A literary club as a cover
A literary club as a cover: in 1946, the world's oldest queer organisation was founded in Amsterdam.
On 7 December 1946, around one hundred and fifty people gathered in Amsterdam to found an association. Its name sounded like a literary circle: the Shakespeare Club. That was intentional. Behind the innocuous façade, homosexuals met, and never before had so many gathered in the Netherlands because of their sexual orientation as on that evening.
The roots go back to before the war. In the spring of 1940, "Levensrecht" (Right to Live), a magazine for homosexual readers, appeared for the first time. Shortly afterwards, Germany occupied the Netherlands and the magazine went underground. After the liberation it reappeared, and the club emerged from its readership. Its first chairman was the former resistance fighter Niek Engelschman. He too appeared under a false name, calling himself Bob Angelo.
Three years later came the next disguise. From then on the club was called the Cultuur- en Ontspanningscentrum, COC for short, meaning Centre for Culture and Leisure. The authorities remained suspicious and long refused the association official recognition. Its most important political goal was the abolition of Article 248bis of the Criminal Code. This made same-sex contact with people aged between sixteen and twenty-one a crime, while sixteen was enough for heterosexuals.
Only under Benno Premsela, who became chairman in 1962, did the association drop the mask. Premsela was the first openly gay activist to appear on Dutch television. In 1971, Article 248bis was abolished, and royal recognition of the COC followed shortly afterwards.
The cover club of back then has become the oldest LGBTQ+ organisation in the world still in existence. Today it supports partner groups in more than thirty-five countries.