The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany by Craig Griffiths (review)

In 1973 a man wrote to the West German broadcaster WDR to complain that a recent film about homosexuality had portrayed the “scum of humanity” (76). The film was Rosa von Praunheim’s legendary It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but Rather the Society in Which He Lives, often considered the prime mover of West Germany’s 1970s gay and lesbian liberation movement. But the man was not an archconservative. Rather, he was a self-identified homophile who thought that Praunheim’s depictions of effeminate, sex-starved gay men were nothing more than vicious stereotypes. He was not alone. While some activists saw the film as a rousing call to arms, others denounced the movie in vitriolic terms.

The conflict over Praunheim’s film that so inflamed viewers is just one of the many ambivalences of West German gay activism that Craig Griffiths, senior lecturer in modern history at Manchester Metropolitan University, unearths in The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany. The first English-language monograph to focus on West Germany’s gay liberation movement, it is part of a recent outpouring of interest in queer activist movements on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, Griffiths’s is the first of at least four English-language monographs that will be published in the next couple of years on queer life and politics in West Germany.

As scholarly attention has turned to histories of activist movements in the United States and western Europe, historians have become increasingly interested in deconstructing the triumphal narratives that have attended the recent successes of those movements. Yet even as queer scholars highlight how such triumphal narratives normalize the violence and exclusion that frequently result from such change, they often essentialize the history of gay activism as a serial battle between radicals who push for true liberation and moderates who accept conformity. In teasing out the ambivalences of West Germany’s gay liberation movement, one of Griffiths’s great innovations is to reject this binary, instead highlighting how even the most radical and progressive of queer projects are shot through with gay shame, respectability politics, and an attachment to triumphal narratives.

His analysis of the so-called Tuntenstreit (fairies’ fight) exemplifies this approach. After Praunheim’s film premiered in West Berlin in 1971, a group of queer activists began meeting and named themselves the Homosexual Action West Berlin (HAW). The group proclaimed itself a radical gay liberation movement opposed to both the staid tactics of older homophiles and the gay subculture’s creeping commercialization. Starting in June 1972, it invited activists from around Europe for an annual week of partying and public demonstration.

At the legendary 1973 gathering, squabbles broke out between some of the activists and so-called Tunten (a term that denoted effeminate gay men), who wore drag during the groups’ demonstration in central West Berlin. The dispute continued well past summer, splintering the HAW. On the one side were the Tunten, who organized a feminist caucus and argued that deconstructing gender must take precedence over class in the group’s work. On the other side were leftists who viewed gay liberation as a subset of the larger socialist struggle. Griffiths documents how vitriolic these disputes became, quoting some members who denounced the Tunten as “a new spawning of upper-class bluster” that distracted from “actual” problems (173). At the same time, these accusations smacked of homophiles’ respectability politics, essentially telling effeminate men to “keep their gender transgression hidden” (172). Moreover, the Tunten’s feminist group, populated primarily by men, left the HAW’s lesbian members cold. Griffiths relays how one author accused the Tunten of “unpolitical enjoyment of grotesque-theatrical performances” (176).

Which, then, of these groups was the genuinely progressive, which the staid moderates? Griffiths’s embrace of ambivalence rejects this sort of binarism. His analysis of the Tuntenstreit and the divisions it spawned...