IF THE MOVING IMAGE explores that which is visible, then the queer moving image exposes what is latent or understated within that visibility. As Alice Kuzniar writes regarding queer German cinema, “[it] provocatively plays upon what the eye can and cannot see… . [Q]ueer cinema is one of baroque display and theatricality that paradoxically hides as much as it reveals. It reminds its viewer that sexual difference is not always something they can see; by disrupting and scotomizing the optic register, it challenges the accepted notion that cinema discloses and makes visible an empirical reality.” The question remains, however, whether Kuzniar's queer cinema concept fits the media of the GDR. With respect to queerness in East Germany, I argue that the space of the theater applies not so much as the intimate confessional between friends. In East German films of the 1970s, the representation of queer relationships piques genuine curiosity in the viewer, while also subsuming these representations under the eye of state surveillance.

East German feature films and documentaries made by the state-sponsored DEFA film studios participated in regimes of representation and visibility that beckoned forth certain identity formations while banishing others to the margins of societal discourse. Institutions, politics, culture, and commercial concerns all played a hand in dictating such regimes. Monogamous heterosexual coupling was normalized in the GDR, and partially leveraged as one of the social dimensions that distinguished its form of socialism from homosocially charged National Socialism. As a corollary, few identity constructs in GDR cinema remained as invisible and obscure as bisexual polyamory, which I define as being involved romantically and sexually in more than one relationship with multiple partners of any gender, with all partners aware and consenting. Polyamory, according to Jeffrey Weeks, presumes “freely chosen relationships based on the potentiality of multipartnerships where rules and boundaries are negotiated rather than given or assumed.” If polyamory breaks the so-called “mononormativity” of a society preoccupied with monogamous relationships, then a bisexual polyamory queers the often heteronormative assumptions of “swinger” couplings in the popular imagination, such as in the films Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969, dir. Paul Mazursky, USA) and Swingers (2002, dir. Stephan Brenninkmeijer, Netherlands).