Hello and welcome to Queer's Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world

and throughout time. My name is Eli. I'm Alice. This is the first of our new series of mini episodes,

which will come out on the eighth of every month. In these episodes, we'll bring you shorter stories

from queer history that couldn't feel their own full episodes, and we'll also be talking to you

about potential myths in queer history and either

confirming or debunking them. For example, today we're going to be talking to you about whether

or not it's true that Swedish people called in gay to work to protest homosexuality being

classified as an illness in Sweden.

As with all of our normal episodes, we're going to give content warnings for our many episodes,

but all that we've really got for this one is that there's a bit of periodypical homophobia.

As I said, we're going to be talking about whether or not people ever really called in gay

to work in Sweden.

So every now and then, on the internet, you'll see like a tweet or a post go around that

says something to the effect that in 1979, homosexuality was classified as an illness in Sweden, and so

Swedes protested it by calling in sick to work, claiming that they felt too gay to do their

jobs. Have you seen posts like that go around? Yeah, yes, no, I definitely have. Yeah.

I like the fact that in that post, or at least the one I've seen, it just says Swedes

calling gay to work and not like gay Swedes to that. So not like gay Swedish people are like, nah, this is so dumb. So, so

1979, Sweden. It is true that in 1979, Sweden, it was still classified as an illness to be

gay. Yeah.

So that much is true.

Good start.

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