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Christer Kihlman
(1930 - living) Finland

Christer Kihlman

Novelist

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Acclaimed as one of the most notable writers in contemporary Finland, Kihlman has characterised himself as a stranger in his own land in many respects. He belongs to the at-one-time privileged Swedish-speaking minority in Finland and he writes in Swedish. Yet he abandoned the bourgeois heritage of his family and became a proponent of a socialist worldview.

Christer KihlmanHe has also "betrayed his oen" by challenging the chauvinist aspects of Finnish society and not fitting into conventional heterosexual marriage, as he has also had relationships with men. Moreover, he has even dared to write about these relationships. Kihlman was one of the first writers in Finland to write openly on homosexuality.

Kihlman traveled in South America, and in the novels that he wrote about his experiences as, for example, in argentina, he studied the differences in the masculine codes of Western Europe and Latin America. How West Europeans have constructed gay identity is not relevant to the lives of the Latin American men who can sleep with men without considering themselves as gay. A measure of Kihlman's significance is that his work has been translated into more than ten languages.

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Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001

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