Still have yet to see an instance of a zionist fragging their fellow war criminals before taking out the trash

I'll grant that the use of "very" there is overstating it, I have a tendency to do that, but a number of people here have mentioned that a noticable amount of people in their orgs cite him as a factor in them starting to move left and organize. I didn't mean to imply that he's the end all be all of moving someone left. He tries to move people into spaces where other socialists pick these people up and keep moving them along and keep them engaged in the work. That, plus seemingly the entire mainstream media trying to paint him as a demon means he's not completely ineffectual. The political establishment is afraid of him to some degree, maybe if only because he's started to really lean in to promoting candidates.

Echoing what TheFinalCapitalist said, Hasan is for left liberals and progressives begining their journey towards becoming communists. He is acutely aware of his role in this capacity and therefore his message is tailored as such. He isn't perfect and has his share of bad takes, but he is ultimately a ~~very~~ valuable piece of the pipeline pushing people leftward and encouraging them to organize IRL via unionizing and getting involved with orgs like the DSA and PSL. If you're already on Lemmygrad/Hexbear, you probably don't have anything to learn from him. You may or may not like his content as commentary or entertainment, it's certainly not for everyone.

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.

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.

What do you mean by macros? Do you have shortcuts for like specific words or phrases you use commonly or something like that?

i thought that was tom scott for a second

Going to shamelessly link my comment thread from the other post about the history of how the GDR suddenly became progressive on queer rights: https://hexbear.net/comment/7179417

yeah they tear the shit out of each other. i occasionally lurk through nazi accounts on twitter and they consantly call each other all kinds of slurs for being the slightly wrong type of fascist or not supporting their very specific LARPy ethnostate based on the writings of a single obscure crank or whatever. i specifically remember one saying something to the effect of "[George Lincoln] Rockwellian racist liberalism has got to go". they infight literally all the time because they're obsessed with purity, it just doesn't penetrate the general culture as much because it happens between a million small accounts shit flinging at each other instead of among much larger and established figures like what happens on the left. although obviously that's changing a bit with big right wing influencers yeling at each other lately.

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

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.