Glad to be Gay Behind the Wall: Gay and Lesbian Activism in 1970s East Germany

Abstract

��� The Gartenstrasse swimming pool lay tucked away in a sleepy corner of East Berlin, fenced in on two sides by the Berlin Wall. Its sauna was a well-known meeting ground for gay men, who sweated underneath a magnificently homoerotic stained-glass window designed by the Expressionist Max Pechstein. In 1971, in this apt municipal space, eighteen-year-old Michael Eggert and twenty-one-year-old Peter Rausch began a friendship which would lead to the founding of Eastern Europe’s first gay liberation group. From 1973 to 1979, the HIB (Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin, or Homosexual Interest Group Berlin) organized regular meetings, discussions, parties, social events, made films and lobbied the authorities for the recognition of gay and lesbian rights. Its events were attended by up to 200 people, and it attracted the attention of numerous socialist authority figures, including the police and the Stasi. Yet despite these successes, the HIB is largely unknown. 1 When discussed at all, it is as part of the pre-history of the more widespread gay and lesbian activism of the 1980s, much of which took place under the mantle of the Protestant Church. Such church-based activism fits neatly into the dominant narrative of state socialism, which stresses growing disillusion and opposition in the 1980s, culminating with communism’s collapse in 1989. This article argues that the HIB was not simply a forerunner of the activism of the 1980s, since it also disrupts such narratives and draws our attention to important aspects of the history of late state socialism, as yet unwritten. The recent burst of historiographical interest in the 1970s has largely bypassed Eastern Europe. It has generally been assumed that the post-1968 social movements of the West had no counterpart on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Stefan Wolle, for example, describes East Germany’s 1968 as a ‘failed revolution’ which was easily crushed by the state authorities. 2 However, new research suggests that the social, cultural and even political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s left their mark on Eastern Europe too. In particular, work on the Eastern European ‘1968’ and its aftermath has suggested that activists were well-informed about events in the West. 3 Furthermore, this new literature points out that the mixture of