The demands for legal recognition of same-sex couples are not new. Ceremonies of friendship and other forms of bonding necessarily have copied heterosexual forms for contracting marriage. In 1884, the deeply religious Swedish philosopher Pontus Wikner wrote in his secret diary about his love for other men. He deeply regretted the wrongs he had done to his wife, and he suggested a remedy for the suffering he and those who were like him had to endure and had inflicted on others:

Wikner died in 1888, but his secret diary was not published until 1971, more than eighty years after his death. His highly-strung prose was typical for his life and time, but his frank confessions about his erotic feelings for men were not. Apparently he had not read any of the emerging literature about homosexuality and the third sex. For Wikner, his feeling for men was something that had to be negotiated with the Church and with his personal faith. But the world was going to change profoundly after his death, when lesbian and gay organisations appeared and grew in importance.

There were no organisations for the third sex in Scandinavia before World War Two, even if some individuals had contacts with Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin. Between 1948 and 1950, however, homophile organisations were founded in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. By the end of the 1950s these movements were rather well established, with their own publications, social events, and political lobby groups manned by volunteers in the capitals, as well as elsewhere. However, they were forced to be discreet and very cautious by the homophobic political climate of the 1950s.