In postwar Europe, the transnational circulation of gay erotica and porn magazines played a crucial role in shaping a shared identity and sense of belonging among gay men.
These materials created informal networks that connected individuals across borders, helping them imagine themselves as part of a larger European gay community. Unlike activist publications that reached smaller, more politically engaged audiences, pornographic media had a much wider reach, making it a powerful cultural force. This helped foster a form of “erotic citizenship” rooted in mutual recognition, desire, and shared marginalisation - ultimately laying the groundwork for a transnational gay identity shaped more by intimacy and visibility than by formal politics.
This emergent sexual identity paralleled and sometimes challenged dominant narratives of European integration, which were grounded in ideals like human rights, cosmopolitanism, equality, and social justice. While official European institutions promoted a collective identity based on historical myths of Greco-Roman heritage, Enlightenment values, and Christian-humanist legacies, gay erotica offered alternative visions of unity—ones driven by desire and representation rather than political rhetoric. By tracing the production, circulation, and consumption of gay porn from 1945 to 2000, the project "The Europe that Gay Porn Built" seeks to uncover how gay men used erotic media to reimagine Europe on their own terms, raising important questions about who gets to define European identity and through what forms of cultural expression.
Project Aims
- We will look at how gay magazines shaped how gay men in Europe saw each other and people outside Europe in new and sometimes contradictory ways.
- We will study how these ideas about gay identity across Europe match or clash with the ideas about Europe promoted by political institutions.
- We will explore how sexuality and desire influence what is said - or left unsaid - when people talk about "Europe."
"The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000" maps, for the first time, the European networks of production, circulation and consumption of gay erotica and porn magazines published between the end of WWII and the turn of the 21st century, and builds on them to develop a cultural study of "Europe" as imagined by gay men.
Project team
- Professor of Gender and Sexuality, John Mercer (BCU)
- Prof. Joao Florencio, Linkopping University
- Prof. Jana Funke, Exeter University
- Dr. Isabell Dahms, Exeter University
- Dr. Piotr Maron, Exeter University
- Bishopsgate Institute, London
- Schwules Museum, Berlin