Axel was born on April 3rd 1915. Pause for a moment and think of the state of gay rights back then: Illegality, closetedness, arrests, prison. Not just in Denmark, but everywhere.
The most important of his seeds, and his claim to a special place in LGBT world history was the founding of what is today LGBT Denmark on midsummer night in 1948, inspired by the UN declaration of Human Rights. The organisation was founded together with a group of friends and Axel had the guts to become the first chaiman - and paid the price, as he was outed in the press later that year: Lost his work, got kicked out of the pension he lived in and got excluded from the political party he was active in. He was basically run out of the provincial town he lived in and had to move to Copenhagen.
The positive side of that was meeting his beloved Eigil - his life long companion and later spouse. Together the two ran the "Association of 1948" as the LGBT organisation was discreetly called for a number of years. It is to my knowledge the oldest still existing LGBT organisation in the world.
But they ran into pornography laws for some of the pics in the magazine the association published. The pics would today probably be considered pretty innocent, but it cost Axel a prison verdict and he got booted from the chairmanship in order to save the organisation.
For the next couple of decades Axel and Eigil stayed on the sidelines. However they did take the same surname - Axgil, a blend of their first names - in protest of not being able to marry.
But in the end they were. Solid lobbying work from LGBT Denmark over decades and the aftermath of the AIDS crisis had rendered especially inheritance laws blatantly unfair and outdated. In 1989 the parliament voted through the world's first same sex civil union law (a side note: it still is, and allthough the new government has promised to get it merged with the general marriage law, the topic is not as hot here as in the US. Everybody considers a civil union a marriage anyway).
Over the years the old controversy from the pornograpy case in the 1950's had also faded and everybody agreed that the first couple in the world to marry could only be one: Axel and Eigil Axgil. The pictures of the happy elderly gentlemen getting showered in confetti while kissing on the steps of Copenhagen City Hall went around the world.
Eigil died in 1995. Two years ago at the opening of the World Outgames Axel was cheered warmly by tens of thousands. Or to pin it in his own words to American journalist Rex Wochner just before the marriage in 1989.
"Be open. Come out. Keep fighting. This is the only way to move anything. If everyone comes out of the closet then this will happen everywhere."
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