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This article examines the intertwined arguments for sexual revolution and decolonization in the Dutch Atlantic in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period, Antillean activists in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles celebrated aspects of the Cuban Revolution and the US Black Power movement for their purported ability to regenerate romantic love. Activists contended that socialism and antiracist activism could forge new bonds of erotic equality to explode the ongoing effects of colonialism, slavery, and the regimes of sexual violence that maintained both. Considering the centrality of sexual politics to Antillean radical imaginaries, this article argues that Antilleans viewed sexual liberation as a primary rather than ancillary component of self-determination. Illuminating the Atlantic currents that informed Antillean arguments for insurgent forms of intimacy—from revolutionary Cuba to black struggle in the United States—this article reconceives of both the substance and geography of the sexual revolution.

In 1951, at the onset of major decolonization initiatives in the Netherlands Antilles, thousands of residents on Aruba successfully joined in protest to defeat Campo Alegre, a proposed brothel near the Aruban oil-refining city of San Nicolas. This article considers the protest movement within the context of Antillean decolonization and argues that debates over sexual politics played an important role in popularizing an Aruban identity separate from neighboring Curaçao—then seat of the government of the Netherlands Antilles and site of the first Campo Alegre brothel. Through analysis of Aruban archival sources, this article examines how the protest movement exploited decolonization policy while also drawing on the rhetoric of leading local political parties who claimed racial and cultural superiority to Curaçao.

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