Pink Perils and Post-war Blues. Homosexuality and Penal Policy in Western Europe's International Forensic Community (1945-1965)

Abstract

During the interwar period, policy concerns with sexual crime at the international level of organizations like the League of Nations were mostly limited to prostitution and sex trafficking. This changed rapidly after the Second World War, when the proliferation of transnational bodies fostered the growth of an international community of forensic experts to whom sex represented an issue closely linked to the social disruptions of war. During what I call the ‘long 1950s’ (i.e. 1945-1965), homosexuality in particular became a topic of debate within European segments of the United Nations and the World Health Organization as well as in the Council of Europe and a cluster of Western European-dominated international organizations such as Interpol, the International Association of Penal Law and several others. This article traces how this debate about homosexuality, punctuated with post-war anxieties concerning the moral corruption of youths, developed over a series of conferences into a broadly supported and increasingly transatlantic consensus that posited the need for a universal reform of sexual criminal law. The article analyzes not only the way this network of experts operated and how forensic knowledge on (homo)sexuality circulated across borders, but it also explores the important synergies between local events, national circumstances and transnational debates, while insisting on the agency of a few key stakeholders who managed to shape the debate in accordance with their personal views.