September 11, 2001, arrived at a strange time for the world, and for the gays, and made that strange time far worse. It was the dawn of a new millennium. In Europe, a Third Way of young and confident social democrats was shredding welfare states with much smiling talk of progressive modernization; in the United States, their spiritual predecessor Bill Clinton had departed the White House popular, but unable to place his successor in office. It did not seem to matter much, anyway. Voter turnout was broadly down; it seemed there was less and less to vote for. The Soviet Union had collapsed and China was just beginning to integrate into the global economy. History, it was confidently believed at the commanding heights of the increasingly interchangeable faces of corporate and state power, had ended. Liberal capitalism had won. Sure, there might be little flare-ups of protest, like the 1999 movement against the WTO meeting in Seattle, but these were confidently dismissed by the people in charge as hangovers from an older era when the future of the world was in serious doubt.
On the ground, for the gays and their friends, things looked a little different. The HIV pandemic had ravaged queer communities for two decades. Murderous and active indifference had turned to passive indifference through the heroic activism of two generations of queer people united in anger and fear for their lives.1 The HIV virus was likely spreading slowly since the 1920s, and began to spread rapidly in urban gay communities in the 1970s. By 1981, when rare cancers began being identified in gay men in Los Angeles and New York, hundreds of thousands were likely already infected.
From its discovery in 1981 onwards, AIDS was a death sentence for millions, spreading rapidly through urban gay communities to indifference and even active scorn from political leaders. It was not until 1996 that queers were certain that HIV caused AIDS; this discovery was prompted by that year’s introduction of HAART antiretroviral therapy, which helped to suppress viral loads and increase T-cell counts in people who before were desperately ill.2 Almost as soon as these therapies became available, the fragile coalition between white gay men, lesbians, Black women, IV drug users, and queer street kids that Sarah Schulman, among others, identify as having been vital to the political movements in New York (her focus) and across the Western world, movements that helped create the therapies, get drugs into bodies, fight for state support for sick people, and build organizations to care for one another, was severed.
‘A trend of white male journalists proclaiming that AIDS is over began on November 10, 1996,’ she writes, with the publication of a New York Times Magazine cover story by amateur race scientist and professional Bad Gay Andrew Sullivan.3 Later in her account of AIDS in New York City, she quotes the experimental filmmaker Tom Kalin, a member of both ACT UP and its artistic branch Gran Fury, responding to the article:
AIDS is over for white fags like me. Andrew Sullivan embodies to me that kind of privilege. Well, bully for you. You got the drugs. You’re an upper-middle-class, white, gay man, who has access and is connected in an urban environment and getting your hands on them and take them, and they work for you. Yippee, I’m so happy. Now, what about all the other people who … could not get their hands on the drugs? Why is the narrative of your life and your survival somehow more important or more interesting than all those other people?4
Charles King, who co-founded Housing Works, an organization supporting people living with HIV and experiencing homelessness, remembered the article as a watershed. Schulman quotes him as saying,
ACT UP, at its core, was gay men and their allies fighting for their lives … I really truly believe that the LGBT community officially abandoned AIDS with Sullivan’s article … and the reason they abandoned it was, for them, it was over. It was now a Black disease, not their disease. You can almost see the mark of that article and sort of the handoff: this is no longer our problem. We’re going to move on to gay marriage and other things that pull us in towards the center, with the presumption that everybody wants to be in the center instead of at the margins.5
By 1992, the Treatment and Data Committee of ACT UP had already departed to form the Treatment Action Group, a more formalized, more professional, more male, and more white organization that had often disagreed with the more working-class and more radical membership of ACT UP over collaboration with drug companies, the aggressiveness of protest tactics, and the breadth of structural goals.
This kind of split had occurred even earlier in some western European countries. In West Germany, where first a Social Democratic and then a Christian Democratic federal government had funded the AIDS- Hilfe network starting in 1983, this state recognition meant that the reconciliation between gay and lesbian groups that characterized AIDS movements in the anglophone world never occurred, with gay men integrating into state institutions far earlier. In the Netherlands, Amsterdam’s local municipal health service already had a relationship with many gay men because of earlier outreach work around hepatitis B, and so already had experience working with gay men in sexual spaces like bars and bathhouses; the Dutch ‘polder model’ of consensus-based policymaking informed cooperation (although of course there were still struggles, inequalities, and power conflicts) between queer communities and public health officials.6 In the fall of 2001, five years after Sullivan’s article was published, the effects of these splits were becoming more and more visible. For urban gay men and lesbians with access to the new life-saving drugs, life seemed good: a new generation of spokespeople had emerged, replacing many gay liberation and AIDS activists who had either died or burned out, spokespeople neatly embodied by Sullivan himself, whom Benjamin Shepard referred to as ‘a free-market loving Tory Thatcherite’. Now that medication was available to keep Sullivan alive, he ‘felt privileged to ignore’ intersectional politics, the brutal inequalities of the global health system, and the millions of people who did not have access to the drugs, which he estimated cost his insurance company almost $16,000 per year.7
This brutal inequality underlay what Shepard called ‘the queer/ gay assimilationist split’, in which those who could afford and have access to AIDS treatment in the Global North developed a different kind of gay politics, one focused on integration into middle-and ruling-class life and the enabling of the seamless generational transfer of property and wealth. If gay liberationists had organized against the draft, ‘gay rights’ groups petitioned for the right to fight in the military. If lesbian separatists had inveighed against the brutality and misogyny of the institution of marriage, ‘gay and lesbian rights’ groups suddenly proposed that marriage was the ultimate sanctifying act needed to make their love meaningful.
A series of challenges against these norms continued to be mounted by activist collectives – including, in the United States, Against Equality and Queers for Racial and Economic Justice, and in the Netherlands, the Black migrant and refugee lesbian group Sister Outsider. Meanwhile, AIDS had, in addition to killing and/or burning out large swaths of two generations of queer activists and community leaders, made a powerful argument to many gays and lesbians that normalcy and integration into state institutions might not be such a bad thing, after all.
The Netherlands became a breathlessly discussed model of the brave new world to come for gay rights in the late 1990s, under the rule of a ‘purple’ coalition government of social democratic and social-liberal parties that made their pro-gay policies a centrepiece of their coalitions.8 If leftist queers in the Netherlands still laughed off marriage – one gay editor of a communist daily newspaper had written, in 1986, that centrist politicians ‘should stop giving presents we haven’t asked for: nuclear plants, cruise missiles, gay marriages … As if we haven’t got our hands full with AIDS.’ A new movement, pioneered by the glossy gay bar rag Gay Krant, ended up bringing around the masses, and converting COC Nederland, the main Dutch gay and lesbian organization, from its previous anti-marriage stance to a pro-marriage one.9 However, even those queer radicals, as the historian Andrew D. J. Shield has written, were too often ‘silent on intersectional issues’.10
The Netherlands became a pioneer for countries like the United States and the United Kingdom in regard to this process of the promotion of marriage equality as both the marquee goal of the gay and lesbian movement and broadly acceptable to a majority of citizens; Nathaniel Frank’s breathless pro-marriage history Awakening notes that it was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage.11 This movement orientation – as Frank approvingly notes in his epilogue, a reorientation of liberation movements towards ‘an institution defined by the public recognition of the dignity of a private bond’ – carried with it other political implications, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere.12
The September 11 attacks restarted history. In the capital cities of the West, it awakened the desires of bloodthirsty neoconservatives who had long sought a new civilizational opponent. These men began a series of criminal and murderous wars in the Middle East, and established a sharpened security regime that targeted refugees and migrants, specifically Muslims – ironically, precisely the reaction that the terrorists had hoped for. With the state itself becoming even more securitized, this new integration-ist gay movement began to morph in even more discomforting ways.
In the fall of 2001, a previously marginal populist political party in the Netherlands called Liveable Netherlands named as its leader a charismatic man named Pim Fortuyn. Two months before, as an increasingly popular newspaper columnist, he had called for ‘a cold war against Islam’, which had ‘taken over’ the role of communism as the civilizational opponent of the West.13 When his outrageous public statements became too hot for the party to handle, he split off his own party, the Pim Fortuyn List, and, in the aftermath of September 11, rocketed to the top of polls for the upcoming Dutch elections.
What made this racist different from all the others? Readers of the British liberal newspaper the Observer found out in 2002, when they opened the Europe section of their papers to find a headline reading ‘Dutch Fall for Gay Mr Right’. ‘Under the watchful gaze of his black-clad, dark-skinned bodyguards,’ the article read, this ‘new dynamic face of the Right in Europe’ had just come from nowhere to take over the Rotterdam city council. ‘Unconventional, with a penchant for lapdogs and luxury’, Fortuyn favoured ‘zero immigration because he believes it is undermining the ultra-liberal permissive society he cherishes’.14
Fortuyn embodied the compatibility between a pro-homosexual politics, racism, and the far right, the way that a certain kind of ‘live and let live’ attitude at the heart of liberal gay politics can transform into a wave of immigrant-bashing hatred that can then turn back on queers themselves. His sweeping success in local and national elections before being murdered by an animal rights activist made him an emblem of the global far right. The uncomfortable conclusion of this, the final chapter in our book, is that Pim Fortuyn may be less a dismaying artifact of a specific moment in post-2001 gay politics in the West than a preview of its future.
Little about Fortuyn’s youth suggested that he might become such an emblem both of a resurgent far right able to cloak its racism in a supposed defence of liberalism, and of the reconciliation of extremely ‘out’ gay politics with neoconservative and even fascist anti-immigration politics. He was born in February of 1948, the third child in a Catholic family led by a salesman and a housewife, in the small town of Driehuis on the Atlantic coast north of Haarlem. The country had been liberated by the Allies only three years before, and there had been a famine at the end of the Second World War. The Nazis had levelled many Dutch cities in their invasion but also encountered a population that was, at least in large part, willing to collaborate. Seventy percent of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, more than in France or Belgium.
After the war, Holland had to find a new place for itself in the world; the country was forced to divest itself of its colonies in Indonesia. Several hundred thousand Dutch people and Indonesian supporters of Dutch colonial rule were exiled, and many of them moved to the Netherlands, which, because of the post-war economic boom and a shortage of working-age men because of the war, began encouraging immigration from southern Europe and the Middle East, mainly Turkey and Morocco. Like political leaders in Germany, the Dutch assumed that most of these migrants would make their money and return home, but they did not. It was this intense climate of a newly multicultural society and a declining colonial power, in the aftermath of war and fascist collaboration, that shaped the Netherlands in which Fortuyn grew up.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s took place in an environment which historian Andrew D. J. Shield calls a ‘disavowal of heterogeneity’ – an insistence by a white Dutch majority that the Netherlands was a homogeneous state.15 Nonetheless, as he demonstrates, ‘immigrants shared many of the same geographies – and even some experiences – with European activists, communards, artists, musicians, feminists, gays, lesbians, and squatters … Thriving youth protest cultures’ that spurred on sexual freedom movements existed ‘in an environment that was already linguistically, culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse’.16
Without denying the often ambivalent and racist relationship between white activists and people of colour and migrant activists, he describes a diverse set of ways in which migrants’ movements around sexuality and gender articulated themselves both independently and in coalition with white movements, and formed, occasionally, integrated movements and spaces. Shield interviews one Turkish so-called ‘guest worker’ who remained in the Netherlands and recalled initially being surprised at seeing gay men on television, but eventually came to see gay liberation as part of a pro-worker and anti-authoritarian politics, aligned with his understandings of his fight for more freedom at work.17
Similarly, Gloria Wekker, herself both an academic and an activist in the refugee, migrant, and people of colour lesbian organization Sister Outsider (named after the book by Audre Lorde), describes these movements as taking place in a ‘balancing act between various societal groups’ – the so-called polder model of Dutch political coalition building – in which a state Directorate of Emancipation Affairs supported the work of various social groups, including Sister Outsider.18 The women’s movement was, she writes, ‘more prepared – at least in principle – than the gay movement to reflect on race as a social and symbolic grammar as important as gender’, even in an environment where the predominant racism of white feminist movements led to the creation of feminist movements specifically led and organized by people of colour, such as the ones in which she participated.19
The young Fortuyn participated enthusiastically in some of these left-wing liberation movements as a PhD student in sociology, studying in Amsterdam and Groningen in the 1970s. After completing his PhD, he taught as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Groningen and then in Rotterdam, working in a broadly social democratic tradition and joining the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid. At that time in opposition, the party transformed itself along the lines of the Clintonite and Blairite Third Way, with former labour leader Wim Kok becoming a junior partner to the centre-right after the 1989 elections and accepting neoliberal reforms. In 1994, Kok’s party became the country’s largest and, as the driving force in a social-liberal coalition, the party remained in power until 2002.
This was one of the first Dutch governments not to involve a Christian political party; excitement over the possibilities for liberal reform overtook concern that this purple government coalition was essentially accepting and continuing a program of hard austerity. The combination of austerity cutting the kinds of (however imperfect) opportunities for intersectional collective thinking and movement making in the 1970s and 1980s plus a reluctance to discuss colonial-era crimes, the reasons for migration, and racism in the Netherlands led to a rather strange code of silence around race and migration. ‘Immigrants … are a taboo subject in the Netherlands, where it is extremely important always to be politically correct on ethnic issues,’ read one business manual for foreigners working in the Netherlands.20
The austerity of the 1990s eventually cost Fortuyn his job and his professorship: budget cuts meant that Fortuyn was made redundant, and he opened a successful business consulting firm, began writing newspaper columns, and bought himself a large house in downtown Rotterdam with a butler. Single and sexually active in darkrooms and sex clubs, he was in lifelong unrequited love with a photographer.
Fortuyn’s first forays into politics occurred in the early 1990s, when he wrote a pamphlet called ‘To the People of the Netherlands’, a populist, patriotic, and nationalist manifesto (mirroring a similar text from the 1780s) attacking the political elite. The polder model of cooperative decision-making led to a certain cosiness at the top of Dutch politics, which Fortuyn attacked both in the pamphlet and in his newspaper columns. Similarly, he began to ‘sound the alarm bell’ about migration, as he saw it, tying the government’s cosy pursuit of austerity and cooperative decision-making model that seemed to shut out all outside influence to the lack of public conversation about migrants and migration. The substantial influence of the country’s tabloid media led to a moral panic about migrant crime, while, as Shield provocatively proposes, the formation of the European Union itself led to a series of debates about and emphases on ‘Europeanness’ that took on a racialized character.21
As unemployment rose and budget cuts continued to hack away at the social welfare state, Fortuyn, despite favouring neoliberal economic policies, saw an opportunity to argue that migrants were the reason why the cuts were being made, and Islamic ethno-religious inferiority the reason for the country’s increasing social divisions. As both Shield and Wekker demonstrate, dominant remembrances of the diverse post-‘68 liberation movements began by the 1990s to congeal into a narrative in which migrants, a separate category and absent from emancipation struggles, posed a threat to liberation. In this view, liberation and tolerance had already been accomplished until the immigrants showed up to spoil the party.22
If tolerance was the Dutch national brand, then Fortuyn could develop a Dutch-branded far-right politics by accusing migrants, and especially Muslims, of lacking that tolerance. It was not Fortuyn, whose proposals came to include the forcible re-education of Muslims living in the Netherlands and a complete ban on immigration, who was intolerant, but the people he sought to deport and lock up. In her 2007 monograph Terrorist Assemblages, the queer theorist Jasbir K Puar examines what she calls ‘homonationalism’, a network of ‘connections among sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity in relation to the tactics, strategies, and logistics of war machines’.23 A new ‘benevolence’ towards gays and lesbians in the public sphere on issues like marriage, she writes, ‘is contingent upon ever narrowing parameters’ – of whiteness, of class position, and of adherence to gender norms. The married gay subject can then be defended by the state, and set off against supposedly terrifying terrorists who threaten the liberal freedom these subjects embody. This neat trick of reversal, familiar today as a key part of the far-right playbook in debates about the provision of healthcare to transgender children and the supposed scourge of ‘cancel culture’ at universities, was pioneered by Fortuyn. In a political landscape constrained by the common sense of neoliberalism and capitalist realism, it plays on the racism inherent in neoliberalism to create a frisson of radicalism regarding standard-issue conservative politics.
Today’s conservatives, busy starting money-losing, billionaire-underwritten media empires where they write every day to baying choruses of approval about the ways that teenagers are mean to them on the Internet, have decided that the real prohibitions on speech are not the material risks presented by precarious employment but the fact that someone might exercise their own free speech and disagree with you. Historians whose work fails every possible test of professional standards and who have conveniently decided that critique of those failures is a violation of their right to free expression clap and cheer as governments ban, and threaten to ban, the teaching of critical race theory, gender studies, and anti-capitalist thought. They encourage their students to insult and attack their colleagues and then claim that they are the victims of organized campaigns of persecution. It is an idiocracy of bootlicking elitists doing backflips to evince the radicalism of what is, in fact, a boring set of political beliefs commonly held among people with power that serve to maintain and reproduce that power in the most banal ways imaginable.
It is only the impoverished nature of the debate – in the Netherlands then and in the anglosphere now – that makes such a cheap trick compelling to a terrifyingly broad swath of the population. A memory culture that diminished the colonial crimes of the Dutch combined with a social-liberal government that slashed budgets while celebrating a cosmetic version of diversity and emancipation to form a petri dish for this kind of resentment-based politics. ‘The hegemonic Dutch reading’, Wekker writes, became that ‘the women’s and gay movements [had] largely accomplished their aims’, leading to these perceived national victories becoming a point of nationalist pride. Fortuyn himself wrote, in 1997, that these movements were ‘the greatest mental and cultural achievement after the creation of the welfare state in the modern history of mankind’.24 Despite research showing that Dutch baby boomers of all ethnic backgrounds were becoming more sexually conservative as they aged, with members of Dutch Christian churches among the most conservative, the narrative that it was specifically immigrants who were threatening the progress of Dutch women and homosexuals, who were cast as uniformly white, became more and more prevalent throughout the 1990s.25
Rotterdam, where Fortuyn made his home, was historically a hotbed of the Dutch Labour Party. Rotterdam – one of the largest cities in the Netherlands, and Europe’s largest seaport – shrunk significantly from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century as technologies developed in the distribution and logistics sector, including the introduction in the 1970s of intermodal container shipping, in which goods can be moved from ship to train to truck without ever being taken out of their containers. This advance dramatically reduced the need for union labour by longshoremen, who responded with waves of labour militancy in the 1970s and 1980s but who were largely unable to fight back against the tidal wave of automation. In Rotterdam, unlike in some other cities, there was land available (and land was created) to build the wider and deeper shipping lanes and large, systematized unloading equipment necessary for container shipping.
Nevertheless, less labour was required; additionally, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, an accelerating process of deindustrialization hit the city as with many other industrial cities in Europe and North America. The guest worker program, which had brought mainly blue-collar industrial workers, made Rotterdam one of the Netherlands’ most diverse cities by race and country of origin, with foreign-born citizens making up nearly 50 percent of Rotterdam residents. The Turkish population of Rotterdam increased from 1.5 to 35 percent of labourers between 1961 and 1975, and the share of Moroccans went from 0 to 10.5 percent.26 Guest workers were initially kept from integrating by official city policy that intended them to continue working as cheap labourers.27 In the late 1970s, after a series of riots in the Afrikaanderwijk neighbourhood, the Labour Party proposed an integration program. This coincided with federal-level neoliberal policies from the Labour Party, and prompted an extreme-right response: the extreme right went from zero to six council seats between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, before being kicked off the council in 1998.28
It was in the 1990s that Fortuyn began turning more formally towards politics. While his early books and columns were, according to the historian Merijn Oudenampsen, ‘neo-liberal tributes to … the calculating and emancipated citizen who happily entered the globalized marketplace and no longer needed the welfare state’, his 1995 book The Orphaned Society actually argued against the post-1968 emancipation movements and called for the restoration of the patriarchal family – but in potentially gay or lesbian form.
‘Fruit of emancipation’, he wrote, ‘could be that the care-giving role of the mother, and the law-function of the father, do not have to be linked to the biological position of men and women.’29 In 1997, he wrote a pamphlet called Against the Islamisation of Our Culture, in which he tied the moral relativism of Dutch culture to its cosy political elite and insisted that liberation required aggressive action on moral norms.30 In the summer of 2001, continuing his program of escalating rhetoric against migrants, he gave an interview to a local newspaper in Rotterdam complaining about the number of immigrants: ‘The Netherlands is full. Rotterdam as well. In a couple of years, this city will consist of 56% of people who are not from the Netherlands … We allow too many foreign people to enter. In that way we get an underclass that consists of too many people who are badly equipped to contribute either economically or culturally.’31 That same summer, he called for a ‘cold war’ against Islam in the Netherlands.
His statements were greeted with complacency by members of other political parties, who tended to dismiss him and his popularity; this dismissal was often aided by his colourful public presence, open homosexuality (still a novelty among politicians), and public discussion of his own sexuality. He displayed, as Gloria Wekker writes, ‘simultaneous disgust and desire … towards male Muslims’, often bragging of his sexual exploits with young Moroccans and Turks.32 Fortuyn once joked in an interview that semen tasted like the Dutch liqueur Berenberg.33
Whereas the Church had traditionally been the source of authority for right-wing Dutch politics – the Netherlands has a large presence of Catholic and Calvinist churches – Fortuyn was willing to criticize the Church, especially those parts of it that had followed what some of us might consider to be a Christian line on how to treat other people. ‘The leftist church, which includes part of the media, the Green Party and the Labour Party, has for years forbade discussions that deal with the multicultural society and the problems it brings forth’, Fortuyn wrote, ‘by continuously combining those with discrimination, with racism, and not in the last place, with the blackest page of the history of this part of the continent: fascism and Nazism.’34
Asked in an interview to discuss the Ten Commandments, he began waxing poetic about clubs’ darkrooms:
It is absolutely not my intention to speak blasphemy, but I have to tell you that I find the atmosphere of the Catholic liturgy back in certain acts in the dark room of such a gentlemen’s club. The dark room that I frequent in Rotterdam is not totally blacked out: just like in an old cathedral, the light comes in filtered. In such circumstances, making love has a religious aspect to it. Religiosity and merging–that you sometimes have in sex–can be two sides of the same coin.35
In darkrooms, he said, ‘you find the whole range of emotions there that also exists within a relationship: from blowing your nose to the most intimate form of being together’.36
‘I don’t hate Arabs’, he said, ‘I even sleep with them.’37 Discussing sex with Muslims, he said, ‘there is a remarkable extra weight attached to doing homosexuality … Their suppressed feelings make for a really strange kind of sex: very focused on fucking, without intimacy, a quick climax, no kissing.’38 Wekker reads the ‘political economy of desire’ that wraps around Fortuyn’s seemingly off-hand sexual comments against the Dutch cultural archive, in which ‘men and women perceived as others … are always already sexualized … wild and excessive’.39 His ‘verbal transgressions’, she argues, served to position him as a sovereign and emancipated sexual subject, revealing something of the shape and scale of the relationship between the development of sexuality and the development of colonial capitalism.40
Here the charismatic Fortuyn, through his sexuality, was able to present as the apotheosis of the 1960s emancipation movements what was in fact their opposite: he was the voice of what Oudenampsen calls a broader ‘conservative backlash’ against permissiveness, relativism, and anti-authoritarianism.41
September 11 only lit a fire under Fortuyn and his supporters. While he had already declared his intention to enter national politics, after the attacks, in a wave of islamophobia that was among the attackers’ principal intents, he was recruited to lead a political party called Liveable Netherlands. A movement of ‘Liveable’ independent political parties, organizing around a shared hatred of the establishment political parties, had been forming around the Netherlands from rump local independent groups on municipal councils since the late 1980s.
Liveable Rotterdam, in which Fortuyn also ran, was founded by a fan of his, the former high schoolteacher Ronald Sørensen. The party was at that time mostly ideologically incoherent, but Fortuyn, after being named its chief candidate, began to transform the party in his image in anticipation of the May 2002 national elections. He repeatedly argued that Muslims were an internal threat, did not accept Western values, and that the religion had not yet been reformed. Here, he echoed the words of orientalists like Bernard Lewis, one of the chief academic advisers to the neoconservatives who were then busily planning to murder millions of Iraqis.
The party began to climb in opinion polls. In October of 2001 it still looked like the Labour-led social-liberal coalition was to cruise to a third term under Kok. But it began to falter. In February of 2002, at which point Fortuyn’s party had risen in the polls from zero seats to twenty, he gave an interview to the newspaper Volkskrant. In it, he combined calls to restrict immigration – ‘the borders are closing, we are cancelling the Refugee Convention’ – with populist promises to ‘eliminate waiting lists in health care’, targeting the social-liberal government’s cuts. He called for no asylum seekers to be admitted. And with a somewhat regretful tone, he admitted that he could not strip civil rights from Muslims – ‘they are our Moroccan bastard boys’ – but said that he wished to ‘abolish that strange article of the Constitution, you will not discriminate … I don’t hate Islam. I think it’s a backward culture,’ he said, using a word achterlijk, that also means ‘retarded’. ‘In what country could a party leader of such a big movement as mine be openly gay? How fantastic that this is possible here. You can be proud of that. And I would like to keep it that way.’42
The use of the word ‘retarded’ and the call to abolish the constitutional clause prohibiting discrimination under the law were somehow too much for the other leaders of Liveable Netherlands, who kicked Fortuyn off their list. He remained leader of Liveable Rotterdam as their candidate for the March 2002 local elections, and promptly founded his own national list, the Pim Fortuyn List. The first public opinion poll taken after his Volksk-rant interview saw his list in fourth place, with the list projected as winning thirteen seats to the governing Labour Party’s thirty.43 If there had been a small setback from the twenty that Liveable Netherlands had polled before his interview, he quickly set himself to making up the gap.
In the March 2002 local elections, Liveable Rotterdam, under Fortuyn’s leadership, swept to victory with 36 percent of the vote, and went into governing coalition with the Christian Democrats and a conservative liberal party, knocking Labour out of power in Rotterdam for the first time since the Second World War. This victory lent Fortuyn a great deal of legitimacy. Later that month he released a book in which he presented his politics as a kind of common sense liberalism. ‘In Holland’, he asked, ‘homosexuality is treated the same way as heterosexuality: in what Islamic country does that happen … how can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?’44
Profiling Fortuyn for the New Yorker, the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert noted that he ‘claimed the Jews … as his allies’. He had written a book worrying ‘that the Jewish State’, Kolbert writes, ‘might not be able to survive the threat posed by its fundamentalist neighbors’.45 Along with the neoconservative clash-of-civilizations whizz-kids who surrounded Bush and Blair as they prepared to murder millions of Iraqis on behalf of military contractors, Fortuyn was one of the first far-rightists to recruit Jews as a kind of body armour. ‘Christianity and Judaism have gone through the process of enlightenment, making them creative and constructive elements in society,’ he once said. ‘That didn’t happen in Islam. There is a tension between the values of modern society and the principles of Islam.’46
Mainstream conservatives had pioneered this move, reformatting their paeans to ‘Christian values’ into ‘Judeo- Christian’ as, in the words of the historian James Loeffler, ‘an ecumenical marketing meme for combating godless communism’.47 European far-right leaders before Fortuyn (like the French Jean-Marie Le Pen, who led his far-right National Front party into the second round of the French elections at the same time that Fortuyn was on the upswing in the Netherlands) had tended, like Le Pen, to be Holocaust deniers and open fascist sympathizers. Fortuyn used his homosexuality and his apparent sympathy for Jews to distance himself from Le Pen, claiming his policies had nothing to do with Le Pen and that comparisons were ‘intolerable’.48 However, both platforms called for the reduction of migration to zero and enormous expansions of prisons. ‘Why is it, in the Netherlands’, read Fortuyn’s manifesto, ‘that we can allow four elderly people to a room in a nursing home, but not four criminals to a cell?’49
While Fortuyn publicly decried almost all of the old parties and refused to acknowledge the idea that he would accept being a junior minister in anyone’s government – he intended, he claimed, to be the Netherlands’ first gay prime minister – he in fact had a privately quite warm relationship with the Christian Democrats, who had been locked out of power since the social-liberal coalition took over in the mid- 1990s. His 1995 book The Orphaned Society was introduced at its launch by the then-leader of the Christian Democrats; Oudenampsen writes that senior Christian Democrats saw ‘important overlaps between the “ideology critique” developed by Fortuyn and that of the Christian Democrat Party. Fortuyn … had taken much of his conservative ideas from the CDA [Christian Democrat Appeal] … In the campaign for the 2002 elections, Fortuyn’s party and the Christian Democrat Party agreed not to attack each other. In the autumn of 2001, Fortuyn is said to have privately professed his faith’ in Jan- Peter Balkenende, the leader of the Christian Democrats.50
This, too, is a common dynamic of interplay between the new far right and the old conservative right. The general cordon sanitaire across Europe that existed between the centre-right and far-right had broken when, in 2000, the Austrian People’s Party, a Christian-democratic party, agreed to enter in coalition with Jörg Haider’s far-right and partially neo-fascist Freedom Party. (Rumours that Haider was gay and had male lovers may no longer be published after a successful lawsuit by his widow in 2008, after his death in a car accident.)51
Once again the question of style was increasingly important here. Openly gay, Fortuyn wore his dandyism and his homosexuality as a carefully selected marketing tool through which even liberal journalists often found themselves being charmed into writing fluffy articles about him, in much the same way as journalists clamoured to cover the sharp suits and sharper hairstyles of alt-right ideologues like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016. No profile passed by without reference to ‘his expensively tailored suits, immaculate shirts, matching silk handkerchiefs and ties’, to his shaved head, to his immaculately decorated city palace; ‘the dapper, witty rabble-rouser’ was compared favour-ably with Le Pen, who ‘has clearly been gone over by the style police … but the result is a rather unconvincing “cuddly grand-dad” ‘, and with Italy’s Umberto Bossi, who looked ‘like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards … Only Jörg Haider in Austria’, this particular article read, ‘comes anywhere near Pim in the style stakes – but even here the two men are quite obviously in different leagues.’52
If part of Fortuyn’s horror at being compared with Le Pen was his reluctance to be seen as a low-class thuggish reactionary, then this was also a key part of his political appeal – he could whitewash and repackage those ideas for an audience that thought of itself as enlightened and progressive. And liberal journalists persisted in enabling him. ‘There was nothing the effete, former sociology professor hated more than being cast in the same mould as the burly, former French paratrooper,’ Kirsty Lang wrote in the Guardian, in 2002, of the comparisons being made between Fortuyn and Le Pen. ‘He was a civilized man, and Holland was a civilized country,’ she went on. ‘His belief was that Muslim immigration undermined the society he cherished.’53 This mix created a form of xenophobia perfect for a nation whose nationalism is based on tolerance: they can’t be here because they are intolerant, and we are tolerant. By May 6, independent surveys were predicting that the Fortuyn List would come in first in the national elections, just more than a week away.
The next day, Fortuyn was leaving a radio studio in the town of Hilversum, having given an interview. He was attacked by a single gunman who shot him, point-blank, in the head.54 This was the first peacetime political assassination in Holland since the seventeenth century. The fact that Fortuyn was shot outside a radio studio meant that the events – and the quick manhunt for the killer – could all be broadcast live.
Fortuyn’s murderer was almost immediately identified as the thirty-two-year-old environmental activist Volkert van der Graaf, an animal rights campaigner with no history of violent crime, and no weapon permit, and no getaway plan; he was rapidly apprehended, and many Dutch people, especially Fortuyn fans, were suspicious that such an event had been perpetrated by someone seemingly so random. ‘Pim was too outspoken – they were afraid of that,’ one woman told a journalist in the aftermath of the murder.55
The Dutch prime minister Wim Kok gave a speech on television, mourning the death of Fortuyn in starkly nationalistic terms. ‘What went through my head’, he said, ‘is “this is the Netherlands, a nation of tolerance”.’56 A more gimlet-eyed view might argue that both Fortuyn’s emergence as a national political figure and his murder revealed the limits of the Netherlands’ embrace of tolerance and of its adoption of supposedly complete emancipation movements as a national brand.
The murder was experienced, writes the anthropologist Peter Jan Margry, as ‘a cultural shock through which The Netherlands lost its innocence as an honest and peace-loving nation’, with enormous public shrines being built in front of Fortuyn’s home; in front of Rotterdam’s City Hall; in the parking lot where he had been shot; at the monument of William of Orange, a Dutch national hero himself rumoured to have had some homosexual inclinations; and at both the National War Monument and the Homomonument in Amsterdam.57
Crucial here, recalling both Jasbir Puar and Gloria Wekker’s related if different arguments about white homosexuality, colonialism, and the nation, is the simultaneous use of the War Monument and the Homomonument. It marks the symbolic reclamation of a monument to gay liberation as a place of national and nationalist mourning and political signification. After Fortuyn’s death, Margry writes, there was a ‘sharp increase’ in discussions of him as ‘a prophet or hero’, discussions that gelled with Fortuyn’s own comparisons of himself to Moses leading his people to the Promised Land.58 On the evening of the assassination a protest of Fortuyn acolytes in front of the Dutch parliament demanded that politicians who had called Fortuyn a racist and ‘the “leftist” press’ pay for their incitement of violence and hatred.59
Campaigning was suspended, but it was decided that the elections should go ahead as scheduled, as a demonstration of the ongoing strength of Dutch democracy. With a sharp uptick in turnout, the parties comprising the social-liberal coalition all suffered massive losses. In first place were the Christian Democrats, and in second place the leaderless Pim Fortuyn List, which, along with the Christian Democrats and the more conservative of the two liberal parties, entered government coalition under Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende.
This government declared, in 2003, that emancipation was complete – though Gloria Wekker noted that declaration didn’t apply to ‘black, migrant, and refugee women’.60 Massive budget cuts for women’s programs and centres followed, examples of what David Roediger once called ‘the wages of whiteness’ – white women accepting cuts to their movement in exchange for a position atop the racial hierarchy. The new coalition did not even last a year – infighting in the newly leaderless Fortuyn List made the cabinet dramatically unstable, and in the next year’s elections the list lost 12 percent of its support and eighteen seats in Parliament. By the following election in 2006, it was no longer represented there.
But the changes in Dutch, and European, politics that Fortuyn inaugurated were far longer lasting. ‘What had started as one peculiar “gay” perspective on immigration and integration soon became an acceptable political view for huge swathes of the Dutch population,’ Shield writes. Indeed, many new far-right politicians, like Marine Le Pen or Germany’s lesbian Alice Weidel, have followed Fortuyn’s model of sanitizing far-right anti-immigrant politics by tying them to defences of a kind of national liberalism.61 The Dutch conservative-liberal party VVD (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie, or the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) began to adopt many of Fortuyn’s positions on race and immigration, as did the Christian Democrats, who would remain in office until 2010 (when they were surpassed by the VVD).62
Even Wouter Bos, the new leader of the Social Democrats, began to echo some of Fortuyn’s points, writing in 2005 that it was ‘naive’ for social democrats to ignore ‘problems with managing migration and diversity’, writing that ‘unlimited migration and failing integration are a serious threat to solidarity and to the degree of welfare sharing we are proud of as social democrats’, and that a ‘fear of racism’ had prevented leftists from speaking up on this issue.63 The Netherlands has not had a social democrat–led government since Fortuyn’s murder.
In 2006, when the Fortuyn List lost parliamentary representation and no far-right party entered parliament, a Guardian article was eager to present the integration of anti-immigration sentiment into the Dutch polder model as a victory: ‘The ending of the Fortuyn era’, the newspaper opined, ‘shows that … consensus politics is finally asserting itself over the highly sensitive issue of immigration.’64
Four years later, under the leadership of its autocratic leader Geert Wilders, a former member of the conservative-liberal VVD, a new party called the Party for Freedom stormed the Dutch parliament, taking twenty-four seats and third place. Wilders, who campaigned on banning the Qur’an, taxing the wearing of hijabs, closing all mosques in the Netherlands, exiting the European Union, and restoring years of cuts to welfare, and who was banned from entering the United Kingdom due to inciting racial hatred, ended up propping up a right-liberal government for two years.
The Party for Freedom was, in that election, the most popular political party among white Dutch gay men; and this party’s participation in a coalition government, breaking the cordon sanitaire against the participation of the far right in government, was supported by the formerly radical COC Nederland, the country’s largest gay organization, which made a dismissive comment about ‘Moroccan boys’ being violent to gay men in the streets.65
By October of 2013, racial profiling was common enough among Dutch police to become the subject of an Amnesty International report. A district police officer in The Hague gave a television interview in 2010 arguing that Moroccans were genetically more disposed to violence than Dutch people: ‘The people responsible for violence in Gouda [a Dutch city] come from the Rif Mountains. They are Berbers. The word Berber derives from the word “barbarian”. And that naturally means they are culturally somewhat more tempered. They find it easier to live on the streets. You could say that it is a genetic trait.’ In 2015, Gerard Bouman, then the chief of police in the Netherlands, revealed that far-right infiltration in police circles had led to the common occurrence of officers calling to burn mosques and attack Muslims.66
By 2015, national media were counting at least thirty-five daily instances of police violence, with estimates that far more were likely going unreported; only 0.7 percent of reports were ever officially investigated.67 That year Mitch Henriquez, an unarmed Black man, on vacation in the Netherlands from its colony in Aruba, was strangled to death by a police officer. In response to protests, politicians insisted that there was no racism in the police and referred to protestors as ‘hooligans’ and ‘retards’.68 One NGO estimates that forty-one people, half of them with a migration background, have been murdered by police in the Netherlands since Henriquez’s death; in none of these cases have charges been filed against the officer.69 A 2019 United Nations report on the Netherlands condemned racist policing, redlining, and employment and economic inequality based on race and country of origin.70
When Fortuyn was exhumed ten weeks after his burial to be reburied near his summer home in Italy, the exhumation was broadcast on television. Mourners sang the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ in Dutch. A white hearse covered in sunflowers transported the corpse. In the ten weeks he’d been buried in Driehuis, 150,000 mourners visited his grave. The rifle with which Fortuyn was murdered is in the permanent collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. At his trial, Van der Graaf said that he had murdered Fortuyn to protect vulnerable people. After refusing to give a statement for many months, he confessed to the shooting in court. ‘The idea was never concrete until the last moment, the day before the attack. I could see no other option than to do what I did,’ he said. ‘I saw it as a danger, but what should you do about it? I hoped that I could solve it myself.’71
The murder of Fortuyn had, of course, the opposite effect: rather than effectively combating his politics, as nonviolent activism might have done, it instead claimed a human life. In so doing, Van der Graaf cemented the idea that this man had represented the apotheosis of emancipation, and helped to write Fortuyn into the character of the Dutch nation itself. In 2004, Fortuyn was voted, by a state television poll, as the Greatest Dutchman of all time.