Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Gay and lesbian liberation took a big step forward this year when the Netherlands became the first country to allow full-fledged same-sex marriage. Many other countries have come close, offering domestic partnerships and other legal arrangements that approximate marriage, but the Netherlands was the first to offer real marriage for gay and lesbian couples.

Marriage rights signal that this stage of the Dutch gay rights movement is close to a successful end. Dutch gay and lesbian people have received as much right, privilege, and protection they have sought. Activists will always need to be vigilant against homophobia, and will need to make sure the government lives up to its promises. They will need to pay attention to the larger social and political issues that affect gay people, and make sure that gay voices are heard. But Dutch gay and lesbian people now seem to have all the legal protections they need.

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So now what? How about trying to make gay and lesbian lives better? More connected and less lonely? Miss Poubelle recently talked with two Dutch men, Klaas and Tjeerd, who are trying to do just that. They are involved with the Kringen movement, a national organization working for a better and richer Dutch gay life.

Kring is the Dutch word for "circle"; the plural is kringen, "circles." The Kringen are a collection of small groups of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Each group has about 10 or 12 members and agrees to meet regularly, about once a month. A kring meeting begins with each of the members bringing the others up to date on what has been going on since the last meeting. Members talk about work, sex, or anything else important in their lives. After this initial period, the meeting turns to a discussion of the topic for the evening, which can be anything from relationships to politics to religion, so long as it touches on a gay or lesbian theme. Kring meetings take place at a member's home, and there is always some food and drink.

That's all. No complicated political agenda, no psychotherapy. But people who participate in these groups talk at length about how important the Kringen have become to their lives. Over time, they come to share very intimate parts of themselves and their lives with the other members of the kring. The kring members bond together as friends and as a community. And this is how the Kringen are important to Dutch gay life-- they build community among gay and lesbian people, and make their members more connected to others and less isolated.

Kringen have been successful. There were about 50 Kringen in the mid-80s. There are now around 240 groups, involving 2,500 members. The enormous growth seems to show that they answer a need in Dutch life-- the need to make "gay community" a reality, not just a turn of phrase.

As simple as the idea is, Miss Poubelle thinks that there is something brilliant in it. The early Christian church was organized around a similar concept of small groups, and some religious scholars think that they explosive growth of the Christian movement in the early centuries of the first millennium was partially due to the connections and energy members found in such small groups. One doesn't have to be religious to need friendship, connection, and community. In the Dutch case, they have taken a model that worked well for the churches and adapted it to meet the needs of gay people today.

Those involved in the Kringen have recognized an important fact about gay life. We need to have gay and lesbian businesses, like bars, saunas, bookstores, and magazines. But by themselves these aren't enough for a happy life. The quality of our interaction with other people at a bar is likely to be pretty superficial, and nothing is easier than spending an evening at a bathhouse without talking to anyone.

We also need to have legal protections, but legal protections alone will not make us happy. They prevent us from being abused in various ways, but freedom from abuse is not the same thing as a fulfilling life.

To lead a richer and happier life, whether gay or not, we need to be connected to the world and to other people. That seems to get harder, even as the technology for connection gets easier. In the middle of e-mail, internet chat, and mobile phones, there is something both refreshingly retrograde and profoundly wise about deciding to make our lives better by putting away the machines and the drinks for a while and listening to each other, face to face.