Birmingham City Univ.: Research project „The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000“; John Mercer (Birmingham City Univ., UK), João Florêncio (Linköping Univ., SE), and Isabell Dahms and Piotr Maron (Univ. of Exeter, UK) (Web) | (PDF)

Time: 19.-20.05.2027
Venue: Birmingham City Univ.
Proposals by: 01.09.2026

Images have accompanied and deeply shaped political, social, and cultural understandings and experiences of sexuality in postwar Europe. From Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) to Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995); from Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953) to Party, the Spanish magazine that marked „el Destape“ („the undressing“)—the period of cultural frenzy and sexual freedom that allowed soft porn to enter the Spanish cultural mainstream immediately following the death of Franco—postwar visual cultures of sexuality have played a fundamental role in documenting and informing, not always in the most ethical or uncontroversial manner, how people across Europe lived their sexuality, as well as how Europe got to be perceived, from abroad, as a continent of sexual freedoms and/or dangers (Barr 1983; Rugoff 1999; Beattie 2016; Paasonen 2017; Labrador Méndez 2020; Florêncio & Mercer 2025). At the same time, many photographers, filmmakers, and pornographers continued fuelling a long European colonial tradition of orientalist and exploitative image-making fetishising racialised and often younger bodies, a visual corpus that affirms and at times also troubles the borders of Europe understood as a sexual-geographical imaginary (Shepard 2017; Dahms forthcoming; Florêncio & Mercer forthcoming).
Images, too, helped shape postwar European imaginaries of sexuality as it intersected with health and illness, especially as the AIDS crisis hit the continent. From Sweden’s Revolt Press’s 1985 publication of a safer-sex gay porn magazine funded by the State Bacteriological Laboratory—the precursor to the Swedish Public Health Agency—to the UK government’s infamous 1986 public health campaign „AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance“; from the Portuguese National Commission for the Fight Against AIDS’s 1993 campaign „SIDA: Sabe que se pode morrer de solidão“ („AIDS: Do You Know Loneliness Can Kill?“) to the articulation of sexuality, health, and post-Communist masculine body ideals in Polish gay magazines like Filo, Men and Nowy Men, visual culture helped frame sex and sexuality as contested sites overloaded with conflicting meanings hovering between pleasure and liberation on the one hand, and death and disease on the other (Florêncio 2020; Florêncio forthcoming; Maron forthcoming). Continue reading →