Experience

From the Stonewall Riots to Brussels and Antwerp Pride: how much did the New York riots really influence queer activism in Belgium and the Netherlands?

Posted by Timothy on

Today is Brussels Pride‘s main event: the march, the parade, the walk. Whatever you want to call it. Every Pride season, the same story returns. In June 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York fought back against a police raid. The riots that followed became the symbolic birth of modern LGBTQIA+ liberation and inspired Pride marches across the world.

That narrative has become so dominant that Stonewall is often treated as the universal starting point of queer activism everywhere.

But historian Dr Wannes Dupont of the University of Edinburgh‘s GENDER.ED platform argues that the reality in Belgium and the Netherlands was far more complicated.

In his 2021 academic article ‘Gay and Lesbian Liberation in the Low Countries: From Stonewall to Pink Pillar‘, Dupont examines how the Stonewall riots were received in Belgium and the Netherlands , and concludes that their influence was real, but indirect, uneven and often overstated.

“The riots were certainly not the beginning of the gay and lesbian movement in Europe”, Dupont writes. “Stonewall was just one amongst a host of inspirations.”

As Brussels Pride takes place this weekend, his research offers a reminder that LGBTQIA+ activism in the Low Countries was already developing long before the first brick was thrown in Greenwich Village.

Stonewall was reported, but initially felt distant

The Stonewall riots made headlines in Europe in 1969, including in Belgium and the Netherlands. But Dupont shows that the immediate impact was surprisingly limited.

“Most veterans of the Low Countries’ movements have only vague memories of the Christopher Street riots”, he writes. “Some recall that something about them was mentioned in Belgian and Dutch newspapers, but also that it all seemed a million miles away.”

That distance mattered. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, organisations for gay men and lesbians already existed before Stonewall.

The Dutch COC – founded in 1946 under the discreet name Shakespeare Club – had grown into one of Europe’s strongest homophile organisations. Belgium’s first homophile movement dated back to 1953.

These groups were not revolutionary. They focused on careful lobbying, discretion and social acceptance. The goal was not liberation in the radical sense, but tolerance.

Dupont argues that many historians have exaggerated the idea that Europe simply copied the American example after 1969.

“The subtitle to Katherine McFarland Bruce’s otherwise highly informative account of pride parades in the United States implies that other countries simply took a leaf from the American playbook”, he writes critically.

Instead, he argues, LGBTQIA+ politics in Belgium and the Netherlands were shaped primarily by local political cultures and by exchanges within Western Europe itself.

France became the bridge between Stonewall and Belgium

Stonewall did eventually influence Belgium, but not directly. According to Dupont, the connection largely travelled through France. In Paris, activists inspired by both the events of May 1968 and the radical atmosphere that followed Stonewall founded the FHAR – the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action – in 1970.

Some French activists had personally witnessed the post-Stonewall atmosphere in New York. Guy Chevalier, one of the key figures behind the FHAR, travelled to New York shortly after the riots. “I learned everything in the United States”, he later recalled.

Back in Europe, those ideas spread. Young Belgian activists travelled to Paris, encountered the FHAR and brought its radical language and tactics home with them. In 1972, Belgian activists founded the MHAR,  the Homosexual Movement for Revolutionary Action.

This was one of the first clear examples of Stonewall-era liberation politics reaching Belgium. But Dupont stresses that even then, the movement remained small. “There were just not enough warm bodies or sufficient self-confidence to organize anything remotely similar to the pride marches already underway in Great Britain and the US”,  he writes.

The Belgian radical groups were noisy, visible and ideologically ambitious, but also unstable. Internal arguments and exhaustion quickly weakened them. By the mid-1970s, most had already disappeared.

Why the Netherlands reacted differently

The Netherlands proved even less susceptible to Stonewall-style militancy. That was not because Dutch society was conservative. In many ways, it was already moving faster than much of Europe. Amsterdam in the 1960s had become associated with counterculture, youth protest and social liberalisation. The city’s gay scene flourished openly.

But the Dutch LGBTQIA+ movement had already built something powerful before Stonewall happened. The COC was large, organised and increasingly connected to political institutions. Rather than confronting society from the outside, it worked through negotiation, lobbying and gradual reform.

Dupont argues that this institutional strength reduced the appeal of radical liberation politics. “When radical gay and lesbian movements sprang up across the West in the wake of Stonewall during the early 1970s”, he writes, “there seemed less need, and therefore less appetite for such revolutionary militancy in the Netherlands.”

Even younger reformers inside the Dutch movement often disliked the confrontational tone associated with American-style liberation. When Pride marches began appearing abroad in the early 1970s, some Dutch activists dismissed them as “demonstrations devoid of content“.

Others feared that aggressive identity politics would damage public support.

Instead, the Dutch movement increasingly became integrated into the country’s famous ‘pillarised‘ (verzuild) political system, a structure in which social groups organised themselves into powerful networks linked to political institutions.

According to Dupont, the Dutch COC eventually resembled “a homosexual mini-pillar in its own right”.

Stonewall became important later

Ironically, Stonewall became more influential in Belgium and the Netherlands only after the first wave of radical liberation groups had already begun fading.

By the late 1970s, the riots had evolved into an international symbol. Activists increasingly referred to Stonewall not as a direct political model, but as a shared historical reference point.

A major turning point came in 1977. That year, American singer Anita Bryant launched her notorious ‘Save Our Children‘ campaign against gay rights in Florida. The campaign horrified activists across Europe and triggered a new sense of urgency.

In Amsterdam, organisations that had previously been cautious about public protest suddenly joined forces for a solidarity march linked explicitly to Stonewall.

That demonstration became the beginning of the annual Pink Saturday tradition in the Netherlands.

Belgium followed shortly afterwards.

In 1978, activists organised a Gay Day in Flanders. A year later, Belgium saw its first major queer rights march in Antwerp.

By then, Stonewall had become part of a broader international language of Pride. The annual demonstrations that followed gradually embedded the New York riots into European collective memory.

“These marches”, Dupont writes, “helped to inscribe Stonewall into the collective memory of the gay and lesbian movement across Europe.”

More than an American story

Dupont does not deny Stonewall’s importance. On the contrary, he argues that the riots undeniably inspired radical activists across Europe.

“There was a clear link between the birth of radical militant gay and lesbian groups in Western Europe and the events surrounding the Stonewall riots”, he concludes.

But he also warns against treating Stonewall as the sole origin story. In Belgium and the Netherlands, local realities mattered just as much: student revolts, feminism, abortion activism, Dutch-style consensus politics, linguistic tensions in Belgium and the long evolution of existing organisations.

The result was a distinctly European path.

In the Netherlands, strong institutions and political integration limited the appeal of revolutionary liberation politics.

In Belgium, especially in French-speaking circles, Stonewall-inspired radicalism briefly gained visibility through French influence, but proved difficult to sustain.

And yet, over time, Stonewall still became the movement’s central symbol.

Today’s Pride marches in Brussels, Amsterdam and Antwerp all trace part of their symbolic lineage back to New York.

But as Dupont’s research shows, the route was anything but straightforward. Stonewall did not suddenly create LGBTQIA+ activism in the Low Countries. Instead, its meaning slowly travelled across borders, mixed with local political traditions and eventually became woven into a much longer European story.

The latest on LGBTQIA+ events such as prides in Belgium

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