The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970

By Christopher Ewing

The Color of Desire tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, Christopher Ewing charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations.

Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected, as activists worked across groups to develop their visions for queer politics. Ewing describes not only how AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, and Black feminists were connected in unexpected ways but also how they developed contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. Out of these connections, which often exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic, arose new forms of queer fascism as well as their multiple, antiracist contestations. Both unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or "homonationalism," on which many white queer activists based their claims. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking.

The Color of Desire explains how the importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Actors worked across different groups, making it difficult to chart separable political trajectories. At the same time, antiracist activists also used the fractures and openings in groups that were heavily invested in the logics of whiteness to formulate new, antiracist organizations and, albeit in constrained ways, shifted queer politics more generally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501773372

Book preview

The Color of Desire

The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970

Christopher Ewing

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For my parents, Ruanne and J.C.

And for Javi

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: New Year’s Eve, 1970

Part I: An International Movement

1. Sex Tourism in the 1970s and the End of Permissive Islam: Disappointed in Casablanca

2. The European Exception: International Solidarity between Gay Liberation and the Iranian Revolution

3. Antiracism and the AIDS Crisis, or Homonationalism’s Rocky Start

Part II: Activism and the State

4. Making Homophobic Migrants out of Neo-Nazis: Gay Rights after Unification

5. Antiracist Gains and the Emergence of Queer Fascism in the Twenty-First Century: Homophobia’s Side Effects

Epilogue: What Happened to Homonationalism?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Since I’ve met you and moved to Sydney, I haven’t listened to one ABBA song. That’s because now my life is as good as an ABBA song, Muriel Heslop tells her best friend, Rhonda Epinstalk, in the 1994 classic Muriel’s Wedding. For Toni Collette’s character, leaving her suburban life in Porpoise Spit was not only impossible, but unimaginable without the support of Rachel Griffiths’s exuberant Rhonda. This book, deeply personal in so many ways, is similarly unimaginable without the many people who ultimately created it.

For reasons that will forever be unclear to me, Dagmar Herzog decided to take me on as a student fresh out of my undergraduate studies. Her ability to hold seemingly unrelated processes in mind and her insistence on letting the contradictions stand taught me how to explain change over time—an art that I am still trying to perfect. The charity with which Dagmar approaches her historical subjects is surpassed only by her commitment to her students. Her work in both continues to serve as an inspiration.

As I moved through the many steps of this project, I was fortunate enough to have Benjamin Hett and Julia Sneeringer on my team. A staunch supporter of queer history writing, Ben taught me to position my work for diverse and sometimes antipathetic audiences while passing on a sincere love for European history of all methodological stripes. Julia’s measured analyses turned me into a passionate defender of the importance of culture, and her unwavering care in multiple senses of the word helped me to develop an authorial voice with which to defend those commitments. Judith Surkis and David Troyansky pushed me out of my German state of mind, and in that regard, I also thank Laura Belmonte, Khalil Muhammad, Satadru Sen, David Sorkin, and Megan Vaughan. I also thank Christoph Kimmich, Till van Rahden, and Richard Wetzell for bringing me back to the Federal Republic. Jennifer Evans, a champion of younger scholars who has supported this project for years, opening doors for my research and writing to grow, deserves special thanks.

Graduate school would have been overwhelming without the colleagues and friends who had the courage to go ahead and the kindness to look back. Chelsea Schields read every chapter of this book in every iteration, bringing to bear on each sentence a striking ability to offer urgently needed critique in a way that only ever felt supportive. Her feedback has been transformative. Andrew Shield pushed me to reconsider what sources were possible, breaking down useless boundaries between queer pasts and presents. Megan Brown’s precision helped me turn a messy array of ideas into an argument. Most importantly, their friendship was and continues to be sustaining.

This project was originally conceived while I was finishing my undergraduate degree. I am deeply thankful for the mentorship of Maria Höhn and Silke von der Emde, under whose guidance I completed my first work on HIV/AIDS in the Federal Republic and applied to graduate programs. I am also grateful to Benno Gammerl, who introduced me to the Hinterhaus in Kreuzberg where the Schwules Museum kept their archive, and to the sources on which this book is based. His support to this day is invaluable. The Vassar College History Department and German Studies Department created spaces where I could turn those sources into written arguments.

I have had the exciting experience of coming up among a group of scholars who are reshaping their fields. This book has moved in unexpected directions particularly because of long-standing collaborations with Ulrike Schaper and Sébastien Tremblay. I also thank Barbara Bailin, Bradley Boovy, Magdalena Beljan, Emily Campbell, Craig Griffiths, Lukas Herde, Sam Huneke, Michelle Kahn, Nadja Klopprogge, Adrian Lehne, Rachel Love, Martin Lücke, Nic Miller, Philipp Nielsen, Andrea Rottmann, Lars Stiglich, Nikos Papadogiannis, Nisrine Rahal, and Veronika Springmann.

My work has benefited at Virginia Commonwealth University from the feedback and support of wonderful colleagues. In particular, Ying-Chao Kao and madison moore have been an inspirational starting cohort, and Liz Canfield, Leigh Ann Craig, Chris Cynn, Richard Godbeer, Karen Rader, John Powers, KT Shively, and Ryan Smith have been supportive friends and mentors. The VCU History Department and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department have provided a stimulating environment in which to finish this book.

The generous support of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, the Dahlem Junior Host Program, the CUNY Graduate Center, the Virginia Commonwealth University History Department, and the Purdue University Subvention Program all made this work possible. The Transatlantic Summer Institute and the CUNY Transatlantic Summer Workshop both supported this project, and the collaborations these two workshops generated were formative for this work.

I would still be alone with my ideas if it were not for the efforts of the archivists who made this possible. In particular, Peter Rehberg and Kristine Schmidt at the Schwules Museum Berlin, Roman Klarfeld and Dagmar Noeldge at Das feministische Archiv FFBIZ, Tal Nadal at the New York Public Library, Lydia Kiesling and Christine Pagel at the Landesarchiv Berlin, Thomas Tretzmüller at QWIEN, Bettina Just at DoMiD, and the archivists at the Bundesarchiv Koblenz have all made this work possible. I would also like to thank Thomas Tretzmüller at QWIEN, Dagmar Noelgde at FFBIZ, the University of Utrecht, and Hannes Häfele for providing images, and Judith Hanekuijk, Ira Kormannshaus, and Nigel Warner for their assistance in locating the rights and permissions. Finally, thank you to the German Historical Institute for permission to reprint material from the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute and to University of Texas Press for reprint permissions for material that appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Cornell University Press has transformed this project beyond what I thought possible. Thank you to Emily Andrew for seeing promise in my work. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Bethany Wasik, who guided me through each step, offered her editorial expertise, and selected three excellent reviewers, while patiently assuaging my many anxieties. At its core, the process of reviewing is one of collaborative writing. I was lucky enough to work with reviewers who took that collaboration seriously, seeing what I was trying to say—often before I could—and offering me the tools with which to say it.

The enduring love and support my friends have shown me through this process is astounding. From allowing me to crash on their couches so I could visit archives the next day to listening to my ideas through rambling texts and voice memos, Ashley, Genevieve, Katie, and Jessi have given emotional life to this project. Alice, Brad, Matt, Mere, Sam, and Veronika have similarly been subject to my excited chattering while also providing inspiring models of partnership.

My siblings, Aja, Rosemary, and Garet, are a perpetual source of inspiration. Their ways of thinking and speaking pervade these pages. My aunts, Cynthia, Robin, Ronna, and Sally, have always met my work with humor and empathy, while my grandparents, Gramma, Grampa, Granbetty, and Pop-Pop, instilled in all of us the core value of education that now structures my every day. My parents have always created space for their sensitive child to pursue his strange obsessions, even those that led him to make a career out of searching for queer ephemera in Berlin. Finally, to Javi, who drove me up and down the East Coast while I wrote this book, patiently listening when I chose the most stressful moments of I-95 to ask for feedback on the strength of an argument or the clarity of my prose. Since I’ve met you, my life is as good as Dancing Queen.

Abbreviations

Introduction

New Year’s Eve, 1970

At the end of December 1970, Manfred Ewert threw a party at his house in Tangier. Ewert was the Morocco correspondent for him, a magazine for gay men (although few used that term) that had begun circulating in the Federal Republic of Germany earlier that year. Like many white, same-sex desiring European men before him, Ewert had moved to Morocco and set up life there, taking advantage of the low cost of living and relatively loose regulation of sex between men, although the latter perk was starting to fade on account of the country’s recently promulgated antisodomy statute. Unlike many of his German predecessors, however, Ewert could now invite other gay men to join him, using a nationally circulated magazine. In 1969, the Federal Republic had decriminalized sex between men over the age of twenty-one, as well as some obscenity, causing the censorship that had constrained postwar publishing to lose its teeth.¹ Wolfgang Selitsch, the head editor of him, printed the invitation in the December issue of the magazine, beckoning readers to one of the most interesting cities in the world, where guests could relax by the pool, tour the streets, and enjoy the company of boys, whom Ewert had also invited.² Selitsch himself was unable to attend but wished guests a Happy New Year from Germany, where he remained, thinking enviously about the colorful goings-on in North Africa.³

Fewer than fifty years later, the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) party became the first radical right-wing party since 1961 to enter the Bundestag.⁴ Although the party had originally been founded on a platform of Euroskepticism, by the 2017 elections it had swung to the far right, adopting vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric and dancing around less-than-subtle gestures to the Nazi past. The AfD had updated its nationalism, however, to appeal to the twenty-first century voter. One of the party’s two lead candidates, Alice Weidel, had recently come out publicly as a lesbian. Attempting to appeal further to gay and lesbian voters, the party ran a poster campaign in Berlin’s historic gay district featuring two white men with the quote My partner and I place no value on the acquaintance of Muslim immigrants, for whom our love is a deadly sin.⁵ The campaign resonated with the party’s hard-line stance on immigration, which it bolstered by marshaling fears of Muslim homophobia, despite the party’s own opposition to most LGBT rights goals. The transition from racializing Muslim men as sexy boys in Tangier to dangerously homophobic in Berlin was astonishingly swift. In just two generations, the radical right could convincingly formulate claims that would have made little sense to Ewert and Selitsch. How did this happen?

Reflecting on the days and weeks after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, May Ayim wrote in her essay on the year 1990, This new ‘we’—as Chancellor Kohl loved to formulate it—‘this our country’ did not have and does not have space for all.⁶ Ayim was a leading literary voice in the Afro-German movement, which had coalesced in the mid-1980s specifically around Black, queer, and feminist concerns. In her reflections, Ayim pointed out how the euphoria of unification rested upon the long-standing exclusions of assumed German belonging based on whiteness. Racism runs through this history, connecting the casual exoticization of Ewert and Co. with the virulent nationalism of Weidel and her party’s campaign; however, the ways in which white, queer Germans articulated those racisms changed over time and were historically contingent. When Ewert invited him readers to his house in Morocco, fantasies of homoerotic adventures in a mythicized Orient, derived from histories of colonial knowledge production, dominated gay publications. The Guest Worker Program, which brought millions of immigrants from southern Europe, Turkey, North Africa, and South Korea to the Federal Republic, was still in progress, on the continuing assumption that labor migration was a temporary fix to the Federal Republic’s economic needs.⁷ When the AfD entered the Bundestag in 2017, it capitalized on white anxieties about permanent immigration, resurgent in the wake of what the media described as a refugee crisis, starting in 2015. Some saw the German government’s willingness (however reluctant) to process asylum applications from those fleeing the violence of the Syrian Civil War as threatening. After two years of increased immigration, the AfD argued that the 1.6 million predominantly Muslim refugees who had arrived since the summer of 2015 constituted an existential threat to white Germans, gay and straight alike.

In this book I argue that race was crucial to the making of queer politics in the Federal Republic of Germany. As Ayim further points out, So many white Germans still understand racism as an exceptional occurrence or special theme.⁸ A look back at queer German history since 1970 reveals that, far from racism being an exceptional occurrence, precisely the opposite is the case. Racism ran through white, queer politics, rather than existing as an inconsequential subplot. At the same time, it cannot be disentangled from antiracist movements. Racism and antiracism drove competing political agendas that were closely intertwined. Many white, queer West Germans instrumentalized people of color, at home in the Federal Republic and around the world, as well as antiracist political claims, for purposes that often had little to do with dismantling racist structures, institutions, and attitudes. Queer people of color, however, formed antiracist movements that shifted queer political landscapes in the Federal Republic and created different possibilities. White stubbornness constrained these possibilities, in daunting and sometimes violent ways; however, through the work of activists at different moments in time, antiracism became an increasingly unavoidable topic in queer politics. In the pages that follow I show how the complex entanglements of racisms and antiracisms drove queer politics in ways that otherwise seemingly had little to do with race. Further, close attention to queer politics’ transnational dynamics reveals that this phenomenon was not unique to the Federal Republic.

The entanglement of racism and antiracism has resulted in an incomplete reversal in thinking about Islam. Across Europe, Islam has been closely associated with racial difference, particularly as a stand-in for groups racialized as immigrants, regardless of religious affiliation (or non-affiliation) and citizenship status. At the center of white claims-making about Islam is its alleged incompatibility with European, secular values. Many of the debates about Islam have played out on women’s bodies. France, for example, has banned headscarves and other forms of religious dress from public places, the subtext being that Islam is antithetical to French secular modernity.⁹ Germany has been embroiled in its own clash of civilizations narratives, focused on veiled women as a marker of Islam’s alterity.¹⁰ Similarly, and wrapped up in these conversations, are claims that Islam is incompatible with Europe because of the former’s alleged intolerance of homosexuality. Certainly, political Islam has been used to back homophobic agendas, while both state-sponsored and interpersonal violence has been and continues to be carried out in the name of religious conviction. However, the association between Islam and its most conservative elements has well exceeded careful and differentiated concern with Islamic religious doctrines.

The process through which white commentators and politicians have racialized Islam has been, as Fatima El-Tayeb explains, obfuscated by the dogma of colorblindness.¹¹ As a religion, Islam cannot easily be fixed to biologistic accounts of race—or at least adherence to these accounts can be more plausibly denied. For Germany in particular, race as a meaningful social and political category was jettisoned from official discourse after the Holocaust, even as racism, including in the form of murderous antisemitism, endured.¹² Yet, not only did biologistic accounts of racial difference persist, but, as Yasemin Shooman argues, they combined with culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, and class in productive discourses that separated out Islam as a racialized and internal other. This process was, furthermore, not simply a continuation of premodern forms of otherization but also the result of white anxieties about Germany’s late twentieth-century position as a country defined by migration.¹³ In spite of the decades of scholarship and activism that have identified these forms, the idea that generalizing arguments against Islam or the compatibility of Islam with European values constitutes a form of racism is still controversial in the German-speaking world.¹⁴

As these three moments—Ewert’s party in 1970, Ayim’s exclusion from a new Germany in 1990, and Weidel’s election in 2017—suggest, this story is about a much broader mess of queer politics. Part of that mess derives from the fact that, as El-Tayeb, drawing on Paul Gilroy, reminds us, there would be no Western modernity without the contributions of people of color.¹⁵ For example, the very frameworks on which white gay and lesbian activists in the 1970s drew to conceive of their position in society derived directly from Black activism in the United States. In so doing, they were at once able to stake out their minoritarian position and demand that European modernity protect them. However, to follow Gilroy further and as chapter 2 elaborates in detail, the whiteness that some activists instilled in understandings of gay and lesbian identities as they looked internationally in the 1970s allowed those same activists to maintain sets of domestic racial exclusions. Circulating notions of cultural nationalism, as Gilroy describes it, were the early underpinnings of homotransnationalism, to use Christine Klapeer’s term.¹⁶ It is only in later decades, however, that we can realistically speak of active state incorporation of certain queer subjects into nationalist projects as outlined by Jasbir Puar.¹⁷ So much of the operational racism in queer, German history involves the instrumentalization of people of color and their political and intellectual contributions.

The queer politics of race extend well beyond white racisms, however, and involve people of color developing strategies for building other political and community networks. Although white defensiveness restricted the possibilities to do so, antiracist activists reshaped and even unmade racist politics. There were holes in white politics, spaces opened by the contradictions of racism that helped make these processes possible. However, pulling queer politics in antiracist directions involved tremendous amounts of work, not least because of the ferocity, as Gloria Wekker explains in the case of the Dutch, with which whiteness (for Wekker, white innocence specifically) defended itself.¹⁸ Although the politics of race in postcolonial and post-Holocaust Germany were markedly different from yet linked to the politics of race in the Netherlands, the emotional tenor of some of this defensiveness resonates across national lines.¹⁹ Afro-German activists, however, together with Jewish women, racialized immigrant women, and German women racialized as immigrants, carved out spaces in white lesbian scenes, and worked with white lesbians to develop new political programs, projects that took off in the 1980s. The dynamics of queer racisms cannot be understood without considering their interactions with queer antiracisms.

Three sets of political trajectories and actors overlap yet cannot easily be made equivalent: racism/antiracism, white activists/queer activists of color, and making/unmaking homonationalism. Some white actors organized in specifically antiracist ways. Perhaps the most well-documented history is that of Dagmar Schultz, a white, German lesbian woman who invited the Black US feminist theorist, activist, and poet Audre Lorde to Berlin in 1984.²⁰ Others, working in the German AIDS-Help, Germany’s leading AIDS organization, founded in 1983, redirected the organization in deliberately antiracist directions, understanding that nationalist exclusions of racialized immigrants and people of color were detrimental to prevention work. This book tells these stories as well as how they interconnected with queer of color activism. Similarly, some queer people of color worked to shore up racist projects. As white-led organizations began increasingly to focus on predominantly Muslim men as constituting a criminal threat to queer people, they relied on native informants to reinforce and authenticate racialized claims.²¹ More than that, some queer people of color actively invested themselves in these projects as they were developed across the political spectrum. Rather than viewing these instances as exceptions to a rule, I understand and present all of these actors as part of the same, integrated history, navigating complicated and changing political landscapes.

Finally, I have focused on homonationalism as a core theme, to which the politics of race were essential. Defined by Puar as a shift in the way queer subjects relate to nation-states, homonationalism is the recent phenomenon by which some queer bodies become the temporary recipients of the ‘measures of benevolence’ afforded by multicultural democracy, contingent upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normativity, and bodily integrity.²² Puar used this formulation to identify some queer people’s acceptance of the logics of the US war on terror, as well as the state’s strategic use of normative queers to justify American imperial exceptionalism. Homonationalism can be also, as many scholars have noted, a useful way of making sense of queer German politics in the early twenty-first century.²³ This concept is inextricably tied to race, as white, queer political constructions of racialized others were crucial to a wider program of accessing rights and protections. Homonationalism becomes trickier, however, when applied historically because of the interrelated concepts of European sexual exceptionalism and homonormativity. European sexual exceptionalism, borrowed from Puar’s discussion of US sexual exceptionalism and elaborated by scholars like Christine Klapeer, Gianmaria Colpani, and Adriano José Habed, involves the overrepresentation of Europe at its borders as an exceptional bearer of sexual freedom and the ultimate guarantor of civil rights.²⁴ Although an integrating Europe is in some ways antithetical to nationalisms, as Éric Fassin explains, it is also an assemblage of national identities.²⁵ In this book I chart the making of European sexual exceptionalism in the (West) German context; however, this process was not self-understood, nor was it a line from unfreedom to freedom for queer, white Germans. Similarly, the new, neoliberal politics of homonormativity, as Lisa Duggan outlined in 2002, which involved a depoliticized gay constituency and culture anchored in domesticity and consumption, do not cleanly map onto queer politics of the 1970s and 1980s.²⁶ They also do not easily adhere to the paradoxes of 2010s and 2020s right-wing queer politics. Homonationalism as the national politics of exceptional homonormativity is therefore understood here as historically contingent and highly contested. Antiracist activists questioned and undermined emergent homonationalist formations, as did virulently racist, white, queer Germans as they espoused authoritarian alternatives. Undoing homonationalism happened from different directions and was articulated through both racist and antiracist projects. Queer of color activism, antiracist politics, and critics of homonationalism, even if they often overlapped, are by no means simply synonymous. In examining the politics of racism and antiracism in the Federal Republic we must pay attention also to the possibilities, both troubling and inspiring, that actors in the past imagined instead.

In what follows, I outline four critical interventions I make in service of explaining the importance of racial politics to queer political movements. The first, and most central to the primary argument of this project, is that it is necessary to think through racism and antiracism together in order to understand queer politics of race. Second, the queer politics of race were a project of groups often discussed separately. Although treating gay men and lesbian women separately, as I do at different moments in this book, can be helpful, queer racisms and antiracisms were the result of joint political projects, even if collaboration was contentious rather than harmonious. Third, racialized desire runs through this project, both as a tool for knowledge production and as a troubling theme for queer politics. While lesbian women participated in exoticization, it was white men’s desire for men of color that resulted in some of the most vociferous arguments in queer political scenes more broadly. Finally and relatedly, the politics of race were marked by often-heated debates about knowledge. From the persistence of Orientalism in circuits of gay travel to analyses of homophobic violence, many white, queer Germans produced and reproduced knowledge of racial difference. At the same time, queer people of color and antiracist activists worked within these frames to dismantle racial essentialism and develop alternative ways of making sense of lived experience. By attending to these four interventions, it becomes possible to push beyond a simple assertion that race was important, and comprehend what the politics of race, and those involved in its making, actually did.

Racism and Antiracism Together

Since the 1990s, German scholars linked to activist scenes have developed a growing body of literature on the queer politics of race. Fatima El-Tayeb, Jin Haritaworn, and Zülfukar Çetin in particular have examined the ways in which queer people of color have organized communities and political movements, and revealed the importance of homonationalism to white, queer German politics.²⁷ In many ways, my own work on the queer politics of race began as a project of historicizing these studies—that is, thinking about the origins of postwar gay racism in the Federal Republic. In the process, a series of pressing questions emerged that extended beyond the original scope of this project. Most importantly, how did racist and antiracist politics—and the people who moved these politics—inform each other? This question stemmed from contradictions within postwar white gay politics, which not only oscillated between but combined appeals to antiracism, at least as some white activists defined it, and multiple racial exclusions. Answering this question requires attention to forms of queer of color activism and specifically the ways they connected, both deliberately and inadvertently, to white-dominated political movements.

This work happened at multiple levels. Queer politics changed through activism on municipal, national, and international activism and within and across a wide variety of organizations. The first two chapters focus on international politics and transnational mobilities, while subsequent chapters move in focus from national to local levels. These levels are, nevertheless, also closely connected. Transnational sex tourism of the 1970s, the subject of chapter 1, shifted in response to changes in national law and the organizing and publishing possibilities those changes produced. Similarly, the queer politics of 1990s Berlin were enmeshed in transnational conversations about violence prevention and European institutions, the subject of chapter 4. If we want to examine entanglements between racist and antiracist political trajectories, then we also have to study how activists and movements worked across these different levels from the 1970s into the 2010s.

Race has slowly become a topic in white, queer histories. In contrast, the scholarship on queer of color activism in Germany, particularly as written by those involved in activist movements, is well established. Afro-German activists in particular have written and published extensively about the movement, as well as about Black history in Germany more broadly. Writer- and scholar-activists, like Marion Kraft, Katharina Oguntoye, and Peggy Piesche, as well as scholars in the US, like Tiffany Florvil, Priscilla Layne, and Sara Pugach, have made significant contributions to both histories, documenting the Afro-German women’s movement from queer perspectives and decolonizing nineteenth- and twentieth- century German history.²⁸ Yet, focused discussions of race and racism have been missing from studies of white-dominated queer movements, particularly after 1945. Historians like Heike Bauer, Laurie Marhoefer, and Javier Samper Vendrell have investigated how racism and colonialism inflected movements for homosexual emancipation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁹ Most recently, Marhoefer has offered the insight that racism and antiracism, as well as colonialism and anti-colonialism, were present from the beginning of German gay politics in the early twentieth century.³⁰ Bradley Boovy, also drawing on queer of color critique, has examined the implicit whiteness of publications and politics in the 1950s and 1960s.³¹ Nevertheless, much work remains to be done, especially work focused on the years after the emergence of gay liberation in the Federal Republic. Many of ideological apparatuses that are central to these histories of earlier movements for sexual liberation, including, as Marhoefer lays out, eugenics, empire, and anti-colonialism, were missing or fundamentally reconstituted in the period after 1970.³² Even concepts that endured in name—racism, antisemitism, or antiracism, for example—have taken on new meanings. How could they not after the Holocaust? Or after the global upheavals of the midcentury? I build here on the rich scholarly field that exists because of the work of queer activists and scholars of color, while further engaging with the history of white racisms as they developed in the 1970s and after.

Queer German Histories

Whose stories do we tell together, and when do we separate them? This question is relevant not only for a study of race, but also for studies of queer German history more generally. Answering this question requires an encounter with terminology. Jennifer Evans’s 2016 special issue of German History called for a queer German history, one that questions heroic narratives and claims to a universal experience, taking nothing for granted.³³ Anna Hájková, in insisting on the necessity of telling queer histories of the Holocaust, situates the term queer as a way to describe those who engaged in non-normative sexual practices while not implying that those who did so identified as queer, or as gay, lesbian, bisexual, homosexual, or otherwise.³⁴ Drawing on these insights, I argue that attention to racism and antiracism requires writing queer German history as Evans outlines. Doing so at once throws into question liberalization narratives of gay and lesbian history and directs our attention to the ways in which those who made queer politics perpetuated different forms of marginalization. Although queer theory enjoins us to think through exclusions, queer theoretical interventions are also often predicated on whiteness, as Hiram Perez reminds us.³⁵ There is nothing inherently antiracist about being queer or doing queerness; however, we can use queer theoretical tools, particularly as developed by queer of color critique, to start to engage in this process for German history.³⁶

Doing so requires further definitional work. Following Hájková, I use the term queer to describe both methods and those who engaged in non-normative sexual practices or gender expressions, without suggesting that they identified as such or that the term was always in popular use. As Craig Griffiths cautions, using queer in this way risks eliding important debates about nomenclature. This concern is important, as we need to take seriously the ways in which people in the past thought and felt about themselves.³⁷ However, even though terms like homosexual, homophile, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, and transsexual were in popular use from this history’s beginning, they do not fully encapsulate the diversity of practices and feelings embodied by the historical actors in this story. Perhaps even more inappropriate would be the application of an acronym like LGBT, or its more inclusive form, LGBTQIA+, to moments in the past where it did not exist or to groups of people who did not feel themselves to be in alliance. As Jennifer Evans cautions, queerness is about more than rigid identities, and historians must consider both those who were differently queered and the historic and continued tensions that exist within queer and trans* communities.³⁸ Finally, it would be clumsy to assume that just because we are studying something approaching modern sexuality, everyone who had sexual encounters with members of their own sex, for instance, articulated those experiences through identity terms.³⁹ Instead, queer, when balanced with specific identity terms that individuals and groups used, can help to position groups of people as part of an integrated history without implying shared subjectivity.

This challenge becomes increasingly pressing as the scope of the study expands to include more groups and identities. It has become something of a convention in queer German history to examine groups separately, particularly gay men and lesbian women. There are some good reasons to do so. Jens Dobler and Harald Rimmele point out that the division between lesbian and gay activism well precedes the fractures of the 1970s along the lines of gay liberation and women’s liberation as possible models of queer activism.⁴⁰ German law regulated sex between men differently from sex between women, a distinction that would remain ensconced in the penal code in the form of Paragraph 175 until 1994. Important differences remained even after legal reform in 1969 and 1973, which saw the decriminalization of sex between men over the age of 21, followed by the lowering of the age of consent to 18. Many lesbian women felt their concerns aligned more closely with women’s liberation and its overarching critique of misogyny than with gay liberation groups, which were often led by or comprised primarily of men. The debate over commemoration of National Socialist persecution reveals, however, that an exclusive focus on the law, and, as Andrea Rottmann explains, the related concept of persecution, can be mobilized to perpetuate the erasure of lesbian women from public memory cultures or, as Samuel Clowes Huneke argues, the complexity and brutality of their treatment by the state.⁴¹ At the same time, as Christiane Leidinger has laid out in her comprehensive overview of the historiography of lesbian movements in Germany, there exists a self-perpetuating dearth of literature, particularly of histories that focus on the formation of the lesbian movement in the Federal Republic during the 1970s and 1980s.⁴² The divide is not absolute, however, and historians like Laurie Marhoefer and Benno Gammerl have written histories that benefit from combined attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* Germans.⁴³ Nevertheless, historians need to continue to be careful when making decisions about whose stories to tell and for what reasons.

When examining the queer politics of race in the Federal Republic, it is necessary to take both collaborations and divides seriously. A singular focus on gay men or lesbian women may make sense in studies within distinct parameters—for example, in an examination of gay constructions of normative masculinity, and certainly in the emergence of antiracist, lesbian, feminist community building in the 1980s.⁴⁴ Chapter 1 tells a male-dominated story, in its focus on travel cultures set up by gay men in the 1970s, building on their homophile predecessors and marshaling sexual desires that often explicitly excluded women and valued racialized masculinity. Yet, the entanglement of racism and antiracism was also an entanglement of gay and lesbian activism, which sometimes, and often ambivalently, expanded to include trans* and gender non-conforming activists. The making of European sexual exceptionalism, particularly