Dag Øistein Endsjø (born 1968)

Translator's Note: This is a machine-assisted translation completed on May 23, 2025. While care has been taken to maintain accuracy, this translation has not yet undergone human review or validation.

Endsjø is perhaps best known as the leader of the Human Rights Alliance, a coalition of various human rights organizations working across different grounds of discrimination.
For many years, he was also an active participant in public debate.

From 2006 to 2017, Endsjø served as a professor at the University of Bergen. He previously held the position of associate professor at NTNU. As leader of the Human Rights Alliance from 2004 to 2013 and again from 2017 to 2018, he played a key role in ensuring that Norwegian equality legislation came to include and treat all grounds of discrimination equally, in accordance with human rights principles.

He is currently Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Oslo.

In the interview, Endsjø speaks in depth about his work with the Human Rights Alliance. He also discusses his publications, particularly the book Sex and Religion: From Purity Balls to Holy Homosexuality, which has so far been published in ten languages. He also co-edited Tired of Gender: Near-Gender Experiences and Other True Stories with Helge Svare in 2001, and authored Natural Sex: Sexuality and Gender in Early Christianity.

In 2010, Kim Friele and Knut Olav Åmås named Endsjø “Gay Man of the Decade” in Blikk magazine, citing, among other reasons, “his role as the first to publicly advocate for a gender-neutral marriage law and for promoting a unified anti-discrimination framework.”

Dag Øistein Endsjø served as information officer, deputy chair, and later chair of the student organization Homoversitas at the University of Oslo in 1991 and 1992. Among other responsibilities, he designed posters and other informational materials for the group. These materials have been donated to Skeivt Arkiv.

In an excerpt from the interview, Endsjø reflects on how he became so deeply engaged in the field of human rights.

The full interview is available in our reading room. Skeivt Arkiv interviewed Dag Øistein Endsjø in Oslo, October 2024.