ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the place of “Europe” in the context of Austria’s lesbian/gay movement and its continuing struggle to achieve full social and legal equality for the country’s queers. To investigate the place of Europe in Austria’s lesbian/gay discourses in their variously overlapping dimensions. From its initial inception, Austria’s lesbian/gay movement took recourse to an affirmative vision of Europe in its efforts to improve the situation of the country’s lesbians and gay men. The conception of Austria’s homophobic legislation as an impediment to the country’s standing as a contemporary European civilization remained a central trope in the discourse of the lesbian/gay movement. The European Idea represents the freedom to live one’s own self-determined life. Europe means emancipation. Until the early 1990s, Austria’s mass media was actively complicit in the systematic subordination of the country’s homosexuals. In the ethnographic realities of Austria, the development was transported in and coded through “Europe.”
