ABSTRACT
As the first two countries to legalise same-sex marriage, the Netherlands and Belgium have a reputation for being extraordinarily LGB-friendly.1 This assumed LGB-friendliness is confirmed by representative studies showing that the overwhelming majority of Dutch (92%) and Belgian (85%) respondents agree with the statement that gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own lives as they wish (Kuyper, 2015, p. 8). Other findings about the Netherlands and Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium that I will discuss in this chapter) also corroborate this LGB-friendly reputation. For instance, only eight percent of Flemish people (Pickery & Noppe, 2007) and four to eight percent of Dutch people (Keuzenkamp, 2010; Keuzenkamp & Kuyper, 2013; Kuyper, 2015) would consider it problematic if their child’s school teacher were a homosexual man or woman. And only 1% of Dutch people and 4% of Belgian people indicate that they would feel uncomfortable about having gay or lesbian neighbours (Keuzenkamp, 2010).
