| Summary: | In the late 1940s an Icelandic writer, Elías Mar (1924–2007), wrote and published novels that were set in Reykjavík and dealt with young men’s same-sex desire and sexual identity crisis. Later he became quite outspoken about his bisexuality and a well-known participant in one of the earliest queer subcultures in Reykjavík, a crowd that gathered at the café Adlon on Laugavegur 11 in the 1950s. This thesis discusses Elías’s published and unpublished texts, fictional as well as personal, from the 1940s and his transformation from a frustrated teenager to a young bisexual man and one of the best known Icelandic writers. In addition to literary analyses of the texts in question the thesis studies how writing and publishing them affected Elías’s personal and professional development; how becoming a published writer enabled him to travel, explore his sexual identity and express in his writings queer feelings and thoughts that rarely entered public discourse in Iceland at the time. The dissertation is the first comprehensive study of queer themes in Elías Mar’s work and the first dissertation on queer Icelandic literature. It also includes an examination of how homosexuality was ‘brought into discourse’ in Iceland in the early and mid-twentieth century and the role Elías – and his idol, the writer Halldór Laxness – played in that process. The findings show that while it was rarely addressed in the first half of the twentieth century, public discussion of homosexuality increased significantly around 1950 and included for the first time concerns regarding the existence of male homosexuals in Reykjavík. This suggests that (male) homosexuality was in this period becoming a more prominent part of Icelanders’ vocabulary and conception of the world. This development went hand in hand with other social and cultural changes generally referred to as modernisation. Homosexuality was, at least from the 1920s onward, often portrayed as a particularly modern phenomenon, both in writings that expressed concerns about modernisation and ...
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