Lesbian and Gay Rights Blossom
East Germany in the 1970s
Workers
World, November 11, 2004
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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 Communist Party and the state created a historic milestone for
same-sex emancipation.
Next: 1980s East Germany: stunning social gains in
workers’ state.
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