Legal Liberation Through Relegation to the Home: Criminal Law and Male Homosexuality in Early Twentieth-Century Norway and Denmark

This study discusses the legal liberations of sexual liaisons between men that took place in Norway and Denmark in the early decades of the twentieth century. Researchers have tended to align the liberalizations with processes of social change and modernization, attributing special importance to the introduction of new scientific understandings of same-sex desire. Building on analyses of penal code drafts, bills, and parliamentary minutes, the article argues that other considerations were equally important. Legislators feared that a strict ban would lead to growing awareness of the existence of male same-sex eroticism and its national dissipation. Therefore, they preferred a legal regulation founded on tolerance of private and consensual relations. A central aim of the Danish and Norwegian liberalizations was to refer same-sex desiring men to a secluded existence in the private sphere, thus forging a regulatory alignment between state tolerance and the home. Finally, the article discusses the possibility of inscribing this historical alignment into a genealogy of contemporary sexual politics in Norway and Denmark. In recent years, lesbian women and gay men have become national citizens, partly by being anchored in the home through rights to marriage and reproduction.