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[-] Azarova@hexbear.net 26 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The GDR pivoted on queer rights in the 1980s and enacted a massive series of reforms to essentially legalize queer existence and developed education programs to combat stigma. This guy is definitely a lib, but here's a good article about it for anyone interested: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/gay-liberation-behind-iron-curtain/

For further reading, he wrote a book called States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany by Samuel Clowes Huneke. The last chapter before the epilogue covers this policy turn and the public pressure campaign that spurred it.

For a brief summary, the queer liberation movement in the GDR eventually ended up organizing alongside the church after they were rebuffed for going through more official means. The organizing under the church began to swell with membership, and the security services began to grow concerned with the partnership.

Membership continued to swell and activists began to coordinate strategy at national meetings. They soon agreed on a set of wide-ranging policy goals, including better access to housing, abolition of the higher age of consent for homosexual sex, ability to serve in the military, and better access to sexual health services. [...]

Under pressure to stem the tide of gay liberation, the secret police began debating new strategies. Departments exchanged flurries of memos debating what course of action the government should pursue. In 1985 the Stasi finally produced a new set of guidelines on how to prevent what it termed “the political misuse of homosexuals.” Some of its recommendations were unsurprising, such as ramping up surveillance of gay activist leaders. But its final recommendation was entirely novel. It insisted that the government find “resolution[s] to homosexuals’ humanitarian problems.” That is, the Stasi decided to actually address activists’ demands.

The phrase "political misuse of homosexuals" is kind of goofy, but the Stasi began to realize that the marginalized nature of queer people within socialist society made them a vector for subversion via blackmail. If the state removed the legal restrictions, such as the possibility of being removed from positions for one's sexuality or gender identity, then blackmailing queer people was no longer a possible vector for Western subversion. This tactic is still used to this very day! The zionist entity does this to Palestinians. Further, addressing the demands of the activists meant that the relationship between the queer community and the church would no longer have reason to exist.

Thus began a series of genuinely radical changes in East German society. The state-censored newspapers, which for decades had hardly ever mentioned homosexuality, suddenly started printing dozens of stories about gay men and lesbians. The government also freed periodicals to accept personal advertisements from gay men and lesbians looking for partners.

The state tasked Berlin psychology professor Reiner Werner with writing a book titled Homosexuality: A Call to Knowledge and Tolerance, which appeared in 1987. Its initial run of 50,000 copies sold out in a matter of weeks. It would also approve a gay film, Coming Out, that premiered on November 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall fell.

In addition, the state began granting official recognition to gay groups, such as the Sunday Club, a secular activist collective run by Sillge that had been meeting in East Berlin since the early 1980s. And it authorized East Germany’s first gay discos, such as Die Busche, a club that still exists today.

The government even allowed gay chapters within the Free German Youth (FDJ), the state’s official youth scouting organization, and mandated that all FDJ members attend educational sessions dealing with homosexuality. All of a sudden, East German youth were required to attend meetings of gay groups such as the Sunday Club. [...]

In 1987 the East German Supreme Court struck down the law that set a higher age of consent for gay men and lesbians. The following year, the military allowed gay soldiers, reversing a policy the government had instituted in the 1950s.

[-] Azarova@hexbear.net 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Quoting now from the aforementioned States of Liberation,

As gears ground within the Stasi, Sillge and her comrades continued to pressure the regime. In her book, she recalls that a group of "despairing lesbians" wrote to the Ministery of the Interior in 1984 demanding "expert rationales for [government] decisions to decline" homosexual petitions. Soon thereafter the women were granted an audience with officials at the Berlin Magistrate, who told them that the matter first had to be "scientifically researched." As a consequence of that discussion, the prorector for social sciences at Berlin's Humboldt University convened a research group on homosexuality, which began meeting in the autumn of 1984.

The committe worked for the next several months and on 25 January 1985 produced a remarkable report titled "On the Situation of Homophile Citizens of the GDR." It argued that gay people in East Germany had a right to feel at home in socialist society and that the East German constitution forbade "discrimination against homophile citizens." It acknowledged both the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and prejucides that festered in East German society. The paper discussed the extraordinary suicide rate among gay people, remarking that it was four to five times higher than the rest of the population. Adopting activists' language, the academics wrote that the state's "disregard for the personal and sometimes grave social problems of homophiles" had led to "purposefully negative political reactions." [...] In short, East German anti-gay animus came with consequences for gay people and the state alike.

The report made ten suggestions about how to address those problems. It recommended:

that there be more publishing on the topic of homosexuality;

that Humboldt University host a permanent homosexuality research group;

that the government create "consulation centres at the communal level," which would help homosexuals with questions of "way of life," "counselling for family members" of homosexuals, "sexual counselling," suicide counselling, and counselling related to coming out;

that the government change the make-up of existing marriage and sex counselling centres;

that the government review §151, which set a higher age of consent for gay men and lesbians;

that workplace discimination against gay people be examined;

that the government allow coupled lesbians and gay men to live together;

that the government revisit regulations governing the publication of personal advertisements and approval of public events;

that there be research on the situation of older homosexuals;

and that it be examined how living conditions for gay people differ between "metropolis, medium city, town and villages" in the GDR.

[-] Azarova@hexbear.net 15 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Just a few more quotes because I cannot help myself and I feel this history is so important to know. It absolutely shatters any myth that queer rights can only exist within liberal "democracies", and had the GDR and the rest of the socialist world continued to exist, I don't think its unreasonable to believe that these policies would've eventually promulgated to other socialist states. Obviously we have the example of Cuba today, but the GDR was one of the most progressive states in the world on queer issues at the time, at least in policy. Culture obviously has significant lag time, but the GDR attempted to correct for this by a massive education campaign.

On 5 March 1985, the executive of the Marriage and Family Section of the East German Society for Social Hygiene, an agency that oversaw the county's network of marriage and sexual counselling centres, handed down a new decision. Describing homosexuals as "a minority" in need of the heterosexual majority's "goodwill" for the "assertion and recognition of their legitimate interests," the board rejected the view that homosexuality is a medical or psychological condition. Instead it recognized homosexuality as a "biopsychic variant of human sexuality." The board blasted the "one-sided heterosexually oriented environment" in East Germany and the "heterosexually oriented sexual education [that] offers homosexuals no assistance." It concluded by insisting that, "There is no humane alternative to the full recognition of homosexuals as emancipated and equal citizens." The hundreds of marriage and sexual counselling centres around the country began to accept gay and lesbian patients for counselling on medical and psychological concerns specific to their sexuality. [...]

The regime was also quite aggressive in its response to HIV and AIDS. Unlike in West Germany, the disease spread at a sluggish pace in the East. Not until 1986 was there a single HIV infection in East Berlin, and not until 1987 was there a case of AIDS. The government also worked to educate East Germans about the virus. Working circles and state-sanctioned groups organized jount programming to spread information about the disease. By 20 June 1985, there were five AIDS consulting centres in various cities.

tl;dr: 1990 worst year of my life, nazi successor state ate the only good germany to have ever existed right after it did a bunch of gay shit germany-cool

[-] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I thought this was interesting so I did some random digging around. First I found a lot of frothing at the mouth anti communist stuff about how apparently the KGB/Stasi invented AIDS denialism in the early 80s by claiming it was engineered by the US. TBH there is a window of time when that was not an unreasonable thing to have believed. But there were no relevant leads in there.

Also found this: Folland J. “Not Even the Highest Wall Can Stop AIDS”: Expertise and Viral Politics at the German-German Border. Central European History. 2023 (paywalled but available on sci-hub; search by DOI). It isn't as anti-communist as the title suggests. Likely the citations provide some interesting points to jump off for a german reader. The main narrative is not in contradiction to the information you present.

I think it does suggest some good questions though as to the extent that the slower start of HIV/AIDS in GDR has to do with attitudes towards LGBTQ people. Have to remember that while HIV/AIDS is considered in the west to be a condition highly associated with MSM, this is not the case globally, and an informed person in early/mid 80s GDR would not assume their population would follow the western trend, to the extent it was even real.

passage from “Not Even the Highest Wall Can Stop AIDS”

In addition to white East German men who identified as gay or bisexual, the other group most affected by HIV/AIDS in the GDR consisted of students and guest workers from sub-Saharan Africa.31 In East Germany between 1986 and 1990, there were approximately 200 confirmed cases of HIV in citizens of African countries. Out of the dozen or so who got sick with AIDS during their stay, many died in East German hospitals.32 News of their deaths was urgently communicated to the highest levels of the government and the SED.33 Their encounters with the East German state, moreover, were in many ways shaped by the ways in which East German efforts to combat AIDS were initially framed as an aspect of socialist solidarity with Africa and with the rest of the state-socialist world.34 In the mid- to late 1980s, East German health officials made a concerted effort to help establish and (they hoped) ultimately lead a Warsaw Pact–based collective effort geared toward AIDS research and prevention. Socialist countries fighting the epidemic together would mean, according to Soviet and East German representatives, a strong stance against AIDS-related discrimination.35 It also meant that Warsaw Pact countries would be able to lobby together at the WHO for funds to be diverted to AIDS prevention and other programs that were “in the interest of health care in socialist countries and our friends in the developing world.”36

These were (potentially) meaningful symbolic gestures of socialist solidarity with the “third world,” but there were practical gestures as well. In some instances, local officials and school administrators sent letters up the SED chain of command seeking assurances that foreign students who had tested positive for HIV would be allowed to remain in the country and receive medical care.37 Correspondence that took place prior to 1987 about for- eign students and workers who had tested positive for HIV was concerned mostly with the logistics of providing treatment. When a Zambian student of agricultural sciences at a regional college in Gera tested positive in 1985 for what were then called LAV/HTLV-III anti- bodies, for example, the Minister for Health filed a report that mentioned neither the indi- vidual’s immigration status nor any ongoing contact between the ministry and the Zambian embassy about the student’s condition. Instead, the student was referred to the Central AIDS Consultation Center at Charité Hospital in Berlin for further assessment and, potentially, long-term care.38 Likewise, around the same time, the Ministry of Health issued instructions regarding the care of foreign AIDS patients in which the ministry’s (official) priorities included making specialized medical care available as efficiently as possible, guarding patient privacy, and being sensitive to cultural differences. Any decisions about a patient’s repatriation, the document stated, would need to be made in consultation with Ministry of Health representatives and with doctors and administrators at the hospital where the patient was being treated.39

And also found s short, interesting primary document. AIDS in East Germany, an account of a visit to GDR published in 1988 BMJ. It is comporting with the title of the previous article with the photo, which I also included.

fulltext BMJ article

AIDS in East Germany

Infection with HIV is rare in the German Democratic Republic, with only 48 known carriers and seven cases of AIDS. These figures were given to British health care workers on a recent seven day visit to the country organised by the London-Berlin (GDR) Commiittee.

Two main factors seem to have limited the transmission of the virus. Firstly, there are very few intravenous drug users. The penalties for dealing in drugs are high and there is careful scrutiny of border traffic. The authorities state that “there are almost no intravenous drug users,” although other drug misuse occurs. Secondly, in East Germany imported blood products have not been used to treat patients with haemophilia. Of 1300 haemophiliacs tested, only five were positive for the virus, and they had been treated abroad.

The homosexual community is substantial in East Berlin. The old law relating to homosexuality was abolished in 1957, and since then homosexuality has been perfectly legal. At an early stage members of the National AIDS Committee, including the director, Professor Jurgen Grosser, resolved to make contact with homosexuals. It became apparent that homosexual men from West Berlin were seeking ‘“clean” partners in the East, and so the risks of unprotected intercourse with these men were carefully explained. So far the AIDS epidemic seems not to have affected homosexual men in East Germany to any great extent.

Compulsory AIDS tests are carried out on three main groups of people—namely, donors of blood, semen, or transplanted organs; foreign students; and prisoners.

Nine people positive for the virus have been identified. among 1-5 million blood donors, and 500000 tests have been per- formed for other indications. Compulsory screening has not reduced the number of people coming forward to donate blood.

‘There are significant numbers of foreign students pursuing higher training in East Germany and compulsory tests and certifica- tion are required for stays of longer than three months.

Currently the prison authorities do not supply condoms for the use of prisoners, and we were not provided with data on the prevalence of homosexuality or seropositivity among the prison population.

Public awareness of the AIDS problem seems high, and our impression was that a vigorous and thoughtful education campaign had been mounted as the result of careful preparation.

—N J COOLING, Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge CB1 SEF

source: AIDS in East Germany (BMJ. 1988 Nov 26)

So I think both of those are showing a bigger picture of HIV/AIDS that is more commensurate with the realities in the 80s. The idea of "gay plague" or GRID is a nasty western concept to begin with, and has from the first moment been disputed.

Reading what you posted was very interesting, thank you.

[-] edie@lemmy.encryptionin.space 3 points 5 days ago

Your link to Wikipedia doesn't work, you must include https:// at the front. Otherwise the link will be to the current instance.

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[-] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 3 points 4 days ago

Thank you are right. Don't know how that ended up in my clipboard.

[-] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 4 points 5 days ago

that Humboldt University host a permanent homosexuality research group;

That one sounded framiliar. Prior to WW2, Berlin nurtured LGBT liberation. In the west this was erased and written over. I have long wondered about USSR, especially GDR and East Berlin. I find no answers in any of this. Was the activity you describe completely disconnected, like how in the west the "new left" was severed from the "old"? In the 1980s, it was well within living memory.

But the idea of Humboldt University being the a location of academia relating to LGBTQ people was originated at least as far back as the 1930s. Here is a page from HU (Wayback machine, archived in 2005) describing: Berlin and its Sexological Heritage.

Not a perfect source, just the one I was able to dig up. The story it recounts is basically accurate but far from comprehensive.

But the reason it sounded framiliar to me is that HU did eventually give institutional support to LGBT academia. I would be curious about the continuities that likely exist between what you said and that coming into being.

[-] Azarova@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

First of all, thank you for the replies and interest! Second, sorry for the late reply, I didn't have time to give it the attention it deserved until recently.

Was the activity you describe completely disconnected, like how in the west the "new left" was severed from the "old"?

Unfortunately the vast majority of my knowledge of queer history lies in the "Hirschfeld era", for lack of a better phrase. Pretty much everything I know about the GDR queer experience comes from States of Liberation, which is the only major English language source on the subject I am aware of, but I haven't dug into this in a while. There seems to be a fair bit more literature on the subject in German, but I unfortunately cannot read German, let alone at an academic level. The only mentions of Hirschfeld Huneke makes in the book outside of his brief historical context of pre-war Germany is to two groups in the FRG, the "Magnus Hirschfeld Centre in Hamburg" and the "Magnus Hirschfeld Society." Hirschfeld's work would've certainly been in living memory, but only relatively recently (as in the past few decades) has there been a great deal of scholarship on his work as parts of his archive are found in various estates. Heike Bauer's The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture talks a bit about that. The caveat being that I can only speak from an English-reader's perspective. All this to say that I do not know the answer as to whether queer GDR citizens were looking back towards Hirschfeld specifically. He certainly would've made a good figure to turn back to especially for the GDR as the Insitute for Sexual Science was documented to at times allow Comintern members to reside there. States of Liberation is on Anna's Archive if you want to take a look yourself, but a Ctrl+F through it only brings up those couple of instances where Hirschfeld is mentioned aside from his activity pre-war.

[-] SuperZutsuki@hexbear.net 7 points 5 days ago

I tracked down the original source of that article screenshot: FTM June 1990, page 3

[-] Azarova@hexbear.net 8 points 5 days ago

Holy shit I can't believe it's digitally archived. What a fins, thank you!

[-] SuperZutsuki@hexbear.net 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I found it through this site

https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/

[-] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 4 points 5 days ago

gold-communist the nerd of nerdery that can't be faked

[-] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 4 points 5 days ago

Berlin psychology professor Reiner Werner with writing a book titled Homosexuality: A Call to Knowledge and Tolerance, which appeared in 1987. Its initial run of 50,000 copies sold out in a matter of weeks.

I was also interested in that. As far as I can tell, the english-translated title only exists here, the book is called Homosexualität : Herausforderung an Wissen und Toleranz. I did not conduct extensive diving for it, but seems not to exist in any digitized form that I can detect.

However it is available for a few euros or pounds in paper copy. Which supports the idea that it was widely circulated. Hopefully, someone will take one of these and do a good scanning job to put it online, for the sake of history. A seller listing the table of contents is the best I found

Homosexualität TOC (translated by firefox)

Output: 1.Edition * Scope/Format: 187 pages : illustrations, graph. Darst. ; 21 cm * Notes: Literaturverz. Pages 179 - 184 * Year of publication: 1987 * Type of cover and original sale price: cartoned : M 25.00, M 18.00 (GDR-Pr.) * Subject: Psychology ; 14 Sociology, Society Table of Contents

Introduction 7
Fears of contact 14
Suffering in the force field between culture and nature 20
Consequences of lazy compromises 26
Coming out 29
Homosexuality between social constraints and self-development 37
SIGMUND FREUD or game of hide-and-seek with the libido 41 Theoretical preliminary remarks 41 Mechanisms of adaptation and its importance for homosexuality 52
On the thesis of seducibility 65
About Lot and Torment of Ageing 76
Gay partnerships and environment 83 Solid partnerships without a common residence 87 Fixed partnerships with common residence 89 change of connection partnerships 90 Habitual partnerships 92 Final observations 93
Problematic partner behavior of homosexuals 95 Partnership with unilateral-altruistic features 97 Partnership with infantile hypochondric traits 98 Partnership with demonstrative-hysteroid trains 100 Partnership with fearful-defensive features 103 Partnership with tuny-ascetic features 106
Homosexuality in the discord between partnership and adaptation 109
Terms, Facts, Classification of Homosexual Relationships 117
Female homosexuality and Lesbicity 128
Homosexual devotions 133 pedophilia, pederasty 138 fetishism 140 transvestism 141 voyeurism 143 Exhibitionism 144 Masochism and sadism 146
Transsexuality 148
Homosexuality in constraints of social needs 152 Preliminary remarks 152 Specific consultation centres 154 Creation of communication possibilities 156 Processing of housing applications 158 Community of goods instead of ? Marriage" 158 On the age of protection of young people 160 advertisements as a means of dating 161 professional suitability issues 162 journalism and homosexuality 164 Integration of homosexuals ? complex social concern 167
Postscript 169
Addendum: Viewpoints 172 Helga E. Hörz (Berlin) ? Ethical Positions on Homosexuality 172 Günther Dörner (Berlin) ? Hormone-dependent brain development and homosexuality 175
Bibliography 181
Catalogue 185 neat copy, cover and book block with small reading tracks, book block according to age browned, overall condition: good * Publisher: Berlin : Verlag Volk u. Health * Binding: paperback.

Judging by the above, he is very influenced by the post-WW2, nazi-influenced western ideas about LGBTQ people, rather than the pre-nazi Berlin progress.

Reiner Werner - Wikipedia (de -> en via firefox) gives a small clue regarding my questions in other comments:

In 1988, together with Marcus Schütz, he founded a “Magnus Hirschfeld Working Group” at the Club of Cultural Workers in Berlin, which had to cease its work under this name in 1991 under the pressure of the West Berlin namesake.

[-] Azarova@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Judging by the above, he is very influenced by the post-WW2, nazi-influenced western ideas about LGBTQ people, rather than the pre-nazi Berlin progress.

I didn't include it as I felt I was already getting very wordy, but Huneke mentions that the book was widely criticized. It's moreso that the state sponsored a study at all that was the groundbreaking part. Quoting Huneke on page 209,

True, the book had numerous problems and was widely criticized. One Stasi report noted that, "among hetero- and homosexual individuals there is an overwhelmingly deprecating view" of the book. Not only had Werner devoted the vast majority of the text to gay men, as Ursula Sillge, among others, complained, he had also invented a nonsense term "lesbicity" ("Lesbizität") with which to discuss female homosexuality. Yet, for all its flaws, the book signalled a rupture with decades-old taboos.

And even though he was cooking up some wack ass ideas, it was the first domino in a serious of efforts towards public education.

Other authors pressured the regime to adopt school texts that addressed homosexuality more tolerantly. A doctor in Jena campaigned for the publication of a book that would help the parents of gay and lesbian children. Although authorities initially resisted his entreaties, by 1987 his manuscript was under consideration at a press.

A state sponsored text aimed at parents of queer children! In 1987!!! This is so wild to think about given the tantrum the right wing in the US is throwing over the mere implication that children could be queer 40 years later.

[-] edie@lemmy.encryptionin.space 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Hopefully, someone will take one of these and do a good scanning job to put it online, for the sake of history

It seems to be a softcover, so it should be pretty easy, just put it through a flatbed scanner. If you want to you can make a post at !book_requests@hexbear.net, I might even get to it some day.

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