The Two-Faced Fifties: Homosexuality and Penal Policy in the International Forensic Community, 1945–1965

In the summer of 1958, at its seventeenth annual General Assembly, Interpol discussed a global report that the organization had drawn up to explore the issue of homosexuality and crime. Historians of sexuality have devoted virtually no attention to this report, which is remarkable, given that Interpol's engagement with homosexuality occurred while a broader concert of international organizations concerned with penal law and its enforcement was beginning to scrutinize the "problem" of what they generally referred to as sexual "deviance."¹ Apart from Interpol, the International Association of Penal Law, the International Society of Criminology, the Council of Europe, the World Health Organization, the United Nations' Social Defence Section, and several more agencies all put sexual "deviance" and homosexuality more particularly on their interlocking agendas during the 1950s and the early 1960s.² Paradoxically, while these organizations initially served mainly as a conduit for the spread of postwar fears about the growth of sexual crime and the dangers of the homosexual seduction of minors, during the late 1940s and the early 1950s they became the engines of what one observer called, with hindsight, the "dedramatization" of sexual crime soon thereafter, helping to create an international consensus that, among other things, homosexuality should be decriminalized.³ This article examines the emergence of homosexuality as a matter of international penal policy within organizations that were, at the time, still primarily dominated by Western European countries, even though more global and transatlantic connections would also prove highly important.

Despite this manifest transnationalism, however, the circulation of ideas about sexual deviance (a term that was so loosely used and ubiquitous at the time that I will henceforth dispense with the scare quotes) was nevertheless driven by national circumstances and local events, as I will demonstrate with reference to Belgium.⁴ Moreover, in stark contrast to the common view of large international organizations as impersonal bureaucratic behemoths and vast "systems without brains,"⁵ I want to argue that, at least in their early days, the agencies I have named still functioned largely as an old boy network: strategically positioned individuals such as Florent Louwage, the longtime president of Interpol, Alexis Goldenberg, another senior figure within the organization, and Trevor Gibbens, a WHO forensic expert, played an outsized role. What emerges is a picture of what I will call the "long 1950s" that complicates narratives portraying this decade as a monochromatic and sexually oppressive prelude to the more colorful 1960s. Indeed, while police and policy concerns about juvenile delinquency and homosexuality peaked at the national level throughout Western Europe during the late 1950s, at the very same time a consensus on the need for far-reaching liberalization of sexual criminal law was building between policy makers at the supranational one.

The big-picture sociological approach to sex in the style of Alfred Kinsey increasingly called into question the essentialisms and the hyperbole of a traditional psychiatric focus on small groups of violent sexual offenders. The new approach favored a fundamental legal distinction between the private realm of consensual sexual discretion and a public sphere of enforced propriety (effectively understood as heteronormative familialism). This postwar syncretization of the individual's liberties, on the one hand, and the social body's collective prerogatives, on the other, took the discursive form of weighing human rights against social-defense imperatives.⁶ Homosexuality took on special significance within this wider balancing act.

Two organizations were particularly influential in this process: the International Criminal Police Commission (commonly known as Interpol), which was overseen by representatives of Western European countries; and the United Nations European Consultative Group on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (ECG), at which Interpol and several other leading criminal policy organizations enjoyed consultative status.⁷ I will begin with the reestablishment of Interpol soon after the war and gradually focus more on its synergy with the ECG as I discuss the growing engagement with homosexuality among international organizations during the 1950s and the early 1960s. A final section will briefly examine transatlantic cross-pollination and how it fomented what David...