Better days

On one of our river runs, Elin mentioned that Jonas Gardell had written a book about the early days of the LGBT movement in the Swedish city of Örebro. Obviously, this was a topic that resonated with me on several levels. In addition to this history, the book ended up retelling a forbidden love story set in Uppsala a hundred years earlier in the 1870s.

After spending the morning recording another lecture for my new online course in which I brought up different questions about emancipation and determinism, reading Gardell reminded me of the same temporalities, of the hopes that we moderns invest in the future. While never teleological or guaranteed, progress has also been very real when it comes to how we, as a society, relate to sexuality. Staying with Sofi at Axel Hotel in Madrid a couple of weeks ago, I particularly liked how they had turned the table around, stating that they are “hetero-friendly”.