Dutch gay rights campaigner and former MP Coos Huijsen dies

Former MP Coos Huijsen died on Monday aged 87, his family said in a statement. He died at home after a short illness, with his husband Lank Bos at his side. Huijsen came out in 1976 as the first openly gay parliamentarian in the world, by his own account and his family's.

Huijsen became an MP in 1972 for the CHU, the Christian Historical Union, one of the parties that later merged into the CDA. Half a year later he left the party because he disagreed with its decision not to back the Den Uyl cabinet.

In 1976 he returned to the Tweede Kamer as an independent, taking the seat vacated by Willem Scholten. He came out on that occasion, and Bos, whom he had met in 1973, attended his swearing-in. Rumours about his sexuality had circulated earlier, and he had denied them. He left parliament in 1977.

He joined the PvdA after the elections but never sat in parliament for it. Before politics he had been a primary school teacher and history teacher in Delft and The Hague. He went back to teaching history at the Gerrit van der Veen College in Amsterdam-Zuid, where he was head from 1986 to 1998.

Huijsen wrote on socialism and democracy and published books in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2012 he gained a doctorate from the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the House of Orange. In 2007 he co-founded Het Blauwe Fonds, a foundation for LGBT equality. He published his memoir Homo politicus in 2016, and a new version, Roze Draad, on fifty years of gay emancipation appeared this year.