Coos Huijsen

Jacobus (Coos) Huijsen
Member of the Dutch House of Representatives
In office June 20, 1972 – December 7, 1972
In office March 30, 1976 – June 8, 1977
Personal details
Born	March 20, 1939 The Hague, Netherlands
Political party	Christian Historical Union (1972-1976) Group Huijsen (1976-1977) Labour Party (1977)

Coos Huijsen (born March 20, 1939 in The Hague) is a former Dutch politician, who was a member of the House of Representatives in 1972–1973 and from 1976 to 1977. In his first term in office, he was a member of the Christian Historical Union, which he left because the party would not support the left-leaning Den Uyl cabinet; in his second term, he sat as an independent member under his own banner of Groep-Huijsen.^[1]

As a member of the House of Representatives in 1976, Huijsen came out as gay, making him the country's first openly LGBT politician and the first known openly gay member of a national legislature in the world.^[1][2] In 2016, Huijsen published an autobiographical account of his coming-out, in the context of a changing Dutch society in the 1970s: Homo Politicus (Balans, Amsterdam).

After leaving parliament, Huijsen worked as a school teacher and director.^[1] He also switched parties again, becoming a member of the Dutch Labour Party in which he was active until 2000; he left that party because he found the party put too little work into education and gay emancipation.^[3] He then pursued a career as a historian, publishing several books on the Dutch monarchy, including:

• De oranjemythe, een postmodern phenomeen ("The Orange Myth, a postmodern phenomenon"),^[4]
• Beatrix: De kroon op de republiek ("Beatrix, crown on the republic"; 2005)^[5] and
• Nederland en het verhaal van Oranje ("The Netherlands and the story of Orange"; originally a PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012).
• Homo Politicus. De eerste parlementariër ter wereld die uit de kast kwam ("Homo Politicus. The First MP Worldwide Who Came Out of the Closet" - autobiography)

References