ABSTRACT
The concept of “the paedophile” was largely unknown in Denmark for most of the twentieth century. When it appeared in the media in the 1960s, the concept was used to distinguish between law-abiding and criminal homosexual men, and was part of a successful campaign to clean up the rather hedonistic gay male culture of the period. In the early 1970s, a paedophile activist group appeared, which had several conflicts with the established gay and lesbian organisation over questions of alliances, sexual liberation and solidarity. Due to increased public anxiety over paedophilia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the paedophile activist group dissolved itself in 2003. In later years, the idea of a predatory group of organised paedophiles has largely been replaced with the more fluid concept of “the offender”, and paedophile panics have died out. However, the paedophile panics of the turn of the millennium have left their institutionalised mark on habitus, ideas about sexuality and gender roles in Denmark. In my chapter, I describe these cultural traces of the paedophile panics and address the question of how the paedophiles were articulated as a sexual minority in the first place, and the different strategies those articulations were part of over the years.
