Ode to Joke Swiebel | A life as a Gesamtkunstwerk

On 26 January 2024, Joke Swiebel received her doctorate from the University of Amsterdam at the age of 82 for her research Homopolitics in the Netherlands (1966-2023): the symbolic power of legislation. Yet another milestone in her dynamic, multi-coloured life that took place mainly in Amsterdam.

I got to know Joke in 1974 as an able fighter for gay emancipation. She was then a member of the main board of the Association for the Integration of Homosexuality COC. Earlier, she was president of the Federation of Student Work Groups Homosexuality.Activist as Joke was, she was never absent from the battlefield. For instance, she organised the first gay demonstration in the Netherlands in 1969.

At the age of 35, she switched from being a primary activist to the field of policy development on emancipation issues. She worked for the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work and for the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. Whereas her work first focused on the Netherlands, it gradually became more international. Joke increasingly performed at meetings of the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union. She became a role model for her younger colleagues.

Joke was 58 when she became an MEP for the Labour Party. A period of five years dawned during which she did a lot of manual work as a politician in areas in which she had become thoroughly skilled. Her range of duties covered human rights, equal treatment and anti-discrimination legislation and asylum and migration policy. Her working life can be characterised as an intense, directional search for freedom and justice and opportunities to realise them. She did so successively as an activist, policy official and politician.

Did Joke retire after her time in the European Parliament? There was no question of this. Her life experiences and insights provided her with enough material to reflect on this. It was not until the corona years 2020 - 2023 that Joke decided to make a study of the four legislative changes that mark the history of homosexuality between 1966 and 2023 in the Netherlands. She described the results of that study in her dissertation “Homopolitics in the Netherlands”.

For me, her personal life story on the one hand and the aforementioned history on the other, together form a fascinating Gesamtkunstwerk.