian or
Japanese”158; “white or Indonesian”159; “Italian or Spanish”160;
“Hindustani, Chinese, or Japanese”161 and so forth. Others wrote
more generally on the topic of ethnic preference: “prefer darker, any
nationality”162; “Asians preferred”163; “prefer negro”164; “colored pre-
ferred;” and “coloreds welcome.”165 In the 1980s, the presence of gays
with immigrant backgrounds—and (white) men’s attention to ethnic
diversity in gay scenes—had never been higher.
Finally, international posts in Dutch (and Danish) publications con-
tinued to connect men across the world with potential visitors. An
Algerian man sought correspondence with young men in Amsterdam,
“and perhaps meeting,” and provided his name and post office box for
easy correspondence (“K. Asser, Annaba ALGERIA”).166 Several men
managed to acquire copies of De Gay Krant from across the Iron
Curtain, and invited readers to visit them in Hungary or Poland.167 A
young man in Thailand posted several times to offer his travel tips for
those visiting Phuket, including language instruction.168
In the 1960s–70s, it seemed that erotic photographs of men of color
were often imported from international pornographers, e.g. Cadinot.
RETURNING TO CONTACT ADS AS “SOCIAL MEDIA” 205
But in the 1980s, it was clear that some Dutch residents with immi-
grant backgrounds posed for erotic photographs. De Gay Krant pro-
filed erotic photographer “Fritz” in an article entitled, “My Most
Beautiful Models I Pick Up on the Street,” under which they published
a photograph of a brown-skinned, dark-eyed boy, artistically posed with
his genitals half-obscured; another young man of color appeared on the
next page, with the caption “an example of a beautiful male nude.”169
Fritz said that many of his models were not gay-identified, nor did their
modeling necessitate participating in sex. Dutch (and Danish) contact
ads from the 1960sto 80s confirm that amateur photographers offered
money to young men willing to pose, and these offers could have been
enticing to young newcomers seeking extra cash. However, while gay
journals continued to use images of men of color—often to attract
readers’ fantasies about “exotic” others—they might have found
Europeans to pose as “non-Western” men; this could have been the
case for Fig. 7.3, published on the cover of Gay Agenda in 1986, but
unfortunately no one active with this journal at the time could confirm
the model’s origin. Regardless, this Gay Agenda cover confirms that
the imagery of gay magazines in the 1960s–1980s depicted a diversity
of men as potential sexual partners and/or socio-political allies.
(Fig. 7.3)
RETURNING TO CONTACT ADS AS “SOCIAL MEDIA”

For decades prior to the advent of digital social media, lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender (or trans*) (LGBT) contact ads served as a form of
“social media” for same-sex-desiring people in the Netherlands, Denmark,
and around the world. Many individuals—even those who were “discreet”
about their orientation—were willing to (semi-)publicly post personal
details about themselves, their ideal mates, and their dreams. These ads
opened new spaces for communication about love, casual sex, friendship,
housing, employment, and legal advice, and facilitated correspondence
across both external borders (i.e. international communications) and
internal “borders” of class, age, ethnic community, or rural/urban spaces.
But there were many limitations to printed contact ads: before read-
ers posted or responded to an ad, they needed to pay for the concrete
copies of the journal, for their ad, for stamps (including international
stamps), and for photograph prints (if they desired a higher response
rate). Journals limited users by word count, and overall did not allow
Fig. 7.3 Orientalist fantasy in the gay press (1986)

Gay Agenda 12 (November 1986). Image used with permission from Arjan Kröner on behalf
of Alex Kröner, publisher of Gay Agenda in the 1980s.
RETURNING TO CONTACT ADS AS “SOCIAL MEDIA” 207
photographs.170 Users had to tolerate long wait times, and even lost
correspondences. Furthermore, those who were discreet and shared
their home with roommates, family, or a partner would need to corre-
spond through a post office box or alternative address. But as these ads
show, a diverse group of people was willing to post and correspond
using these contact ads.
The problematic aspects of racial “preference” or fetishization were
not discussed in these 1960s–80s publications. But those who posted ads
(in this extensive analysis) never explicitly prohibited any ethnic group
from contacting them, in contrast to current practices where users
experience discrimination in the form of racial-sexual exclusionary pre-
ferences (e.g. No Blacks, No Asians171) and intentionally racist online
messages.172 As this chapter has argued, the white men and women—
especially in activist periodicals—who desired to meet members of parti-
cular foreign communities, might have felt they were doing activist work
by incorporating underrepresented groups into the movement for gay
and lesbian liberation. In particular, those who wrote “skin color unim-
portant” attempted to show their familiarity with, interest in, and/or
solidarity with immigrants in Europe. Yet while no one posted “No
Blacks, No Asians” in the 1960s–80s, that does not mean that no one
behaved that way in practice (i.e. when corresponding by letter or
socializing in physical spaces).
Immigrants and people of color contributed in various ways to the
Dutch and Danish homophile, gay, and lesbian movements and “scenes”
of the late 1960s and 1970s: as consumers of publications, as contributors
to periodicals, as pen-pals, as lovers, as roommates, as co-workers. From
the 1960s through to the 1980s, their presence in the community
increased, even in self-avowedly “homogeneous” countries. Chapter 8
elaborates on how some of these actors experienced Dutch and Danish
society, how they participated in gay/lesbian subcultures, and how they
felt about activist organizations and events. The Dutch and Danish gay/
lesbian liberation movements—including their activist periodicals, erotic
magazines, activist pamphlets, and word-of-mouth stories—helped con-
tribute to the momentum of sexual liberation movements internationally.
The Dutch and (though less so) Danish movements thrived and radica-
lized in environments that were already multi-ethnic; and in both the
Netherlands and Denmark, the “scene” was not only made up of interna-
tional tourists and students, but also immigrants from (former) colonies,
labor-exporting countries, and war-torn regions around the world.
NOTES
1. Some of the Dutch empirical material, 1965–1983, and some of this
analysis was first published in Andrew D.J. Shield, “‘Suriname—Seeking
a Lonely, Lesbian Friend for Correspondence’: Immigration and Homo-
emancipation in the Netherlands, 1965–79,” History Workshop Journal,
78:1 (2014): 246–264.
2. Eos (Jan/Feb, 1970).
3. Pan 5 (1972). This same man posted two other times in this Danish journal:
Pan 5 (1973) and Pan 9 (1973).
4. SEK (August 1976).
5. SEK (May 1977).
6. Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú, Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S.
Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
2005); Keja Valens, Bill Johnson González, and Bradley S. Epps, Passing
Lines: Sexuality and Immigrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University,
2005).
7. H.G. Cocks, Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (London:
Random House Books, 2009), xi.
8. Sharif Mowlabocus, Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 15.
9. See for example, Ben Light, “Networked Masculinities and Social
Networking Sites: A Call for the Analysis of Men and Contemporary
Digital Media,” Masculinities and Social Change 2:3 (2013): 245–265, or
E. Cassidy, Gay Men, Social Media and Self-Presentation: Managing
Identities in Gaydar, Facebook and Beyond (PhD Dissertation, Brisbane,
Queensland University of Technology, 2013).
10. For another interesting use of (heterosexual) contact ads, see: Massimo
Perinelli, “Sex and the Radical Left, 1969–1972,” in After the History of
Sexuality: Germany Interventions, eds. Scott Spector, Dagmar Herzog, and
Helmut Puff (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 248–281.
11. These periodicals can be accessed as PDF files via the Internationaal homo
lesbisch informatiecentrum en archief (IHLIA) at the main branch of the
Amsterdam Public Library, the Netherlands.
12. The official publications of the Association of 1948 were Vennen (only
from 1949–1951), Forbundsnyt (1951–1963, which had contact ads),
and Panbladet (1953–2007, which had contact ads after 1971).
Independent publications included Vennen (1952–1970), Eos (1958–
1971), and Coq (1970s), the latter of which were pornographic after
the late 1960s. All of the above sources were available through the library
of LGBT Denmark, and/or by request at the Royal Library of
Copenhagen.
NOTES 209
13. The 207 romance ads, and forty-three housing/jobs/other ads, come from
two issues from every year 1971–77 (usually one in the Spring and one in
the Fall). Posts from Sweden and Norway were not included in this analysis.
14. De Gay Krant (August 1982).
15. There were perhaps more trans people who posted in Denmark than the
Netherlands. Vennen, for example, began to include a section
“Transvestitter” in December 1968. Pan had a handful of posts (e.g. April
1971, April 1976). In the Netherlands, someone who identified as “traves-
tiet” posted for housing in De Gay Krant (February 1985), and otherwise
people sometimes specified that they did not want a “travestie-type.”
16. e.g. De Schakel (April 1965, April 1966, April 1967, etc.)
17. Theo van der Meer, “Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex in the Early
Modern Period,” in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond
Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
For Britain: Randolph Trumbach, “Renaissance Sodomy, 1500–1700” and
“Modern Sodomy: The Origins of Modern Homosexuality, 1700–1800,”
in A Gay History of Britain, ed. Matt Cook (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
2007). For France: Jeffrey Merrick, Order and Disorder Under the Ancien
Régime (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
18. Wilhelm von Rosen, “A Short History of Gay Denmark 1613–1989: The
Rise and the Possibly Happy End of the Danish Homosexual,” Nordisk
Sexologi 12 (1994): 125–136.
19. That is, men could be “normal” if they had sex with women and—in the
“active” position—with (generally younger, adolescent) males. See
Trumbach in A Gay History of Britain (n 17).
20. For an exploration of these themes in the English context, see Randolph
Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and
Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic
Press, 1978). These “companionate marriages” were more egalitarian in
structure: they were based on love, rather than familial arrangements; they
emphasized maternal and paternal love for children, as well as shared house-
hold activities during leisure time; and the model shunned casual homo-
sexual encounters, promoting heterosexuality. On the term compulsory
heterosexuality, see also the poem by Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980).
21. Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the
Household Economy, 1650-the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
22. The Dutch “vice laws” of 1911 raised the homosexual age-of-consent to
twenty-one (rather than sixteen for heterosexuals); for the extensive history
of this and related laws: Gert Hekma and Theo van der Meer (eds.),
“Bewaar me voor de waanzin van het recht”: Homoseksualiteit en strafrecht
in Nederland [“Save me from the Madness of the Law”: Homosexuality and

Criminal Law in the Netherlands”] (Diemen: AMB, 2011). In Denmark, a
similar law rooted in the “seduction” theory passed in the early 1930s,
which raised the age of consent to eighteen for homosexuals (rather than
fifteen); and another law in the 1960s effectively raised it to twenty-one,
discussed later: Peter Edelberg, “The Long Sexual Revolution: The Police
and the New Gay Man,” in Sexual Revolutions, eds. Gert Hekma and Alaina
Giami (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
23. Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge,
2003), 198–202.
24. Ann Laura Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race,
and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Scott
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 217–218.
25. Aldrich (n 23), 198–202. The papers were De Ochtendpost and Java-Bode.
26. Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 53–54.
27. For the Netherlands and Denmark respectively, see: Theo van der Meer,
“Eugenic and Sexual Folklores and the Castration of Sex Offenders in the
Netherlands (1938–1968)” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part
C 39:2 (2008): 195–204; and Edelberg (n 22), 49.
28. The post-war “economic miracle” allowed more Dutch and Danish work-
ing-class men to adopt “companionate marriage” practices: working-class
men would spend more leisure time with wives and children (e.g. on car
trips to the countryside for picnics) rather than in homosocial venues (i.e.
drinking in pubs with other men); Peter Van Rooden, “The Strange Death
of Dutch Christendom,” in Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in
Honour of Hugh McLeod, eds. Callum Brown et al. (Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, 2010).
29. On women’s (sexual) independence during wartime and in the immediate
post-war years in Germany (and the sense of a dissolution, and then rebuild-
ing, of sexual order): Dagmar Herzog, “Sex and the Third Reich” and “The
Fragility of Heterosexuality,” in Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in
Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton University Press, 2005).
30. The rise in consumer culture during the post-war “miracle years” not only
encouraged some women to pursue paid work, but this consumerism also—
as Heineman showed for the case of post-war Germany—encouraged mid-
dle-class men, women, and couples to purchase sex-related products (e.g.
pessaries, lubricants, erotic photographs) through mail-order catalogues:
“By the time the media discovered a ‘sex wave’ in the early 1960s, mail-
order erotica firms had served half of all West German households, which
were progressing from recovery to plenty as the economic miracle finally
reached the working class”; Elizabeth D. Heineman, “The Economic
NOTES 211
Miracle in the Bedroom: Big Business and Sexual Consumption in

Reconstruction West Germany,” The Journal of Modern History 78:4
(December 2006): 846–877; here, 847.
31. See Chapter 2 of this book, and Peter Van Rooden, “Longterm Religious
Developments in the Netherlands, 1750–2000,” in The Decline of
Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, eds. Hugh McLeod et al.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
32. Gert Hekma, “Amsterdam,” in Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600,
ed. David Higgs (New York: Routledge, 1999), 82.
33. Wilhelm von Rosen and Peter Edelberg refer to the “Ugly Law” (1961–
1971) that targeted men who had sex with men under the age of twenty-one
based on the seduction principle. Technically, the law forbade “prostitu-
tion” with a male under the age of twenty-one, but the vice squads inter-
preted the law loosely and targeted anyone who sought sex with a male
under twenty-one, making the case that buying the younger man a drink was
equivalent to exchanging goods for sex. See von Rosen and Edelberg, ibid.
34. Hekma (n 32), 83–84.
35. While a number of internal events in the Netherlands and Denmark cata-
lyzed their radicalization (e.g. demonstrations and youth cultures surround-
ing 1968), it is also true that the COC and F1948 had their eye on the
Stonewall riots in New York City (1969), during which police clashed at a
gay bar on Christopher Street, and after which directly influenced the
founding of the “Gay Liberation Front” (1969) and the first pride march
in New York on Christopher Street (1970). A number of U.S. historians and
activists have challenged the prominence of Stonewall as the moment of
radical change (as in “pre-Stonewall” vs. “post-Stonewall” movements)—
myself included—but it is also true that this event did not go unnoticed in
Europe. The COC periodical mentioned the Stonewall riots in several issues
in the early 1970s (e.g. Sec, February 1971; Sik, April 1971; Sec, July 1972).
And the radical gay group in Copenhagen chose the Danish equivalent of
“Gay Liberation Front” as its name (in 1970), likely following the lead of
groups in the U.S.A., Canada, and U.K. That being said, this connection
should not be overemphasized, as local politics played a bigger role in the
radicalization of the Dutch and Danish gay movements. In West Germany,
for example, the radicalized gay group was unfamiliar with the Stonewall
riots; see Herzog (n 29), 264 and 347.
36. Hekma (n 32), 84.
37. Hekma and van der Meer (n 22).
38. von Rosen (n 18), 131.
39. Seq (February 1971). Emphasis added.
40. “Balance in the 2nd Year,” (February 1971). Emphasis added. In 1972, the
COC also offered a workgroup for gay Antilleans: Sec (February 1972).
41. See post from the “American negro” in this section: Eos (December 1966).
In the 1970s, U.S. Americans who wrote into these European papers
identified as “white” or “black” in several posts: Vennen (September
1970), Amsterdam Gayzette (Dec/Jan 1975/’76). In 1982, a Canadian
man posted with “Asian background” (De Gay Krant, August 1982).
42. Seq (January 1969). Also: “practicing (orthodox) protestant” in Schakel
(April 1966); “prot.-chr.” in De Schakel Krant (September 1967); and
one protestant-for-protestant in De Schakel (April 1965).
43. e.g. Schakelkrant (July/August 1968).
44. e.g. Schakel (April 1966).
45. Schakelkrant (September 1968)
46. Eos (September 1966). Note: Danish publication.
47. Schakelkrant, (April 1967).
48. Vennen (September 1965).
49. To be precise, the three posts above could have been from the same young
man; but my ethnographic work (Chapter 8) shows that Indonesians were
the most common ethnic minority group in the Dutch gay “scene” in the
1960s–70s; furthermore, two of my (Indonesian) interviewees lived in
Germany as young adults.
50. Eos (October 1969).
51. Schakelkrant (September 1967): “Geloof of ras niet belangrijk.”
52. Vennen (March 1964).
53. Schakelkrant (September 1967).
55. Schakelkrant (April 1967.)
56. Seq (April 1969).
57. Seq (January 1969).
60. Vennen (January 1962). The post was in English. On the term “colored,”
see the first footnote in Chapter 2, and discussions in Chapter 8.
61. Eos 114 (1969).
62. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, Random House,
1979), 186–90. Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
63. For more on this topic, see the 2018 special issue of Sexualities that coins,
theorizes, and historicizes the “sexotic,” based on a seminar at the Max
Planck Institute in Berlin in February 2015.
64. Coq (November 1976). Though this interview was from the 1970s, it
applies to many of the photographs purchased by and published in
Dutch/Danish periodicals in the late 1960s.
65. Eos (December 1966). Lowercase “negro” in the original.
NOTES 213
66. Eos (October 1966). If of interest: “handicap unimportant,” in ad in Seq

(January 1969).
67. The Dutch statistic refers to 1965–1979, and the Danish statistic to the
1970s, based on my own calculations.
69. De Schakel (April 1965.) Note: Vriendin is used in Dutch to mean both
platonic and romantic girlfriend.
70. De Schakel (April 1966.)
71. Schakelkrant (April 1967).
72. Schakelkrant (April 1967)
73. Seq (January 1969). In Danish.
74. Vennen (September 1965). In Danish.
75. Vennen (September 1965). In English.
76. Eos (September 1966). Lowercase “mediterranean” in the English original.
77. Eos (October 1966).
78. e.g. Mainland, Mallorca, Canary Islands: see Schakeltjes (November 1966),
de Schakel Krant (March 1968), Pan (4: 1975), etc.
79. e.g. Eos (October 1966), note: “with a house in Tangiers”; De Schakel
(November 1966), Schakelkrant (March 1968), Vennen (January 1970).
80. Schakelkrant (April 1967). Note: “with chauffeur.”
82. Though women contributed with one in five ads, I found no advertisements
placed by female immigrants or by women seeking women of color. Other
primary sources must be used to support my argument that racial diversity,
racial tolerance, and immigration/integration networks existed in lesbian
circles in the Netherlands to a comparable degree.
84. Pan 1 (1973).
85. SEK (April 1976).
86. Seq (Summer 1971).
87. SEK (March 1979).
88. Sec (February 1971) and Sec (January 1972).
89. SEK (May 1974).
92. The latter was posted in German: Eos (Jan/Feb, 1970).
93. SEK (April 1978). Originally in English, so he was probably new to the
Netherlands.
94. See, for example, Seq (No. 4, 1970), SEK (July 1979), the latter of whom
was a heterosexual (Jewish) woman seeking a gay male companion.
95. Eos (Jan/Feb 1970).
96. Coq (March 1977).
97. In the Netherlands: Incognito—a travel guide advertised alongside COC

personal ads—recommending hundreds of cafés, bars, and beaches to
cruise “in Europe and Morocco.” See for example SEQ (May/June
1970) and Figure 8. In Denmark: e.g. advertised on the back of the
Danish periodical Coq in 1976 and 1977: The Golden Key Gay Guide:
The Wonderful Gay-world 76 / 77 (COQ International Gay Group,
1976/1977). Originally published in Amsterdam and soon after (and
since) from Berlin: Spartacus International Gay Guide, published every
year from 1970 through to the present. From the U.S.: Falcon
International Gay Guide, which discontinued, though the pornography
company continued through to the present.
98. Vennen (May? 1970).
99. Pan 1&2 (1977).
100. SEK (July 1979).
101. Sec (August 1972).
102. An example of a trusting woman: Penny [last name and address removed],
Rose Bay, Sydney, N.S.W. 20209, Australia; Panblad 5 (1971).
103. Eos (Jan/Feb 1970): “Homosexual boys and girls all over the world! Do you
want to correspond and spend your free time with an intelligent boy, 30,
black hair, gay and very impulsive, interested in art, travelling and everlasting
friendship?”
104. Vennen (September 1970).
105. Pan 5 (1971). Edesio . . . in Porto Alegre, RGS, Brazil.
106. Pan 5 (1972).
107. Pan 5 (1973) and Pan 9 (1973).
108. SEK (March 1975).
109. Sec (January 1971).
110. Eos (March/April 1971).
111. e.g. Seq (Summer 1971), Sec (February 1972). The man in the 1972 post
was born c. 1907.
112. Pan 4 (1971).
113. Pan 5 (1971).
114. Pan 1 (1973).
116. Vennen (1970?).
117. Eos (March/April 1971). Emphasis added.
118. Pan 3 (1974).
119. Coq 11 (1976).
120. Pan 3 (1975)
121. Pan 4 (1976).
122. SEK (August 1974)
NOTES 215
123. HAVO and MAVO (now VMBO) are two tracks of secondary education (i.
e. ages twelve through to seventeen) that are more vocational or technical
than the third track (VWO), but also provide some theoretical and liberal
education.
124. SEK (August 1977).
125. SEK (April 1977). He also expressed a wish that the partner was blond, in
his 20s, and “no beard, no glasses” (GBBS, a common abbreviation in
Dutch personal ads).
127. Sec (April 1971).
128. Though in conversation with Kees Waaldijk, Professor of Comparative
Sexual Orientation Law at Leiden University, he mentioned that some
rights extended to bi-national, same-sex couples in the Netherlands as
early as 1979. More research needs to be conducted on those who legislated
and benefitted from these rights.
129. Pan 1 (1972) [in French, 1972]: “LEBANON: . . . Having completed the
hotelier school in Lausanne . . . I returned to Lebanon to take several jobs,
and finally I opened a night club, ‘Flying Cocotte’ in Beyrouth, the most
selective and with the highest reputation in the Middle East. . . . I would
love to be able to make contact with young men who are interested in
coming to Lebanon in order to choose someone who is apt to collaborate
and live with me.”
130. SEK (May 1977).
131. Klaas Breunissen, “Weg uit Marokko voel ik mij hier nu een vreemde” [“Far
from Morocco, I Feel a Stranger Here”] SEK (August 1983), 28–29.
132. Ibid.
133. De Gay Krant was a Dutch monthly newspaper for gays/lesbians that was
unrelated to the COC. It was printed from 1980–2013, and led by Henk
Krol.
134. While at least one man desired a “monogamous” relationship in 1982—De
Gay Krant (August 1982)—the terms became more popular from 1986–89.
135. Gay Amsterdam (November 1986).
136. To be precise: of the fifty-nine men-for-men ads in February 1989, thirteen
(22%) mentioned safer sex practices (i.e. nine with “safe,” one with
“condom,” two with “sucking” only, and one with “no sex”), and eleven
(18%) mentioned durable relationships (i.e. seven with “monoga-
mous”—a rare term in the 1970s—and three with “serious,” and one with
“steady,” though both of these were also used in the 1970s). Aside from
these men-for-men ads, there were also the ads (mentioned in text) for the
AIDS speaker, Amsterdam Jacks party, and massages on this same page. The
only woman-for-woman ad this month did not refer to safer sex or mono-
gamy (but rather, to cats and conversation). De Gay Krant (February 1989).
137. De Gay Krant (February 1989).

138. De Gay Krant (August 1982), De Gay Krant (September 1982), De Gay
Krant (July 1989).
139. De Gay Krant (February 1985) or De Gay Krant (November 1986).
140. De Gay Krant (February 1985). In Dutch.
142. De Gay Krant (January 1987).
143. De Gay Krant (June 1982).
144. De Gay Krant (November 1986).
148. e.g. a Chinese man in ‘s-Gravenhage, De Gay Krant (July 1989).
149. De Gay Krant (February 1983). VWO is one of the three forms of secondary
education (from ages twelve through to eighteen) and prepares students for
a university track.
150. The first three examples were all posted in De Gay Krant (February 1985).
See also De Gay Krant (June 1982), De Gay Krant (August 1982).
References to disability were uncommon, but can be found from time to
time (cited earlier).
151. De Gay Krant (May 1982).
160. De Gay Krant (November 1986).
162. Three ads in De Gay Krant (February 1985).
163. De Gay Krant (September 1982).
164. De Gay Krant (February 1983): “Neger.”
165. “Colored” used as kleurling(en) in De Gay Krant (February 1984) or
gekleurde in De Gay Krant (February 1983).
166. Gay Amsterdam (Jan/Feb 1986).
167. See post from a man in Hungary in Gay Amsterdam (Jan/Feb 1986) who
sought “writing and maybe holidays” together, and a man in Poland—in
Gay Amsterdam (6: 1987)—who invited “active” Dutch men to visit; he
even provided his full name: Andrew [last name removed], Warszawska.
Other ads from Poland: SEK (April 1974) and SEK (September 1977).
NOTES 217
168. See three ads in De Gay Krant (February 1989).

169. “Mijn Mooiste Modellen pik ik zo op van straat,” De Gay Krant (June
1982), 5–6.
170. A handful of journals did have photo inserts, and otherwise, I only saw one
or two posts in these publications that managed to include a photograph.
171. FS: The Gay Health and Life Mag, 148 (June/July 2015). Available for free
download; last accessed June 2015 via issuu.com/gmfa/docs/fs148. This
U.K.-based gay magazine released an issue on the theme “Racism and the
Gay Scene”; in one article, they report that of the 400 white men surveyed
on their website, 23% thought it was okay to list “No Blacks, No Asians” as a
sexual “preference” on online dating profiles.
172. For more on current practices of sexual-racial exclusions in Denmark, see
Andrew DJ Shield, “New in Town: Gay Immigrants and Geosocial Dating
Apps,” in LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe, eds. Alexander Dhoest,
Lukasz Szulc and Bart Eeckhout (London: Routledge, 2017).
CHAPTER 8
“I was one of the first colored gays”:

Experiences of Immigrants and Ethnic
Minorities in Gay/Lesbian Scenes, the
Netherlands and Denmark, 1960s–80s
This chapter is structured around fifty-seven interviews with gay-identi-

fied men who participated in gay/lesbian “scenes” in the 1960s–80s,
including those who were active in organized movements like the
Center for Culture and Leisure (COC) in the Netherlands, or the
Association of 1948 (F1948) and the Gay Liberation Front (BBF) in
Denmark; those who patronized gay/lesbian establishments; those
whose social circles included other gays and lesbians; and/or those
who “cruised” for sex in saunas, cinemas, parks or other public spaces.
Of these interviewees, twenty-four were men of color—both immigrants
and ethnic-minority Dutch and Danes—who experienced these scenes in
the 1960s–80s (i.e. were born in the 1930s–60s): sixteen from the
Netherlands, eight from Denmark. Immigrants from (former) colonies
were the largest group: thirteen had origins in the (former) Dutch East
Indies, three in the (former) Dutch Caribbean, and one in (Danish)
Greenland. One (from Iran) received asylum in the 1980s, and another
was a de facto refugee (from Turkey) who found work. Finally, there
were five other gay men of African descent (e.g. a German who grew up
in an orphanage; a Dane with South African parents, etc.). Many
remarked on being “one of the first colored1 gays” in their scenes and
circles in Northwest Europe.
I recruited nearly all interviewees virtually, in 2014 and 2015, through
profiles on various online platforms primarily for gay men, on which I

220 8 “I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST COLORED GAYS” . . .
presented myself as a researcher seeking to speak to anyone about gay life

in the 1960s–80s.2 Although most users of these platforms logged on in
search of dates, all interviewees were happy to chat with me about their
experiences in the 1960s–80s. We first messaged back and forth (i.e. the
screening process) before moving to Skype for semi-structured interviews
that included questions about “coming out,” gay activism, and ethnic
diversity. In six instances, we met in person in Amsterdam, Utrecht,
Copenhagen, and Odense. Many said that I could use their full names,
but I have used only first names (and some aliases) for consistency. The
major benefit of online recruitment was that I was able to contact various
men from across the Netherlands and Denmark—not just those in the
capitals, or friends-of-friends through the snowball method—and that I
could do so while living in Copenhagen.
The major downside of recruiting informants from these platforms was
that I limited myself primarily to gay and bisexual men. A small but visible
percentage of the users on these platforms are transgender women, and
one interviewee (from Iran) mentions trans acquaintances from his coun-
try of origin. Lesbian women of color’s experiences appear throughout
Chapter 6, including those of Gloria Wekker and Julia da Lima in the
Netherlands, and of (interviewee) Fresscia Carrasco in Denmark. Wekker
has also written extensively on the sexual cultures of Afro-Caribbean
women—and more generally about black, migrant, and refugee women’s
experiences—in the Netherlands since the 1980s.3
This research is not “virtual ethnography,” as it does not scrutinize the
online platforms as fields in which to research specific (sub)cultures; the
online platforms merely served as tools from which to recruit informants.4
Future research could provide rich insights into the roles of race/ethnicity
on these platforms: for example on Bullchat.nl—a Dutch chat site where
users choose one-time screen-names and profiles—about 5% of users
chose names that reflect their (non-white) ethnic background. Of the
approximately 2,000 users signed online on any given weekday afternoon
(c. 2014–15), there were usually twenty to thirty screen-names that used
Marok-/Maroc-/Mocro; twenty to thirty that used “black” (in English);
ten to twenty that used Turk-; ten to twenty with Arab-; ten to twenty
with “getint” (tinted); five to ten that used Asia-; five to ten with Latin-;
and a handful with Hind-, Indo-, Suri-, zwart (“black”), Afri-, westind-,
and antill-. In contrast, there were rarely users who identified as white.5
The first half of this chapter focuses on the narratives of men of color
who lived as openly gay in the 1960–70s, when gay/lesbian scenes were
“I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST COLORED GAYS” . . . 221
radicalizing; and the second half presents narratives from the 1980s, when
the gay/lesbian scenes grew increasingly more diverse. Certain topics
re-emerge throughout: self-identity (i.e. as a person of color, as a sexual
minority), urban migration, friendship networks, sexual exoticism, and
discrimination. Thus, this chapter answers some questions raised in
Chapter 7 about the lived experiences of ethnic minorities and immigrants
in the Netherlands and Denmark. Finally, the chapter is book-ended with
considerations about the co-existence of different “sexual cultures” in the
Netherlands and Denmark in the 1960s–80s.
Wekker has theorized “homo nostalgia,” a concept that combines
mainstream nativist nostalgia—i.e. for the 1950s when the Netherlands
was “unproblematically white and gender relations were clear”—and gay
rights: in other words, she identified speech acts that refer to a mythical
past (perhaps 20016) when gay men “could kiss and hold hands in public,
before Muslims came and rained on our parade.”7 While Wekker uses
“homo nostalgia” primarily to critique homonationalist politics since
2002, she also questions why “the dominant image, after sixty years of
migration, is still that gay men and lesbians belong to the dominant ethnic
group.”8 In other words, why don’t gay men know that the “scene” has
always included contributions from and sub-communities of black,
migrant, and refugee people?
The white-washing of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (or trans*),
queer (LGBTQ) history has strange bedfellows: Joseph Massad, Professor
of Middle East Studies, has provided a (necessary and often very good)
critique of the “Gay International”—his term for the disparate groups
of gay and lesbian organizations across North America and Western
Europe—for their global outreach, such as their attempts “to help ‘liber-
ate’ Arab and Muslim ‘gays and lesbians’ from the oppression under which
they allegedly live”; but he too characterizes these groups as “dominated
by white Western males,” which, while partly true, erases many of the
narratives explored in this chapter.
Thus the impetus for this chapter—which builds on Chapter 2’s
discussion of the “disavowal of heterogeneity”—was the demand for
research on the history of gay/lesbian organizing in heterogeneous
contexts. All of the informants in this chapter found it useful to draw
from labels like “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “transgender”—as
well as concepts like “the closet,” “coming out,” and gay/lesbian
“emancipation”—when talking about their identities, friends, experi-
ences and feelings in the 1960s–80s.
EARLY DIVERSITY IN GAY SCENES, 1960S–1970S

In the 1960s–70s, openly gay men of color were not necessarily few, but
they were often far between. Many recalled being “one of the first” people
of color to navigate a gay/lesbian scene that was otherwise entirely white
in the Netherlands and Denmark. Those who ventured into gay spaces
tended to meet white gay men, and thus many people of color had
friendship networks that were entirely white. In the Netherlands, these
first openly gay men of color tended to be those with roots in the former
Dutch East Indies whose ethnic backgrounds varied tremendously.
Thus we start with four narratives of “Indonesian” men—one Papuan,
one Ambonese, one Chinese-Indo-Dutch, and one Indo-Dutch—and
highlight three recurring themes: coming out, urban migration (and
exploration), and social networks. Moving to Denmark, we focus on the
narrative of Alfred, a black immigrant from Germany who has lived on
Jutland, and has lived openly as gay, since the 1960s. This first section on
the 1960s–70s also considers the sexual identities of several prominent
African-American jazz dancers and choreographers who moved to
Copenhagen in these decades.
Although ethnic diversity was not a universal facet of Dutch and
especially Danish gay/lesbian scenes in the 1960–70s, it is important to
remember that these scenes were diverse in other regards (e.g. geography,
social class, age, and/or education level). Many gay and lesbian people
migrated to cities or university towns (i.e. internal migrants) in order to
live openly, and thus urban areas and universities emerged as more densely
gay/lesbian. These areas also showed national and linguistic variation
from white European immigrants, for example the sizeable number of
Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, or Faroese immigrants in Denmark, or the
number of Belgian or German immigrants, as well as Frisians, in the
Netherlands. In the Netherlands especially, there was internal diversity
with regard to religious identification during the final decades of pillariza-
tion. Finally, Western tourists, including people of color from the U.K.
and the U.S., also contributed to some interviewee’s memories of ethnic
diversity in gay/lesbian scenes in the 1960s–70s.
Four “Indonesian” Perspectives: Raymond

Raymond (b. 1954, Irian Jaya) was born in “Dutch New Guinea” during
an intermediary period after the Dutch had ceded most of the East Indies
EARLY DIVERSITY IN GAY SCENES, 1960S–1970S 223
to independent Indonesia (1949), but before Indonesia annexed the

Papua province (1969). Raymond, who is ethnically Papuan, had an
early education that was Dutch, and which encouraged Papuan national
identity, in the hope that the region would one day be independent. Yet in
the early 1960s, Raymond migrated to South Limburg (southeast
Netherlands) with his parents, brothers and sisters, and some extended
family members who eventually moved to the United States. At the age of
fifteen, he was one of the youngest to graduate from his Dutch secondary
school, and he found work at a nearby store. Shortly after, he effectively
“came out” when he met and started to date a Dutch man, which he
claims was “no problem for the family.” This was just after the abolition of
the Dutch law (in 1971) that prevented under-twenty-one-year-olds from
engaging in homosexual networks.
Raymond and his boyfriend visited Berlin for half a year, where
Raymond first participated in gay nightlife: he proudly recalled being
“the first colored guy at the bars” in Berlin, an experience that continued
upon returning to the Netherlands and exploring gay scenes. Back in
Limburg (a Catholic-majority region), Raymond found new work in
burgeoning gay establishments: there were the two gay bars, Heaven
and Sjinderhannes, a sauna, and a gay coffee shop. All were owned by
the same man, so Raymond rotated work in them. Although Raymond did
not participate in formal organizations for gay/lesbian emancipation (e.g.
the COC), his work at these establishments helped foster a gay/lesbian
subculture in the southern Netherlands that undoubtedly helped establish
a “movement” there.
Two years later, Raymond and his boyfriend split up, and Raymond
moved to Amsterdam, where the cultural differences were immediately
apparent: “Those were the hippie times, the Woodstock days,” Raymond
remembered, when “all the guys had long hair,” and the gay men “looked
like women” with ponytails and platform shoes. “There were crazy
clothes,” he recalled. “I wore high heels!”
In Amsterdam, Raymond first met other gay men with roots in the
former Dutch East Indies, and a few of them did drag shows. I inquired
whether their drag performances drew any inspiration from traditional
“Indonesian” performance, and he laughed: “Not at all. They performed
Dionne Warrick and Tina Turner!” During these years, Raymond met
many interesting people, such as Manfred Langer, an Austrian entrepre-
neur who transformed Amsterdam’s gay scene in the 1970s–80s by open-
ing three popular gay bars and a disco.9 But despite Amsterdam’s famed
tolerance, most of the gay bars were still very discreet. Raymond often had
to knock on little windows or ring a bell, and it was up to the will of the
bartender whether or not a patron could enter a gay bar; other bars only
had back doors. (These measures kept out the troublemakers who thought
it was fun to pick on the gays; but they also catered to “discreet” bar-goers
who did not want to be seen entering a gay bar from the street.) Raymond
fell in love with Amsterdam’s vibrant culture, and has lived there ever
since.
Clarence
Clarence (b. 1956, Ede, Netherlands) came from a family who emigrated
from the Molucca Islands in 1950. Unlike most Moluccans, Clarence did
not grow up in a segregated Moluccan neighborhood, with its own
Moluccan churches and schools (see Chapter 2’s footnote on Moluccans).
Because his father had a good military position, Clarence attended Dutch
schools that were “mostly all white,” and where he felt a part of “the Dutch
community.” At home, his parents tried to speak Malay; but as the youngest
of eight children, Clarence followed his siblings’ lead and only spoke Dutch
to his parents.
In 1976 and after attending university, Clarence moved from his small
town to the nearby city of Arnhem, where he found the courage to walk
into his first gay bar. Terrified, he took the seat closest to the door: “I
didn’t know what could happen at a gay bar.” The friendly bartender tried
to engage him in conversation, but Clarence was nervous and abruptly left.
But a week later, he returned, and met some other patrons at the bar who
would become his new group of friends. On weekends, they would visit
Arnhem, starting at a fashionable gay bar they nicknamed the “Bijenkorf”
after the upscale department store, and ending at a gay “night bar” that
stayed open until 5:00 in the morning. Periodically, they took trips to
Amsterdam, as they had heard—mostly through word-of-mouth—about
the plethora of gay bars, drag shows, saunas, and other establishments; but
they were overall content with the blossoming gay/lesbian subculture in
their eastern region, and Clarence never relocated to the gay capital.
Clarence “never met a Moluccan in a gay bar” in the 1970s, however
one of the bartenders at Arnhem’s “night bar” was “Indonesian,” and he
would sometimes meet other gays with origins in the former East Indies.
Clarence believed Moluccans to be less “open about their sexuality” than
other “Indonesian” groups: “[Moluccans] don’t believe men can love

men, or women can love women. You may not say the word gay.”
But Clarence’s parents recognized that he was different from his older
heterosexual brothers, who went to discos and dated Dutch girls in the
1960s–70s. Around 1976, Clarence told his parents, “I’m not going to
marry,” about which his parents “were not upset.” In the following
decades, he introduced them to some of his gay male “friends,” and
suspected that his parents “always knew” he was gay. Further, he was
cousins with Julia da Lima—the Moluccan feminist lesbian activist—so
many in his extended family were familiar with gay/lesbian identities.
Although Clarence never participated in gay/lesbian activism (e.g. the
COC, protests), his patronage of gay establishment and participation in
gay social circles allowed for gay/lesbian subcultures to prosper in the
eastern Netherlands, where Clarence continues to live today.
Tonny
The family of Tonny (b. 1949, Bali) prospered in the newly independent
Indonesia, despite their connections to the colonial past. Tonny’s father, a
prominent Chinese businessman with a Dutch education, decided to
remain in Indonesia with his wife, a mixed-race Dutch-Indonesian
woman, even as the vast majority of Dutch families emigrated. Tonny
grew up on a private compound where he mostly interacted with other
elite families. His family spoke Dutch at home, and attracted stares from
neighbors on the weekends when they took Sunday bike rides through the
town.
From 1968 to 1973, Tonny studied in Heidelberg, West Germany,
where he visited his first gay bars, most of which were locked establish-
ments that one had to knock to enter. “I was just about the only person
from Asia” in Heidelberg, he recalled. Returning to Bali and later Jakarta,
Tonny worked for a travel agency that catered to Germans in Indonesia,
but he desired to return to Europe. On his Indonesian passport, Tonny
made frequent trips to the Netherlands in the 1970s and early 1980s to
visit his mother’s extended family. In part because he was impressed with
the gay life in Amsterdam, he moved to the Netherlands in 1983.
Amsterdam was “quite diverse,” but the gay scene was not as multicultural
as the rest of the city.
Yet although Tonny moved to the Netherlands in part to live more
openly as gay, it is also true that Tonny had a comfortable life in Indonesia
where he lived relatively openly as gay. Tonny had a serious relationship

with a man, which many of his friends knew, and if they were in the privacy
of a friend’s compound, there was no threat to their safety. In Jakarta,
there were venues that catered to gay and lesbian Indonesians; and further,
it was common for upper-class gay and lesbian Indonesians to travel to
cities with large gay/lesbian subcultures (e.g. Amsterdam, San Francisco,
and Sydney).10 Tonny’s boyfriend was content with this life in Jakarta, and
refused to move with Tonny when he relocated to Amsterdam in the
1980s.
Frank
Frank (b. 1948) was born in the Dutch East Indies, but his “European”
family “repatriated” to the Netherlands soon after. He identifies fore-
most as Dutch, but said that he has always been viewed as “Nederlands
indische” (a Dutch-Indo person) or “Indo”; when asked, he agreed that
the term “person of color” applied to him. For Frank, being indische
meant that his family was “old Dutch,” and that he could trace back
their presence in the East Indies for generations. His family tree was not
only Dutch and Indonesian, but also British, Polish, Portuguese,
French, and Italian: “The Dutch have always easily mixed abroad,” he
smiled.
At the age of fourteen (1962), Frank came out as gay to his family, but
the age of consent for homosexuality—and age cut-off for most gay spaces
—was twenty-one. As soon as he turned twenty-one (1969), he joined the
COC, where he remained an active member for over a decade. Frank
described the gay scene as “always diverse.” However to him, diversity
was not just being “white, Indo or black,” but included a multiplicity
of identities in gay and lesbian circles: “The COC had lots of Jewish
members. I had more than a few Jewish friends there.”
Frank attended De Odeon Keller (1952–89), one of Amsterdam’s
wildest and most famous discos for decades, and recalled that “the first
black gays came” at the end of the 1970s. Another interviewee worked as a
doorman at the disco in the 1970s, and confirmed that the venue—as well
as The Viking Club (1976–87)—was a “mixed” crowd and popular with
Surinamese people. But Frank reiterated that Afro-Caribbean patrons
were not necessarily gay or lesbian, as the club was diverse in many ways.
There are other narratives not included here, such as J.J. (b. 1950, the
Netherlands), who first started traveling from his town in the east of the
country to The Hague and Amsterdam in 1970 to attend gay spaces

including activist meetings. Even though he was “very shy,” J.J. (who is
“part Indonesian”) volunteered at the COC store, which sold condoms,
books and cards, and which provided information to local institutions like
schools.
These various narratives show that visible minorities contributed in a
variety of ways to gay/lesbian subcultures across the Netherlands in the
1960s–70s. Later in this chapter, we will hear additional narratives from
the multicultural 1980s, and will reflect on issues of racism and sexual
exoticism.
Alfred’s Perspective in Denmark

Alfred was born in Germany just after World War II (1946) to a German
mother and an African-American father, who was stationed as a soldier
there.11 Like a number of mixed-race children of unmarried parents born
in post-war Germany, Alfred was sent to an orphanage, which he described
as a bad experience for most “mulatto” children, as the teachers favored
the “white” children (his terms). At around the age of sixteen, Alfred and
some others from the orphanage went on a summer vacation to Denmark,
where Alfred met a family on the beach with several other mixed/black
children, who the white Danish parents had adopted from Germany. The
family took a liking to Alfred, and arranged for him to move in 1962 to the
small town of Kolding in Jutland, where he would work as an apprentice
for a baker.
Alfred never had a sexual interest in girls, and in 1967, he came out as
gay; the following year, he traveled to Copenhagen and visited his first gay
bar. Returning to Jutland, he gradually made gay friends, and by 1971 he
joined the Aarhus branch of the activist group F1948, where he remained
active through the 1980s.12 Aside from participating in activist organiza-
tions, Alfred also visited gay bars all across Denmark in the 1970s: there
was Club 77 in Fredericia (on Jutland), which he went to periodically for
over a decade; there was a bar in Odense named Flakhaven (on Funen),
which was adorned with activist flags and banners; and of course, there was
Copenhagen (on Sealand), the hotspot for gay bars, cinemas and saunas.
As in the Netherlands, most of the Danish gay bars that Alfred visited in
the late 1960s and 1970s had locked entrances at the back of the building,
where patrons had to knock to enter. Alfred recalled that the majority of
gay men he knew were afraid to come out, and instead had sex in parks,
toilets, and train stations. “It was hard to take guys home,” Alfred said,
explaining that these men were too afraid to be seen with another man,
especially one who was openly gay like Alfred.13 Various other intervie-
wees remarked on the difficulty in prolonging romantic relationships with
other men during these decades.
Reflecting on the 1960s–70s, Alfred recalled proudly, “I was one of the
first colored gays.” In the 1980s, Alfred started to see more black and
mixed (black/white) families in Denmark, but did not feel that gay/
lesbian establishments were “diverse” until the 2000s. Retired, he lives
with his dog in a small town on Western Jutland by the park island Rømø.
African-American Jazz Dancers in Denmark

In the 1960s–70s, several prominent African-American jazz dancer-
choreographers moved to Copenhagen, opened their own dance
schools, and choreographed performances at the Royal Theatre, namely
Georges Mills,14 Doug Crutchfield,15 and Henry Turner.16 Scholars of
the performing arts have praised these men for shaping jazz and modern
dance in Northern Europe, but have not speculated on their sexual
orientation.17 Yet two of my Danish interviewees—a male actor, and a
female dancer—confidently described them as gay.18
As a student of Georges Mills in the 1970s, the dancer remembered
him as “a very kind teacher” with “long, beautiful limbs.” Now a chor-
eographer, she confirmed that Mills, Crutchfield and Turner “greatly
influenced modern dance” in Denmark. She assumed that “they enjoyed
the gay scene in Denmark” for its leniency compared to the United
States, though she had never heard them speak directly about sexuality.
Yet she knew dancers often downplayed their homosexuality in these
decades to avoid homophobic criticism; this was the case for Alvin Ailey
(1931–1989), perhaps the most famous African-American choreogra-
pher from the 1960s–80s, who visited the Nordic countries in 1965.19
The other interviewee studied with Mills in Aalborg from 1968 through
to 1971, and agreed that he was discreet about his homosexuality. He
also mentioned other notable dancers who were discreet about their
sexuality, such as (the Danish) Erik Bruhn (1928–1986), and his brief
lover (the celebrated Russian) Rudolf Nudeyev (1938–1993),20 the
latter of whom was an early “queer migrant,” as he defected from the
Soviet Union and lived with Bruhn (in Copenhagen and London) for
much of the 1960s.
THE INCREASINGLY MULTICULTURAL 1980S 229
A U.S. blog devoted to Doug Crutchfield attracted some noteworthy

comments from his former students, such as the following, posted by a
Danish woman who studied with Crutchfield as a teenager:
Crutchfield was first of all fabulously beautiful and . . . exotic and was not
averse to playing it up a bit. . . . [H]e often led class dressed in a blue,
crocheted unitard (with flared legs, it was the 70s after all) . . . [which]
no doubt inflamed the fantasies of many a Danish housewife in the
class.21
In addition to avoiding possible homophobia, these jazz dancers might

have downplayed their homosexuality in the public eye so as to appeal to
heterosexual women (i.e. clients) as sex symbols.
Both the female dancer and the male actor said they heard through
word-of-mouth that—like Ailey, Bruhn, and Nudeyev—these men died of
AIDS-related causes, though I cannot confirm this. Crutchfield, for exam-
ple, returned to Ohio in 1985 and died in 1989. But according to the U.S.
blogger, no contacts from Crutchfield’s family would answer his questions
about Crutchfield’s death, and one told him to “quit seeking out the
negative.”22 Regardless of the lack of evidence that these men participated
in any gay scenes in Denmark, it is noteworthy to include them in this
historic look at ethnic diversity, immigration and homosexuality in
Denmark.
THE INCREASINGLY MULTICULTURAL 1980S

“If you’re colored, you had to be the nice, pretty boy”: An Aruban’s
perspective of the Netherlands
Ruud (b. 1965, Aruba) did not necessarily think of himself as “black”
before he moved to the Netherlands at the age of nine, as he experienced
life within elite social circles and institutions that were primarily white.
His father was white and Dutch, so Ruud “repatriated” to the
Netherlands in 1974, even though he had never lived there. Although
he arrived during the largest wave of immigration from the Dutch
Caribbean, he recalled being “the only non-white” student in his
schools in Limburg and Eindhoven. In 1984, at the age of eighteen,
he moved to Amsterdam and immediately started to explore the city’s
gay scene.
Ruud met a few older black (Surinamese and Antillean) men in

Amsterdam, some of whom had been openly gay in the 1970s. He was
impressed that they had gone “their [own] way” in order to identify as gay:
They had to emancipate themselves as homosexuals . . . The Antilleans that

you would have seen in the gay scene at the time weren’t concerned about
their color; it was a bigger thing for them to liberate themselves as
homosexuals.
The difficulties these men faced, in Ruud’s opinion, related to “the image
that homosexuality has in the Caribbean,” where “being a homosexual
[man] meant being effeminate,” and where gay identities were rarely
adopted by non-white people. (Further, he added: “lesbianism in these
societies is far more approved of than male homosexuality.”23) Ruud said
he was never in a “closet” so he never came out, which he attributes
partially to his socio-economic class: “If you go to university to study,
you’re from a different group. . . . Coming out as a gay man is a normal
part of development,” he opined.
Ruud visited Regliersdwarsstraat—an epicenter of gay Amsterdam with
several gay bars alongside the same quiet street—where he “would count
the non-white people.” Seeing people of color did not necessarily put him at
ease: he often saw “all these young Asian guys with older white men, you
know, all these stereotypes.” The age-structured patterns he observed in
inter-ethnic relationships affected the way he perceived, and was perceived
within, Amsterdam’s gay scene: “If you’re colored, you had to be the nice,
pretty boy. . . . And if you were different, or yourself, you know, they’d try
to categorize you . . . there [would be] . . . no place for you there.”
For this reason, Ruud rejected many mainstream gay/lesbian establish-
ments, and instead chose to explore the creative venues forged by art
students, such as RoXY (1987–1999), where “everybody felt welcome
because you could be weird, whether you were black, yellow, whatever.”
Like in De Odeon Keller, sexuality “was integral” to RoXY but the
clientele was neither “overly gay nor straight.” Like Frank, Ruud recalled
that many straight Afro-Carribean men and women would frequent De
Odeon Keller, as well as RoXY, and (on Reguliersdwarsstraat) Havana
Boven (1989–1990s). The music was loud, there were “people dancing on
every corner; the image people had about Amsterdam at that time, that
was really happening” at these venues, where Ruud felt comfortable
identifying as both gay and black.
Greenlandic and Gay

As the narratives from the Netherlands show, immigrants from (former)
European colonies were often among the earliest visible minorities in
European gay scenes, due to familiarity with the Dutch language, access
to universities, knowledge of urban cultures, and mobility, among other
reasons. In Denmark, this is also true, though there are far fewer immi-
grants from Greenland altogether. Like Indonesian and Caribbean
migrants (of color) in the Netherlands, Greenlanders with an Inuit back-
ground share some advantages over other migrants (e.g. citizenship and
language abilities) and also faced disadvantages (e.g. racial discrimination,
stereotyping, social inequalities related to centuries of imperialism).
In Copenhagen, one interviewee remarked that in the 1980s, while
living on Thule Air Force Base (U.S.A.) in Greenland—with a mix of U.S.
American, Danish, and Greenlandic staff—he met an extraordinary num-
ber of gay men who were discreetly open about their orientation. For
example, he ran into a childhood friend of his, a white Dane, who was in a
relationship with an African-American soldier; and he knew another white
Dane who was dating an Inuit man on the kitchen staff, as native
Greenlanders represented about 10% of those on the U.S. base.
Although historian Jens Rydström does not address Thule Air Force
Base in his history of Greenlandic laws about homosexuality, he does
address Greenlandic “migration of sexual minorities to larger cities” such
as Copenhagen in search of LGBTQ communities.24 This was the case for
Ole (b. 1965) who was born and raised in a village of approximately 1,000
inhabitants in southern Greenland. As a teenager, he briefly lived and
studied in the United States, where he lived openly as gay. Not wanting
to return to his small community in Greenland, Ole decided to move to
Denmark; but unfortunately, he spent his first three years in a small town
in Jutland where he felt “back in the closet,” and was only comfortable
opening up about his sexuality to a few close friends. By 1987, he moved
to Copenhagen, where he has lived (openly as gay) since.
Rethinking Refugees
From Turkey, Chile, China, or Iran: many refugees who entered Europe
in the 1980s on the grounds of political or religious/ethnic persecution
came to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. One man from
Turkey told me his story of arriving in Europe on a false passport,
exploring various gay bars and cruising areas, and eventually joining a
gay/lesbian organization so he could participate on their sports team. A
Chilean man (b. 1951) fled Pinochet in 1973; a decade later, he managed
a book café in the Copenhagen Botanic Gardens with his Danish male
partner. Another interviewee recalled meeting a gay Chinese man in 1989
who was an asylum seeker living in a refugee camp outside of Copenhagen;
the refugee “specifically chose Denmark because he was gay,” but did not
disclose his orientation to the immigration authorities. Today, refugees
can seek asylum in much of Europe on the grounds of sexual orientation
and gender identity, but this was not possible in the 1980s. The following
narrative explores one man’s experience as a gay refugee in the 1980s.
A Refugee’s Perspective: Sean from Iran

Sean (b. 1965, Tehran) had a privileged childhood in Iran: his father was
well connected with the government, he and his sister attended interna-
tional schools, and they lived in a comfortable and safe home. Sean’s
earliest memory of the concept of “gay” related to a car-ride in Iran with
his aunt around 1977. The radio announced something about a gay pride
rally elsewhere in the world, and she remarked that homosexuals were
“disgusting”; Sean did not understand, so she explained that homosexuals
were two men who lived like a man and a woman, and Sean remembered
thinking, “I must be like those people.” At the time, Tehran—with many
ties to “the West”—tolerated bars with a “gay” reputation, a Red Light
District, and women’s risqué clothing (e.g. mini-skirts, tube tops).
But Sean’s comfortable childhood—and Tehran’s tolerant atmosphere
towards sexuality—changed dramatically with the overthrow of the Shah
in 1979. Suddenly Sean’s parents and their siblings were targeted as anti-
revolutionaries: they were harassed or detained, their cars followed, houses
searched. Sean and his sister were pulled from school and tutored at home,
where they spent most of their time. As the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988)
progressed, Sean approached military age, and his family grew worried
about his future; they assumed Sean would be “sent to the minefields” due
to the family’s elite and anti-revolutionary background. Forbidden from
leaving the country, Sean dramatically escaped over the mountains to
Turkey—by foot, by donkey, and by bus to Istanbul—with financial
support from his family. He stayed briefly with cousins in Turkey; but
since Iran compensated Turkey for returning military defectors, Sean fled
onwards to Europe by bribing someone at the airport to accept his
expired, pre-Revolution passport with a photo of him from the age of

seven. The year was 1984.
The destination, Denmark, was not entirely random. Sean desired to go
to the United States, but a family friend recommended he choose
Scandinavia or the Netherlands. He immediately thought of his time at
an international school in central Asia, where he and his sister “knew some
Danish kids . . . [and] had an art teacher called Mrs. Rasmussen [who was
Danish],” so he decided on Denmark. On the plane, he met eight other
Iranian asylum seekers, and they decided that he should represent the
group, since he spoke the best English. A man warned Sean that he
would be “slapped and tortured” by the Danish authorities, since “that’s
how authorities act[ed].” But when Sean announced at the airport that the
group sought asylum on the grounds of political persecution and/or war,
the Danish authorities asked them to take a seat, and quietly filled out
their paperwork. Later that night, the group was bussed to a temporary
Red Cross shelter in Copenhagen, where they were given breakfast and
spending money. Sean was excited to walk the pedestrian streets of
Copenhagen, but did not dare inquire about anything gay.
After a week, he was transferred to a refugee camp in an old milk facility
on the island of Lolland-Falster, far from the capital. “The whole thing
with being gay” was difficult in the camps, as both Danes and asylum
seekers asked “why I didn’t have a girlfriend.” He was sure there were
“people in the refugee camp who could see I was gay” and that was not
necessarily safe for him. While his case was processed—which he said took
only a few months, unlike today’s years-long cases—he became acquainted
with a Danish family who invited him over for dinners, taught him basic
Danish, and eventually found him an apartment. They also pressured him
with questions about girlfriends, but he did not feel comfortable opening
up about his sexuality. Around 1986, Sean moved to Copenhagen to
finish his secondary-school education: “That’s when my life really started.”
One afternoon in Copenhagen, while walking from school to the train
station with fellow Iranian classmates, Sean passed an entry to a courtyard
with a large open gate. One classmate warned him, “Don’t ever go to that
club . . . that’s a gay club!” The group laughed, and continued to the
station. When the group split up, Sean did an immediate U-turn and
walked back to the courtyard of the famous Pan Club (of F1948). Even
though it was afternoon and the bar was totally empty, and even though
Sean did not drink at the time, he entered and ordered a Coke, and stared
excitedly out the window. Suddenly the bartender asked, “Why are you
hiding behind the curtain? Are you afraid someone will say, ‘What are you
doing here?’ If that happens, just say, ‘I can ask you the same thing!’” Sean
laughed and immediately felt at ease.
Over the next few years, Sean frequented various gay bars, and even
met another gay Iranian man with whom he is still in touch. The vast
majority of men he met were white and Scandinavian, but he met hand-
fuls of men from various Middle Eastern countries. He has lived openly
as gay since—to everyone except a few older relatives—and still lives in
Copenhagen today.
A small hint at some unexplored narratives: Sean worked for many years
as a translator for Iranian and Afghani migrants and refugees in Denmark.
Over the years, he met an estimated twenty to thirty people who he
suspected were trans women, noting that Iranian medical and legal autho-
rities accommodate trans women more readily than homosexual men.25
Some of these women chose sex work in Denmark, likely due to limited
opportunities. He ran into one of these women a few years back, and she
proudly shared that she had remitted enough money to build three houses
for her family in Iran.
RACISM AND SEXUAL EXOTICISM

Despite being one of the only people of African descent living in Jutland in
the 1960s–70s, Alfred said he never experienced racism in Denmark,
neither in gay subcultures nor in mainstream society:
I was lucky; since I came to Denmark I haven’t experienced discrimination

on the grounds of my skin color or because I’m gay . . . Of course there were
some people who stared at me. They were not used to seeing people of color
[nogle farvede, lit. “some coloreds”]. But there were never any comments.
If a Dane asked why he was not married, he always answered truthfully

that he was gay; he felt that this honesty helped him connect with people.
Interestingly, he attributed people’s acceptance of him, a black immigrant,
to his openness about his homosexuality.
Another interviewee of African descent (b. 1966, Denmark) said he felt
like a “curio” (his word) growing up in Jutland, but he never had issues
with racial discrimination until the mid-1980s when refugees arrived in his
area from Iran and Iraq. He felt more negative attention directed at him
(from strangers) due to his skin color, and he started to encounter hostility
RACISM AND SEXUAL EXOTICISM 235
when attempting to enter heterosexual clubs on Jutland. Bouncers and

bartenders looked at him skeptically until he opened his mouth and spoke
fluent Danish, at which point they immediately softened. He was not yet
openly gay, so it is interesting to contrast the nervousness he provoked
among white Danes at heterosexual clubs, versus the friendliness that
Alfred stimulated when he came out as gay. These contrasting experiences
could be read in light of centuries of white “sexotic” depictions of black
male virility as a threat to white women.26
Before Sean from Iran lived in Copenhagen, he resided in a small town
in Denmark where most locals were unaccustomed to meeting people with
immigrant backgrounds: “Back then they hadn’t seen that many dark
people, so I’d actually have people come and touch me,” which made
him feel uncomfortable. However, when asked about parallel experiences
in gay spaces, Sean’s temperament was much more jovial: “I was like a kid
in a candy store,” he smiled, recalling how Scandinavian men were “lining
up” to talk to him; as a Middle Easterner, he felt he could attract a good-
looking lot “without even moving a finger.” His first lover—a Swedish
medical student with “model” looks—was smitten with Sean, and would
take the boat from Malmö to Copenhagen to pick him up after classes.
Similarly, Alfred also acknowledged that his skin color—which often
informed people’s first impressions of him—played a role in some white
men’s fantasies. First he emphasized the positive: “My advantage was that
I was colored and everyone wanted to try it with a colored guy.” Yet later
on the topic, he pondered his difficulties forming close bonds with other
men: “The problem came when I happened to fall for a guy, or wanted a
little more,” he told me, adding that many men tended to withdraw from
him. “It was træls,” he said, using the typically Jutland word for irritating/
tiresome. Yet as mentioned before, Alfred attributed their coldness fore-
most to internalized homophobia, and not to racism.
In the Netherlands, three of my interviewees—including Ruud—
explicitly criticized racial exotification in gay subcultures, such as J.J.—
the Dutch-Indonesian man who volunteered at a COC store in the
1970s—who recalled that in his extended social circle, most people
treated him as Dutch, but some saw him “as a sort of tropical surprise.”
Hesitant to use the term “offended,” he asserted that, “It was not nice to
be just that.” After all, he knew he was not the first Indonesian that most
Dutch people had met, so he was frustrated to be pigeonholed as some-
thing “exotic” (his word). Finally, a short interview with a man who only
wished to be identified as a “person of color” said that he “hated the
white gay scene,” as it was “all about sex and appearance,” and he felt he
was “mostly viewed as the exotic sex play thing.”
When speaking with white men about the 1960s–80s, some made
stereotypical statements about ethnicity and sexuality that reflected domi-
nant ideas at the time. One of the more offensive examples came from a
Dutch man (b. 1948), who said that he always liked Indonesians because
they were “like tender service boys,” “obedient,” “submissive by nature,”
and had a “lovely, gentle style.” Another (b. 1956) said, “Indonesians
were pretty” and thus “very popular.” A Dane (b. 1957) who would often
go to a gay sauna in the 1980s claimed that the venue attracted Turkish
men; he added that he intentionally avoided them since they lived in
crowded housing and hence were “dirty.”
A white activist (b. 1950, Denmark) recalled that in the 1970s, his
Gay Liberation Front (BBF) friends viewed sex with men of color as
positive for one’s sexual development; but since the people of color they
saw in Aarhus were mostly working-class immigrants, they felt that sex
with these men would have been “like rape,” as radical activists tended to
hold the opinion that sex should always be between “equals.”27
ON THE ABSENCE OF MOROCCAN, TURKISH,

AND PAKISTANI PERSPECTIVES
The narratives in this chapter have shown that men of various national and
cultural backgrounds used labels and found concepts like “gay” and “the
closet” useful. Indeed some men of Moroccan, Turkish, and Pakistani
backgrounds might have been in “the closet” since the 1960s, as I did not
encounter anyone from the “guest worker” immigration wave on online
platforms. More likely, casual and anonymous homosexuality has not been
relevant for their identity and politics.
One white interviewee (b. 1956, the Netherlands) recalled that while
walking home from bars in the 1970s, Moroccans “asked if you had a girl,
and if you said no, they wanted to come home with you” for sex. In
Denmark, one interviewee (b. 1953) claimed that he encountered immigrant
men cruising for sex “in the public WC’s and the parks.” Another white man
(b. 1965, the Netherlands) claimed that Moroccans and Turks were known
to “rent rooms” with gay men who might actually be their lovers.
Two white interviewees also claimed to notice differences in sexual
cultures between European, Turkish and Moroccan men who sought
ON THE ABSENCE OF MOROCCAN, TURKISH, AND PAKISTANI PERSPECTIVES 237
anonymous sex. The first (b. 1949, the Netherlands), who is bisexual and
married to a woman, said that in the 1970s he cruised parks and streets,
where he met Moroccan men who were, like him, “shy, afraid, nervous”
about the sexual meet-ups. Although he said there was “little presence”
of people from these countries, he made numerous generalizations:
“they did not kiss . . . they wanted the dominant role . . . they did not
accept being gay or bi and imitated hetero sex.” The interviewee who
said he encountered Turkish men at a gay sauna in Copenhagen echoed
the sentiment that Turkish men brought a “codex”—his word for their
rules of behavior—for engagement in homosexual acts. Indeed, numer-
ous anthropologists and historians have detailed the so-called
“Mediterranean model”, whereby “normal” men might have sex with
women and adolescent males, as long as he takes the active role with the
males.28
But one should be skeptical of (often white, European) narratives that
classify the “Mediterranean” and “Muslim” countries as places where male
bisexuality is universal. Popular fiction throughout Europe and the United
States would have contributed to these perceptions, including André Gide’s
L’Immoraliste (1902) and William S. Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch
(1959).29 Travel guides also contributed to this image—the 1977 Falcon
World Gay Guide published as many cruising areas in Tangier, Morocco, as
in Amsterdam and Copenhagen30—as would the fictionalized travel stories
and erotic photo sets found in many gay periodicals.
European tourists’ perspectives on “Mediterranean bisexuality” often
lack critical discussion of the legacies of imperialism and the role of poverty
in defining the sexual culture of the area, and often elide sexual cultures
with prostitution. Writing in 1983, for example, an Italian scholar sug-
gested that Western gay sex tourism fit into traditional Moroccan patterns
of homosexuality “without changing it.”31 Yet imperialism and tourism
exacerbated economic inequality and increased the frequency of face-to-
face interaction between the wealthiest and the poorest in the country, as
one can read about in the semi-autobiographical For Bread Alone by
Mohammad Choukri (b. 1935, Ayt Chiker, Morocco).32 One interviewee
astutely observed that although North African males had a reputation for
selling sex in the Netherlands (white), working-class adolescents filled a
similar role a century back, due to economic necessity, opportunism, and
personal choice.
Despite this critique of “the Mediterranean model” of sexuality, it is
noteworthy that four of my interviewees who grew up in Europe—two
white, one Indonesian, and one Moroccan—remarked that they had

their first homosexual experiences as adolescents while on family vaca-
tions in Italy, Egypt, Iran, and Morocco (where they had casual and
anonymous sex with “locals”). It is striking that so many of my inter-
viewees participated in casual homosexual sex for the first time when
traveling to areas of the world where definitions of homosexuality
differed from that of Northwest Europe’s in the 1960s–80s. Related,
that younger Europeans with Moroccan backgrounds often refer indir-
ectly to this “Mediterranean model” when speaking about their parent’s
generation, as this final section details.
Because I did not speak with any Moroccan (or Turkish, Pakistani)
interviewees who lived openly as gay in the 1960s–80s, I also enlisted
three younger gay men of Moroccan descent (b. 1969–1982) for inter-
views, and they spoke to me about their parents’ generation and homo-
sexuality: “You’ll never find a gay Moroccan over 40,” one told me. The
second repeated this sentiment, “None of them are out.” The third
interviewee, C.T., told me, as if explaining an elementary aspect of the
culture: “Most Moroccans are part-time bisexuals . . . They’re not afraid to
do things they like.”
C.T. (b. 1969, Morocco) is a member of “generation 1.5” since he was
born in Morocco, and five years later he and his mother reunited with his
father, who had been working in the Netherlands. His father came to
Europe for employment, money, and a new life; and although the family
planned to return to Morocco, they did not. C.T. never spoke with his
father or father’s friends about homosexuality, but he suspected that some
of them enjoyed sex with men in the 1970s. “Most of them didn’t have a
wife or girlfriend here. So if they were not able to find a Dutch girlfriend
for sex, they would accept a man-version.” Additionally, he suspected that
a Moroccan man would “cross boundaries” when he grew tired of his
female partner.
Clarence—the Moluccan gay man who said that Moluccans didn’t
“believe” men and women could love members of the same sex—com-
pared their views to those of Moroccans in the Netherlands. C.T. said
something similar: “a Moroccan will always deny his bi or gay [feelings]”
and consequently, the “gay Moroccan” existed only in gossip. Although
C.T. sounded critical of the system he described, he identified largely
within the system until recently, when he started to feel that the label
gay or bi might be appropriate for himself.
ON THE ABSENCE OF MOROCCAN, TURKISH, AND PAKISTANI PERSPECTIVES 239
Mo (b. 1976, Flanders) was the first in his family to be born in Europe,
but could be called “generation 2.5” since both of his parents arrived in
Belgium as adolescent children of guest workers. His Moroccan grand-
fathers took dangerous work in the mines after many Italians had been
killed on the job, and both grandfathers sent for their wives and children
to join them; his parents met and married in Belgium. Both C.T. and Mo
are quoted in Chapter 3 in support of the “conservative turn” that coin-
cided with the arrival of their families in the 1970s; for Mo’s parents, it was
difficult both to come of age alongside movements for sexual liberation,
and also during the period when their parents grew more conservative.
Mo had never met an openly gay Moroccan from the “first generation”;
however, he was confident that many of those who arrived in Europe in the
1960s–70s were interested in sex with men. He reiterated some of the narra-
tives about “closed” views on homosexuality: “those guys were never [gay] in
the open. They will never talk about it. They are all married.” And he analyzed
the behaviors of family friends who he suspected were gay: “you know it when
their eyes follow you . . . or they swallow in a certain way.” Mo identifies openly
as gay, and says he went to his first gay bar when he was fourteen (c. 1990).
Another Moroccan-Dutch interviewee (b. 1982), whose parents immi-
grated from Morocco in the 1970s to work in the industrial sector,
compared his parents’ views on homosexuality, abortion, and sex before
marriage to those held by “evangelic[al] Christians in the U.S., and the
Catholic church.” They “dislike gays,” who are a “shame for your family.”
Consequently, members of the community had to be discreet, since
“People like to gossip.” He suspected that his parents probably had
more open attitudes towards sexuality in the Netherlands in the 1970s
than they do today, but then added, “It’s not something to brag about.”
This sentiment summarizes a major problem with the crafting of retro-
spection, and with conducting oral histories on sensitive topics like
(homo)sexuality: an informant (i.e. a first generation “guest worker”)
might profess certain attitudes today, while denying—or forgetting—
their mindsets upon arrival in Europe in the 1960s–70s.
Through its presentation of diverse narratives of mostly gay men who

lived in Denmark and the Netherlands in the 1960s–1980s, this chapter
engaged with Wekker’s critique of “homo-nostalgia” by showing that
Dutch and Danish gay and lesbian scenes were never homogeneously
white, European, or Christian. Chapter 7 showed that men and women
of color, and with immigration backgrounds, contributed to gay and

lesbian movements and social circles through correspondence in personal
ads. This chapter brings these printed correspondences to life by delving
into the personal histories of immigrants and ethnic minorities who
participated in gay and lesbian organizations, commercial venues, and
friendship networks. While some narratives—such as Clarence’s about
his Moluccan family—suggest that non-European cultures could hinder
some LGBTQ people’s ability to live fully openly, other narratives—such
as Raymond’s about his Papuan family—suggest that non-European
immigrant families could tolerate “coming out” to a higher degree than
many contemporaneous white Europeans. And even as the Danish and
particularly Dutch scenes grew more diverse in the 1980s, some queer
people of color felt that stereotypes and fantasies about “non-Western”
sexuality tinted (or tainted) their encounters in majority-white gay and
lesbian scenes. Overall, the narratives in this chapter—which represent
some of the earliest queer-of-color perspectives on Europe’s gay and
lesbian scenes—challenge us to consider that nascent “queer migration”
theories must be integrated into colonial, post-colonial, asylum, and labor
migration histories.
NOTES
1. I address interviewees’ and mainstream uses of “colored” (rather than the
more common U.K. and U.S. usage, “of color”) in Chapter 2, fn 1. Here I
add a few more notes based on my conversations in 2014–15 with Alfred,
whose narrative is featured in this chapter. When he first arrived in Denmark,
people tended to use the word “neger” (“Negro”), but Alfred agrees with
me that most people today associate this word with negative connotations.
Alfred says that he and other mixed-race people of African descent prefer
“farvet” or “mulat” (“colored” or “mulatto”), but he recognizes that it’s
also becoming more “modern” to say “mikset” (“mixed”); but for him,
“mixed” is too general, so he sticks with farvet. He referred to his father as
“sort amerikansk” (“black American”). As Alfred’s quotation—the title of
this chapter—was originally in Danish, I could have translated it as, “I was
one of the first gays of color,” but “colored gays” is a closer match to the
ways that many of this generation use the word; see quotations from
Raymond and Ruud in this chapter with “colored” (originally in English).
2. All interviews comply with the ethnical standards of the international review
board located at the City University of New York. Unlike previous chapters
in this book, this chapter does not footnote every quotation, but rather
NOTES 241
attributes the quotation to the (anonymous or named) speakers directly in

the text.
3. E.g. Gloria Wekker, “What’s Identity Got to Do with It? Rethinking
Identity in Light of the Mati Work in Suriname,” in Female Desires, eds.
Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999).
4. E.g. Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000); Annette
N. Markham, “Fieldwork in Social Media: What Would Malinowski Do?”
Qualitative Communication Research, 2(4, 2013): 434–446. I also reflected
on Sundén’s piece about the need for self-reflexivity when conducting inter-
views with those who might form attachments to the interviewer, and vice
versa: Jenny Sundén, “Desires at Play: On Closeness and Epistemological
Uncertainty,” Games and Culture 7:2 (2012): 164–184.
5. Otherwise the most common user names make reference to location, age
(e.g. senior, young guy), sexual activity (e.g. date, bottom, cam), sexual
identity (e.g. bi), or other adjectives (e.g. sporty, nudist). Additionally, there
are always dozens of users with “escort” or with monetary symbols in their
names.
6. i.e. the nine months of 2001 after gay marriage was legalized in the
Netherlands, but before the events of 11 September drew widespread atten-
tion to the supposed threat of Islam in Europe; Linda Duits, “We lijden aan
homo-nostalgie” [“We Suffer from Gay Nostalgia’], The Post Online, last
accessed October 2016 via cult.tpo.nl/column/lijden-aan-homo-nostalgie/.
7. Gloria Wekker, “Of Homo Nostalgia and (Post)Coloniality,” in White
Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 108. Originally: Gloria Wekker, “Van homo nos-
talgie en betere tijden. Multiculturaliteit en postkolonialiteit” [“On Gay
Nostalgia and Better Times: Multiculturalism and Postcolonialism”]
(George Mosse Lecture, Amsterdam, 2009); available online as.docx file
by searching “Van Homo Nostalgie en betere Tijden—AISSR”; last
accessed October 2015. Also discussed in Suhraiya Jivraj and Anisa De
Jong, “The Dutch Homo-emancipation Policy and its Silencing Effects on
Queer Muslims,” Feminist Legal Studies, Special Issue: ‘Liabilities of Queer
Antiracist Critique,’ 19:2 (2011).
8. Wekker, “Van homo nostalgie”, ibid.
9. Ben Holthuis, “Manfred Langer: That’s iT” (The Hague: BZZToH
Publishers, 1994).
10. On lesbian experiences in elite Jakarta circles in the 1990s, see: Alison J.
Murray, “Let Them Take Ecstasy: Class and Jakarta Lesbians,” in
Blackwood and Wieringa (n 3).
11. For more on relationships between German women and African-American
men during this period, see Maria Höhn, “Heimat in Turmoil: African-
American GIs in 1950s West Germany,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural

History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
12. According to Alfred, there were conflicts between the lesbians in the leader-
ship positions and the gay male volunteers, and many F1948 branches
deteriorated in the 1980s.
13. On internalized homophobia in West German gay subcultures, see Martin
Dannecker, “Der unstillbare Wunsch nach Anerkennung.
Homosexuellenpolitik in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren,” in Was heißt
hier schwul? Politik und Identitäten im Wandel, ed. D. Grumbach (Hamburg:
Männerschwarm, 1997), 37; cited in Franz X. Eder, “The Long History of the
‘Sexual Revolution’ in West Germany,” in Sexual Revolutions, eds. Gert
Hekma and Alaina Giami (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 105.
14. Mills opened the Danish-American Dance Theatre School in the early
1960s, and by 1964, he changed its name to the Georges Mills moderne
ballet skole, and put a new emphasis on jazz ballet classes; see Lena
Hammergren, “Dancing African-American Jazz in the Nordic Region,” in
Nordic Dance Spaces: Practicing and Imagining a Region, eds. Karen Vedel
and Petri Hoppu (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2014), 108, 118.
Already in 1964, Mills had established himself as a choreographer in
Denmark, providing choreographic assistance to the Danish Royal
Theater’s revival of the jazz opera (Rise and Fall of the City of)
Mahagonny. In 1968, he choreographed the premier of the play Voks by
the Danish beat-author Klaus Rifbjerg. Tove Wallenstrøm (1915–2013)—a
prominent stage actress in the 1930s–40s—studied jazz ballet under Mills;
via the Danish film database.
15. Crutchfield was born in 1938. He was one of the first teachers at Mills’
school in 1963, and opened his own school in 1965. By 1970, he offered
dance therapy programs to the elderly and worked with disabled children;
Hammergren, ibid, 109. He founded the dance academy Vimmelskaftet in
Copenhagen; Danish film database. A short documentary from 1971
entitled Dancing Prophet (1971, dir. Bruce Baker) profiled Crutchfield,
the “son of a minister from Cincinnati, Ohio, [who] knew what he wanted
to do with the rest of his life . . . and it wasn’t what his father wished for
him”; via the Chicago Film Archives.
16. Henry Turner’s International Dance Center of Scandinavia blurred the lines
between dance school and sub-culture, as the school (by 1976) advertised its
own disco, sauna, and lounge; Hammergren (n 14), 109.
17. Hammergren (n 14), 102, 122.
18. On the larger wave of (heterosexual) African-American jazz musicians in
Denmark in the 1960s–80s, see the footnote in Chapter 2 relating to the
artists among the post-war visible immigrants.
NOTES 243
19. Many queer scholars have written that Ailey was a homosexual with numer-
ous lovers, who eventually died of HIV-related illness in 1989; yet Ailey’s
autobiography was “sexually sanitized” and his death certificate did not
mention HIV/AIDS. “Alvin Ailey,” glbtq.com (An Encyclopedia of
GLBTQ Culture), last accessed October 2016 via glbtqarchive.com/arts/
ailey_a_A.pdf.
20. Even though they dated and lived together, Bruhn and Nudeyev did not live
as openly gay. Nudeyev was one of the most esteemed ballet dancers and
choreographers of the twentieth century. Shortly after defecting from the
Soviet Union, Nudeyev spent a year in Copenhagen in 1961. He arranged a
meeting with Bruhn at the bar of the Hotel d’Angleterre, “which at the time
was the socially upward-mobile meeting place for Copenhagen’s homosex-
uals and theatre-goers.” The two hit it off and began a sexual relationship
that lasted until 1967. Nureyev moved in with Bruhn, who lived with his
mother, before moving together to London. In addition to being “the
dance world’s first true male superstar of the twentieth century,” Nudeyev
was “the darling of the anti-communist West.” Nureyev died of AIDS in
1993. See: Wilhelm von Rosen, “Erik Bruhn,” and A.M. Wentink,
“Rudolph Nureyev,” in Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian
History: From World War II to the Present Day, eds. Robert Aldrich and
Garry Wotherspoon (London: Routledge, 2000), 61–62, 306–307.
21. Corey Jarell, “Doug Crutchfield, Cincinnati Fabulous!” I’ll Keep You Posted
(blog) (31 October 2001), last accessed October 2016 via illkeepyouposted.
typepad.com/ill_keep_you_posted/2011/10/doug-crutchfield-1.html.
22. Comment by CC (22 December 2011), on Jarell’s post (above).
23. E.g. Wekker (n 3).
24. Jens Rydström, “Introduction” and “Nordic Peripheries,” in Criminally
Queer: Homosexuality and Criminal Law in Scandinavia, 1842–1999, eds.
Jens Rydström and Kati Mustola (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007); quote from
p. 30.
25. For an historic perspective on sexuality and bodies in Iran, see: Afsaneh
Najmabadi, “Types, Acts, or What? Regulation of Sexuality in Nineteenth-
Century Iran,” in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal
Geographies of Desire, eds. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi
(Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard
University, 2008).
26. For more on this topic, see the 2018 special issue of Sexualities that coins,
theorizes, and historicizes the “sexotic,” based on a seminar at the Max
Planck Institute in Berlin in February 2015.
27. Curious if “like rape” was a language error, I followed up a week later; my
interviewee stood by his words, and even confirmed with a friend from the
time that this was the dominant BBF view on homosexuality. This opinion
contrasts those of many French radical gay activists in the Homosexual

Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR) who, in their 1971 take on a
famous abortion manifesto, declared “We are more than 343 sluts. We’ve
been buggered by Arabs. We’re proud of it and we’ll do it again. Sign and
circulate this petition,” in an attempt to show solidarity with the émigrés in
France. See: Todd Shepard, “‘Something Notably Erotic’: Politics, ‘Arab
Men,’ and Sexual Revolution in Post-decolonization France, 1962–1974,”
Journal of Modern History (March 2012): 106.
28. Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and
Homosexual Fantasy. (London: Routledge, 1993). Stephen O. Murray and
Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature
(New York: New York University Press, 1997). Joseph A. Boone,
“Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA, 110
(1995): 89–107; Joseph A. Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
29. Only more recently can one read the explicit sexual “adventures” in certain
published letters and diaries: see the specific entries from Tangiers by
William S. Burroughs, in The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945–1959,
ed. Oliver C. G. Harris (New York: Viking, 1993); the section by historian
Samuel Steward on Algeria in 1939 (and of visiting Gide and his Arab lover
in Paris) in Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and times of Samuel
Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2010); or the entries about Morocco by English play-
wright Joe Orton in Joe Orton and John Lahr, The Orton Diaries: Including
the Correspondence of Edna Welthorpe and Others (New York: Harper &
Row, 1986).
30. Falcon World Gay Guide (Baltimore, MD: Falcon Guides, 1977). This
shows that gay tourists to Morocco were eager to share with each other
their hidden, or not so hidden, enclaves in the city. The guide also suggests
ten locations in Istanbul, Turkey; eight in Algiers, Algeria; and provides
scattered suggestions for Jakarta, Indonesia; Izmir, Turkey; Beirut,
Lebanon; Tunis, Tunisia; Casablanca, Morocco; and Marrakesh, Morocco.
31. Gianni De Martino, “An Italian in Morocco,” in Sexuality and Eroticism
Among Males in Moslem Societies, eds. Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer
(Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park, 1992), 25.
32. Mohammad Choukri was one of the protégés of expatriate author Paul
Bowles. Despite his narrator’s constant desire for sexual satisfaction and
nonchalance about active homosexuality with younger males (as an adoles-
cent), Choukri portrayed the narrator—his adolescent self—as conflicted
about an encounter he had with a Spanish man who picked him up in a
nice car, and paid for the opportunity to give the narrator (Choukri) oral
sex. The incident, if true, would have occurred during the period of the
NOTES 245
French and Spanish protectorates in Morocco (i.e. prior to 1956). Choukri

depicted himself as dehydrated and sick from eating rotting food, yet still
ashamed of his choice to engage in homosexual prostitution for survival. He
did not return to this mode of earning money for the remainder of the
narrative. Mohamed Choukri, Al-Khubz al-Hafi, Sirah Dhatiyyah
Riwa’iyyah, 1935–1956 [“Plain Bread, A Novelistic Autobiography, 1935–
1956”], fifth edn. (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 1995). For the English edition, see
For Bread Alone, translated with an introduction by Paul Bowles (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987).
CHAPTER 9
Epilogue: “It was a cultural evolution”:

Rethinking Immigrant Sexual Politics
Since the 1980s
In The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, Rita Chin posi-

tioned foreign workers as central to understanding national identity
and gender politics in Germany; this book extends Chin’s argument to
the Netherlands and Denmark, and also emphasizes that foreign work-
ers were not peripheral to sexual politics in the post-war era, but
shaped conversations about, drew inspiration from, and at times parti-
cipated in movements for sexual liberation, whether by dancing in
night clubs, discussing non-procreative sex, or “coming out” as gay
or lesbian.
Yet many of today’s journalists and politicians continue to cast the first
generation of immigrants—from Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, and other
Muslim-majority countries—and even their children and grandchildren
as perpetually foreign, stubborn and sexually conservative. Right-wing
and nativist politicians strategically link Muslim and “immigrant” com-
munities to misogyny and sexual conservatism. So why is there a contra-
diction between the many liberal cases explored in this book, and the
conservative relationship between Muslim “immigrants” and sexuality
today?
Chapter 3 suggested three trajectories after the initial period of liberal-
ization and experimentation in the late 1960s and early 1970s: (1) a
conservative turn; (2) a conservative turn, with retention of some liberal
ideas; and in some cases, (3) continuous liberalization. The conservative

248 9 EPILOGUE: “IT WAS A CULTURAL EVOLUTION” . . .
turn—even with retention of some liberalized ideas—related to family

reunification and the baby boom (in the late 1970s and 1980s), during
which time many felt a pressure “to conform” within the growing immi-
grant community and “to be more Muslim,” in one interviewee’s words.
Initial excitement for drinking, dancing, and one-night stands with
European women, and in some cases homosexual activity, subsided; free
time was now spent with community and religious groups, or with
spouses, children, parents, and in-laws.
Yet it is hardly true that this conservative turn—like the baby boom—
was unique to “immigrants.” After all, a 2002 longitudinal study on
Dutch attitudes toward pre- and extra-marital sexuality concluded that
the “growing-conservative-when-growing-older argument” held true for
Dutch attitudes toward sexual permissiveness. The study also concluded
that “churches are successful at keeping members from developing pro-
gressive opinions,” and clarified later that the “differences between the
religious denominations appear relatively small,” and those surveyed
“from conservative churches, such as the Dutch Reformed, and Jews,
Muslims, and Hindus are [only] slightly more opposed to premarital
sexuality than are members of the Catholic and Protestant churches” in
the Netherlands.1
If attitudes toward sexual permissiveness have been similarly conser-
vative for Muslims and religious non-Muslims in the Netherlands—and if
one considers that many “native” Europeans in the 1980s also back-
tracked on their previously liberalized opinions about sexuality—then
from where did the trope arise linking immigrants to sexual conserva-
tism? Marlou Schrover suggested that one media frame in the
Netherlands—i.e. the oppressed migrant woman as a victim of the abu-
sive man—was an unintentional byproduct of feminist campaigns for a
change in residency laws (Chapter 6). David Bos’ recent work shows that
the media did not depict homosexuals and Muslims as adversaries prior
to the mid-1980s and that this frame resulted partly from the advocacy of
key gay, Muslim spokes people (!).2
Joan W. Scott, in her analysis of headscarf debates in France over the last
three decades, attests that local media attention to issues related to Muslims
in Europe (e.g. girls’ head coverings in public schools) tend to flare in
relation to media coverage of (vaguely related) international and pan-
European events.3 Thus one could look to various events that attracted
media attention in the 1990s to contextualize why European attention, at
times, fixated on immigrants’ attitudes toward gender and sexuality.
REVISITING “THE CONSERVATIVE TURN” 249
REVISITING “THE CONSERVATIVE TURN”

In the 1990s—as sociologist Tariq Modood argued—European conversa-
tions on integration shifted from a focus on “immigrants” to a focus on
“Muslims” in Europe, including their religiosity, and their supposedly
conservative attitudes towards freedom of speech. The discursive shift to
“Muslims” related partly to the growing importance of Islam in the prac-
tices of some immigrants in Europe, such as Moroccans in the Netherlands,
as Cottaar and Bouras noted. But drawing from Scott’s call to contextua-
lize European debates about Muslims, one could also consider how Dutch
and Danish allegations of Muslim and gender/sexual “conservatism” since
the 1990s have related to the following global and pan-European debates:
1. In 1989, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie set off a pan-European

discussion of Islam’s supposed opposition to “freedom of speech.”
Modood noted that while the media focused on “Muslim sensitiv-
ities against offensive literature,” it rarely questioned European calls
for censorship, such as “radical feminists against pornography.”4
2. From 1991 through 1995 or so, European countries accepted refu-
gees from the former Yugoslavia at unprecedented rates,5 prompting
many in Europe to claim that the “boat is full.” By 1998, Dutch
immigration scholars—studying how journalists connected refugees
to crime and disorder in their reports—predicted that these refugees
would replace Turkish and Moroccan immigrants as the lowest totem
on the “ethnic hierarchy” in the Netherlands.6 But negative attention
to one group did not necessarily displace attention from another.
3. In 1993, the European Union officially formed. As the EU accepted
applications from countries with disparate languages, cultures, and
recent histories, many attempted to define the “European civiliza-
tion” that united all EU members; these dialogues frequently
referred to Greek democracy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian
values.7 Debates against Turkey’s petitions to join the EU also
reiterated that Europe was inherently non-Muslim.
4. In 1990, the reunification of East and West Germany provoked—in
Chin’s words—an “unexpected return of race” in German national
debates about belonging and identity. Germans sought to identify
fundamental similarities that united those who had lived for decades
in fundamentally different cultures, often to the exclusion of “guest
workers.”8
5. Unemployment rose in the mid-1990s, inevitably reawakening dor-

mant accusations that foreigners take too many European jobs.9
Future research on the rise of political, journalistic, and public conflation

of immigrants/Islam and sexual conservatism must look carefully at the
roles that international and local current events play in framing each of
these debates. This list is by no means complete; it merely hints at some
ways to think more broadly about media depictions of immigrants.
Another example of a politicized discussion that tied foreigners to fearful
discussions of sexuality was the HIV epidemic; as the European media
portrayed HIV as allochthonous (i.e. as something from the United States
or Africa), the public would have formed new associations between
foreigners and sexual threats, hearkening back to previous discursive
links (i.e. between immigrant “ghettos” and rape).
REVISITING “CONTINUOUS LIBERALIZATION”

When Wasif Shadid surveyed 280 Moroccans in the Netherlands in 1979,
he asked them whether or not they agreed with eight statements relating
to the “emancipation of women.”10 Each statement began with “In gen-
eral, I do not object to . . . ”; Shadid found them to rank, from easiest to
hardest to accept, in the following order:
1. Moroccans wearing western costumes in Morocco.

2. Moroccan women participating in the labor process side by side with
men.
3. Moroccan women wearing European style clothing.
4. Moroccan women having the same rights as men.
5. Presenting alcoholic beverages to Dutch guests.
6. Moroccan women having the same rights as Dutch women.
7. A Moroccan changing his nationality into Dutch citizenship.
8. A Moroccan girl marrying a Dutch man.
This book’s earlier analysis of the “conservative turn,” ventures into some
of these points; for example, why were the rights of Dutch women (#6)
more threatening than the rights of (Moroccan or Dutch) men (#4)? This
ranking suggested that some Moroccan men did not approve of the
gender and sexual independence they associated with Dutch women.
But the list also showed the retention of liberalized ideas, for example,
REVISITING “CONTINUOUS LIBERALIZATION” 251
with regard to women adopting “European style” clothing, or earning an

independent income. And while women’s work was a necessity—not
emancipatory—for many foreign women, many associated wage-earning
with independent decision-making; as Rosa Labarca expressed about
Chilean women in Denmark in the 1970s: “Now she decides for herself
what she will buy for herself, for the children, for the home.”11
At the bottom of Shadid’s 1979 list: the hardest for Moroccan immi-
grants to accept was “a Moroccan girl marrying a Dutch man,” likely due
to anxieties about the identity and citizenship (#7) of future generations.
To think about how opinions on this topic have changed over time, the
reader should refer back to Table 2.1. Mixed marriages involving a
Moroccan woman increased: in 1985–89, only 1.3% of Moroccan
women (one in seventy-seven) married across ethnic lines, likely due to
pressures from their parents’ generation; but just ten years later, the
percentage more than tripled to 4.4% (one in twenty-three); and there
were similar figures for Turkish women. Presuming that the Moroccan
parents maintained a relationship with their daughter after a mixed mar-
riage, this statistic suggests a liberalization of the first generation’s atti-
tudes on this topic.
Moroccan women’s divorce rates increased from the 1990s to the
2000s (from 9.4 to 17.2 divorced women for every 1,000 married
women) at a greater rate than Dutch women’s divorce rates (from 10.9
to 15.6 in the same period).12 This could relate to the eventual loosening
of visa laws, which allowed more women who entered the Netherlands
through family reunification to divorce and live independently. While
neither mixed marriage nor divorce is a clear indicator of “women’s
emancipation” or “liberalization,” these statistics—and the following
example—complicate the notion that immigrants are “unable to change”
their beliefs about gender roles and sexuality.
“It was a cultural evolution”: HTIB and Homosexuality Since 2004

The topic of “guest worker” impressions of homosexuality have
recurred throughout this book: in Chapter 3, one of the Turkish
interviewees referred to his initial shock at seeing an openly gay man
on television—“how dare you . . . !”—but said that over time he per-
ceived gay liberation as part and parcel of anti-authoritarianism, and
related to a worker striking for better pay, a soldier speaking against
nuclear weapons, and a woman talking back to her husband. Moroccan
and Turkish left-wing organizations Komitee Marokkaanse Arbeiders

in Nederland (KMAN: Committee for Moroccan Workers in the
Netherlands) and Hollanda Türkiyeli Isçiler Birligi (HTIB: Turkish
Worker Association in the Netherlands) accepted solidarity from The
(Dutch Association for the Integration of Homosexuality) COC, and
printed its name in support materials for their campaigns (Chapter 5).
However, interviewee I.N.—one of the original volunteers with HTIB
in 1974—recalled that this solidarity was not without controversy.
But when I.N. helped organize the thirty-year celebration event for
HTIB in 2004, he noticed a sea-change. For the first time, there was
momentum in the group to organize a panel on anti-gay/lesbian discri-
mination in the Turkish community, a dramatic step with regard to
HTIB’s stance on homosexuality. By talking about gay and lesbian issues
in the Turkish community, I.N. said, “you make it easier for the families to
accept,” and that was the goal of the event.13
The momentum continued in the following years: HTIB’s chairman
became a leader in a Dutch project to provide information and lead
activities in schools about LGBTQ issues. A member of HTIB flew to an
LGBTQ Conference in South Africa to accept an award for the group’s
efforts to promote inclusion and diversity. The group has actively changed
its stance on homosexuality, which has not gone unnoticed. I.N. reflected,
“It was a cultural evolution, I would say.”
In October 2014, I decided to drop by the HTIB office, located on one
of Amsterdam’s many quiet, canal-facing streets. A small sign (HTIB)
alerted me that I was at the correct space, as the building looked otherwise
residential, and the door was open. I entered and walked toward a room
with warm light, which I could see was an event space with black-and-white
photographs from HTIB’s past, and a few offices. As I walked towards this
space, my eye was caught by a large and colorful poster in the hallway: first
in Turkish, “Eşcinsel olma özgürlüğünü DESTEKLIYORUZ,” and then
in Dutch: “Wij komen op voor de vrijheid om HOMO TE ZIJN!” (In
English: “We stand up for the freedom TO BE GAY!”) On a magenta and
green background was an array of thirty-six faces—each with a full name—
of members of the Turkish-Dutch community who supported LGBTQ
rights. I paused to take a photograph.
Standing now in the hallway, I stopped to explore the stacks of pamphlets
and informational materials available to passers-through. Included here were
a stack of booklets entitled, in Dutch, “I am Turkish and I am a lesbian:
lesbian women tell their stories.” The thirty-eight-page publication included
REVISITING “CONTINUOUS LIBERALIZATION” 253
fifteen personal narratives of Turkish-Dutch women discussing their sexu-

ality; and while most were “second generation” and born in the Netherlands,
there were five who were born in the 1970s, one of whom arrived in the
Netherlands in 1976 at the age of four: “When I was eleven or twelve, I
didn’t really know that I was a lesbian, but I was looking at women,” her
narrative shared; she noted later that within the Turkish community of the
Netherlands, “The attitude toward lesbians is changing for the better.”14
It was then that I noticed that the building also included an office for The
Committee for Moroccan Workers in Amsterdam (KMAA: Komité
Marokkaanse Arbeiders Amsterdam). Thus, some of the pamphlets in the
hallway were not Turkish-specific. For example, there was another booklet
entitled “Allochtone [non-native] parents on sexual diversity: the role of
school and educators,” with a foreword about the acceptance of homosexu-
ality. The thirty-page booklet talked about issues like homosexuality and
religion, having a gay/lesbian child, and safety in schools, and was aimed at
promoting “awareness about sexual diversity” to immigrant parents.15
It is worth considering that one catalyst for HTIB’s—and subsequently
KMAA’s—“cultural evolution” was the post-Fortuyn climate, when public
discourses increasingly blamed immigrant communities for societal homo-
phobia; with this lens, these immigrant organizations’ pro-LGBTQ stances
were defensive. But more likely, HTIB’s and KMAA’s “cultural evolution”
related to positive personal experiences with LGBTQ acquaintances. The
booklet, “I am Turkish and I am a lesbian” provides just a hint at the power
that “coming out” can have with regard to winning support for LGBTQ
identities and rights from family, friends and other allies.
Another example of liberalization on LGBTQ topics: the Kwaku Festival—
the Netherlands’ largest annual Surinamese festival since 1975—began to
incorporate a “Pink Sunday” into its line-up in 2008. As the festival can
accommodate around 21,000 people, some groups have called its Pink
Sunday “the largest black LGBT event” in Europe.16 In 2015, a local televi-
sion show attended the Pink Sunday and asked for the perspectives of three
older men, all of whom were religious leaders: a (South Asian-Caribbean)
Hindu pandit, an imam (also of South Asian-Caribbean descent), and a (Afro-
Caribbean) priest. All three basically agreed that LGBTQ people should be
accepted for who they are, that their sexual orientation could not be changed,
and that if someone took issue with homosexuality, it was their own problem,
not the homosexual’s problem.17 According to a Dutch-Antillean intervie-
wee, the Kwaku Festival was a “nice development” in the community’s
perceptions of LGBTQ identities.18
FORGING NEW IDENTITIES

Sociologist Michele Grigolo, in 2003, provided a queer critique to state
authorities’ approval of asylum on the grounds of LGBTI (I for intersex)
identities (i.e. as “membership of a particular social group”19). There was a
tension between queer notions of identity (i.e. as constructed and fluid),
and the asylum authorities’ essentialist understanding of orientation (e.g.
their demands for concrete documentation that an applicant was LGBTI,
has been threatened because of being LGBTI, and will continue to be
threatened upon return to their country of origin on account of being
LGBTI).20 Writing both idealistically and practically, Grigolo called for
“universal sexual rights” that relied not on a homo/hetero binary (i.e.
where homosexuals are the only protected group), nor on the notion of
immutable orientation, but rather on “sexual and relational self-determi-
nation and development, on the basis of personal choice.”21
This call was addressed in 2006, when a group of twenty-nine interna-
tional human rights experts (unrelated to Grigolo) met in Indonesia to
draft the Yogyakarta Principles regarding the “universal enjoyment of
all human rights . . . by all persons, irrespective of sexual orientation or
gender identity. . . . ”22 The authors only once used the words lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and intersex—in the Preamble—
but otherwise referred to sexual orientation and gender identity with a
broad definition.23 The right to asylum was addressed, but most principles
concerned rights in one’s country of residence, such as The Right to
Freedom from Arbitrary Deprivation of Liberty, or The Right to
Adequate Housing. Yet the authors struggled with the same issues as
Grigolo—and indeed, a number of queer-migration scholars24 and acti-
vists who work with LGBTI asylum seekers—namely that one should not
need a sexual or gender identity to receive humanitarian rights, such as
asylum; yet identity labels remain central to the obtaining or exercising of
these rights (i.e. through asylum). This is the contradictory reality for
LGBTI asylum seekers in the “perverse present.”25 LGBTI asylum seekers
know they have the best chance at success when they identify as wholly
gay/lesbian (i.e. not bi, queer, fluid, pansexual, pangender, asexual, or
something else) and when they present an Orientalizing rescue-narrative
that frames tolerant Europe as the best possible destination, after fleeing
their (often Muslim-majority, or sub-Saharan) countries of origin.26
It is worth considering that some LGBTQ immigrants do not experience
Northwest Europe as sexually “liberated.” In one Danish documentary, a
NOTES 255
binational gay couple talk about falling in love later in life, and their life in a
small village on the island of Møn, Denmark. Poul Jensen (b. 1944,
Denmark), a fisherman, met Bandit “Mai” Phittak (b. 1964, Thailand) at
a gay bar in Copenhagen when Mai was on vacation. After dating for a
few months, they married, and Mai decided to move to Denmark—Møn
specifically—where Mai found a job and began the arduous task of learning
the local language and culture. As both had previously been in long-term
partnerships with women, both men had to learn to live openly as gay.
Although Mai depicted Møn as a place where his same-sex marriage was
both legally and socially recognized, he did not necessarily portray the
island’s aging fishing community as a bastion of gay liberation.27
As sexual and gender identity labels and practices continue to shift,
expand, collapse and disappear, some lament the “alphabet soup” of
LGBTQPAI+ discourses. But it is inspiring to consider that the emergence
and popularization of new labels and practices have come “from below,”
often from those who are conscious of the social construction and decon-
struction of categories, the historical relationship of certain categories to
structures of power, the intersectionality of identities, and the multiplicity
of lived experiences within communities. New sexual and gender identity
labels (or lack thereof) emerge in settings that are heterogeneous in many
regards, including race, ethnicity, religion, and migration status, and they
leave room for individual meaning-making. Consequently, new identities
and practices speak not only to the present interpretations of the histories
of genders and sexualities, but also to the histories of imperialism, inequal-
ity, Orientalism, and global migration.
NOTES
1. Gerbert Kraaykamp, “Trends and Countertrends in Sexual Permissiveness:
Three Decades of Attitude Change in The Netherlands 1965–1995,”
Journal of Marriage and Family 64:1 (February 2002): 225, 233.
2. David Bos, “Hoe homo’s en moslims iets met elkaar kregen: Een lange-
termijnanalyse van het discours over homoseksualiteit en islam in
Nederlandse dagbladen, radio-en televisieprogramma’s” [“How gays and
Muslims came together: A longitudinal analysis of the discourse on homo-
sexuality and Islam in Dutch newspapers, radio and television programs”],
Religie en Samenleving 11:2 (September 2016): 227–229.
3. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007). See also Joan Scott, “Symptomatic Politics: The
Banning of Islamic Head Scarves in French Public Schools,” French Politics,

Culture, and Society (Winter 2005). For more on the sexual politics of the
“veil,” see: Eric Fassin, “The Rise and Fall of Sexual Politics in the Public
Sphere: A Transatlantic Contrast,” Public Culture 18:1 (2006): 79–91.
4. Tariq Modood, “Muslims and the Politics of Difference,” The Political
Quarterly 74 (2003): 100–101.
5. In Denmark, approximately 20,000 Yugoslavian refugees, mostly Bosnians,
came in 1991–1993; see e.g. “Denmark and Refugees After the Second
World War,” an multimedia exhibit at The Danish Jewish Museum (Spring
2015).
6. Drawing from previous work—which had said that Western European
foreigners and Jews were the most accepted ethnic-minority groups in the
Netherlands, whereas Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were the least
accepted—Lubbers et al. predicted that refugees were now the least toler-
ated group in society. His hypothesis was based on an analysis of thousands
of media reports on asylum seekers in Dutch newspapers, which tended to
connect the seekers to deviance (or, at best, to the “problems” they faced in
the Netherlands). Marcel Lubbers, Peer Scheepers and Fred Wester, “Ethnic
Minorities in Dutch Newspapers, 1990–5: Patterns of Criminalization and
Problematization,” International Communication Gazette 60:5 (1998).
7. See e.g. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is
Critique Secular? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
8. Rita Chin, “Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race,”
in After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and
Europe, eds. Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley and Atina Grossmann
(Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 80–101.
9. Unemployment was 12.9% in Denmark in 1994, and around 8% in the
Netherlands. By the end of the 1990s, joblessness was greatly ameliorated
in both countries, e.g. the Danish unemployment rate decreased to 6.5% by
1998; Per H. Jensen, “Activation of the Unemployed in Denmark since the
early 1990s. Welfare or Workfare?” (Centre for Comparative Welfare State
Studies, Aalborg University, 1999). On the Netherlands: “Whereas in the
early 1980s the Dutch unemployment rate was as high as 12% and in the early
1990s it was still as high as 8%, it fell to 2% in the early 21st century”; Michèle
Belot and Jan C. van Ours, “Labor Market Institutions and Unemployment”
(CESifo DICE Report, 2003).
10. W. S. Shadid, Moroccan Workers in the Netherlands, (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Leiden, 1979), 216.
Labarca], Kvinder 32 (June/July 1980), 16–18. The quotation begins, “In
Chile they’ve done cleaning work their whole lives without getting paid for
it. Here they get an hourly wage, and that is a positive experience for them.”
NOTES 257
12. Own data, via Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, gathered May 2010 via
http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/.
13. I.N. interview (October 2014).
14. Quotation from Gülresen (b. 1972), a driver/chauffeur; via Katılım, “Ik ben
Turkse en ik ben lesbisch” [“I am Turkish and I am a lesbian”] (the
Netherlands: Stichting Katılım, 2014), 34–35, funded and published by
the Katılım Foundation (f. 2007), a group that works with and for
Turkish women and LGBTs; additional funding came from the city councils
in Amsterdam, Deventer, Utrecht, and Amersfoot; via Stichting Katılım,
“News,” last accessed October 2016 via http://www.katilim.nl/nieuws.
html.
Derya (b. 1972), a jurist, said that she knew she was oriented toward
women, “ever since I was young,” but that she did not come out until she
was twenty-nine (1991). She is now open about her lesbian identity to
everyone except her parents. Ayşe (b. 1974) is a psychologist and researcher.
Beldan (b. 1970), a cartoonist, only arrived in the Netherlands in 1997.
15. By Zeki Arslan, the program manager of Forum (The Institute for
Multicultural Issues), an (now-defunct) independent think-tank for issues
facing Turkish and Moroccan youth in the Netherlands.
16. COC Amsterdam, “Roze Zondag op het Kwaku Festival” (3 July 2015), last
accessed October 2016 via https://www.cocamsterdam.nl/2015/07/03/
roze-zondag-op-het-kwaku-festival/. According to this release, the Pink
Sundays in 2013 and 2014 attracted crowds of 21,000. Note also that
they use the term “black LHBT event” in Dutch, that is, with the English
word “black.”
17. Buurttelevisie Amsterdam Zuidoost, “Roze Zondag Kwaku Summer
Festival 2015,” YouTube (uploaded 28 July 2015), last accessed October
2016 via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol9G7IXDkxk.
18. Interview with Ruud (October 2014).
19. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Article 1 of the 1951
Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, as amended by the 1967
Protocol.
20. Michele Grigolo, “Sexualities and the ECHR: Introducing the Universal
Sexual Legal Subject,” European Journal of International Law 14:5 (2003):
1023–1044.
21. Ibid, 1028.
22. “Principle 1: The Right to the Universal Enjoyment of Human Rights,” in
the “Yogyakarta Principles” (Yogyakarta, Indonesia: 2007), last accessed
October 2015 via http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles_en.
htm.
23. “Preamble,” in ibid. The authors defined their key terms in only two
footnotes: “(1) Sexual orientation is understood to refer to each person’s
capacity for profound emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to, and
intimate and sexual relations with, individuals of a different gender or the
same gender or more than one gender; (2)Gender identity is understood to
refer to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of
gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth,
including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely
chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical
or other means) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech
and mannerisms.”
24. “Queer Migration Research Network” (est. 2010 by Karma R. Chávez &
Eithne Luibhéid), http://queermigration.com/.
25. “Perverse present” is the model of historiography named by J. J. Halberstam
in Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 52–54. This
theory draws from Michel Foucault’s critique of presentism—in which
history is read teleologically as a path of progress toward the utopian pre-
sent—and Eve Sedgwick’s application of this concept to the history of
sexuality (i.e. the reading of current sexual systems as replacements of
older models). Writing in 1998, Halberstam used perverse presentism to
also underscore what one does not understand about the present and cannot
know about the past (in the book’s case, regarding constructions of mascu-
linities). See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University University of California
Press, 1991).
26. Deniz Akin, “Queer Asylum Seekers: Translating Sexuality in Norway,” Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42:15 (2016). For Denmark: Søren Laursen and
Mary Lisa Jayaseelan, Disturbing Knowledge: Decisions from Asylum Cases as
Documentation of Persecution of LGBT Persons. Copenhagen: LBL [Now: LGBT
Denmark] and Danish Refugee Council, 2009. For the most comprehensive
documents on this topic from the Netherlands (on Europe as a whole), see:
Sabine Jansen and Thomas Spijkerboer, Fleeing Homophobia: Asylum Claims
Related to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Europe (COC Nederland
and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, September 2011). With similar themes, but
not focusing on asylum: Sara Ahlstedt, “The Feeling of Migration: Narratives of
Queer Intimacies and Partner Migration,” (Ph.D. dissertation at Linköping
University, Sweden, Department of Social and Welfare Studies, 2016). See also
the organizations LGBT Asylum and Sabaah in Denmark, Secret Garden and
Maruf in the Netherlands, and the WelcomeOUT’s international- and asylum-
themed LGBTQ activities (e.g. in Uppsala, September 2016).
27. My Love—Historien om Poul & Mai, dir. Iben Haahr Andersen (Denmark:
Klassefilm ApS, 2012).
ARCHIVES AND SOURCES
Delpher (Dutch newspapers online)
• Het vrije volk

• Nederlands Dagblad (was Gereformeerd gezinsblad (1948–1967);
changed in 1968)
• De Telegraaf
• De Tijd 1845–1974
• De Waarheid
Det Kongelige Bibliotek [The Danish Royal Library] Manuscript

Collections and Archives
• Fremmedarbejderbladet (1971–1977)
• Al-Ghad (1968)
• Murat Alpar (poetry)
• Socialt Arbejde—Teori og Praksis [Social Work—Theory and
Practice] (1977–1985)
• Coq (1970s)
Ephemera from organizations
• Dutch: COC, HTIB, KMAN, Habibi Ana, Secret Garden, Stichting

Katılım, Maruf

and Sexualities in History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49613-9
260 ARCHIVES AND SOURCES
• Danish: Sabaah, LGBT Asylum, Kvinder, Out&About, New Times

• Swedish: RFSU, RFSL, WelcomeOUT
• German: LSVD
Films
• Dancing Prophet. Directed by Bruce Baker. Franciscan

Communications, 1971
• Fra Thailand til Thy [Danish: From Thailand to (the Danish county
of) Thy]. Directed by Janus Metz. Denmark: Cosmo Film Doc ApS,
2007
• I Am Curious (Yellow), 1968. Directed by Vilgot Sjoö;man. Grove
Press, 1967
• My Love—Historien om Poul & Mai [Danish: My Love: The Story of
Poul and Mai]. Directed by Iben Haahr Andersen. Denmark:
Klassefilm ApS, 2012
• Slavernes Slægt [Danish: The Descendents of Slaves]. Directed by
Alex Frank Larsen. DR2, 2005
• Slavernij [Dutch: Slavery]. Directed by Frank Zichem. Teleac/
NOT, 2003
• Sumé—Mumisitsinerup Nipaa [Greenlandic: Sumé: The Sound of a
Revolution]. Directed by Inuk Silis Høegh. Bullitt Film, 2014
• The Act of Killing. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. Det Danske
Film Institut, 2013
International Gay Information Center Archives, LGBT Periodicals, New

York Public Library
• COC ephemera (Amsterdam, NL: 1970–1990)

• De Gay Krant (Amsterdam, NL: 1982–1990)
• Spartacus (Amsterdam, NL: 1982–1986)
• Homologie
International Gay and Lesbian Archives (IHLIA), Amsterdam Public

Library
• COC Periodiek (1960–1964)

• Levensrecht (1940, 1946–1947)
• Paarse September (1972–1976)
ARCHIVES AND SOURCES 261
• Pan (1951–1952)
• Schakel (1954–1966)
• Schakelkrant (1967–1968)
• Sec (1971–1973)
• SEK (1974–1979)
• Seq (1969–1971)
• Vriendschap (1949–1964)
International Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis [International Institute

for Social History], Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
• Migrant Photo Archive

• KMAN (and MVVN) Collection
• HTIB (and HTKB) Collection
• Federatie Studentenwerkgroepen Homoseksualiteit (FSWH)
Kvinfo: Køn, Viden, Information, Forskning [Kvinfo: Sex/Gender,

Knowledge, Information and Research]
• Kvinder (1975–1984)
LGBT Denmark Library
• Eos (1958–71)
• Forbundsnyt (1951–1963)
• Panbladet (1953–2007)
• Vennen (1949–1970)
Museums and Museum Libraries
• The Immigrant Museum, Farum, Denmark

• Museum of Copenhagen, “Becoming a Copenhagener” (permanent
exhibit)
• The Danish-Jewish Museum, Copenhagen
• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
• Amsterdam Museum
• Schwules Museum*, Berlin
262 ARCHIVES AND SOURCES
Political speeches and bulletins
• PVV.nl
• danskfolkeparti.dk
• Danske Folkeblad
Primary sources in J.W. Sørensen, “Velkommen Mustafa?” (1970)
• Arbejdsgivere
• Fagbladet
• Folketingstidende
Selected Periodicals from the holdings of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,

Transgender History Society, San Francisco, California; accessed via
microfilm (Woodbridge, CT: Thomas Gale Primary Source Microfilm,
2004).
• Gay Men of African Descent (U.S.) papers

• Vennen (Uafhængigt Kamporgan for de Homofile/i Norden)
(Copenhagen, Denmark: 1954–1969).
Stadsbiblioteket (Danish newspapers online)
• Aalborg Stiftstidende (1977–1999)

• Aarhuus Stifts-Tidende (1871–1989)
• Aktuelt (1959–1978)
• Information (1945-)
• Jyllands-Posten
United Nations (online documents)
• The Netherlands and Morocco Agreement Concerning the

Recruitment and Placement of Moroccan workers in the
Netherlands, Signed at The Hague 14 May 1969 (No. 9781),
United Nations Treaty Series (1969) 162–171
• United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 1951 Convention
Relating to the Status of Refugees, as amended by the 1967 Protocol
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, Barry D. Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Andre Krouwel, editors. The Global
Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide
Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.
Ahlstedt, Sara. “The Feeling of Migration: Narratives of Queer Intimacies and
Partner Migration,” Ph.D.dissertation at Linköping University (Sweden),
Department of Social and Welfare Studies, 2016.
Akgündüz Ahmet Labour Migration from Turkey to Western Europe: 1960–1974: A
Multidisciplinary Analysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Akin, Deniz. “Queer Asylum Seekers: Translating Sexuality in Norway.” Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies 42:15 (2016).
Aldrich, Robert. The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and
Homosexual Fantasy. London: Routledge, 1993.
Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. London: Routledge, 2003.
Allyn, David. Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History.
Boston, Mass: Little, Brown, 2000.
Amsterdams Initiatief tegen Fascisme, Racisme en Antisemitisme. Geef fascisme
geen kans!: diskussies over de vele gezichten van het hedendaagse fascisme. [Don’t
give fascism a chance!: discussions/disputes on the many faces of contemporary
fascism]. Amsterdam: SUA, 1982.
Andersen, Karen. Gæstearbejder Udlænding Indvandrer Dansker! Migration til
Danmark i 1968–78 [Guest-worker, Alien, Immigrant, Dane! Migration to
Denmark, 1968–78]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979.
Anderson, Morten Bendix, and Niklas Olsen, editors. 1968: dengang og nu [1968:
then and now]. Copenhagen: Copenhagen University, 2004.

264 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andreassen, Rikke. The Mass Media’s Construction of Gender, Race, Sexuality and
Nationality. An Analysis of the Danish News Media’s Communication About
Visible Minorities. Ph.D Thesis, University of Toronto, 2005.
Andreassen, Rikke. “Sing a Song, but Stay Out of Politics: Two Cases of
Representations of Racial/Ethnic Minorities in the Danish Media.” In Media
in Motion: Cultural Complexity and Migration in the Nordic Region, edited by
Elisabeth Eide and Kaarina Nikunen, 163–80. Surrey, England, 2011.
Andreassen, Rikke. “Gender as a Tool in Danish Debates About Muslims.” In
Islam in Denmark: The Challenge of Diversity, edited by Jørgen S. Nielsen.
143–60. Lanham, UK: Lexington Books, 2012.
Andreassen, Rikke. Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic
Displays. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Limited, 2015.
Andreassen, Rikke. “Diversity and Intimacy: Regulations, Celebrations and
Condemnation.” In New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and
Society, edited by Ursula Lindqvist and Jenny Björklund. Cambridge
University Press, 2015.
Andreassen, Rikke, and Anne Folke Henningsen. Menneskeudstilling:
Fremvisninger af eksotiske mennesker i Zoologisk Have og Tivoli [Human
Exhibition: Showings of Exotic People at the Copenhagen Zoo and Tivoli].
Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter, 2011.
Antoun, Richard T. “On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: A
Study in the Accommodation of Traditions” American Anthropologist 70:4
(August 1968): 671–697.
Armbruster, Heidi, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, editors. Negotiating
Multicultural Europe: Borders, Networks, Neighbourhoods. Basingstoke, GB:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Is Critique
Secular?. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Babayan, Kathryn, and Afsaneh Najmabadi. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations
Across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle
Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2008.
Ben Jelloun, Tahar. La Plus Haute Des Solitudes. [The Greatest Solitude]. Paris:
Seuil, 1977.
Blaagaard, Bolette, and Rikke Andreassen. “The Disappearing Act: The Forgotten
History of Colonialism, Eugenics and Gendered Othering in Denmark.” In
Teaching “Race” with a Gendered Edge, edited by Brigitte Hipfl and Kristin
Loftsdóttir. Utrecht: ATGENDER, 2012.
Bleys, Rudi. The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour Outside
the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750–1918. Washington Square,
NY: New York University Press, 1995.
Boone, Joseph A. “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism.”
PMLA 110 (1995): 89–107.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 265
Boone, Joseph A. The Homoerotics of Orientalism. New York: Columbia University

Press, 2014.
Bos, David. ([In Dutch]) “Strangled by Taboos’: Changes in the Acceptance of
Homosexuality in the Moroccan Community in the Netherlands.” In Steeds
Gewoner Nooit Gewoon [Increasingly Common, Never Ordinary], edited by Saskia
Keuzenkamp, 265–86. Den Haag: Sociaal and Cultureel Planbureau, June 2010.
Bos, David J. “Hoe homo’s en moslims iets met elkaar kregen: Een lange-termij-
nanalyse van het discours over homoseksualiteit en islam in Nederlandse dag-
bladen, radio- en televisieprogramma’s” [How gays and Muslims came
together: A longitudinal analysis of the discourse on homosexuality and Islam
in Dutch newspapers, radio and television programs].” Religie en Samenleving
11:2 (September 2016): 206–48.
Bosch, Mineke. “The Meaning of a Kiss: Different Historiographical Approaches
to the Sixties in the Netherlands.” L’Homme 20:2 (2009): 51–63.
Botman, Maayke, Nancy Jouwe en Gloria Wekker, editors. Caleidoscopische visies. De
zwarte, migranten- en vluchtelingen-vrouwenbeweging in Nederland [Kaleidoscopic
visions: The black, migrant and refugee women’s movement in the Netherlands].
Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen Publishers, 2001.
Bourg, Julian. “‘Your Sexual Revolution Is Not Ours’: French Feminist
‘Moralism’ and the Limits of Desire.” In Gender and Sexuality in 1968:
Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination, edited by Lessie Jo
Frazier and Deborah Cohen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Bovenkerk, Frank. The Sociology of Return Migration: A Bibliographic Essay. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
Bovenkerk, Frank. “The Netherlands.” In International Labor Migration in Europe,
edited by Ronald E. Krane. 118–32. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979.
Bracke, Sarah. “From ‘saving women’ to ‘saving gays’: Rescue Narratives and
Their Dis/continuities.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19:2 (2012)
237–52.
Buijs, Laurens, Gert Hekma, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. “‘As long as they keep
away from me’: The Paradox of Antigay Violence in a Gay-Friendly Country.”
Sexualities 14:6 (2011): 632–52.
Buruma, Ian. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits
of Tolerance. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Butler, Judith. “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood.” In
Is Critique Secular, edited by. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and
Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2009.
Butler, Judith, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West. The Power of
Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Captain, Esther. “Harmless Identities: Representations of Racial Consciousness
among Three Generations Indo-Europeans.” In Dutch Racism, edited by
Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving, Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2014.
266 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Castles, Stephen, and Mark J. Miller. The Age of Migration: International

Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Guilford, 1993.
Chapkis, Wendy.“Review: Dutch Perspective” The Women’s Review of Books 2:7
(April 1985): 13.
Cherribi, Oussama. “Imams d’Amsterdam: à travers l’exemple des imams de la
diaspora marocaine.” Ph.D. dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2000.
Chin, Rita. The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Chin, Rita. “Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race.” In
After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe,
edited by Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann.
80–101. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Chin, Rita. “Turkish Women, West German Feminists, and the Gendered
Discourse on Muslim Cultural Difference.” Public Cultures 22:3 (2010):
557–81.
Choukri, Mohamed. Al-Khubz al-Hafi, Sirah Dhatiyyah Riwa’iyyah, 1935–1956
[Plain Bread, A Novelistic Autobiography, 1935–1956], fifth edition. Beirut:
Dar al-Saqi, 1995; or For Bread Alone, translated with an introduction by Paul
Bowles. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987.
Clancy-Smith, Julia. Mediterraneans. Berkeley, CA: University of California,
2011.
Clark, Cal, and Janet Clark. “The Gender Gap in Yugoslavia: Elite versus Mass
Levels.” Political Psychology 8: 3 (September 1987): 411–26.
Cocks, H. G. Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column. London:
Random House Books, 2009.
Cornelins, Victor. Fra St. Croix til Nakskov [From St. Croix to Nakskov].
Fredericia: Frimodts forlag, 1977.
Cottaar, Annemarie, and Nadia Bouras. Marokkanen in Nederland: de pioniers
vertellen. Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 2009.
Dahlerup, Drude. “Is the New Women’s Movement Dead? Decline or Change of
the Danish Movement.” In The New Women’s Movement: Feminism and
Political Power in Europe and the USA, edited by Drude Dahlerup. 217–45.
London: Sage Publications, 1986.
Dahlerup, Drude. “Denmark: High Representation of Women Without Gender
Quotas.” In Breaking Male Dominance in Old Democracies, edited by. Drude
Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Dahlerup, Drude, and Monique Leyenaar. Breaking Male Dominance in Old
Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Danbolt, Mathias, and Lene Myong. “Guldkysten og den historiske og politiske
‘korrekthed’” [The Gold Coast and historical and political “correctness”].
Peculiar (blog), 27 July 2015. Last accessed October 2016 via http://pecu
liar.dk/guldkysten-og-den-historiske-og-politiske-korrekthed/.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 267
Davis, John, and Anette Warring. “Living Utopia. Communal Living in Denmark
and Britain.” Cultural and Social History 8:4 (2011): 513–30.
Davis, Susan Schaefer, and Douglas A. Davis Adolescence in a Moroccan Town:
Making Social Sense. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989.
De Leeuw, Marc, and van Wichelen Sonja. 2014. “Institutionalizing the Muslim
Other: Naar Nederland and the Violence of Culturalism.” In Dutch Racism,
edited by. Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V.
De Martino, Gianni. 1992. “An Italian in Morocco.” In Sexuality and Eroticism
Among Males in Moslem Societies, edited by. Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer,
Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park.
De Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household
Economy, 1650-the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Diner, Dan. “Nation, Migration, and Memory: On Historical Concepts of
Citizenship.” Constellations 4:3 (1998): 293–306.
Drud-Jensen, Ted, Mads, and Sune Prahl Knudsen. Ondt i Røven [Pain in the
Ass]. Copenhagen: Høst, 2005.
Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the
Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon, 2003.
“Dutch Moroccans be like #BornHere.” Al Jazeera (English), 19 March 2014.
Last accessed October 2016 via http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/
201403191437-0023571
Duyvendak, Jan Willem. The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western
Europe and the United States. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Duyvendak, Jan Willem and Peter Scholten. “Deconstructing the Dutch
Multicultural Model: A Frame Perspective on Dutch Immigrant Integration
Policymaking.” Comparative European Politics 10:3 (2012):, 266–82.
Duyvendak, Jan Willem, Peter Geschiere, and Evelien Tonkens, editors. The
Culturalization of Citizenship: Belonging and Polarization in a Globalizing
World. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Edelberg, Peter. “The Long Sexual Revolution: The Police and the New Gay
Man.” In Sexual Revolutions, edited by Gert Hekma and Alaina Giami. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014a.
Edelberg, Peter. The Queer Road to frisind: Copenhagen 1945–2012.” In Queer
Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe Since 1945, edited by Jennifer Evans and Matt
Cook. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014b.
Eder, Franz X. “The Long History of the ‘Sexual Revolution’ in West Germany.”
In Sexual Revolutions, edited by Gert Hekma and Alaina Giami. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Eide, Elisabeth, and Kaarina Nikunen, editors. Media in Motion: Cultural
Complexity and Migration in the Nordic Region. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011.
Eley, Geoff. “The Trouble with ‘Race’: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the
Remaking of Europe.” In After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and
268 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Democracy in Germany and Europe, edited by Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach,

Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann. 80–101. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of
Michigan Press, 2009.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. “‘Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer Muslims in the
Neoliberal European City.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (February
(2012): 79–95.
Entzinger, Han. “Shifting Paradigms: An Appraisal of Immigration in the
Netherlands.” In European Migration in the Late Twentieth Century, edited
by Heinz Fassmann and Münz. Rainer Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994.
Erdem, Mahmut, and Ole Hammer. Folket med de trætte okser [The People with
the Tired Oxen]. Copenhagen: Underskoven, 2008.
Escoffier, Jeffrey, editor. Sexual Revolution. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
2003.
Escoffier, Jeffrey. Bigger than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake
to Hardcore. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009.
Essed, Philomena, and Isabel Hoving. editors. Dutch Racism. Amsterdam: Rodopi
B.V., 2014.
Ewing, Katherine Pratt. Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Fassin, Eric. “The Rise and Fall of Sexual Politics in the Public Sphere: A
Transatlantic Contrast.” Public Cultures 18:1 (2006): 79–91.
Fassin, Eric. “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy
and the Politics of Immigration in Europe.” Public Cultures 22:3 (2010): 507–29.
Fassin, Eric. “Gender Crusades: Mobilizing Against Equality in Europe.” Semi-
Plenary Panel at the Council for European Studies 2015 Conference, 10 July
2015.
Fassin, Éric, and Judith Surkis. “Introduction: Transgressing Boundaries” Public
Cultures (Special Issue: Dossier on Sexual Boundaries, National Identities, and
Transnational Migrations in Europe) 22:3 (2010): 486–505.
Fauser, Margit. Migrants and Cities: The Accommodation of Migrant Organizations
in Europe. Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.
Feather, Leonard, and Ira Gitler The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Ferree, Myra Marx. “Framing Equality: The Politics of Race, Class, Gender in the
US, Germany, and the Expanding European Union.” In The Gender Politics of
the European Union, edited by Silke Roth, New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2008.
Fink, Carole. Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and
International Minority Protection, 1878–1938. Cambridge and New York:
BIBLIOGRAPHY 269
Formes, Malia B. “Beyond Complicity Versus Resistance: Recent Work on Gender

and European Imperialism.” Journal of Social History 28:3 (1995): 629–41.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Pantheon, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life”
(1912). Reprinted. In Sexuality, edited by Robert A. Nye. 176–78. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gerholm, Lena. “Overcoming Temptation: On Masculinity and Sexuality Among
Muslims in Stockholm.” Global Networks 3:3 (2003): 401–416.
Gildea, Robert, James Mark, and Anette Warring, editors. Europe’s 1968—Voices of
Revolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Göktürk, Deniz, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, editors. Germany in Transit:
Nation and Migration, 1955–2005. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2007.
Grigolo, Michele. “Sexualities and the ECHR: Introducing the Universal
Sexual Legal Subject.” European Journal of International Law 14:5
(2003): 1023–44.
Halberstam, J. J. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Halperin, David. “Is There a History of Sexuality?” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David Halperin. New
York: Routledge, 1993
Hammergren, Lena. “Dancing African-American jazz in the Nordic Region.” In
Nordic Dance Spaces: Practicing and Imagining a Region, edited by Karen
Vedel and Petri Hoppu. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014.
Healy, Dan. “Masculine Purity and ‘Gentlemen’s Mischief’: Sexual Exchange and
Prostitution Between Russian Men, 1861–1941.” Slavic Review 60:2 (2001):
233–65.
Healy, Dan. “Active, Passive, and Russian: The National Idea in Gay Men’s
Pornography.” Russian Review 69 (April 2010): 210–30.
Heineman, Elizabeth D., “The Economic Miracle in the Bedroom: Big Business
and Sexual Consumption in Reconstruction West Germany,” The Journal of
Modern History 78:4 (December 2006): 846–77.
Hekma, Gert. “Amsterdam.” In Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600,
edited by David Higgs, New York: Routledge, 1999.
Hekma, Gert. “Imams and Homosexuality: A Post-gay Debate in The
Netherlands.” Sexualities 5 (2002): 237–48
Hekma, Gert. “Queer in the Netherlands: Pro-Gay and Anti-Sex—Sexual Politics
at a Turning Point.” In Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies, edited by
Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Hekma, Gert, and Alaina Giami. editors. Sexual Revolutions. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014.
270 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hekma, Gert, and Theo van der Meer. “Bewaar me voor de waanzin van het recht”:
Homoseksualiteit en strafrecht in Nederland [“Save me from the madness of the
law”: Homosexuality and criminal law in the Netherlands]. Diemen: AMB,
2011.
Hekma, Gert, Harry Oosterhuis, and James D. Steakley. Gay Men and the Sexual
History of the Political Left. New York: Harrington Park, 1995.
Herzog, Dagmar. Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century
Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Herzog, Dagmar. “Post Coitum Triste Est . . . ? Sexual Politics and Cultures in
Postunification Germany” German Politics and Society 94:28 (Spring
2010):111–40.
Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History. New York:
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks., “African-American Women’s History and the
Metalanguage of Race” Signs 17:2 (Winter 1992): 251–74.
Hine, Christine. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2000.
Hjarnø, Jan. Fremmedarbejdere: En Etnologisk Undersdgelse af Arbejdskrafteksportens
virkningeri Tyrkiet [Foreign Workers: An Ethnological Study of the Effects of
Labor Export in Turkey]. Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, 1971.
Hoefte, Rosemarijn. In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and
Javanese Laborers in Suriname. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998.
Höhn, Maria. “Heimat in Turmoil: African-American GIs in 1950s West
Germany.” In The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–
1968, edited by Hanna Schissler, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis
1918–1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Huntington, Samuel. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, (Summer
1993).
Hurenkamp, Menno, Evelien Tonkens, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. Crafting
Citizenship: Negotiating Tensions in a Modern Society. Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1990.
Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity, 1650–1750. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001/2002.
Jarell, Corey. “Doug Crutchfield, Cincinnati Fabulous!” I’ll Keep You Posted (blog),
31 October 2001. Last accessed October 2016 via http://illkeepyouposted.
typepad.com/ill_keep_you_posted/2011/10/doug-crutchfield-1.html
Jivraj, Suhraiya, and Anisa De Jong, “The Dutch Homo-Emancipation Policy and
its Silencing Effects on Queer Muslims,” Feminist Legal Studies (Special Issue:
Liabilities of queer antiracist critique) 9:2 (August 2011): 143–58.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 271
Johnson, Bruce. Earogenous Zones: Sound, Sexuality and Cinema. London:

Equinox Publishers, 2010.
Jones, Guno. “Biology, Culure, ‘Postcolonial Citizenship’ and the Dutch Nation,
1945–2007.” In Dutch Racism, edited by Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving.
Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V, 2014.
Jonker, Ellis. “Embodying Otherness While Teaching Race and Gender at White
European Universities.” In Teaching “Race” with a Gendered Edge, edited
byBrigitte Hipfl and Kristín Loftsdóttir 63–68. Utrecht: ATGENDER, 2012.
Jønsson, Heidi Vad. “Immigrant Policy Developing in Copenhagen and Ishøj in
the 1970s.” Scandinavian Journal of History 35:4 (2013):590–611.
Kazancı, Piril. Fragen Project: Analysis of Turkish Feminist Texts. Amsterdam:
ATRIA, the Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History, 2013.
Kennedy, James C. Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw. Nederland in de jaren zestig [New
Babylon under construction. The Netherlands in the sixties]. Amsterdam:
Mepper, 1995.
Keuzenkamp, Saskia, editor. Steeds gewoner, nooit gewoon [Increasingly
Common, Never Ordinary]. Den Haag: Sociaal and Cultureel Planbureau,
June. 2010.
Klausen, Jytte. Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Klausen, Jytte. The Cartoons that Shook the World. New Haven, CT: Yale
Kool-Smit, Joke. “Het onbehagen bij de vrouw” [The Unease of Women].
Originally published in The Guide 130: 9/10 (November 1967): 267–81.
Last accessed October 2016 via http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/kool007eris01_
01/kool007eris01_01_0003.php/.
Kraaykamp, Gerbert., “Trends and Countertrends in Sexual Permissiveness: Three
Decades of Attitude Change in The Netherlands 1965–1995,” Journal of
Marriage and Family 64:1 (February 2002): 225–39.
Kudat, Ayse. “Structural Change in the Migrant Turkish Family.” In Manpower
Mobility Across Cultural Boundaries, edited by Ronald E. Krane, Leiden: Brill,
1975.
Kudat, Ayse, and Mine Sabuncuoglu. “The Changing Composition of Europe’s
Guestworker Population.” Monthly Labor Review (October 1980).
Kulick, Don. “Four Hundred Thousand Swedish Perverts.” GLQ 11:2 (2005):
205–35.
Laursen, Søren, and Mary Lisa Jayaseelan. Disturbing Knowledge: Decisions from
Asylum Cases as Documentation of Persecution of LGBT Persons. Copenhagen:
LBL [Now: LGBT Denmark] and Danish Refugee Council, 2009.
Lennerhed, Lena. “Sexual Liberalism in Sweden.” In Sexual Revolutions, edited by
Gert Hekma and Alaina Giami, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
272 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Linde, Amalie, Mathilde Hørmand-Pallesen, and Kønigsfeldt. Amalie

Børneimporten: Et Mørkt Kapitel i Fortællingen Om Udenlandsk Adoption
[The Import of Children: A Dark Chapter in the Story of Foreign
Adoptions]. Copenhagen: Kristeligt Dagblad, 2013.
Lintelman, Joy K. “Our Serving Sisters: Swedish-American Domestic Servants
and Their Ethnic Community.” Social Science History 15:3 (1991):
381–95.
Lubbers, Marcel,Peer Scheepers and Fred Wester. “Ethnic Minorities in Dutch
Newspapers, 1990–5: Patterns of Criminalization and Problematization,”
International Communication Gazette 60:5 (1998): 415–31.
Lucassen, Leo. “To Amsterdam: Migrations Past and Present.” In New York
and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape, edited by
Nancy Foner, Jan Rath, and Jan Willem Duyvendak, New York: NYU Press,
2014.
Lucassen, Leo, and Charlotte Laarman “Immigration, Intermarriage and the
Changing Face of Europe in the Post War Period.” The History of the Family
14:1 (2009): 52–68.
Lucassen, Leo, Wim Willems, and Annemarie Cottaar. Gypsies and Other Itinerant
Groups. A Socio-Historical Approach. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.
Luibhéid, Eithne, and Lionel Cantú. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship,
and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005.
Maier, Sylvia. “Honour Killings and the Cultural Defense in Germany.” In
Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural
Defense, edited by Marie-Claire Foblets and Alison Dundes Renteln. 229–46.
Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2009.
Mandel, Ruth. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and
Belonging in Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Marselis, Randi. “Descendants of Slaves: The Articulation of Mixed Racial
Ancestry in a Danish Television Documentary Series.” European Journal of
Cultural Studies 11:4 (2008): 447–69.
Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties. Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the
United States, c. 1958–c.1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Massad, Joseph. “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab
World.” Public Culture 14:2 (2002): 361–85.
Massad, Joseph. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Matthiessen, Poul Chr. Immigration to Denmark: An Overview of the Research
Carried Out from 1999 to 2006 by the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit.
Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009.
McLeod, Hugh. The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007.
McLeod, Hugh, and Werner Ustorf, editors. The Decline of Christendom in
Western Europe, 1750–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 273
Mepschen, Paul. “Sex and the Other: Homosexuality and Islam in Dutch Public
Discourse.” Masters Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2008.
Mepschen, Paul, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Evelien H. Tonkens. “Sexual
Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands.”
Sociology 44 (2010): 962–79.
Mepschen, Paul, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. “European Sexual Nationalism: The
Culturalization of Citizenship and the Sexual Politics of Belonging and
Exclusion.” Perspectives on Europe 42:1 (Spring 2012): 70–6.
Merrick, Jeffrey. Order and Disorder Under the Ancien Reégime. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
(Mirdal) Mizrahi Sirazi, Gretty. “Tyrkerne (The Turks).” In Gæstearbejder i
København: en undersøgelse [Guest-workers in Copenhagen: an investigation],
edited by Eggert Petersen. Copenhagen: Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke, 1970.
Mirdal, Gretty. “Stress and Distress in Migration.” International Migration
Review 18:4 (1984): 984–1003.
Mitchell, Gregory. “TurboConsumers™ in Paradise: Tourism, Civil Rights, and
Brazil’s Gay Sex Industry.” American Ethnologist 38:4 (2011): 666–82.
Modood, Tariq. “Muslims and the Politics of Difference.” The Political Quarterly
74 (2003).
Modood Tariq and Fauzia Ahmad. “British Muslim Perspectives on
Multiculturalism.” Theory, Culture and Society 24:2 (2007): 187–213.
Mowlabocus, Sharif. Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.
Mügge, Liza. Beyond Dutch Borders Transnational Politics Among Colonial
Migrants, Guest Workers and the Second Generation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
Muller, Henry M. “Morocco in Transition.” Social Science 35 January (1960):
48–54.
Mullins, Greg. Colonial Affair: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier.
Madison, WI: University of Madison, 2002.
Murray, Alison J. “Let Them Take Ecstasy: Class and Jakarta Lesbians.” In Female
Desires, edited by Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999.
Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History,
and Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Myong, Lene. “Bliv dansk, bliv inkluderet: transnational adoption i et in- og
eksklusionsperspektiv” [Be Danish, be included: transnational adoption in an
inclusionary and exclusionary perspective].” Paedagogisk Psykologisk Tidsskrift
48:3 (2011): 268–76.
Nadia, Bouras. Het land van herkomst: perspectieven op verbondenheid met
Marokko, 1960–2010 [The country of origin: perspectives on solidarity with
Morocco, 1960–2010]. Ph.D. thesis, Leiden University, 2012.
274 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. “Types, Acts, or What? Regulation of Sexuality in

Nineteenth-Century Iran.” In Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across
Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh
Najmabadi, Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard
University, 2008.
Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism.
Delhi: Oxford, 1983.
Nielsen, Jørgen Hans.“Forholdet mellem etniske grupper [Relations between ethnic
groups].” In Integration i Danmark omkring årtusindeskiftet [Integration in
Denmark at the Turn of the Millenium], edited by Gunnar Viby Mogensen
and Poul Chr, Matthiessen, 409–33. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2000.
Ohliger, Rainer, Karen Schönwälder, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos. European
Encounters: Migrants, Migration, and European Societies since 1945. Aldershot,
Hants. England: Ashgate, 2003.
Onderwater, Pieternel. “Wij zijn geen ‘zielige vrouwtjes’! Een onderzoek naar de
houding van de Turkse vrouwenbeweging in Nederland ten opzichte van het
seksedebat tussen 1970 en 2008” [We are not ‘pathetic females’! A study of the
attitude of the Turkish women’s movement in the Netherlands regarding the
sex debate, 1970–2008”]. Masters thesis, Utrecht University, 2008.
Open Society Foundations. Muslims in Amsterdam. New York, NY: Open Society
Foundations, 2010.
Open Society Foundations. Muslims in Berlin. New York, NY: Open Society
Foundations, 2010.
Open Society Foundations. Muslims in Rotterdam. New York, NY: Open Society
Foundations, 2010.
Open Society Foundations. Muslims in Europe: A Report on 11 EU Cities. New
York, NY: Open Society Foundations, 2010.
Open Society Foundations. Muslims in Copenhagen. New York, NY: Open Society
Foundations, 2011.
Orton, Joe, and John Lahr The Orton Diaries: Including the Correspondence of
Edna Welthorpe and Others. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Outshoorn, Joyce. “The Feminist Movement and Abortion Policy in the Netherlands.”
In The New Women’s Movement: Feminism and Political Power in Europe and the
USA, edited by Drude Dahlerup, London: Sage Publications, 1986.
Özyürek, Esra. “Convert Alert: German Muslims and Turkish Christians as
Threats to Security in the New Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 51:1 (January 2009): 91–116.
Penninx, Rinus. Ethnic minorities. Den Haag: Staatsuitgeverij, Wetenschappelijke
Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 1979.
Perinelli, Massimo. “Sex and the Radical Left, 1969–1972.” In After the History of
Sexuality: Germany Interventions, edited by Scott Spector, Dagmar Herzog,
and Helmut Puff, 248–81. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 275
Petersen, Michael Nebeling. “‘ . . . Med et regnbueflag i hånden’: Fortællinger om

homoseksuelle inklusioner og homonationalisme” [“‘ . . . With a Rainbow Flag
in Hand’”: Stories about gay inclusions and homonationalism”]. Lambda
Nordica 16:1 (2011): 41–68.
Peumans, Wim. “‘Nee, Ik denk echt wel dat ik het ben’: Homoseksualiteit bij
Jongeren uit Etnische Minderheden” [“‘No, I don’t really think that I’m
that’”: Homosexuality in Children from Ethnic Minorities”]. WelWijs 22:4
(2011).
Peumans, Wim. Seks en Stigma Over Grenzen Heen: Homoseksuele en lesbische
migranten in Vlaanderen en Brussel [Sex and Stigma across Borders: Gay and
lesbian immigrants in Flanders and Brussels]. Leuven: Acco Publishing, 2011.
Peumans, Wim. “To the Land of Milk and Honey: Migration to Belgium as a Stigma
Management Strategy.” Studi Emigrazione /Migration Studies 49:187 (2012)
541–59.
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Rassam, Amal. “Women and Domestic Power in Morocco.” International Journal
of Middle East Studies 12:2 (September 1980): 171–79.
Rath, Jan. “Research on Immigrant Ethnic Minorities in the Netherlands.” In The
Politics of Social Science Research: ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Social Change, edited by
Peter Ratcliffe, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001.
Rijkschroeff, R., Jan Willem Duyvendak, and T. Pels. Bronnenonderzoek integra-
tiebeleid [Source Research(-based) Integration Policy]. Utrecht: Verwey-
Jonker Instituut, 2003.
Robcis, Camille. “Liberté, Égalité, Hétérosexualité: Race and Reproduction in the
French Gay Marriage Debates” Constellations 22:3 (September 2015): 447–61.
Rothberg, Michael, and Yasemin Yildiz. “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives
of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany.” Parallax 17:4
(2011): 32–48.
Runblom, Harald. “Swedish Multiculturalism in a Comparative European
Perspective.” Sociological Forum 9:4 (1994): 623–40.
Rydström, Jens. Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden,
1880–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003.
Rydström, Jens. “Introduction” and “Nordic Peripheries.” In Criminally Queer:
Homosexuality and Criminal Law in Scandinavia, 1842–1999, edited by Jens
Rydström and Kati Mustola, Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007.
Rydström, Jens, and Kati Mustola. editors. Criminally Queer: Homosexuality and
Criminal Law in Scandinavia, 1842–1999. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1979.
Schissler, Hanna, editor. The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of Germany,
1919–1968. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
276 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Schrover, Marlou. “Pillarization, Multiculturalism and Cultural Freezing: Dutch

Migration History and the Enforcement of Essentialist Ideas.” BMGN: Low
Countries Historical Review 125:2–3 (January 2010): 239–54.
Schrover, Marlou. “Multiculturalism, Dependent Residence Status and Honour
Killings: Explaining Current Dutch Intolerance Towards Ethnic Minorities
from a Gender Perspective (1960–2000).” In Gender, Migration and
Categorisation: Making Distinctions Between Migrants in Western Countries,
1945–2010, edited by Marlou Schrover and Deirdre M. Moloney. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2013.
Schrover, Marlou, and Deirdre M. Moloney. “Introduction.” In Gender,
Migration and Categorisation: Making Distinctions Between Migrants in
Western Countries, 1945–2010, edited by Marlou Schrover and Deirdre M.
Moloney. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.
Schulman, Sarah. “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’” The New York Times, 22 November
(2011). Last accessed May 2017 via www.nytimes.com.
Schwartz, Jonathan Matthew. Reluctant Hosts: Denmark’s Reception of Guest
Workers. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1985.
Scott, Joan. “Symptomatic Politics: The Banning of Islamic Head Scarves in
French Public Schools.” French Politics, Culture, and Society (Winter 2005).
Scott, Joan Wallach. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In
Feminism and History, edited by Joan Wallach Scott, Oxford: Oxford
Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University University
of California Press, 1991.
Shadid, W. [asef Abdel Rahman]. Moroccan Workers in the Netherlands. Ph.D.
dissertation, Leiden, 1979.
Shadid, W.A.R., and P.S. Van Koningsveld. “Institutionalization and Integration
of Islam in the Netherlands.” In The Integration of Islam and Hinduism in
Western Europe, edited by W. A. R. Shadid and P. S. Van Koningsveld,
Kampen, the Netherlands: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1991.
Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization: the Algerian War and the
Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Shepard, Todd. “Something Notably Erotic’: Politics, ‘Arab Men,’ and Sexual
Revolution in Post-decolonization France, 1962–1974.” Journal of Modern
History 84: 1 (March 2012): 80–115.
Shield, Andrew D.J. “‘Suriname – Seeking a Lonely, Lesbian Friend for
Correspondence’: Immigration and Homo-emancipation in the Netherlands,
1965–1979.” History Workshop Journal 78:1 (2014): 246–64.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 277
Shield, Andrew D.J. “New in Town: Gay Immigrants and Geosocial Media.” In
LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe, edited by Alexander Dhoest, Lukasz
Szulc, & Bart Eeckhout, 244–61. London: Routledge, 2017.
Sieg, Katrin. Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Sieg, Katrin. “Black Virgins: Sexuality and the Democratic Body in Europe” New
German Critique 109: 37:1 (Winter 2010).
Siegfried, Detlef. “Music and Protest in 1960s Europe.” In 1968 in Europe. A
History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977, edited by Martin Klimke and
Joachim Scharloth, 57–70. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
Slobodian, Quinn. Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
Small, Stephen. “First Impressions: Race and Immigration in Holland.” In Dutch
Racism, edited by Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving, Amsterdam: Rodopi B.
V., 2014.
Smith, Andrea L. Europe’s Invisible Migrants. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2003.
Sneeringer, Julia. “Meeting The Beatles: What Beatlemania Can Tell Us About
West Germany in the 1960s.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and
Culture 6:2 (2013): 172–198.
Somerville, Siobhan B. “Sexual Aliens and the Racialized State: A Queer Reading
of the 1952 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act.” In Queer Migrations,
edited by Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú. 75–91. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota, 2005.
Spector, Scott, Dagmar Herzog, and Helmut Puff, editors. After the History of
Sexuality: Germany Interventions. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2011.
Spring, Justin. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor,
Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Stoler, Ann Laura. “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and
Morality in Colonial Asia.” In Feminism and History, edited by Joan Scott.
209–66. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Stoler, Ann. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in
Colonial Rule. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2010.
Sundén, Jenny. “Desires at Play: On Closeness and Epistemological Uncertainty.”
Games and Culture 7:2 (2012): 164–84.
Surkis, Judith. “Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and French Sovereignty.”
Public Cultures 22:3 (2010): 531–56.
Tamagne, Florence. A History of Homosexuality in Europe. 2 volumes. New York:
Algora Publishing, 2004.
Tekeli, Sirin. “Women in Turkish Politics.” In Women in Turkish Society, edited by
Nermin Abadan-Unat. 293–311. Leiden: Brill, 1981.
278 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tekeli, Sirin. “The Turkish Women’s Movement: A Brief History of Success.”

Quaderns de la Mediterrània 14 (2010).
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Knopf
Doubleday, 1966 [1963].
Thurner, Manuela. “Subject to Change: Theories and Paradigms of U.S. Feminist
History.” Journal of Women’s History 9:2 (1997): 122–46.
Tonkens, Evelien, M. Hurenkamp, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. Culturalization of
Citizenship in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam School for Social
Sciences Research, 2008.
Trumbach, Randolph. The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and
Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Academic Press,
1978.
Trumbach, Randolph. “Renaissance Sodomy, 1500–1700” and “Modern
Sodomy: The Origins of Modern Homosexuality, 1700–1800.” In A Gay
History of Britain, edited by Matt Cook, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.
Valens, Keja, Bill Johnson González, and Bradley S. Epps. Passing Lines: Sexuality
and Immigrants. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2005.
Van Amersfoort, Hans. Immigration and the Formation of Minority Groups: The
Dutch Experience, 1945–1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Van, Baar, and Hubertus Johannes Martinus. The European Roma: Minority
Representation, Memory, and the Limits of Transnational Governmentality.
Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2011.
Van De Loo, Vilan. De vrouw beslist: de tweede feministische golf in Nederland [The
woman decides: the second feminist wave in the Netherlands]. Wormer.
Netherlands: Inmerc, 2005.
Van Der Meer, Theo. “Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex in the Early
Modern Period.” In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in
Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt, New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Van Der Meer, Theo. Potenrammen als rite de passage. Daders van anti-homo-
seksueel geweld in beeld [Gaybashing as a rite of passage. Perpetrators of anti-gay
violence in perspective]. Amsterdam, Utrecht: SAD-schorerstichting/NIS,
1995.
Van Der Meer, Theo. “Gay Bashing: A Rite of Passage?” Culture, Health, and
Sexuality 5 (March/April 2003).
Van Der Meer, Theo. “Eugenic and Sexual Folklores and the Castration of Sex
Offenders in the Netherlands (1938–1968).” Studies in History and Philosophy
of Science Part C 39:2 (2008): 195–204.
Van Rooden, Peter. “Longterm Religious Developments in the Netherlands,
1750–2000.” In The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000,
edited by. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, Cambridge: Cambridge
BIBLIOGRAPHY 279
Van Rooden, Peter. “The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom.” In

Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod, edited
by Callum Brown, M. F. Snape, and Hugh McLeod. 175–95. Farnham, Surrey,
UK: Ashgate, 2010.
Von Rosen, Wilhelm. “A Short History of Gay Denmark 1613–1989: The Rise
and the Possibly Happy End of the Danish Homosexual.” Nordisk Sexologi 12:2
(June 1994): 125–36.
Von Rosen, Wilhelm. “Erik Bruhn.” In Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay and
Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day, edited by Robert
Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, 61–2. London: Routledge, 2000 (see also:
A.M. Wentink, “Rudolph Nureyev”, 306–07).
Warring, Anette. “Around 1968—Danish Historiography.” Scandinavian Journal
of History 33:4 (December 2008): 353–65.
Weeks, Jeffrey. “The Invention of Sexuality.” In Sexuality, edited by Robert Nye,
New York: Routledge, 2003.
Wekker, Gloria. “Mati-ism and Black Lesbianism: Two Idealtypical Expressions of
Female Homosexuality in Black Communities of the Diaspora (1996).” In Our
Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited
by Thomas Glave, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Also published
in Classics in Lesbian Studies, edited by Esther D. Rothblum. New York:
Harrington Park, 1997.
Wekker, Gloria. “What’s Identity Got to Do with It? Rethinking Identity in Light
of the Mati Work in Suriname.” In Female Desires, edited by Evelyn Blackwood
and Saskia E. Wieringa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Wekker, Gloria. “Van homo nostalgie en betere tijden. Multiculturaliteit en post-
kolonialiteit” [On Gay Nostalgia and Better Times: Multiculturalism and
Postcolonialism]. George Mosse Lecture, Amsterdam, 2009.
Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Willems, Wim. “Why Governments Do Not Learn: Colonial Migrants and Gypsy
Refugees in the Netherlands.” In European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and
European Societies Since 1945, edited by Rainer Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder, and
Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2003a.
Willems, Wim. “No Sheltering Sky: Migrant Identities of Dutch Nationals from
Indonesia.” In Europe’s Invisible Migrants, edited by Andrea Smith. 33–59.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003b.
Woesthoff, Julia. “The Ambiguities of Anti-Racism: Representations of Foreign
Laborers and the West German media, 1955–1990.” Ph.D. dissertation,
Michigan State University, 2004.
Woesthoff, Julia. “Romancing the Foreigner: ‘Fictitious Marriages’ and the Crisis
between Immigration and Human Rights.” In Sexuality in Austria, edited by
280 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dagmar Herzog, (Contemporary Austrian

Studies 15) New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007.
Würtz Sørensen, Jørgen. Velkommen Mustafa? Debatten om gæstearbejderne og det
danske samfund i starten af 1970ʹerne [Welcome Mustafa? The debate about
guest-workers and Danish society at the start of the 1970s]. Working paper for
the Center for Culture Research, Aarhus University, August 1988a.
Würtz Sørensen, Jørgen. Der kom fremmede: Migration, Højkonjunktur,
Kultursammenstød: fremmedarbejderne i Danmark frem til 1970. [The stran-
gers came: migration, high conjuncture, and culture clash: foreign workers in
Denmark up to 1970.] Working paper for the Center for Culture Research,
Aarhus University, August 1988b.
Yildiz, Yasemin. “Turkish Girls, Allah’s Daughters, and the Contemporary
German Subject: Itinerary of a Figure.” German Life and Letters 62:3
(2009): 465–81.
Yılmaz, Ferruh. “Ethnicized Ontologies: From Foreign WORKER to MUSLIM
Immigrant.” Ph.D. dissertation, San Diego: University of California, 2006.
“Yogyakarta Principles: The Application of International Human Rights Law in
Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.” Written in Yogyakarta,
Indonesia in 2007, and published online. Last accessed May 2017 via http://
www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles_en/
INDEX
A Arab immigrants in Denmark, 49n86,

Aarhus, 107n4, 110n61, 154, 227, 59, 203, 204
236 Aruba, 30, 194, 203, 229
Abortion, 5, 9, 64, 84n36, 87, 95, 96, Association of 1948, 17n19, 72, 180,
98, 119, 134, 139n11, 140n13, 182, 208n12, 219
163, 183, 239, 243n27 Austria, 3, 5, 9, 223
“Action 182”, 122–124 Avedøre housing projects, 92, 108n28
Adoption, 2, 26, 35, 46n68, 46n69,
227
Affirmative action, 6, 115, 131, 135 B
African-American immigrants in Bars, gay/lesbian, 6–8, 17n19, 72, 179,
Denmark, 41n19, 222, 228–229, 223, 224, 225, 227, 230, 232, 234
242n18 Bars, heterosexual, see Dance clubs
African-Americans, see Civil Rights BBF, see Gay Liberation Front
Movement BDR, see Germany
Age-of-consent laws, 184–185, Belgium, 5, 7, 9, 11, 23, 33, 76, 117,
209–222, 226 125, 239
AIDS, see HIV Bikes, 8, 60, 91, 138, 155, 255
Al-Ghad (1968), 59, 60 Bisexuality, 180, 237
Amicales, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, Boarding houses, 54
128, 133, 138, 142n52 Breadwinner, 77, 163, 181
Anti-authority, 56, 251–252
Anti-colonialism, 6, 32, 132
Anti-fascism, 6, 124, 126, 127, 129 C
Antillean immigrants in the Cartoon crisis, 2
Netherlands, 162, 189, 211n40, Catholicism, 22–23, 37, 167n8, 185,
229–230, 203 187

282 INDEX
Cheating, 70–71 de facto refugees, 12, 35, 55, 219

Chile, 34, 71, 78, 127, 163, 164, De Odeon Keller (nightclub), 226,
172n66, 231, 256n10 230
Chilean immigrants in Denmark, 71, Disavowal, 19, 20, 221
164, 232, 251 Discrimination, 25, 37, 67, 104, 105,
Chilean immigrants in the 111n65, 111n67, 131, 133, 158,
Netherlands, 127 160, 184, 207, 221, 231, 234,
Citizenship, 1, 14n1, 21, 23, 34, 252
45n60, 56, 68, 98, 108n21, Divorce, 5, 12, 57, 69, 71, 148, 183,
167n8, 201, 208n6, 250, 251 251
Civil Rights Movement, The U.S., 150 Dolle Mina, 63, 118, 119, 130–132,
“Closet”, see “Coming out” 140n13
Clubs, see Dance clubs Drag, 223, 224
COC, 17n19, 72, 119, 124, 129, 136, Drug cultures, 9, 10, 117, 119
137, 179, 180, 182–184, 187, Dutch East Indies, 26, 32, 182, 219,
191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 201, 222, 223, 226
211n35, 217n97, 219, 223, 225, Dutch East Indies Company, 26
226, 227, 235, 252, 257n15, Dutch Reformed Church, 248
258n25
Colonialism, 16n4, 20, 33, 39n6,
44n47, 120, 163, 241n7
“Colored”, 15, 19–38, 38n1, 73, 204, E
219–240, 240n1 Economic determinism, 12, 38, 55
“Coming out”, 220–222, 230, 240, Economic miracle (1950s), 210n28,
247, 253 210n30
Communist Party, 105, 124, 125, EEC, European Economic
139n10, 144n92 Community, 21, 33, 95, 96
Condoms, 97, 99, 203, 215n135, 227 England, see United Kingdom
Conservative Turn, 54, 74–77, 79, 80, Erdem, Mahmut, 53, 62, 66, 67
239, 247–250 Ethnic paradox, 117
Contraception, 5, 12, 96, 99, 183 “Exotic”, 7, 28, 189, 205, 235
Cruising, 8, 119, 179, 181, 184, 232,
236, 237
F
F1948, see Association of 1948
D Family reunification, 6, 21, 33, 34, 36,
DA, the Danish Employers 46n64, 54, 58, 68, 74, 148, 248,
Association, 89, 134, 158 251
Da Lima, Julia, 150, 220, 225 Faroe Islands, 22, 30, 45n56, 192
Dance clubs, 6, 8, 16n13, 53, 55, 57, FAT (Association of Workers from
65–67, 73, 87, 101, 189 Turkey in Denmark), 135, 136
The Danish People's Party (DF), 2 Female foreign workers, 98
INDEX 283
Feminism, first wave, 130, 152–153, Heterogeneity, 19, 20, 22, 221
155–158 Heterosexuality, 137, 181, 209n20
Feminism, second-wave, 6, 63, 95, Hindustani, 27, 163, 203, 204
130, 151, 159 Hippies, 64, 67, 184, 223
FNV (Dutch Federation of Trade Hiring freezes, 33, 77, 88, 92
Unions), 124, 126–128 HIV, 10, 203, 243n19, 250
Fortuyn, Pim, 1, 2, 253 Holocaust, 25–26
France, 5, 9, 11, 33, 39n6, 40n14, Homo-emancipation, see Gay/lesbian
45n57, 60, 117, 121–123, 140n16, liberation
167n8, 181, 190, 193, 248 Homogeneity, 44n55
Freedom of speech, 2, 4, 249, 249n1 Homonationalism, 3
Fremmedarbejderbladet or “The Homophile, 8, 14n2–15n2,
Foreign Worker Journal” 17n19, 72, 177, 179–184,
(1971-77), 6, 12, 65, 66, 77, 87, 187, 207
88, 96–101, 106, 134, 135, 154 Homophobia, 4, 14n2–15n2, 229,
235, 242n13, 253, 258n25
Homosexuality, perceptions of, 5, 72,
G 251–254
Gay/lesbian liberation, 80, 115, 118, HTIB (Turkish Worker Association in
124, 177, 178, 184, 207 the Netherlands), 116, 123,
Gay Liberation Front in Denmark 124–129, 131, 132, 136–139,
(BBF), 72, 119, 184, 219, 236, 148, 154, 159, 251–253
243n27 HTKB (Turkish Women’s Group of
“Generation 1.5”, 201, 238 the Netherlands), 123, 128, 154,
Germany and West Germany, 3, 5, 9, 155, 159, 160, 163, 164,
11, 23, 33, 35, 36, 38, 47n74, 170n30, 170n33, 173n73
116, 125, 127, 148, 162, Human exhibitions, 27, 44n48
170n37, 182, 191, 196, 210n29,
210n30, 211n35, 212n49, 222,
225, 227, 247, 249 I
Ghettos, 92, 94, 109n28, 250 Indo-Dutch immigrants in the
Great Britain, see United Kingdom Netherlands, 27, 31, 187, 193,
Greenland, 30, 45n56, 219, 231 226–227
Greenlandic immigrants in Indonesia (independent), 223, 225
Denmark, 30 Indonesian immigrants in the
Grey Wolves, 125–128, 136, 138 Netherlands, 27, 31, 187,
222–226, 45n60
Inter-ethnic marriage, see Mixed
H marriage
Halal meat, 37, 58, 94 International Women’s Day, 163,
Hammer, Ole, 87–91, 98, 99, 104, 172n63
106, 107n9, 134–136 International Workers Day, 126
284 INDEX
Internet, 58, 178, 179 Lebanon, 201, 215n129, 244n30

Intersex, 14n2–15n2, 254 Leisure time, 209n20, 210n28
“Introductory period” before Lesbian, 2, 3, 6–8, 10, 13, 14, 14n2,
marriage, 80 17n19, 43n43, 64, 72, 73, 74,
Iran, 34, 219, 220, 231, 232, 234, 80, 82n495, 115, 118, 119, 124,
235, 238, 243n25 129, 137, 138, 147, 148, 151,
Iran-Iraq War, 34, 232 166, 177–207, 208n1, 209n20,
Ishøj (housing), 90 212n49, 213n82, 215n132,
Islam, 1, 2, 3, 16n4, 16n13, 49n88, 219–240, 241n10, 242n12,
127, 128, 167n8, 241n6, 249, 243n20, 247, 251–254, 257n13
250 LGBTQ, 1–4, 7, 8, 14n2, 17n19,
Islamism, 1–18, 127 82n4, 137, 217n171, 221, 231,
Isolation, 13, 77, 88, 155 240, 252–255, 258n25
Israel, 25, 195 Ligestilling (gender equality in
Denmark), 95, 99
Limburg, southeast Netherlands, 187,
J 223, 229
Japan, 60, 191 LO, the Danish Trade Union
Jazz, 35, 47n71, 119, 222, 228, 229, Congress, 89, 106, 158
242n14, 242n18 Lynching atmosphere, 103
Jews, 20, 24–28, 42n27, 42n30, 94,
248, 256n5
M
Maternity rights, 12, 87, 99
K Mirdal, Gretty, 35, 47n74, 57, 64, 66,
Kidnapping, 100 70, 77–79, 83n16, 83n17, 84n43
KMAN (Committee for Foreign Mixed marriages, 68, 69, 100, 251
Workers in the Molucca, 33, 45n60, 224
Netherlands), 116, 120–133, Moluccans in the Netherlands, see
136–139, 148, 155, 160, 163, Indonesian immigrants in the
252 Netherlands
KOMKAR (a Kurdish association in Moreno, Darío, 73
Denmark), 135, 136 Moroccan immigrants in the
KULU (the Women’s Committee on Netherlands, 76, 120–124, 133,
Developing Countries), 160, 166 164, 187, 238–239
Kvinder, 71, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164 Moroccan women of KMAN, see
MVVN
Morocco, 21, 37, 54, 55, 58, 67, 68,
L 76, 79, 117, 120–123, 127, 130,
Labarca Olmos, Rosa Inés, 164 131, 133, 138, 153, 163, 178,
Language classes, 13, 153–155 192, 237–239, 244n30, 244n32,
Larsen, Nella, 28, 44n47, 44n52 247, 250
INDEX 285
Mosques, 36, 37, 49n87, 121 Pim Fortuyn List, see Fortuyn, Pim
Multiculturalism, 30, 37, 49n87, Poland, 4, 23, 41n20, 216n166, 204
49n88, 62, 66, 149, 162, Police, 5, 8, 10, 23, 72, 98, 99, 103,
167n12, 188, 196, 202, 225, 111n67, 126, 157, 182, 184,
227, 229–234 185, 211n35
Murder, 3, 17n13, 20, 25, 26, 92, Polygyny, 69, 79
100, 103, 125, 127, 193 Pornography, 5, 9, 64, 66, 117–119,
Müren, Zeki, 73 183, 189, 249
“Muslims”, 2, 4, 12–14, 27, Positive discrimination, see Affirmative
36, 37, 60, 66, 67, 76, 79, action
94, 167n8, 221, Pregnancy, 10, 98, 102
237, 247–249 Prostitution, see Sex work
Muslims in Europe series, 11–14 Psychiatry, 5, 182, 185
MVVN, (Moroccan Women’s Union Purple September, 64, 72,
of the Netherlands), 133, 155, 179, 184
163 PVV, see Wilders, Geert
PWO, 130, 159
N
Nørrebro (Copenhagen), 48n78, 66 Q
Norway, 22, 94, 185, 209n13, 222 Queer, see LGBTQ
Nuclear weapons, see Peace movement Queer migration, 178, 228, 231–232,
Nudity, 64, 94, 118 240, 254
NVB (Dutch Women’s Quotas, see Affirmative action
Movement), 124, 128, 129, 165
O R
Olive oil, 10, 58 Racism, 3, 4, 37, 49n86, 77,
One-night stands, 66, 94, 248 105, 120, 126, 128, 138,
Orientalism, 4, 162, 189, 255 150, 151, 164, 227,
234–236
Rape, 92, 95, 119, 236, 250
P Red Light District, see Sex work
Pakistani immigrants in Denmark, 58, Redstockings (Denmark), 64, 71, 72,
105, 108n21, 154, 187 95–96, 99, 103, 118, 134, 135,
Papua, 223 156, 160, 162
Parliament, 1, 2, 8, 88, 104, 105, 118, Refugee camp, 232, 233
130, 131 Religion, 12, 40n14, 76, 98,
Peace movement, 159–160 109n30, 185, 188, 192,
Pillarization, 22, 37, 49n88, 168n12, 253, 255
183, 222 Remittances, 37, 48n79, 234
286 INDEX
Repatriates, 21, 31, 32, 45n57, 187, Suriname, 27, 30–32, 43n43,
226, 229 45n59, 123, 177, 194,
Rock & roll, 9–10, 31, 32, 119 203–204
Rødstrømperne, see Redstockings Surinamese immigrants in the
Roma and Sinti, 21, 25–26 Netherlands, 27, 32, 45n59,
Royals, 22, 25, 33, 118 129, 147, 189, 203, 226,
230, 253
Sweden, 2, 3, 5, 11, 22, 23, 25, 33,
37, 103, 138
S Swedish Democrats (SD), 2, 15n2
Safe sex, 97, 135, 203, 215
Saunas, 9, 219, 223, 224, 227,
T
236, 237
Thule Air Force Base, 231
SBW (Foundation for Foreign
Tourism, 196, 237
Workers), 116, 123, 126, 131,
Trade unions, see Unions
132, 137
Trans*, 15n2, 137, 180, 205,
Scenes, 6–7, 119–121, 201, 204, 207,
209n15, 221, 234, 254, 257n22
219–245
Translation, 38n1, 111n65, 203
Second-Generation, 45n60, 46n65,
Transnational paradox, 117
80, 131, 135, 253
Transvestite, see Trans*
Second-wave feminism, see Feminism,
Turkey, 5, 12, 21, 35–38, 53, 54, 56,
second-wave
57, 59, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 99,
Secularization, 25, 49n87, 159, 183,
124–125, 130, 135–136, 148,
185, 192
154, 155, 158, 159–160,
Sexism, 77, 96, 102, 119,
162–164, 192, 231, 232,
133, 166
244n30, 247, 249
“Sexotic”, 189, 199, 235
Turkish immigrants in Denmark, 35,
Sexual education, 6, 87, 97
36, 37, 47n74, 57, 66, 70,
Sexual harassment, 133
98–100, 156–159, 237
“Sexual Revolution”, 4, 5, 11, 15n2,
Turkish immigrants in the
98, 177
Netherlands, 56, 68, 124–129,
Sex work, 9, 65–66, 237, 244n32
131, 137, 148, 149, 154–155,
Sister Outsider, 151
159–160, 169n23, 251–254
Slander, 103
Slavery, 20, 27, 39n6,
43n43, 44n44
Social Media, 7, 14, 59, 178–180, U
191, 205–207 Unions, 12, 13, 23, 88–89, 91,
Stonewall, 183, 211n35 105, 106, 115, 118–122,
Strikes, 12, 13, 95, 119, 120, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131,
122–125, 128, 132, 134, 133–136, 138, 149, 155–159,
135, 149, 155–158, 160 228, 249
INDEX 287
United Kingdom, 5, 9, 119 World travel, see Tourism; Colonialism

United States, 3, 4, 25, 118, World War II, 7, 17n19, 28, 30, 47n71,
150, 185, 196, 197, 83n31, 180, 182, 187, 227
223, 228, 231, 233,
237, 250
U.N. World Conference on
Women, 160, 165 X
Xenophobia, 46n62, 234
V
Venereal disease, 98, 99 Y
Viktoriagade (Copenhagen), 66 Yugoslavia, 21, 46n63, 197, 249
Virgin Islands, 27–28, 40n6 Yugoslavian immigrants in
Virility taunting, 62, 83n28 Denmark, 33, 46n63, 91,
100–101, 103
Yugoslavian immigrants in the
W Netherlands, 153, 169n23,
Wekker, Gloria, 20, 147, 148, 151, 249, 256n5
220, 221, 239
West Germany, see Germany
Whiteness, 19, 151, 185, 192
Wilders, Geert, 2, 3 Z
Women’s work, 77–78, 154, 251 Zoo, see Human exhibitions

Immigrants in The Sexual Revolution - Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Immigrants in The Sexual Revolution - Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Genders and Sexualities in History

More information about this series at

Genders and Sexualities in History

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941728

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © Emmy Verhoeff in Hardinxsveld, 1963

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: “The disaster of Islamization . . . where gays

2 “There were no colored people in the classrooms”: The

3 “Like the Great Pyramids of Egypt . . . you can’t talk about

4 “ . . . [I]t does not have to be because they want to get mar-

5 “They’re ﬁghting for women’s rights, we’re ﬁghting for

6 “All of that talk about feminism was very hard

Part III Participation

7 “Help me, an Indonesian boy living in Holland . . . ﬂee my

8 “I was one of the ﬁrst colored gays”: Experiences of

9 Epilogue: “It was a cultural evolution”: Rethinking

Archives and Sources 259

Fig. 2.1 Sex, (post-)colonialism, Rock & Roll I: Indo-Rock band,

Table 2.1 Rough overview of “Visible Minority” immigrants

Introduction: “The disaster

In the past decade, much of Western Europe has seen a “culturalization of

© The Author(s) 2017 1

twenty people showed up to SD’s suburban pride festival (while a hundred

racist, or didn’t distance themselves from such expressions” of anti-

ABOUT THIS BOOK

emancipation and sexual liberalness. But in the 1960s–80s, European

regard to their sexual orientation. Gay and lesbian organizations and

WHY THE NETHERLANDS, DENMARK

countries is very easy, so let us begin lightheartedly: both the Netherlands

Turkish candy. Many were curious to explore European cities; some

HISTORY SPEAKS TO THE PRESENT

The Muslims in Europe series—like so many articles, news reports,

incorporated pro-gay, anti-Muslim-immigrant rhetoric into his presidential

“There were no colored people

The various waves of post-World War II immigrants in the Netherlands

© The Author(s) 2017 19

A. Colonial and Post-Colonial Migrants:

B. Labor Migrants (and their Families):

Despite centuries of international immigration, and despite these various

Instead, migration researchers tended to focus on Dutch and Danish

HETEROGENEITY PRIOR TO THE 1950S

religious differences were institutionalized through separate state struc-

Christian, European Immigrants

and working conditions in Denmark, as most were poor farmers who

Jews, Sinti and Roma

(1783–1853), and thus the subjects of several works in the (Danish)

the Netherlands or the colonies.38 The practice of concubinage largely

Cornelins was caged—allegedly due to “bad behavior”—in order to

SIXTEEN GROUPS OF “VISIBLE” MIGRANTS, 1960S–80S

Table 2.1 Rough overview of “Visible Minority” immigrants in the Netherlands

(Post-)Colonial migrants, 1950s–80s

and also encompass a huge range of sub-categories that should debunk

Colonial and Post-Colonial Migrants

Among colonial and post-colonial migrants, one can consider the

(1) The “European” “repatriates” (both white and mixed ethnicity)

Netherlands from Suriname and the Antilles.57 Already by the 1980s,

(4) Non-white people who relocated to Europe involuntarily, or under

Labor Migrants and Their Families

(5) Foreign laborers from within the European Economic Community

were those from Muslim-majority countries, most notably the

(9) Individuals who sought asylum based on political opinions, and