East Germany in the 1970s
Lesbian & gay movement blossoms
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 20
By Leslie Feinberg
"The legal situation of GDR [East German] gays improved
considerably in 1968 with the elimination of Paragraph 175,"
historian Jim Steakley concluded in his published research. He
credited the abolition of the almost century-old Prussian
anti-homosexual law to the pioneering work of Dr. Rudolph
Klimmer, a gay communist physician.
This move, part of an overhaul of the criminal code,
elevated the GDR to the same progressive level as Hungary,
Poland and Czechoslovakia, which also decriminalized
homosexuality in the mid-1960s. (Body Politic, December
1976-January 1977)
Writing in 1976, the Canadian researcher described an East
German gay population characterized by long-term relationships,
apparently more so than in West Germany or the United States.
"The durability of such relationships may also reflect the
relative lack of anomie and competitiveness in socialist
society, yet the prevalence of gay couples is all the more
striking in light of the fact that at 50 percent and still
climbing, the GDR's divorce rate is the highest in the
world.
"Although it deserves a more detailed analysis," he
continued, "GDR citizens properly interpret the divorce rate as
an index of women's emancipation rather than social collapse.
In any case, the gay couples are seldom burdened by the
ideology of pure monogamy, and affairs on the side as well as
casual sexual encounters are standard.
"Parks, beaches (where nude bathing is widespread), and
other public places have never been the locus of police
entrapment, and arrests for public indecency are virtually
unknown."
However, one last thorn of legal discrimination remained in
the body of East German law. While the age of sexual consent
was the same for same-sex and heterosexual minors, under the
provisions of Paragraphs 150 and 151, homosexual adults
penalized for relationships with under-age youths could be
sentenced to three years behind bars, while heterosexuals only
faced two-year sentences.
Steakley met with Klimmer during his research in the GDR.
"Dr. Klimmer regards it as his greatest success," he reported,
"that these paragraphs explicitly contain a provision allowing
prison terms to be suspended in favor of probation, and court
practice shows that this option has been widely adopted in
cases which do not involve assault or coercion."
Before the GDR was overturned, even this legal inequity was
removed.
Housing and employment, however, continued to be sites of
struggles for equality after 1961. Partly this was due to lack
of resources in the workers' state that made the early goal of
socialism--equal distribution--difficult to attain. And age-old
prejudice was also an obstacle.
Steakley gave voice to the frustration of gays with the
GDR's governmental housing agency, which allocated space based
on family size. This made it virtually impossible for single
men to rent more than a studio apartment. But he did not
examine this social crisis out of its economic context.
"Housing is still at a premium in the GDR, and it was only
in 1975 that Berlin, for example, attained the per-capita level
of housing that it had prior to World War II," he explained,
"In order to keep the country from sinking below its current
zero population growth, the government makes no bones about
rewarding childbirth; and while abortion and contraceptives are
freely available, premarital sex and unmarried motherhood are
promoted in pop songs."
While the housing crunch Steakley described in 1976
constrained singles, he found that gays in East Germany were
"optimistic that the GDR's ongoing, high-priority construction
program will open new options within the next decade."
When examining the housing crisis in the GDR, it's important
to reiterate that, by law, rent could not exceed 10 percent of
an individual's income.
And when it came to jobs, Steakley stressed, "homosexuals
are occasionally fired by a homophobic superior. But gays have
successfully argued their cases in special GDR workers' courts
and had their jobs restored with back pay."
Unlike a capitalist economic system, where wages are always
in danger of being driven down by an "army of unemployed"
competing against the employed, jobs are a right in a planned
economy. Steakley stressed, "In a country with the right (not
the obligation) to work and a serious labor shortage, job
performance has become the sole criterion for hiring and
firing."
Flowering of lesbian, gay subculture
In his 10 pages of results of a study of the lesbian and gay
movement in the GDR, published in 1989, researcher John Parsons
explained that during the 1950s and 1960s an underground gay
subculture had developed. But, he continued, "The 1970s and
early 1980s were a time when this lesbian and gay subculture
grew and flowered, creating a broad self-consciousness and
assertiveness." (OUT/LOOK, Summer 1989)
The Berlin Association for Homosexual Concerns (HIB) was
established in the spring of 1972 by both women and men. They
organized public and private discussion groups and programs,
held film showings and book readings, and hosted speakers from
the fields of medicine, psychology and sociology.
Steakley added an important point about the class character
of the association. "Unlike most gay organizations in West
Germany, the HIB is largely made up of workers and professional
people rather than students." Two of the three members of the
steering committee belonged to the Communist Party.
Parsons noted the role of women. "Parallel with these
efforts, lesbians and feminists were organizing their own
discussion groups centered on questions of women's
liberation."
He added that although public discussion focused on male
same-sexuality, "One fact that is striking, however, is that
lesbian and gay cultural institutions and friendship circles in
East Germany historically have been integrated much more across
gender lines than those in either West Germany or the United
States."
Steakley, writing closer to the period of the formation of
HIB, said that while the organization waited until 1976 to
apply for state recognition, "it by no means had an underground
status during its first four years."
In its first year, the group approached the Ministry of
Health to request public meeting space. But the HIB delegation
angrily withdrew its request after a psychiatrist offered to
turn those weekly meetings into group therapy.
So the group turned to the national labor union--the FDGB.
Steakley reported, "The FDGB was unable to provide rooms but
urged the HIB to continue its search, noting that gays had
legitimate concerns and should not be required to continue
meeting in private homes."
He added that activists protested a lack of protection from
anti-gay bashers to the Berlin police "and the HIB got a
positive response."
The group also lodged complaints with city administrators
when one of Berlin's gay bars was closed in 1975. "Protests to
municipal authorities brought assurances that the measure was
not intentionally anti-gay but part of a larger urban renewal
program designed to enhance the capital's 'cosmopolitan
character' which would soon lead to the opening of several new
bars 'for every taste.'"
And Parsons pointed out that during the 1970s, a number of
gay-identified clubs and cafes opened up in major East German
cities.
Answering the "Rat Man"
On June 1, 1976, HIB organized a very successful forum
publicly sponsored by the Urania Society--a public education
agency.
The event, a talk by Dr. Peter G. Klemm entitled "Sex Roles
in Socialist Society," filled the meeting hall to capacity. Of
the 500 who attended, only an estimated one-third were gay or
lesbian.
Klemm's speech and the discussion that followed demonstrated
a progressive current in a raging polemic against the work of
Dr. Gunter Domer, a Berlin endocrinology researcher dubbed "Rat
Man" by HIB activists.
Dorner claimed to be able to produce "homosexual" or
"heterosexual" litters of rats based on injecting pregnant rats
at different stages in the gestation period. Steakley
emphasized, "Dormer's experiments raise the specter of pregnant
women being tested for hormonal 'normalcy' and given booster
shots if the results indicate that the fetus is
'homosexual.'"
East German gays and lesbians recalled all too well that
under capitalism, the fascist eugenics wing of biological
determinism rose to power with Nazism. But in the GDR, Dorner's
theories and the faction of science he represented did not
prevail.
Klemm argued against drawing broad generalizations about
human sexuality based on animal research. His eloquent
elaboration of this position, clarifying even today, appeared
in a 1975 article in Fur Dich, a women's magazine with the
largest circulation in the GDR.
"It is one of many human achievements to have liberated
sexuality from its function as biological reproduction and to
have made it into an independent source of pleasure and life
enrichment. Once we have acknowledged this and accepted the
fundamentally human, and therefore social, function of
sexuality, we must also grant that the source of pleasure
cannot be set by biological criteria; the 'wrong' taste in
pleasure cannot be declared a 'sickness' in need of
treatment.
"Homosexuals suffer only in an intolerant milieu!
Homosexuality is a form of 'deviance' only in terms of
traditional sex-role concepts! Any halfway imaginative
heterosexual couple deviates from the 'natural'--e.g., the
sexual behavior of rats--just as much as a homosexual
couple.
"It is therefore quite proper to doubt whether the problem
of bi-, homo- or hyposexuality can be actually solved with a
shot of hormones in the fourth month of pregnancy, or even
should be. Changes in the traditional concept of sex roles are
certainly the more correct and above all the humane approach,
and these remarks are intended as a contribution to that goal."
(Body Politic)
Steakley concluded in 1976 that these views by Dr. Klemm
were "a sample of the progressive psychological standpoint
which is becoming increasingly influential in the GDR. It is
perhaps significant that the founding of the gay movement has
come since 1971, when the government announced that the GDR had
achieved the level of a 'developed socialist society' and could
now begin to lay the groundwork for the transition to
communism.
"Not just experts but gay people from all walks of life are
playing a role in the broad, democratic discussion of the
socialist personality and sexuality, feminism and the future of
the family."
That was East Germany in the 1970s. But by the 1980s,
efforts by the Com munist Party and the state created a
historic milestone for same-sex emancipation.
Next: 1980s East Germany: stunning social gains in
workers' state.
Reprinted from the Nov. 11, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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