Alaskaball [comrade/them, any]
Main, home of the dope ass bear.The GDR pivoted on queer rights in the 1980s and enacted a massive series of reforms to essentially legalize queer existence and developed education programs to combat stigma. This guy is definitely a lib, but here's a good article about it for anyone interested: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/gay-liberation-behind-iron-curtain/
For further reading, he wrote a book called States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany by Samuel Clowes Huneke. The last chapter before the epilogue covers this policy turn and the public pressure campaign that spurred it.
For a brief summary, the queer liberation movement in the GDR eventually ended up organizing alongside the church after they were rebuffed for going through more official means. The organizing under the church began to swell with membership, and the security services began to grow concerned with the partnership.
Membership continued to swell and activists began to coordinate strategy at national meetings. They soon agreed on a set of wide-ranging policy goals, including better access to housing, abolition of the higher age of consent for homosexual sex, ability to serve in the military, and better access to sexual health services. [...]
Under pressure to stem the tide of gay liberation, the secret police began debating new strategies. Departments exchanged flurries of memos debating what course of action the government should pursue. In 1985 the Stasi finally produced a new set of guidelines on how to prevent what it termed “the political misuse of homosexuals.” Some of its recommendations were unsurprising, such as ramping up surveillance of gay activist leaders. But its final recommendation was entirely novel. It insisted that the government find “resolution[s] to homosexuals’ humanitarian problems.” That is, the Stasi decided to actually address activists’ demands.
The phrase "political misuse of homosexuals" is kind of goofy, but the Stasi began to realize that the marginalized nature of queer people within socialist society made them a vector for subversion via blackmail. If the state removed the legal restrictions, such as the possibility of being removed from positions for one's sexuality or gender identity, then blackmailing queer people was no longer a possible vector for Western subversion. This tactic is still used to this very day! The zionist entity does this to Palestinians. Further, addressing the demands of the activists meant that the relationship between the queer community and the church would no longer have reason to exist.
Thus began a series of genuinely radical changes in East German society. The state-censored newspapers, which for decades had hardly ever mentioned homosexuality, suddenly started printing dozens of stories about gay men and lesbians. The government also freed periodicals to accept personal advertisements from gay men and lesbians looking for partners.
The state tasked Berlin psychology professor Reiner Werner with writing a book titled Homosexuality: A Call to Knowledge and Tolerance, which appeared in 1987. Its initial run of 50,000 copies sold out in a matter of weeks. It would also approve a gay film, Coming Out, that premiered on November 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall fell.
In addition, the state began granting official recognition to gay groups, such as the Sunday Club, a secular activist collective run by Sillge that had been meeting in East Berlin since the early 1980s. And it authorized East Germany’s first gay discos, such as Die Busche, a club that still exists today.
The government even allowed gay chapters within the Free German Youth (FDJ), the state’s official youth scouting organization, and mandated that all FDJ members attend educational sessions dealing with homosexuality. All of a sudden, East German youth were required to attend meetings of gay groups such as the Sunday Club. [...]
In 1987 the East German Supreme Court struck down the law that set a higher age of consent for gay men and lesbians. The following year, the military allowed gay soldiers, reversing a policy the government had instituted in the 1950s.
I tracked down the original source of that article screenshot: FTM June 1990, page 3
Holy shit I can't believe it's digitally archived. What a fins, thank you!
I found it through this site
https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/
Quoting now from the aforementioned States of Liberation,
As gears ground within the Stasi, Sillge and her comrades continued to pressure the regime. In her book, she recalls that a group of "despairing lesbians" wrote to the Ministery of the Interior in 1984 demanding "expert rationales for [government] decisions to decline" homosexual petitions. Soon thereafter the women were granted an audience with officials at the Berlin Magistrate, who told them that the matter first had to be "scientifically researched." As a consequence of that discussion, the prorector for social sciences at Berlin's Humboldt University convened a research group on homosexuality, which began meeting in the autumn of 1984.
The committe worked for the next several months and on 25 January 1985 produced a remarkable report titled "On the Situation of Homophile Citizens of the GDR." It argued that gay people in East Germany had a right to feel at home in socialist society and that the East German constitution forbade "discrimination against homophile citizens." It acknowledged both the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and prejucides that festered in East German society. The paper discussed the extraordinary suicide rate among gay people, remarking that it was four to five times higher than the rest of the population. Adopting activists' language, the academics wrote that the state's "disregard for the personal and sometimes grave social problems of homophiles" had led to "purposefully negative political reactions." [...] In short, East German anti-gay animus came with consequences for gay people and the state alike.
The report made ten suggestions about how to address those problems. It recommended:
- that there be more publishing on the topic of homosexuality;
- that Humboldt University host a permanent homosexuality research group;
- that the government create "consulation centres at the communal level," which would help homosexuals with questions of "way of life," "counselling for family members" of homosexuals, "sexual counselling," suicide counselling, and counselling related to coming out;
- that the government change the make-up of existing marriage and sex counselling centres;
- that the government review §151, which set a higher age of consent for gay men and lesbians;
- that workplace discimination against gay people be examined;
- that the government allow coupled lesbians and gay men to live together;
- that the government revisit regulations governing the publication of personal advertisements and approval of public events;
- that there be research on the situation of older homosexuals;
- and that it be examined how living conditions for gay people differ between "metropolis, medium city, town and villages" in the GDR.
Just a few more quotes because I cannot help myself and I feel this history is so important to know. It absolutely shatters any myth that queer rights can only exist within liberal "democracies", and had the GDR and the rest of the socialist world continued to exist, I don't think its unreasonable to believe that these policies would've eventually promulgated to other socialist states. Obviously we have the example of Cuba today, but the GDR was one of the most progressive states in the world on queer issues at the time, at least in policy. Culture obviously has significant lag time, but the GDR attempted to correct for this by a massive education campaign.
On 5 March 1985, the executive of the Marriage and Family Section of the East German Society for Social Hygiene, an agency that oversaw the county's network of marriage and sexual counselling centres, handed down a new decision. Describing homosexuals as "a minority" in need of the heterosexual majority's "goodwill" for the "assertion and recognition of their legitimate interests," the board rejected the view that homosexuality is a medical or psychological condition. Instead it recognized homosexuality as a "biopsychic variant of human sexuality." The board blasted the "one-sided heterosexually oriented environment" in East Germany and the "heterosexually oriented sexual education [that] offers homosexuals no assistance." It concluded by insisting that, "There is no humane alternative to the full recognition of homosexuals as emancipated and equal citizens." The hundreds of marriage and sexual counselling centres around the country began to accept gay and lesbian patients for counselling on medical and psychological concerns specific to their sexuality. [...]
The regime was also quite aggressive in its response to HIV and AIDS. Unlike in West Germany, the disease spread at a sluggish pace in the East. Not until 1986 was there a single HIV infection in East Berlin, and not until 1987 was there a case of AIDS. The government also worked to educate East Germans about the virus. Working circles and state-sanctioned groups organized jount programming to spread information about the disease. By 20 June 1985, there were five AIDS consulting centres in various cities.
tl;dr: 1990 worst year of my life, nazi successor state ate the only good germany to have ever existed right after it did a bunch of gay shit
Reunification was a tragedy and West Germany shouldn't have existed in the first place.
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The German communists today also call it annexation instead of reunification. I think it couldn't describe the situation any better.
Here is more from wikipedia Paragraph 175. It actually contains the specific text from the image, which relates to the 1987 GDR repeal of P175. But also explains that functionally, the law was not enfrced in GDR since the 1950s. While they continued apace in WG. P175 was not struck from WG until 1994 during the process of reconciling the post-re-unification legal codes. So all of WG can thank GDR for that.
I redacted lightly to make it not too long but the section on WG is pretty interesting if you want to know what kind of difference denazificaiton can make vs not. So you should read the original for that.
::: spoiler partial text of wikipedia Paragraph 175 (part 1; see following comment for part 2
Paragraph 175, known formally as §175 StGB and also referred to as Section 175 in English, was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994.[1] It made sexual acts between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality as well as forms of prostitution and underage sexual abuse. Overall, around 140,000 men were convicted under the law.
[...]
Paragraph 175, known formally as §175 StGB and also referred to as Section 175 in English, was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994.[1] It made sexual acts between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality as well as forms of prostitution and underage sexual abuse. Overall, around 140,000 men were convicted under the law.
Historical overview
Paragraph 175 was adopted in 1871, shortly after Germany was unified. Beginning in the 1890s, sexual reformers fought against the "disgraceful paragraph",[3] and soon won the support of August Bebel, head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD); however, a petition in the Reichstag to abolish Paragraph 175 floundered in 1898.[4] In 1907, a Reichstag Committee decided to broaden the paragraph to make lesbian sexual acts punishable as well, but debates about how to define female sexuality meant the proposal languished and was abandoned.[5] In 1929, another Reichstag Committee decided to repeal Paragraph 175 with the votes of the Social Democrats, the Communist Party (KPD) and the German Democratic Party (DDP); however, the rise of the Nazi Party prevented the implementation of the repeal.[4] Although modified at various times, the paragraph remained part of German law until 1994.[4]
In 1935, the Nazis broadened the law so that the courts could pursue any "lewd act" whatsoever, even one involving no physical contact, such as masturbating next to each other.[6]
[...]
Development in the Soviet occupation zone and in East Germany
[...]
A revision of the criminal code in 1957 made it possible to put aside prosecution of an illegal action that represented no danger to socialist society because of lack of consequence. This removed Paragraph 175 from the effective body of the law, because at the same time the East Berlin Court of Appeal (Kammergericht) decided that all punishments deriving from the old form of Paragraph 175 should be suspended due to the insignificance of the acts to which it had been applied. On this basis, homosexual acts between consenting adults ceased to be punished, beginning in the late 1950s.[34]
On 1 July 1968, the GDR adopted its own code of criminal law. In it § 151 StGB-DDR provided for a sentence up to three years' imprisonment or probation for an adult (18 and over) who engaged in sexual acts with a youth (under 18) of the same sex. This law applied not only to men who have sex with boys but equally to women who have sex with girls.[35]
On 11 August 1987, the Supreme Court of the GDR struck down a conviction under Paragraph 151 on the basis that "homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist society, and the civil rights are warranted to them exactly as to all other citizens." One year later, the Volkskammer (the parliament of the GDR), in its fifth revision of the criminal code, brought the written law in line with what the court had ruled, striking Paragraph 151 without replacement. The act passed into law May 30, 1989. This removed all specific reference to homosexuality from East German criminal law.[36]
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::: spoiler partial text of wikipedia Paragraph 175 (part 2; see previous comment for part 1
Development in West Germany
After World War II, the victorious Allies demanded the abolition of all laws with specifically National Socialist content; however, they left it to West Germany to decide whether or not the expansion of laws regulating male homosexual relationships falling under Paragraph 175 should be left in place. On May 10, 1957, the Federal Constitutional Court upheld the decision to retain the 1935 version, claiming that the paragraph was "not influenced by National Socialist [i.e., Nazi] politics to such a degree that it would have to be abolished in a free democratic state".[38]
Between 1945 and 1969, about 100,000 men were indicted and about 50,000 men sentenced to prison. The rate of convictions for violation of Paragraph 175 rose by 44 percent, and in the 1960s, the number remained as much as four times higher than it had been in the last years of the Weimar Republic.[39] Many arrests, lawsuits, and proceedings in Frankfurt in 1950–1951 had serious consequences.[40] These Frankfurt Homosexual Trials of 1950/51 marked an early climax in the persecution of homosexual men in the Federal Republic of Germany, which showed clear continuities from the Nazi era, but took place under the auspices of the new Adenauer era. They were largely initiated by the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office, using the sex worker Otto Blankenstein as a key witness.[41]
The strong continuities between the Nazi era and postwar West Germany are partly due to the continuity in staffing of the police and judiciary, which was disrupted in East Germany. The retention of the Nazis' legal basis for the charges, however, was due to a conservative Christian political realignment; criminalization was strongly defended by some CDU/CSU politicians such as Franz-Josef Wuermeling and Adolf Süsterhenn. These "Catholic maximalists" faced increasing opposition from Protestants and the more liberal elements within their own party.[42] Similar to the thinking during the Nazi Regime, the government argued that there was a difference between a homosexual man and a homosexual woman, and that because all men were assumed to be more aggressive and predatory than women, lesbianism would not be criminalized. Therefore, it was argued, while lesbianism violated nature, it did not present the same threat to society as did male homosexuality.[39]
[...]
On 23 November 1973, the social-liberal coalition of the SPD and the Free Democratic Party passed a complete reform of the laws concerning sex and sexuality. The paragraph was renamed from "Crimes and misdemeanors against morality" into "Offenses against sexual self-determination", and the word Unzucht ("lewdness") was replaced by the equivalent of the term "sexual acts". Paragraph 175 only retained sex with minors as a qualifying attribute; the age of consent was lowered to 18 (compared to 14 for heterosexual sex).[45]
In 1986 the Green Party and the first openly gay member of the German parliament tried to remove Paragraph 175 together with Paragraph 182. This would have meant a general age of consent of 14 years.[46][failed verification] This was opposed by the CDU, SPD, and FDP,[citation needed] and Paragraph 175 remained a part of German law for eight more years.
Developments after 1990
Deletion of Paragraph 175
In the course of reconciling the legal codes of the two German states after 1990, the Bundestag had to decide whether Paragraph 175 should be abolished entirely (as in the former East Germany) or whether the remaining West German form of the law should be extended to what had now become the eastern portion of the Federal Republic. In 1994, at the end of the period of reconciliation of laws, it was decided – especially in view of the social changes that had occurred in the meantime – to strike Paragraph 175 entirely from the legal code. Paragraph 175 was repealed on 10 March 1994.[47]
[...]
Pardon of the victims
On 17 May 2002 – a date chosen symbolically as "17.5." – the Bundestag passed a supplement to the NS-Aufhebungsgesetz (law on the annulment of national socialist unjust verdicts in the criminal justice [de; fr]).[51] By this supplement to the act, Nazi-era convictions of homosexuals and deserters from the Wehrmacht were annulled.[52] Louder criticism came from the lesbian and gay movement, because the Bundestag left post-1945 judgments untouched, although the legal basis from the end of the war to 1969 was the same as in the Nazi era.
The issue of pardoning men convicted in the postwar era remained controversial. On 12 May 2016, Federal Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, announced that Germany was investigating the possibility of pardoning and compensating all gay men convicted under Paragraph 175.[53] In cases where victims had died still bearing a conviction, the government will instead make payments to gay rights groups.[53] This was confirmed on 8 October 2016, when Maas laid out the compensation scheme and announced that the government was setting aside €30 million to cover claims.[54] The law comprises both individual pardons and a collective pardon and the documenting of suffering caused by the law, with the full process expected to take up to five years.[55] Those affected by the pardon can apply for a "vindication certificate", and relatives can apply for a posthumous pardon.[55] Each person convicted will receive €3,000 compensation, plus €1,500 for each year spent in custody as a result of a conviction under Paragraph 175 – on average, a conviction carried a two-year sentence.[55]
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:Honecker-sad:
