Free Talk! Imagining Sex, Imagining Us: Pornography, Transnational Print Culture, and the Invention of “Gay Europe” by João Florêncio

The circulation of gay erotica and pornography in post-war Europe was central to the development of a shared sense of identity and belonging among European gay men, one which often disrupted the Cold War geopolitical imaginaries of “East” and “West,” and thus their respective boundaries. In this talk, I will sketch those dynamics and the role of transnational print, consumer, and sex cultures in shaping “Gay Europe,” from the immediate postwar decades to the years following the fall of the Iron Curtain. In so doing, I will ask questions about the role played by sexuality and sex media in both reproducing and troubling ideas of European identity, belonging and citizenship that were being advanced at institutional levels as part of the postwar project of European integration. Ideas that remain, to this day, central to the ways in which we understand who counts as “European” and where does “Europe” instead end.