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Desire Revolution
Imagining Queer Europe
Fiona Anderson, Glyn Davis & Nat Raha
To cite this article: Fiona Anderson, Glyn Davis & Nat Raha (2021) Desire Revolution, Third
Text, 35:1, 1-9, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2020.1854978
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Third Text, 2021
Vol. 35, No. 1, 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2020.1854978
Desire Revolution
Imagining Queer Europe
Fiona Anderson, Glyn Davis and Nat Raha
On the final afternoon of the three-day conference ‘Cruising the 1970s:
Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now’ held in Edinburgh in March
2019, attendees were invited to participate in an experimental work-
shop entitled ‘F*ck the Future’. The provocative title’s multiple mean-
ings were intentional, encapsulating a nihilistic dismissal, a call to
sexual action and an expression of dismay (‘Fuck! The Future!’). To
a playlist of extracts from activist speeches, the group entered a cosy
space at the Traverse Theatre strewn with paper banners emblazoned
with themes (‘Archiving’, ‘Decolonizing’, ‘Translating’, ‘Border Cross-
ing’, ‘Cruising’ and so on). The session was designed to facilitate collec-
tive discussions and imagining, extracting and elaborating on
conversations that had been taking place across the days of the
event. Blank paper banners invited the assembly of new ones; existing
banners could be adapted, détourned or even rejected entirely. Vital
political activities with lengthy histories – debate, dissent, sloganeering,
banner-making, people gathering together – were central to the action.
An upbeat music soundtrack, with a heavy emphasis on disco and con-
temporary queer electro-pop, contributed to the euphoric mood of the
session. Participants from across Europe and beyond shared their frus-
trations with contemporary LGBTQ+ politics, anecdotal and archival
tales of neglected queer histories and overlooked sexual cultures, and,
Both images in this article: together, attempted to imagine what a reconfigured queer Europe
‘F*ck the Future’, a workshop could consist of.
held on 16 March 2019, as part
of the ‘Cruising the Seventies:
In the past ten years a number of edited collections have explored
Imagining Queer Europe Then LGBTQ+ life across the constituent member states of the European
and Now’ conference, Traverse Union and addressed the question of what it means to be queer in
Theatre, Edinburgh,
photographs courtesy of Benny Europe today. In LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe (2014),
Nemerofsky Ramsay Phillip Ayoub and David Paternotte expressed concerns with what they
© 2021 Third Text
3
termed ‘the imagined “Europeanness” of LGBT rights’, the idea that the
national diversity of the European Union is automatically accommodat-
ing to queer people, and that support for LGBTQ+ rights is used as a geo-
political bargaining tool in dealings with nearby non-member states with
more homophobic legislative agendas, such as Russia and Ukraine, as it
has been in the UK’s dealings with former colonies such as Uganda.1 In
What’s Queer about Europe? (2014), Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille
Rosello argued for ‘the destabilising consequences of conjoining Queer
and Europe’, suggesting that such a connection may freshly invigorate
both realms of inquiry.2
This special issue critically examines cultural expressions of LGBTQ+
life and struggle across Europe in the 1970s and after, asking what the
queer histories of this decade might offer in the political present of
post-national Europe. It draws on papers and performances that made
up the conference ‘Cruising the 1970s: Imagining Queer Europe Then
and Now’, the culminating public event of the pan-European research
project Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cul-
tures (CRUSEV), financed by Humanities in the European Research Area
(HERA) and the European Commission. Working with research teams in
Poland, Germany, Spain and the UK, CRUSEV traced archival and oral
histories of LGBTQ+ social and sexual cultures from the 1970s and con-
sidered what this knowledge might contribute to understandings of queer
and trans politics and identity in Europe’s present and future.3 Sitting
between well-publicised early expressions of gay liberation in North
America in the late 1960s and the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the
early 1980s, the 1970s occupies a central place in the queer political ima-
ginary and the histories that are told of it. Across Europe in the 1970s,
1 Phillip Ayoub and David
Paternotte, eds, LGBT
expressions of queer sexuality and political responses to LGBTQ+ identi-
Activism and the Making of ties manifested unevenly. Through legislative changes (including, but not
Europe: A Rainbow limited to, decriminalisation), organised rights movements, and a broad
Europe?, Palgrave
Macmillan, London, 2014, p
range of countercultural practices, LGBTQ+ individuals and groups
2; see Rahul Rao, Out of across Europe emerged into tentative public visibility informed by
Time: The Queer Politics of global anti-colonial struggles and in exchange with the Women’s Liber-
Postcoloniality, Oxford
University Press, Oxford,
ation Movement and anti-racist and anti-fascist movements within
2020 Europe.
2 Sudeep Dasgupta and The burgeoning of LGBTQ+ politics across Europe in the 1970s was
Mireille Rosello, shaped through cultural expression and erotic encounters. The circula-
‘Introduction. Queer and tion of manifestos, experimental literature, film and art, and the aesthetic
Europe: An Encounter’, in
Sudeep Dasgupta and dimensions of political activism, as well as sex itself, all represent crucial
Mireille Rosello, eds, What’s forms through which queer life has been lived and imagined. Some of
Queer about Europe?
Productive Encounters and
these traces have been archived and may be recovered or reconstructed;
Re-enchanting Paradigms, others have disappeared from view and can only be figured through
Fordham University Press, imagination and creative practice. In ‘Archival Experiments, Notes and
New York, 2014, p 8
(Dis)orientations’, the introduction to their recent special issue of
3 For details of other CRUSEV Feminist Review on feminist, queer and decolonising archives, Nydia A
events and publications, see
https://www.crusev.ed.ac.
Swaby and Chandra Frank argue for the political value of exploratory
uk. and experimental modes of engaging with archival material. ‘The exper-
4 Nydia A Swaby and imental,’ they write, ‘is inevitably speculative and future orientated.’4
Chandra Frank, ‘Archival With it, they
Experiments, Notes and
(Dis)orientations’, Feminist
Review, vol 125, no 1, 2020, offer the experimental as an imaginary, in which we deliberately
p5 make space for play, refusal and artistic renderings of archives and their
4
5
materiality. We propose experimentation as a form of dwelling and
lingering in the archive to subvert linear notions of time and place.5
Drawing on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Swaby and Frank empha-
sise that ‘Understanding that official archives are bound up with insti-
tutional politics of erasure calls for innovative ways of “reading
against the grain”’ and ‘invites students of the archive to consider
how stories are told. Using fragments and scatters in the archive as
a point of reorientation allows for other stories and narratives to
emerge.’6
Practices of archiving and reimagining the past play a central role in
the making and remaking of post-national European identity. What
Fatima El-Tayeb calls Europe’s ‘continued inability or rather unwilling-
ness to confront… the glaring whiteness underlying [its] self-image’ is,
she writes, shaped by a ‘dialectic of memory and amnesia, in the shape
of an easily animated archive of racial images whose presence is stead-
fastly denied’.7 Queer modes of engaging with the past, like performance,
El-Tayeb argues, can enable minoritised European subjects to ‘[create]
cracks in the circular logic of normative European identities’ because
they enact a ‘rearranging [of] the components of the supposedly stable
but incompatible identities assigned to them’. It offers a way of ‘building
a community based on the shared experience of multiple, contradictory
positionalities’.8 This special issue of Third Text, Imagining Queer
Europe Then and Now, returns to the queer 1970s at a formative point
in Europe’s present through critical engagements with histories of
radical activism, art, poetry, performance and film. It focuses on queer
cultural production and sexual cultures, but also on archival method-
ologies and queer practices of rethinking hegemonic histories across the
breadth of Europe, then and now. Revisiting cultural expressions of
queer life and LGBTQ+ activism in the 1970s through the lens of the
present, and ensuring that this work is done collaboratively and exper-
imentally by artists, poets, filmmakers, historians and activists, allows a
discontinuous history of queer visibility to appear, one that has been var-
iously mythologised and marginalised, its political possibilities limited,
subsumed, opened out and reimagined.
In their introduction to the volume Queer in Europe: Contemporary
Case Studies (2011), Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett emphasise that
5 Ibid to engage historically with the queer experience in Europe must not be
6 Ibid, p 8 a question of ‘catching up… with North America’.9 Such accounts
often overlook the political and cultural complexities of the queer
7 Fatima El-Tayeb, European
Others: Queering Ethnicity 1970s in Europe and the relationship of LGBTQ+ activism to anti-
in Postnational Europe, racist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist and feminist struggles in the same
University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 2011,
period. Radical visions of queer liberation in Europe have often been
p xxv overlooked in favour of liberal agendas of tolerance and assimilation,
8 Ibid, pp xxxv–xxxvi
framed through hegemonic narratives of progress. The widespread and
effusive public commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the
9 Lisa Downing and Robert
Gillett, ‘Introduction’, in
partial decriminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales in
Lisa Downing and Robert 2017, for example, took place as LGBTQ+ hate crimes and homelessness
Gillett, eds, Queer in in those countries grew rapidly as a consequence of fiscal austerity
Europe: Contemporary Case
Studies, Ashgate, Farnham, policies. As Downing and Gillett note, ‘Instead of overturning this
2011, p 5 system [of an essentialising gender binary] and attempting to envisage
6
alternatives, postmodern Europe seeks legislatively to limit the
most baleful of its consequences while endorsing the thinking that pro-
duces them’.10
The commitment of Third Text to globalised perspectives on contem-
porary culture and to challenging dominant understandings of centre and
periphery, progress and tolerance, in art practice and cultural histories
resonates with the aims of this special issue and with the idea of imagining
queer Europe beyond the limits seemingly proscribed by what Downing
and Gillett call ‘postmodern Europe’. The contributions to this special
issue work together to reframe and reanimate the queer past, particularly
the queer 1970s, through the lenses of these related political struggles,
and rethink the dominance of North American queer theory and neolib-
eral LGBT agendas in present-day Europe. This has informed the stories
we tell about Europe’s queer imaginaries as academics and activists,
through our methodology as well as the subjects we explore and the dis-
ciplines we engage with. As Grietje Baars and Nat Raha ask in their con-
tribution to this volume, if we ‘forget Stonewall’, as Sam Bourcier has
encouraged us to do,
what other seventies, or what events of queer Europe, inform our actions
and politicise our consciousness?… Can the particular position and
history that marks Europe as the centre of modernity as enacted
through coloniality and slavery, that in turn has always been resisted
from without and within, provide strategies that inform poetics of
resistance itself?
At a time of deep political and cultural uncertainty in Europe and an
urgent moment in global queer politics, Imagining Queer Europe Then
and Now excavates these unrealised possibilities of queer pasts and
futures and explores expressions of queer community and politics
through art and poetry. It offers new perspectives on the queer past
and the politics of its recovery by engaging with queer cultural production
across Europe. Included are contributions from academics, activists,
artists and poets who have turned to aesthetics in order to explore the
radical manifestations of queer politics, community and sexual cultures
across Europe in the 1970s and after in non-teleological and collaborative
ways while considering the importance of ensuring the agency of audi-
ences in work that reanimates archives. Imagining Queer Europe Then
and Now includes texts and images by artists and poets from the UK,
Germany, France and Spain, work which depicts queer lived experience
in Europe during and after the 1970s or which engages creatively with
it through aesthetic and erotic fantasy in the present. The contributions
foreground queer feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives.
The issue explores work by artists, writers and activists which has been
marginalised in dominant historical accounts of Anglo-American
LGBTQ+ life and cultural production in the 1970s, particularly that of
queer artists and/or writers of colour or work which demands re-examin-
ation from a global queer perspective.
Collectively, the contributors address how queer and gender non-con-
formity embodiment influenced resistances to norms through sexual and
10 Ibid, p 2 aesthetic practices, engaging with aesthetic forms and methods rooted in
7
the 1970s and in archival practices addressing the decade. Each author
offers new and interdisciplinary perspectives on queer archival research
methods, embodied practices of writing about the queer past and the
ways it animates queer life in the present. Graham Bell Tornado’s contri-
bution explores entertainment as a form of social and political critique,
what Bell terms ‘antitainment’, through transfeminist cabaret practice.
Aleksandra Gajowy turns to an erotic drawing by the Polish artist Krzysz-
tof Jung and asks what past visions of queer desire in the midst of repres-
sion might offer queer people in contemporary Poland. Liz Rosenfeld
addresses non-binary subjectivity as a fat queer femme, and how such a
body is caught up and ungendered amid the politics of typically male
gay cruising spaces. Fiona Anderson explores how Rosenfeld and the
artist Prem Sahib have challenged politicised uses of the past through
experimental queer engagements with informal archives of sites of
public sex between men in London. Glyn Davis delves into archives of
gay liberation in the north-east of England and examines the long and
intertwined histories of British homophobia and British sex education.
Jackqueline Frost explores Daniel Guérin’s theory of social repression,
unearthing Guérin’s perspective on gay liberation in France, which takes
its model from anti-colonial struggles. The poet and artist Tarek Lakhrissi
reflects on the value of fantasy, dance and music as modes of queer of
colour survival in the future, in France and beyond. Using fashion as a
lens, Roberto Filippello theorises Mario Mieli’s radical transvestism as
a materially embodied practice of resistance to social norms and the lib-
eration of eros. Flora Dunster, reading the photography of Sunil Gupta,
which accompanies the article, examines the attachment of postcolonial
sites to European queer imaginaries. Engaging with the practice of ima-
gining queerness then and now, this special issue also foregrounds dialo-
gue and dissent through published conversations between activists and
academics. These are edited and expanded transcripts of international
and intergenerational conversations from the Edinburgh conference, on
lesbian politics and the British left, and revolutionary trans politics and
writing across Europe, with Laura Guy and Mandy Merck, and Grietje
Baars and Nat Raha respectively.
Working on a project which aims to learn from the queer past in the
present has been a prescient, albeit challenging, endeavour for many of
our research teams as a broader turn towards populism, nationalism
and fascism is shaping mainstream politics in numerous European
countries, including Poland, Hungary, Spain and the UK. Roman
Kuhar and David Paternotte’s edited collection Anti-Gender Campaigns
in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality (2017) explores the expansion of
anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ policies and hardening cultural attitudes
towards women and LGBTQ+ people in countries such as Germany,
11 See Agnieszka Graff and Hungary, Poland and Italy.11 Some academics in the UK have played pro-
Elżbieta Korolczuk,
‘“Worse than Communism
minent and impactful roles in stoking anti-trans politics and thought in
and Nazism Put Together”: British public life, while others have been active in challenging these
War on Gender in Poland’, phobic practices. Growing discriminatory public discourse in the UK
in Roman Kuhar and David
Paternotte, eds, Anti- popular media and political decision-making around access to health
Gender Campaigns in care and rights for trans people speaks to a need for academics
Europe: Mobilizing against working on LGBTQ+ histories to reflect on connections between the
Equality, Rowman &
Littlefield, London, 2017, past and present and to consider the contemporary power and use
pp 175–194 value of phobic views of gender and sexuality.
8
12 Sarah Marsh, Aamna The safety of LGBTQ+ people across Europe is increasingly at risk. In
Mohdin and Niamh England and Wales, for example, the rate of LGBT hate crime per capita
McIntyre, ‘Homophobic
and Transphobic Hate
rose by 144 per cent during 2013–2014 and 2017–2018. Transphobic
Crimes Surge in England attacks in the same countries have trebled in the same period. Almost
and Wales’, The Guardian, half of these crimes in 2017–2018 were violent offences.12 Overt racial
14 June 2019, https://www.
theguardian.com/world/ discrimination has also increased since the UK’s vote to leave the EU in
2019/jun/14/homophobic- 2016, with a 2019 survey revealing that 71 per cent of people from
and-transphobic-hate- racial minorities have faced discrimination – a figure that includes
crimes-surge-in-england-
and-wales, accessed 29 July LGBTQ+ people of colour.13 The number of prosecutions for LGBT
2020 hate crimes, however, has fallen.14 A study of the 2016 European
13 Robert Booth, ‘Racism Social Survey by Hungarian researchers found that acceptance of gay
Rising since Brexit Vote, and lesbian people in Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine
Nationwide Study Reveals’,
The Guardian, 20 May
has decreased significantly since 2002.15 In July 2019, towards the end
2019, https://www. of the CRUSEV project, a thousand Pride marchers in the northern
theguardian.com/world/ Polish city of Białystok were attacked by four thousand counter-protes-
2019/may/20/racism-on-
the-rise-since-brexit-vote-
ters from nationalist, far-right groups armed with flash bombs, rocks
nationwide-study-reveals, and glass bottles.16 Attempts were made to ban Pride marches in other
accessed 29 July 2020 Polish cities.17 As we were finalising the contents of this issue, Andrzej
14 Mick Tucker, Dan Box and Duda, leader of the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party, was
Ben Hunte, ‘Homophobic re-elected as Poland’s president on a platform which included a pledge
Hate Crime Charges Fall as
Reports Soar’, BBC News, to fight what he called LGBT ‘ideology’. Duda’s weaponisation of a fan-
11 September 2019, https:// tasised ‘sacred’ and ‘inviolable’ homogeneous Polish past and his descrip-
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- tion of the European Union as ‘an imaginary community’ with no value
49509301, accessed 29 July
2020 for contemporary Poland evidences the urgent need for nuanced critical
15 Megan Davies,
engagements with post-national Europe and the ways in which its archi-
‘Homophobia Seen Rising val imaginaries are reinvented and redeployed.18
in European Countries As well as impacting the physical safety and broader lived experience
without Gay Marriage’,
Reuters, 21 August 2019,
of LGBTQ+ people, these hardening attitudes and resulting political pol-
https://www.reuters.com/ icies and cultural agendas have put serious pressure on those of us teach-
article/us-europe-lgbt- ing and undertaking research in the fields of gender studies and queer
lawmaking/homophobia-
seen-rising-in-european-
history. Their legitimacy as scholarly subjects of value is under threat in
countries-without-gay- countries across Europe, including Poland. The Hungarian government,
marriage- for example, has removed accreditation for gender studies programmes
idUSKCN1VA2F0,
accessed 29 July 2020
across the country.19 This shift underscores the importance of undertak-
ing this work and of proper documentation, to ensure that academics
16 Tara John and Muhammad
Darwish, ‘Polish City working on queer and trans histories in the future have adequate archival
Holds First LGBTQ Pride and scholarly resources.
Parade despite Far-Right Across Europe, cultural memory and politicised notions of the past are
Violence’, CNN, 21 July
2019, https://edition.cnn. deployed as tools of the popular right. One of CRUSEV’s key contri-
com/2019/07/21/europe/ butions to contemporary queer scholarship has been to increase the visi-
bialystok-polish-lgbtq-
pride-intl/index.html,
bility of LGBTQ+ people and our histories in safe and supportive ways, to
accessed 29 July 2020 create space for public discussion of topics whose presence in public life is
17 Ibid
increasingly shaped by homophobia and right-wing political agendas.
Cruising the recent past, drawing attention to radical erotic communities
18 ‘Poland’s Andrzej Duda
Rides Wave of “Sacred
and queer sexual cultures, favouring dialogue and multiple, overlapping
Tradition”’, BBC News, 13 voices, creative and experimental visions, CRUSEV has worked to
July 2020, https://www. present a wilfully perverse and antagonistic challenge to accepted and
bbc.co.uk/news/world-
europe-53389096, accessed official histories, to accounts which prioritise legislative tolerance over
29 July 2020; James Shotter other aspects of queer experience. In engaging with queer social and
and Evon Huber, ‘Polish sexual cultures, we have worked collectively to develop original, power-
President Attacks EU as an
“Imaginary Community”’, ful, experimental and radical means through which to reimagine what it
Financial Times, 12 means to be queer in Europe in the present. Cruising the past has offered
9
September 2018, https:// us an embodied and erotic mode of queer world-making in the compli-
www.ft.com/content/
3675c1d8-b673-11e8- cated, shifting cultural and political context of post-national Europe, a
b3ef-799c8613f4a1, way of imagining radical queerness together in the face of ideological
accessed 29 July 2020 attacks that threaten the safety of LGBTQ+ people across Europe. This
19 Elizabeth Redden, ‘Global feels especially vital at a time when progressive liberal narratives of
Attack on Gender Studies’,
Inside Higher Ed, 5
increasing acceptance risk obscuring more nuanced accounts of queer
December 2018, https:// identity and culture, particularly sexual practices, and limit the cultural
www.insidehighered.com/ space available to examine the intersections of heterosexism, nationalism
news/2018/12/05/gender-
studies-scholars-say-field- and racism.
coming-under-attack- There is a particular kind of academic and wider cultural visibility
many-countries-around- afforded to large funded projects such as CRUSEV, and we have been
globe, accessed 29 July
2020 committed to making use of this in ways that might have a longer-term
impact on academics, activists and artists working with LGBTQ+ his-
tories in the present and future, and which might shape student encoun-
ters with these histories. In publishing this collection of articles and
photographs with Third Text, we hope to reach a wide and interdisciplin-
ary audience, and also that the foregrounding of international and inter-
generational dialogue in this special issue will engender further cross-
European queer cultural engagement, particularly between artists,
writers and activists. In the midst of precarity and deep uncertainty, we
cruise the past and call for a revolutionary archive of queer desire.
ORCID
Fiona Anderson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2615-9776
Glyn Davis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1184-5175
