Unwilling to know : male homosexuality at the crossroads of Europe, 1870-1965 / Wannes Dupont, University of Edinburgh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dupont, Wannes, 1983- Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Male homosexuality--Belgium--History--19th century.

Male homosexuality.

Male homosexuality--Belgium--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 244 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2026.

Summary:

Since the 1970s, historians have claimed that an insatiable 'will to know' has powered the growing concern with male homosexuality across Europe and the West, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards. Unwilling To Know challenges this dominant narrative by demonstrating how, unlike in neighbouring France, Germany, and Britain, a mixture of silence and code surrounded homosexuality in Belgium until well after the Second World War. Whereas over a thousand scientific monographs on homosexuality were published in wider Europe between 1898 and 1908, the lack of publishing in Belgium was combined with a marked lack of interest from the police, psychiatrists and wider society. Through internationally comparative analyses, and with particular reference to the importance of religion, Wannes Dupont complicates overly monolithic views of European developments based on a handful of familiar cases. In doing so, this study lays bare the many national, cultural, institutional, legal and religious differences that have shaped the scrutiny of homosexuality in diverging ways.

Contents:

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Small Countries and Grand Narratives

Chapter 1: Cruising Through a Crossroads of Europe

Chapter 2: The Problems and Priorities of Surveillance

Chapter 3: The Legal Irrelevance of Sexual Specifics

Chapter 4: Psychiatric Resistance to the Medicalization of Sin

Chapter 5: Free Will Politics and the Avoidance of Inversion

Chapter 6: Demographic Anxiety and Catholic Code

Chapter 7: Literary Activism on Behalf of a Strange Love

Coda: Pink Perils and Postwar Blues

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Feb 2026).

ISBN:

1-009-57016-1