According to the court testimony of Kurt Haijby, the restaurant owner in question, this is how his many-year relationship with Gustaf V began. Gustaf V is the grandfather of the present king, Carl XVI Gustaf. (If you're a Swedish king and have a Roman numeral in your name, you put it between the two first names you choose to go by.)
I can't speak for all LGBT people, of course, but in my experience, and with apologies to the heroic activists among us, most of the LGBT people in my circle of acquaintances are more interested in enjoying the victories of past liberation struggles than marching in parades with signs reminding us all that the struggle is not over, that there are still countries, like Russia, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia, to pick three at random out of a large pile, where the lives of LGBT people can be utterly miserable.
I happened upon a four-part TV mini-series, last night, from Sweden, which takes up a fascinating tale of royal goings-on and spins it in such a way that LGBT people will grit their teeth at SPOILER ALERT yet another story which fulfills the expectation, "I thought people like that killed themselves."
In this TV version, the (non-royal) gay guy comes off pretty well. He's definitely got the makings of a charlatan, but the real bad guys are the government officials doing their all to hide the king's homosexuality. In this version, Haijby gets sent to Hitler's Germany and the Swedish government rewards Göring with the title of Commander Grand Cross of the Royal Order of the Sword for taking him in, where he ends up for a time in a concentration camp. He returns to Sweden only to end up in an insane asylum, where the director of the asylum is blackmailed into keeping him locked up despite his conviction that Haijby is perfectly sane. As the blurb on the episode guide sums it up:
Based on true events, the story follows restauranteur Kurt Haijby and his secret relationship with king Gustav V, which eventually got out and led to one of the worst miscarriages of justice that Sweden has ever witnessed.
If you check out the Wikipedia version, you get a surprisingly different slant. Here, Haijby is not only a self-serving manipulator, but a pederast, sentenced to hard labor six times for fraud and theft. Not such a cool guy at all.
In the movie version, Gustaf is quite sympathetic. Not without good historical reason: Gustaf walked a tightrope balancing pleasing the Nazis to keep them from invading his country but at the same time helping Jews escape, and even sending a telegram to the Hungarian regent asking him to stop the deportation of Jews from Hungary. But none of this background stuff is taken up by the series, where he's just a lonely old man.
He is clearly taken with Kurt and his gifts to him are freely given, not extorted at all. He does turn away from Kurt in the end, after Kurt writes a book and exposes the correspondence between him and Gustaf which makes plain the sexual relationship was mutual and freely entered into. At that point the liaison moves from gossip to outright scandal. Kurt is arrested and put on trial, but when he refuses to admit his homosexuality the prosecution is able to make him out as a blackmailer. He goes to jail for six years of an eight-year sentence. His defense is that he was only doing what the Swedish constitution asks of its citizens: to love their king. His only mistake was that he loved him too much. The most sinister character in all these machinations is Governor Nothing, who orchestrates it all and lies through his teeth at the trial. Nothing's wife even says to him in an especially telling scene, "You will have to answer for your lies at the gates of Heaven," or words to that effect.
Because of a bias for things that get published and fact-checked, I have to go with the Wikipedia version. But I can't deny that I'm glad the topic of homosexuality has reached such a level that the Swedes can make a movie in which the current monarch's grandfather is not portrayed as some kind of pervert even when he knowingly or unknowingly takes up with one. It's a marvelously entertaining story, even if it does end with a suicide. You are expected to blame the corrupt do-gooders whose homophobia leads them to do all manner of dastardly deeds to hide the homosexuality of their king, but not the king himself, and not his homosexuality, either. That is merely explained away as a prejudice of an earlier age. The suicide is not a just outcome; it's a tragedy that is expected to make us all feel good about the course of gay liberation. The response to finding out your king is gay in the 1930s is to lie your head off. The response in 2023 is, "Who gives a damn?" Things do sometimes get better.
I'm not totally sure I want to call this a piece of LGBT history, since the cover-up of the scandal leads to some doubt about whether the king did have an affair or whether it's entirely an attempt on Haijby's part to extort a whole lot of kronor out of the royal treasury. More than history, in other words, it is yet another example of how one of our main challenges these days is to decide which narrative of events to take to heart and mind. We will likely never know for sure which of the conflicting narratives contains the greater truth - the Wikipedia/historical record one or the revisionist? film series one written by Bengt Braskered and directed by Lisa James Larsson, featuring the excellent Icelandic-Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason as Haijby, and Swedish actors Staffan Göthe as Gustaf and Reine Brynolfsson as Nothing.
Ask me in a year or two. I imagine I'll remember the fictionalized film version and will have forgotten the other one.
Question is what am I to make of my previous remark, that things sometimes do get better. Do I take the spruced-up fictionalization of a historical gay? character as a sign of things getting better? Are they actually better because we can now retell historical events in a better light? Where do we put our focus - on our ability to tell historical events with gay characters in a positive light? That the Swedes are unafraid to make a movie about an allegedly gay king of theirs? Or that - if he was gay - that this is still a scandal and we suspect the family is likely to wish this fiction would just go away?
To see the film you need a subscription to Viaplay on the Roku Channel - at least that's how I accessed it. There may be other ways, but I couldn't find any.
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