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That Cold War mindset I mentioned earlier, which sees LGBTQ rights and liberal democracy is inextricably connected-I think ‘States of Liberation’ shows that this assumption is false. It shows that communist states can actually be progressive on queer issues, while liberal democracies can be remarkably hostile to their LGBTQ citizens. There were certain opportunities and forms of tolerance that existed in East Germany, but not in West Germany – and the opposite is also true. That is to say, I don’t think we can say either East or West Germany treated gay men and lesbians strictly better than the other. “The first and most obvious lesson is that there is no essential connection between queerness and any one state form or economic system. Generally, what are your historical lessons from this case of the two Germanys’ policies regarding LGBTQ people in the Cold War period? But many of them came away disappointed, preferring the more intimate solidarity of the East German subculture.” Queer East Berliners flocked eagerly to West Berlin to take part in its vast commercial subculture of bars, saunas, clubs, bookstores, and so forth. In spite of the remarkable progress of the 1980s, many of them still saw socialist society as one in which they could not flourish.
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The period “produced an initial surge of optimism. Huneke notes that after the progress made by LGBTQ East Germans in the second half of the 1980s, the reunification of Germany was received with ambivalence by the community. They rolled back press censorship of queer issues, allowed gay men and lesbians to access the country’s network of sexual health counseling centers, commissioned books and films about homosexuality, worked with gay and lesbian groups to spread information about HIV, equalized the age of consent, and adopted a new policy of allowing homosexual people to serve openly in the military.” The communist government, Huneke says, soon “passed a slew of far-reaching policy changes and legal reforms. Stasi officials hoped that this approach would rob the movement of its internal impetus and raison d’etre.” Searching about for a way of stalling the groups’ organizational efforts, the Stasi decided that the government would have to solve what it came to call the ‘humanitarian problems of homosexual people in the GDR's socialist society.' That is, the government would have to actually address the problems that gay men and lesbians had been telling it for years that they faced. Over a dozen of these groups had formed across the country by the mid-1980s, posing a far more serious challenge to the government than had the HIB. “In the early 1980s, activists began organizing under the umbrella of the Protestant Church, which was one of the only independent organizations in authoritarian East Germany. How did the great change eventually take place in the status of the LGBTQ community in the 1980s, which was the last decade of the existence of East Germany? How did Germany go from being one of the most homophobic countries in history under the Nazis to becoming one of the most LGBTQ-friendly states on earth today? To answer that question, I needed to look at what had happened to queer people in Germany during the Cold War, in the decades after the fall of Nazism.Ĭharlotte Von Mahlsdorf, who hosted gay activists in her private museum, where they met, hosted large parties, cabarets, and readings. In an email interview, he describes the book as starting “with a big question. dissertation, which he wrote at Stanford University. This is the first book by Huneke, 33, a professor of modern European history at George Mason University in Virginia. How We've Suppressed the Queer History of the Holocaust.The Gay, Jewish Scientist Spared by the Nazis.The author shows how the Nazi past continued to cast its shadow over the status of gay men and women in both West and East Germany in the decades after World War II, and compares the separate struggles by the gay communities in each country. The book, published by the University of Toronto Press, offers a comprehensive and illuminating look at the gay sexual and political history of a divided Germany during the era of the Iron Curtain, on both sides of the Berlin Wall. A scene from Heiner Carow's 1989 'Coming Out.'