About the Author
Elyzabeth Gorman (she/her) is the founder of Badass Tours. Badass Tours leads walking tours through Amsterdam, using storytelling to explore the city's BIPOC, Jewish, LGBTQIA+ and women's history.
Amsterdam’s Pride Parade is a glorious celebration, but there was one year I struggled to enjoy it. I spent the summer of 2019 at Amsterdam’s LGBTQIA archive researching my LGBTQ+ history tour. By chance, I’d spent the weeks before Pride researching an 18th-century wave of violent anti-gay persecutions.
In 1730, an Utrecht sexton testified that he’d caught two men having sex in the ruins of the old church. This single accusation sparked rolling prosecutions that would terrorize the gay population for the rest of the century. One of the men identified was a soldier named Zacharias who’d lived all over the Dutch Republic and made connections with underground networks of gay men. Zacharias gave information on them to save his own life.
One of the men he’d met in Amsterdam was a jeweler named Johannes Keep. He was from a smaller town and had somehow gotten the name of Pieter Marteyns, who ran a sort of guesthouse in Amsterdam for men like him. Pieter helped Johannes get settled in Amsterdam and they became close. Johannes stayed with Pieter even after his business had become successful enough for him to hire a servant. Pieter and Johannes’ servants were both young men in their teens who were arrested along with Pieter and Johannes.
All four were interrogated separately, with days in between for them to recover enough to be tortured again. Johannes held firm the longest, even after being told that the others had confessed. They were all publicly executed — the first of more than 600 executions of gay people in the Dutch Republic over the next 70 years.
So there I was, watching the Pride Parade. I was angry that most people didn’t know this story. I saw a drag queen dancing on a boat sponsored by a bank that invests in a country where they execute gay people and wondered if this was all pointless pinkwashing. I was going to go home when something across the river stopped me short.
I was opposite two huge 17th-century mansions, one of which is inhabited by a family that’s led Amsterdam through politics and wealth for more than four centuries. The balconies and front stairs of these icons of the past were crammed with people waving rainbow flags. The street in front of them was packed with people cheering for a boat of dancing drag queens. The government buildings behind them and to their left were waving huge rainbow flags.
All I could think is what it would mean to Johannes, Pieter, Maurits, and Cornelis to see what Amsterdam would become. It’s not perfect, but it is a monumental thing that Amsterdammers of all types come together to celebrate LGBTQIA+ rights and freedoms.
The slogans for 2019 Pride were “Remember the past” and “Create the future.” I realized, looking at those crowded old houses, that remembering the past isn’t just about remembering its victims or its heroes, though we should. It is a marker by which we can see how far we have come and a warning of what we could slip back into if every person who wears rainbows on Pride doesn’t carry the fight through the rest of the year.
The next boat showed me how we’ll create the future. It was full of LGBTQIA+ supporting parents. When I was a teenager, queer kids who came out — or were outed — lived on the street. Elders in the gay community were each other’s “family you choose.” It was both beautiful and a function of what felt like the inevitable fact that families reject LGBTQIA+ relatives.
The children of the parents in that boat are growing up in a world in which the entire city turns out to celebrate them, and their parents support them. Their straight and cis peers are growing up in a world where they have annual encouragement to accept diversity of gender and sexual orientation. I can’t imagine their lives, and I can’t wait to see what these kids will do.
