Coos Huijsen

Jacobus Huijsen, always known as Coos, was born in The Hague on 20 March 1939 and grew up in Oude Tonge on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee in South Holland. His parents separated when he was two, which was highly unusual in the 1940s and especially in a strictly Protestant village. He later wrote that this unease shaped his childhood even more than the war. His father, a watchmaker, was largely absent, and he moved with his mother to her parents' home. During the Second World War, when part of the island was flooded, they lived with a family in Melissant.

After the war his mother worked in many places, often as a home nurse, and he sometimes moved with her and sometimes stayed with his grandparents or an uncle in Oude Tonge, attending many schools. In 1952 he and his mother moved to Amsterdam, where she married a violinist in the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Although his parents were not religious, he joined the Dutch Reformed Church at 19.

In Amsterdam he attended a mulo school and then the Reformed teacher training college. From the autumn of 1962 he did his national service with the medical corps in Amersfoort. He taught at the Prins Bernhard School in Delft from 1963 to 1968 while studying history part time at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, qualifying in 1972, and in 1968 became a history teacher at the Christelijk Lyceum Overvoorde in The Hague.

In the early 1960s Huijsen joined the youth organisation of the Christian Historical Union (CHU), a Protestant party that later merged into the CDA. He chaired the youth wing from May 1966 to September 1970, becoming the outspoken voice of the party's progressive current, and also chaired the CHU's Delft branch. In 1971, as rumours about his sexuality circulated, the Haagse Post published an article headed Verkeerde Koos; he denied being gay, feeling the time was not yet right. He took up a seat in the House of Representatives by succession on 20 June 1972, but the Biesheuvel cabinet fell that summer and he was not returned at the election that followed.

In 1973 he broke with the CHU over its refusal to support the Den Uyl cabinet, came out to friends and family, and moved to a non-denominational school, the Gerrit van der Veen College in Amsterdam. On 30 March 1976 he took up the seat vacated by Willem Scholten as an independent member, with his partner Lank Bos present at his swearing-in. He was then the first member of a national parliament known to be openly gay, a distinction he learned of only in 2013, when the American political scientist Andrew Reynolds contacted him while researching LGBT politicians. He left the House in 1977 and joined the Labour Party (PvdA), but never sat in parliament again.

With Walter Kamp he founded the Foundation for Free Relationship Rights, which he chaired from 1977 to 1981 and which organised a celebrated protest evening at the Concertgebouw in 1977 against the American campaigner Anita Bryant. He co-founded and chaired the PvdA gay group, served on the board of the Schorer Foundation from 1978 to 1981, chaired Amsterdam's municipal working group on gay emancipation in 1985 and 1986, and in the 1980s chaired the Defence and Aid Fund Netherlands, which raised money to fight racism in South Africa. He believed that anyone who opposed discrimination against gay people had to oppose discrimination by skin colour as well.

He returned to teaching history at the Gerrit van der Veen College and was its director from 1986 to 1998. He wrote critically about the Labour Party in Nog is links niet verloren (1982), Socialisme als opdracht (1986) and De PvdA en het Von Munchhausen-syndroom (1990), and left the party in 2002. In retirement he became a familiar commentator on the monarchy on radio and television, writing De Oranjemythe (2001) and Beatrix, de kroon op de republiek (2005), for which he had two long conversations with Queen Beatrix. In 2012 he obtained a doctorate at the University of Amsterdam with Nederland en het verhaal van Oranje, nominated for the Libris History Prize. With his nephew, the historian Geerten Waling, he published editions of Ernest Renan's What is a Nation? (2013) and of the founding texts of the Dutch Republic (2014), and in 2026 Roze draad, a look back at fifty years of gay emancipation.

Huijsen knew from the age of 16 that he was gay, but in the 1950s coming out seemed impossible to him, and years of pretending contributed to depression and migraines in his youth. In the summer of 1973 he saw a young man on Amsterdam's tram 24 and met him again at a house party. Three months later he and Lank Bos, twelve years his junior and the son of a CHU mayor, were living together in Amsterdam-Zuid. They remained together for more than fifty years and later married. In 2007 he and Bos were among the founders of Het Blauwe Fonds, which supports initiatives for LGBT emancipation and to which they intended to leave their estate.

In later life Huijsen spoke openly of his concern that acceptance of gay people was under pressure, something he said he had already seen as a school director. He once had to escape into a taxi after being abused in the street as gay and pelted with beer cans.

Coos Huijsen died at home on the morning of Monday 19 October 2026, aged 87, after a short illness, with his husband Lank Bos at his side. His family confirmed the death to NRC and announced it in a press statement, noting that it came fifty years after his public coming out. The cause of death was not made public. His death was reported by NRC, NOS and NU.nl, which described him as the first openly gay parliamentarian in the world.

Huijsen's decision to take his seat in 1976 as an openly gay man, with his partner watching from the gallery, made him a pioneer for LGBT politicians worldwide, decades before such openness was common in national parliaments. Through the Foundation for Free Relationship Rights, the Labour Party gay group and Het Blauwe Fonds he helped put gay rights on the Dutch political agenda as a question of human rights, part of the long road that led to the Netherlands becoming the first country to open civil marriage to same-sex couples in 2001. As a historian he left a body of work on the House of Orange and Dutch national identity, and as a school director and writer he remained a sharp and independent voice on the left.