Lesbian and Gay Liberation Beyond the Metropolis: Queer Lives and Politics in the Danish province c. 1965-1985 (QProvince)

QProvince aims to write a provincial queer history in which politics, community, and domestic life are understood as interwoven practices. We examine both visible forms of organising and the everyday infrastructures that made queer life possible: networks, meeting places, friendships, partnerships, discretion, courage, and ingenuity. This is about understanding how people navigated between local belonging and the risk of exclusion, and how participation in local life could shift norms over time. But it is also about something more fundamental: recognising the resistance and queer presence that did in fact exist in the provinces, even when it does not resemble the forms associated with the metropolis, and only becomes visible when we take the province’s social and cultural conditions seriously.

The project’s analytical ambition is to make the provinces a measure in their own right. Rather than reading provincial queer life as a “smaller” or “delayed” echo of the metropolis, we ask what forms of agency were available locally, which norms could be challenged, and what kinds of visibility were possible and desirable. This means that we do not only look for major confrontations, but also for relational and locally grounded forms of activism that unfold in everyday life, in the home, in associational settings, and in local publics.

Recent queer theoretical approaches sharpen this perspective. Inspired by Halberstam, we take “failure” and breaks with success narratives seriously as possible forms of activism, capable of producing change without resembling classic mobilisation. Inspired by Ahmed, we understand norm-breaking not only as transgression, but also as slow, everyday friction against norms that, over time, changes what becomes possible. We therefore look for resistance and change in registers other than those queer historical scholarship has typically used when it is written from the city.

Within this theoretical frame, the provinces become a key site for examining how queer life finds room and produces belonging in the tension between visibility and vulnerability. QProvince therefore investigates not only what was said and done in organised contexts, but also how queer life was lived as practice, and how compromises, tactics, and persistence could shift norms over time.

Methodologically, QProvince works deliberately from the margins. We combine archival research, printed sources, life history interviews, and visual ethnography to study both organised activism and more intimate, everyday forms of queer resistance that unfolded in homes, associations, and local communities.

The project draws on movement archives as well as local and national archives, including organisational records, meeting minutes, letters, flyers, and other traces of debate, organising, and the practical work of everyday politics. Queer magazines and journals are used to map language, conflicts, agendas, and the connections that linked local milieus to one another, just as they created dialogues and relationships between province and metropolis.

Life history interviews are central, because much queer life, and perhaps especially queer life in the provinces, often leaves few and fragmented archival traces. Interviews provide access to otherwise undocumented experiences, relationships, and strategies, and make it possible to understand how people balanced visibility and discretion, home and public life, and local norms and new ideals of liberation.

Where relevant, we also include visual and material sources such as photographs, domestic aesthetics, and other traces from homes and everyday life. This makes it possible to analyse domesticity and intimacy as historically significant and change-making practices, not merely as a private backdrop.

Subproject 1: Politics (Niels Nyegaard)

Examines local homosexual activism and organised liberation politics in selected provincial towns. The focus is on how political strategies, disagreements, and collaborations took shape locally, and how national agendas were translated into specific urban contexts.

Subproject 2: Communities (Tea Dahl Christensen)

Analyses local queer communities with attention to how networks, meeting places, and cultural milieus emerge and are sustained. Microhistorical approaches are used to understand local dynamics, forms of belonging, and the social spaces that made everyday life possible.

Subproject 3: Homes (Michael Nebeling Petersen)

Investigates queer homes and intimacy in the provinces. The focus is on domestic and everyday life, family relations, and the home as a form of protection, a social arena, and a quiet site for the creation of new social structures. The subproject asks what becomes visible when the home is taken seriously as a historical site of politics, care, and change.

Subproject 4: Social Change (Nebeling Petersen, Nyegaard, and Dahl Christensen)

Brings together insights from the first three subprojects and develops the project’s overall theoretical contribution. The ambition is to formulate new perspectives on social change and sexual citizenship when the provinces are not treated as peripheral, but as an analytical point of departure.

QProvince is carried out in close collaboration with Museum Vestfyn and the museum’s attraction MUSEUM ERNST, which has the history of homosexuality as a dedicated focus. Museum Ernst is Frederik Ernst’s former home and silverware factory, and his life story as a homosexual man in the provinces provides an important point of departure for the museum’s current and future research priorities.

The collaboration builds on Museum Vestfyn’s ongoing research project Queer in the Provinces (2024 to 2026), led by Tea Dahl Christensen, which resulted in the anthology Queer i provinsen (eds. Christensen og Edelberg). Published in January 2026, the volume includes contributions from 15 different scholars. The book is an initial contribution to what might be called a provincial turn in Danish queer historiography.

QProvince has an advisory board of leading scholars who follow the project and provide academic guidance on theory, method, archival work, and public engagement. The board functions as a critical and constructive forum where we strengthen the project’s direction, prioritise empirical focal points, and deepen connections to relevant research environments, cultural institutions, and partners.

Members:

• Professor Matt Cook (Oxford University)
• Emeritus Professor John Howard (King’s College London)
• Professor Tone Hellesund (University of Bergen)
• Professor Rikke Andreassen (Roskilde University)
• University Lecturer Riikka Taavetti (University of Turku)
• Professor Pia Quist (University of Copenhagen)
• Associate Professor Peter Edelberg (University of Copenhagen)
• Curator Line Fogh Sørensen (Den Gamle By, Aarhus)
• Curator Cecilie Bønnelycke (Museum Lolland-Falster)