Abstract
This piece analyzes the tensions between racial liberalism and erotic representations in West German homosexual-oriented magazines between 1949 and 1974. Relying primarily on publications such as Der Kreis, Die Insel/Der Weg, Amigo, and Du & Ich, this paper argues that as white West German homosexual men made a case for the end of legal discrimination and for social acceptance, they often constructed their arguments and identity as a persecuted minority in relation to the struggles and imagined experiences of colonized men and racial minorities. At the same time, however, many homosexual men still maintained a set of assumptions about racial difference that exoticized and essentialized men of color, assumptions that are particularly apparent in the erotic representations (both visual and literary) of men of color that appeared in these magazines. I further argue that, although historians of homosexuality in West Germany have traditionally viewed 1969 as a break, due to the radical changes in gay life that followed the 1969 reform of the anti-sodomy statute, the tensions between racial liberalism and exoticization continued well into the 1970s and in a remarkably similar published format. The contradictions within these magazines add to the growing literature on both homosexuality and race in postwar West Germany. Through the close examination of a medium that was crucial to the formation of homosexual communities and the development reformist politics, we can more fully understand the complexities and tensions on which minority politics were built in the wake of fascism.
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Notes
These categories of “severe lewdness” included: coercive intercourse with another man, abuse of position to obtain intercourse with another man, intercourse between a man over 21 and a man under 21, or intercourse with a male sex worker. Men convicted of these crimes could be punished by up to 10 years in prison. The Nazis had also revised Paragraph 175, which originally only criminalized intercourse between men, to include all same-sex activity.
Homosexual acts between women were never criminalized, although there were numerous discussions of criminalization between 1871 and 1969 (Matysik 2004, pp. 26–48); As Claudia Schoppmann shows, although lesbians were more strongly affected by the Nazi policies towards women than towards homosexual men, the ambiguous category of “asocial” allowed for arbitrary persecution of many homosexual women (Schoppmann 1991, pp. 5–6; Schoppmann 1996).
Writing in 1997, however, Dannecker criticized his own earlier views, writing that his characterization of 1950s homophiles as conformist “Kaffee-Kränzchen” (gossipy old queens) was inaccurate, which further points to the political sentiments that informed 1970s scholarship (Dannecker 1997); Historian Dagmar Herzog highlights these interconnected political goals, detailing how gay activists during this period would March bearing slogans such as, “brothers and sisters, gay or not, fighting capitalism is a duty we’ve got!” (Herzog 2005, p. 155).
Historian Martin Klimke has further shown how these fascist indictments were structured by West German leftist interaction with the Black Panthers, whom they saw as an “internal colony” of the United States. The provocative tactics of the Black Panthers, according to many West German activists, constituted nothing less than liberation from imperialism and capitalism in the First World, and gave further credence to their semiotic linkages between American imperialism and National Socialism (Klimke 2010, pp. 108–109).
To say of course that they should have recognized and critiqued liberal racial assumptions would be presentist and an untenable historical argument. I merely want to explain why they did not, since this tension might seem like an overwhelming contradiction to someone immersed in twenty first-century discussions about race and sex.
Although the Bundestag voted to reform Paragraph 184, the law regulating the production and distribution of pornography, in 1973, the law only came into effect in 1974 (“Porno on the rocks” 1975, p. 2). This same draft of the penal code also lowered the age of consent for same-sex activity between men from 21 to 18, making 1974 a decisive turning point for both gay men and homosexual-oriented publications (Schäfer 2006).
Clayton Whisnant makes the point that 1945, while a dramatic legal rupture, was not even a 0 h for homosexual men, arguing that the memory of Weimar liberalism and Nazi persecution were key in the formation of postwar homosexual networks (Whisnant 2012, pp. 11–12).
According to the data gathered by Rainer Hoffschildt, during the Nazi era, approximately 10,000 men were imprisoned in concentration camps under Paragraph 175a, and it is estimated that 7000 of these men died in the camps (Hoffschildt 2002, p. 107).
However, Gottfried Lorenz also contends that “sexual liberalism” might not be the most precise term, given the fact that much of the deregulation of sexuality during this period stemmed not from more liberal attitudes, but from social and legal disorder during the occupation (Lorenz 2010, p. 119).
An excerpt from this article also appeared in the first issue of the American homophile journal One. The fact that One is republishing an article in Die Insel highlights the transnational dimensions of the homophile movement of the early 1950 s and raises further questions about the centrality of Germany in this movement (“Die Insel” 1953, p. 5).
Because Paragraph 175 specifically prohibited intercourse with individuals under 21, many conservatives (and some liberals) used this clause to argue that the law was necessary to the protect minors from predatory homosexuals. In addition, as Dieter Schiefelbein points out, this attitude was used to justify further repressive measures, including heightened police persecution and the introduction of the Law about the Distribution of Youth-Endangering Publications, which came into effect in 1953 (Schiefelbein 1995). These claims forced many homophiles to in turn argue that they did not condone (or desire) sex with minors (H.Z. 1961, pp. 2–6).
This demand for rehabilitation would however appear again in different moments, particularly following the rediscovery of Nazi persecution of homosexuals and the coincidental adoption of the pink triangle as a symbol of gay liberation in the 1970s. Despite these earlier calls for rehabilitation, it was not until 2002 that the German government rehabilitated those convicted under National Socialism. The German government has yet to rehabilitate those convicted after 1945 (Bundestag 2008).
Another reason for at least Italy’s greater liberality had to do with the Zanardelli Code’s roots in the Napoleonic legal tradition, which had separated religion and the law (Graupner 2004). These imaginings also draw on a much longer tradition of seeking (or inadvertently finding) homoerotic possibilities in the Islamicate countries, which in many ways became central to Western imaginings of the “Orient” (Boone 2014).
This is, of course, untrue, given many colonial legal codes that were still in effect that criminalized homosexuality. However, as Robert Aldrich points out, since at least the beginning of French colonization homosexual men and troubled administrators alike thought that homosexuality was prevalent among North African men. Further, the homosocial structures of colonialism, especially earlier on, created remarkable space for homosexual activities that could not be found in Europe (Aldrich 2003).
Burkhardt Riechers further points out that images of naked men from classical antiquity also served the more immediate purpose of providing homosexual men with erotic imagery that could also avoid the censors (Riechers 1999, p. 33).
This shutdown coincided with the development of the censorship board in West Germany to designate and control the distribution of “youth-threatening” publications. Anyone who found legally (or morally) suspect publications could send it to the board for review. In doing so, these censors served to legally enforce sexual morality in a democratic fashion (Heineman 2012). Because of this shutdown, heightened censorship, and the tenuous situation of homosexual men in West Germany, homosexual-oriented magazines were limited to only “artistic” semi-nudes, despite calls from readers for more naked men (“Für und wider die Zeitschrift” 1965).
The incorporation of Austrians into the Aryan race was important not least because of Hitler’s national origins. We are left to speculate then if Hitler’s origins contributed to the editors’ decision to use a letter from a man from Austria, rather than anywhere else in the German-speaking world.
El-Tayeb makes the similar point that Eastern and Southern Europeans are subject to an ongoing process of racial othering that dates goes beyond the context of labor migration (El-Tayeb 2011, pp. xiv–xv).
Particularly during the 1980s, when the feminist anti-porn movement was at its height, gay men struggled to determine what such a critique would mean for their own porn, or even if anti-porn critiques had any merit (Stelten and Streu 1987, pp. 6–7).
As Randall M. Packard and Paul Epstein point out in their 1991 critique on AIDS research in sub-Saharan Africa, much of the research conducted on the disease in the 1980 s was based on assumptions about African sexuality that had more basis in fictive stereotyping than actual facts. (Packard and Epstein 1991); As Herzog points out, HIV/AIDS did not cause a return to sexual conservatism in Europe in the 1980s, but it did provide an opportunity for an outpouring of homophobia, as well as criticisms of the sexual revolution more generally (Herzog 2011, p. 177; see also Jones 1992, p. 458).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Dagmar Herzog for her continued guidance through every phase of this project, as well as to Dr. Julia Sneeringer, Dr. David Sorkin, Dr. Benjamin Hett, and my colleagues at the 2014 Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute for their thoughtful comments. I am also grateful for funding from the Graduate Center History Department and the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute. Finally, my deepest thanks go to Javier Gómez-Lavin for his enduring patience and support.
Funding
This research was funded in part by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The author also received funding from the University of Minnesota to attend the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.
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Ewing, C. “Color Him Black”: Erotic Representations and the Politics of Race in West German Homosexual Magazines, 1949–1974. Sexuality & Culture 21, 382–403 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9345-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9345-2