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Amsterdam built the world's first memorial to people persecuted for being gay and lesbian, and its city hall held the world's first legal same-sex weddings. This walk links the places where queer Amsterdammers organised, remembered, danced, married and resisted.
Stop 1 of 7
All stops
1
Stop 1: Rozenstraat: the COC's old home
Rozenstraat 12–14
The COC, which the LGBTI heritage archive IHLIA calls the world's oldest LGBTI+ organisation, grew out of the "Shakespeare Club", founded on 7 December 1946 by readers of the magazine Levensrecht; its driving force was Niek Engelschman. In 1978, IHLIA says, the COC moved into this building, "Ons Huis" (Our House), built in 1892 as a community centre. Many initiatives began here. The building was later sold and became Hotel Mercier, and in early 2019 COC Amsterdam came back to rooms inside it.
Sources disagree: IHLIA and AT5 say the COC moved in in 1978; Amsterdam op de kaart and Arcam say from about 1980. AT5 dates the sale to 2008 and IHLIA to about ten years after 1999, while Amsterdam op de kaart and Arcam say it was sold to a hotel company in 2013, so the story gives no year.
Westermarkt, on the Keizersgracht beside the Westerkerk
Karin Daan won the 1980 design competition for this memorial: three large triangles of pink granite, each at a different height, linked into one big triangle. The triangle recalls the badge gay men were forced to wear in the Nazi camps. Unveiled on 5 September 1987, it was the world's first memorial to people persecuted for their sexual orientation. Its points face the National Monument on the Dam, the Anne Frank House and the COC. Since 1988 a commemoration has been held here every 4 May.
Sources disagree: I amsterdam says Karin Daan designed the monument in 1979; the Homomonument foundation says the foundation was set up in 1979 and she won the design competition held in 1980.
On 4 May 1970, Remembrance Day, Ad van Delden and Enno den Daas of the Amsterdam Youth Action Groups for Homosexuality hurried from Hotel Krasnapolsky onto the square carrying a wreath tied with lilac ribbons. They wanted to remember the forgotten gay victims of the war, and to protest against the oppression of gay people after 1945. Their request to lay a wreath had been refused. Military police arrested them. The next year, 1971, a wreath was allowed.
In 1927, aged 25, Bet van Beeren took over the Zeedijk bar where she had worked for her uncle, and, the story goes, renamed it 't Mandje. She was openly lesbian, and here gay men and women could be themselves at a time when the vice police watched everything. One tale says she snipped off men's neckties and hung them up. Bet ran the café until her death in 1967, and her younger sister kept it going until 1982. A niece of Bet's reopened it on 29 April 2008.
OBA Oosterdok library, Oosterdokskade 143, 3rd floor
Homodok, the Documentation Centre for Gay Studies, began in 1978 as a working group linked to the University of Amsterdam, listing publications on index cards kept in a shoebox. In 2000 it merged with the Lesbian Archive Amsterdam and the Anna Blaman House in Leeuwarden to form IHLIA. Since May 2007 it has been here, on the third floor of the central library. IHLIA says it holds the largest LGBTI collection in Europe.
At midnight on 1 April 2001, four couples, three male and one female, walked up the stairs to the council chamber here, with the press crowding round them like film stars. Mayor Job Cohen married them: the world's first legal weddings between people of the same sex. The couples had answered a call in the Gay Krant. Cohen later called it one of the finest memories of his time as mayor.
Amsterdam's population register was kept in this building, and the occupiers were checking forged identity papers against it. On the night of 27 March 1943, about ten men in Dutch police uniforms overpowered the guards; explosions followed and the building caught fire. The leaders included Willem Arondéus, a painter and writer open about his homosexuality since the 1910s. Most of the group were arrested, and twelve, Arondéus among them, were shot on 1 July 1943. Through his lawyer, he asked that it be known homosexuals are not cowards.
Sources disagree: The Tel Aviv University Wiener Library page dates the attack to 26 March 1943; the Dutch Resistance Museum (quoting the police report: Saturday 27 March, about 22.15) and IHLIA give 27 March. His last message is known through his lawyer and is paraphrased here.