Sexuality in Austria by Anton Pelinka & Dagmar Herzog

Author:Anton Pelinka & Dagmar Herzog [Pelinka, Anton & Herzog, Dagmar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Europe, Human Sexuality, Social Science, Austria & Hungary, History, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781412806060
Google: vd12mAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 3952413
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2006-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Europe and the Movement

From its initial inception, Austria’s lesbian/gay movement took recourse to an affirmative vision of Europe in its efforts to improve the situation of the country’s lesbians and gay men. Its first political act, in fact, rested on an argument that came to dominate the movement’s political discourse. HOSI—as Austria’s pioneering lesbian/gay rights organization was called in an acronym for Homosexuelle Initiative—had barely come into existence in 1979 when it addressed a formal petition to Austria’s Socialist chancellor, Bruno Kreisky. In it, the group demanded the abolition of Austria’s anti-lesbian/gay laws based in part on the argument that the country’s regressive legislation put it out of step with developments in Europe’s other democracies. In language that betrayed a residue of ethnocentric nostalgia, HOSI thus warned Kreisky of Austria’s singularly archaic position when compared with the “other cultured states (Kulturstaaten) of the Western world.”2

The conception of Austria’s homophobic legislation as an impediment to the country’s standing as a contemporary European civilization remained a central trope in the discourse of the lesbian/gay movement. Indeed, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, it underwrote the countless legal and political initiatives spearheaded by HOSI. Ranging from petitions and demonstrations to legal challenges and lobbying efforts, these initiatives sought to demonstrate Austria’s deficiency when measured against a putatively European standard, a standard that was variously seen as embodied by such progressive countries as Scandinavia and the Netherlands or such standard bearers of Europeanness as Germany and France.3

For nearly two decades, the lesbian/gay movement’s deployment of this “European discourse” had little political effect. Ignored or belittled by Austria’s mass media and placated by the country’s political elite, the queer movement could show next to no legal gains by the early 1990s. Even more importantly—and related to its political ineffectualness—the lesbian/gay movement had failed to break through homosexuality’s inherent privatization. While a small group of activists promoted and performed the ideal of politicized public disclosure, the vast majority of Austria’s homosexuals remained firmly entrenched in the closet.4

This situation changed in the mid-1990s, and once again, it was a deliberate act of “Europeanization” that underwrote the transformation. More than anything else, this development centered on the initiation in 1996 of the Regenbogen Parade (Rainbow Parade), Vienna’s version of a gay pride parade. HOSI had marked the anniversaries of the Stonewall Rebellion throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. But in a political mode that took recourse to such national models as May Day demonstrations, the organization had resisted the creation of the kinds of irreverent parades that had come to characterize Western European gay pride celebrations. The resulting events—earnest marches accompanied by posters and political slogans—failed to draw more than a few dozen participants.5

The creators of the Rainbow Parade sought to overturn this very situation when they announced their initiative. Rather than an overtly political demonstration against Austria’s injurious legislation, it would be a self-consciously cosmopolitan event that took its immediate inspiration from similar celebrations in the rest of Europe. It was in that sense that the modest

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