Unwilling To Know : Male Homosexuality at the Crossroads of Europe, 1870–1965

Debates about homosexuality are historically shaped by national specificities. In comparative and empirically rich ways, Unwilling to Know explores how silence and code surrounded homosexuality in Belgium until well after the Second World War, challenging dominant narratives about the riseof a similar and simultaneous 'will to know' across Europe.

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.