The histories of gay activism in East and West Germany have not been recounted together and Samuel Clowes Huneke aims to interweave them in order to compare the trajectories of gay liberation movements between the end of WWII and reunification. Although the book does include lesbian stories and voices, it is ultimately not representative of the lesbian experiences, especially as they relate to the period's activism. Because of source limitations, the narrative focuses predominantly on the experiences of male activists. And, yet, the source base is, overall, compelling and rich. Huneke draws on multiple sources in order to write a variegated and balanced account. The analysis includes evidence from police and court records from German regional archives, the archives of the East German secret police, government documents of both East and West German provenance, the files of gay activist organizations, and oral histories. The combination of this diverse source base allows Huneke to draw a balanced picture of perspectives ranging from state leaders to grassroots activists.
Buttressed by the wealth of varied sources, Huneke sets out to develop three main arguments. First, he contends that “comparing each state's persecution of gay men in the 1950s and 1960s reveals homophobia to be a much more malleable phenomenon” than usually recognized (6). While the two typical hypotheses maintain that political scapegoating and/or the state's preoccupation with biopolitics undergird state-sponsored homophobic persecution, Huneke advances the point that state animus is a fundamentally contextual, relational, dynamic, and contingent process. In fact, instead of relying on the term homophobia, Huneke deploys the concept of “anti-gay animus” in part because no one term can adequately capture the varied phenomena, processes, and purposes involved in the persecution of gay individuals. Moreover, “anti-gay animus” helps maintain focus on Huneke's analytical priority: “how states conceived of homosexuality and what effects those conceptions had on juridical and police practices” (9). This approach allows Huneke to showcase how two idiosyncratic versions of sexual citizenship emerged in two distinct political and economic regimes. Their shared pre-WWII history notwithstanding, the two German regimes mobilized or constrained their grassroot gay liberation movements in such a way that homosexuality, as a political identity, functioned and evolved in unique ways. Second, Huneke avers that the notion of gay liberation, much like homophobia, is contingent and therefore that gay liberation movements in non-capitalist, non-democratic systems ought to be reconceptualized and analyzed on their own terms. Lastly, by destabilizing both accepted notions of homophobia and gay liberation movements, Huneke proposes to destabilize notions of how advanced and evolved the West German state was in comparison to its socialist counterpart. Ultimately, by removing any a priori value judgments, he seeks to afford a more nuanced and complicated view of Cold War dynamics as well as the varied systems that comprised the Cold War ecosystem.
The book is organized both chronologically and thematically, chapters alternating between comparisons of the gay liberation movements in east and west. Each set of chapters thus traces the turning points in the history of the liberation movements in East and West Germany, making for a satisfying progression. To this reviewer, the final chapter was the most compelling as it traces the unusual and remarkable series of events that led East German authorities to (finally) acquiesce to the demands of the gay activists. Huneke shows that despite their vacillation about homosexuality, the East German state acted on behalf of its gay citizens because the activists strategically: couched their petition as a continuation of the Communist Party's Weimar-era legacy of advancing the decriminalization of homosexuality; made more public the suffering of gay victims in Nazi camps; and began meeting under the aegis of the Protestant Church. This chapter gets at the heart of the book's title by asking “what is liberation?” In an ironic twist, rather than being inimically opposed to dictatorship, East German gay activists understood the success of their movement as linked to it, especially when the regime began delivering on some of the activists’ demands, including permitting the opening of homosexual social spaces, repealing legislation criminalizing homosexual behavior, and permitting homosexuals to serve in the military. In the midst of this about-face, the surveillance state continued to monitor and undermine the work of the activists with their extensive network of informants. Even as it persisted to control gay activists, East Germany was among the first few countries in the world, east or west, to explicitly allow homosexuals to serve in the military and to equalize the age of consent. Thus emerges the paradox central to Huneke's analysis: “Even as the Stasi swelled in size under the Honecker regime, the German government grew increasingly responsive to its citizens’ desires” (223).
Huneke is careful to not make grand, sweeping conclusions based on his case study of the two Germanies. As he notes: “As remarkable as East Germany's gay and lesbian movement was, it does not offer a roadmap for other social and political movements. It was an extraordinary result of its time and place” (223). Though unique, this comparative analysis does support Huneke's claim that we ought to sparingly, if ever, resort to using the term revolution to describe phenomena related to sexual liberation movements. The fact that unification brought gay East Germans uncertainty around their legal status and threats of violence, showcases that reform advances in irregular and unpredictable patters. Liberation cannot be achieved; it can only be safeguarded.
