Europe's first gay demonstration

On 21 January 1969, young people stand in front of the Binnenhof in The Hague, the seat of the Dutch parliament, and do something that had never happened like this in Europe before: they demonstrate publicly for the rights of homosexuals. Their target is a single article.

Article 248bis of the Criminal Code dated from 1911. It made sexual contact between adults and same-sex young people under twenty-one a crime. For heterosexual contact, the limit was sixteen. The law was therefore less about protecting young people than about stigmatising an orientation. For decades it led to convictions, blackmail and ruined lives.

The protest was organised by an association of student working groups on homosexuality, the FSWH. The COC, the country's long-established homosexual organisation, had set up this offshoot only a year earlier. It was chaired by the young politics student Joke Swiebel. The timing was carefully chosen: the Justice Ministry's budget was being debated in parliament, and with it Article 248bis.

The action was not radical. Swiebel later remembered a rather well-behaved, respectable event. And yet it was a break. Until then, the COC had only negotiated behind closed doors, discreetly and without fuss. Now homosexuals and their allies were showing themselves in the open street.

About six months later came the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York. The rally in The Hague is therefore considered the beginning of the modern gay movement in the Netherlands and the first demonstration of its kind in Europe. The pressure worked: in 1971 parliament abolished Article 248bis.

Joke Swiebel remained committed to the cause all her life. She later sat in the European Parliament and, at the age of eighty-two, earned a doctorate on six decades of Dutch gay politics.