the man known as the world's first openly gay MP came out in 1976 with his boyfriend in the room. 50 years later, he died with the same man beside him.
Photo: Coos Huijsen is sworn in to the Dutch parliament, 1976. Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Coos Huijsen met Lank Bos in the summer of 1973, on tram 24 in Amsterdam, NRC reports. Within three months they were living together. In 1976, when Huijsen took his seat in the Dutch parliament, Bos was there. On Monday morning, when Huijsen died at home in Amsterdam after a short illness, Bos was there too. He was 87.
how coos huijsen came out
Huijsen first entered the Tweede Kamer in 1972 for the Christian Historical Union, a forerunner of today's CDA, and left the party within six months over its refusal to back the Den Uyl government, NOS reports. He had denied rumors that he was gay. In 1976 he came back as an independent to fill a vacant seat, and at that swearing-in, with Bos present, he came out.
The way NL Times tells it, Bos was challenged at the ceremony after explaining he was there as Huijsen's partner, and Huijsen's objection to how Bos was treated became the turning point in his decision to say it publicly. Imagine being the official who asked. Fifty years later you are a footnote in somebody's obituary, and he is the first line.
By his own account and his family's, that made him the first openly gay parliamentarian anywhere in the world. NRC says he did not learn this himself until 2013, when an American political scientist writing a book on LGBTQ politicians called to tell him.
after parliament
He left the Kamer in 1977, joined the PvdA, and went back to teaching history, eventually running the Gerrit van der Veen College in Amsterdam from 1986 to 1998. He became one of the country's best-known commentators on the House of Orange, earned a doctorate on it, and co-founded Het Blauwe Fonds, which funds LGBTQ emancipation projects, in 2007. His memoir, Homo Politicus, came out in 2016, and an updated edition, Roze Draad (Pink Thread), arrived this year, half a century after the swearing-in.
NRC writes that in recent years he worried about acceptance of gay people slipping. The pink thread, it turns out, ran a long way, and he held the end of it.
