Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki—three of the world’s happiest cities, also the most progressive, and the most gay-friendly. But did you know they also have a lot of fascinating LGBTQ+ history?
Here are a few of the famous LGBTQ+ people from these cities’ past.
Hans Christian Andersen is a great example. The picture we get from his diaries and letters is that he was bisexual but also asexual, i.e. that he had crushes on both men and women but did not act or preferred not to act on them sexually.
Probably his biggest crush was on a young male friend (the son of an important patron), Edvard Collin. Andersen wrote him some pretty explicit letters: he said, among other things, that he desired Collin “like a woman.”
But Collin married a woman, and shortly afterwards, Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid, which clearly mirrors his experience with Collin (because in Andersen’s book, unlike the Disney movie, the mermaid loses the prince). It even seems likely that the fact that the princess can’t speak mirrors Andersen not being able to speak more openly about “the love that dares not speak its name.”
Another person who lived for years in Andersen’s neighborhood in Copenhagen is Lili Elbe. Assigned male at birth, Lilly was a painter and married to a woman painter. They started by filling in for their wife’s female models and ended up having the second gender-affirmation surgery (hence their last name “Elbe” chosen for the river in Dresden, where their surgery was performed). There remain many great paintings of Elbe by their wife Gerda Wegener—but you probably know the story from the movie The Danish Girl.
Probably the most famous LGBTQ+ person from Stockholm ever is the great movie star, Greta Garbo, one of the only silent movie actors who made it big in the talkies. Her sexuality is hard to pin down: she was elusive, both off screen and on (which is what the public liked about her).
But she certainly had a lesbian side, and she didn’t mind bringing that to the public’s attention, in a veiled way. Despite the studio’s hesitation, she, then the biggest of all stars, insisted on making Queen Christina, a movie in which she starred as another famously queer Swedish person, a 17th century queen who wore men’s clothing, seemed to have an affair with a countess, and ultimately abdicated the throne rather than get married to a man.
And in the movie, although they introduced a fictional heterosexual plot, Garbo did all of these things. She wore men’s clothing; in fact, her heterosexual love interest fell in love with her dressed as a boy! And she kissed the countess on the lips—only the 2nd kiss between women in movie history (following Marlene Dietrich in Morocco 3 years earlier). And although she lost interest in the countess and let her marry, this only happened after the heterosexual main plot got going—making clear that the countess was a love interest.
Finally, Helsinki produced one of the most famous of all gay artists, Tom of Finland, whose work reflects a gay S&M fantasy based on Helsinki’s gay underground in years when LGBTQ+ relations were still illegal. In fact, there are several less well-known great gay artists from the Nordic countries: Christian Zimmermann from Denmark, Eugène Jansson from Sweden, and Magnus Enckell from Finland— their work is too sexy to show on social media, so look them up!
