The Gay Movement in 1970s West Germany: Liberation in its Multi-dimensional Context

Griffiths, Craig ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3910-5267 (2022) The Gay Movement in 1970s West Germany: Liberation in its Multi-dimensional Context. In: Rethinking Social Movements after '68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond. Berghahn Books, pp. 217-237. ISBN 9781800735651

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Abstract

Perhaps more than any other social movement in the long 1970s, the gay movement has often been pigeonholed as an “exotic” or “single-issue” or merely “cultural” phenomenon, testament to the implicit skepticism in some quarters over its political relevance. Seeking to differentiate a “left-alternative milieu” from “new social movements,” Dieter Rucht categorizes what he refers to as the “coming out of gays and lesbians” as a “cultural-expressive” aspect of the long 1970s, as opposed to its more “political-instrumental” counterparts. In fact, the gay liberation movement, for the most part, was driven forward by activists with a transformational agenda: theirs was no narrow vision of gradually increasing tolerance bit by bit, politely encouraging same-sex desiring men and women out of the closet. Instead of single-issue politics, activists diagnosed homosexual oppression as inseparable from the structural injustice of the capitalist system and hence intimately connected with other forms of social and racial exclusion. In one of the earliest accounts of the West German gay movement, Andreas Pareik, a member of the Homosexual Action West Berlin, titled his work “Struggle for an identity.” This struggle for an identity was never only sexual—or only cultural—but always also political. Referring to the gay movement as a “single-issue movement” trivializes and erases the multidirectional form of activists’ political and emotional attachments.