The 1980s were a decade of political liberation struggles across the Global South. Despite the tragic end to most of these attempts, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics, a legacy in a way of the 1970s, were at the center of these ongoing conflicts. As Iran’s people swept away 2500 years of monarchy in 1979 and overthrew Jimmy Carter’s ‘Island of Stability’,[1] West Berlin hosted a United States-American import, the first Christopher Street Day (CSD). With the defeat of the promises of the 1979 incomplete Revolution, freedom, independence, and social justice,[2] Islamists seized power. Western mainstream media began to replace the rosy image of pre-revolution Iran, which had focused on Soraya Esfandiary, the German Iranian second queen in the regime the Shah established after the CIA coup of 1953, and on Farah Diba (Pahlavi), the third queen. Darker depictions came to the fore instead that portrayed Middle Eastern masculinity no longer in terms of exotic sexual appeal, but rather in terms of a ‘terrifying’ strangeness. According to this new paradigm, Iranian women and queer people needed to be saved from the perils of the Islamist regime by the ‘civilized’ proponents of the ‘rights’ discourse in the West. This discourse continued to rely on colonial dichotomies such as ‘free versus oppressed’ and ‘modern versus traditional’. It is no coincidence that this postcolonial shift from ‘liberation’ to ‘rights and recognition’ coincided with the first CSD in West Berlin.
Political repression and mass executions of communist revolutionaries occurred from Iran to Turkey during the 1980s. Throughout this decade, struggles for liberation in a Marxist idiom connected people from the global South beyond the nation-state against the legacy of colonialism. Several of these revolutionaries then fled, escaping as a queer act. They fled wars, executions, uprisings, and reactionary regimes. These major upheavals include the revolution in Nicaragua, opposition to imperialist interventions in Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the first Palestinian Intifada and the Gwangju anti-capitalist student uprisings and massacres in South Korea. Were these stories reflected in West Berlin’s queer communities and diasporas?
Queer emancipation must be seen in the context of those other local and global struggles. Nowadays, sexual politics is trapped between particularized sexual nativism and universalized LGBTQIA+ citizenship. To determine what forms of political solidarity with the Global South remain available to us, it becomes increasingly crucial to look at the past.[3] My research here focuses on West Berlin’s queer diaspora and on conversations I had with people from these communities. What effects did the upheavals elsewhere have on non-heterosexual, ‘queer’ diaspora communities during the 1980s?[4] What role did transnational solidarity play in the 1980s West Berlin gay and lesbian movement? Were West Berlin’s CSDs in the 1980s ‘homonationalist’, associating LGBTQIA+ people and their rights with a nationalist ideology and the claim that immigrants, especially Muslims, are homophobic while Western society was tolerant? All this happened in the middle of HIV/AIDS, and while the autonomous movement and the Black Women’s movement in Germany (ADEFRA) gained momentum. How did all this impact on queer people of color (QPoC) activism in West Berlin?
Queer PoC Transnational Solidarity
In this piece, which is part of a larger study on transnational QPoC solidarity in West Berlin and New York City in the 1970s and 1990s, I attempt to answer these questions. As a start, we must name three notable queer-related organizations from the 1980s: Akarsu, which means ‘flowing water’ in Turkish, served as a place of self-help for lesbian migrant women living in West Berlin. In 1986, Akarsu hosted a sexuality circle for Turkish immigrant women. Lale Arpat, the group ‘s founder, described it to the author in 2022 as “a self-help gathering without a facilitator”. Many participants, including Arpat, married men in the 1990s. Lesbianism is no longer an identity for her. In her view, she is “an ally”. Arpat’s story illustrates 1980s queer life “outside of a clearly delineated movement or organization and without identity politics”. While books like Verena Stefan’s Shedding created a presence for predominantly white lesbian voices in the late 1970s, there are other stories, the often-untold experiences of queer women of color who identified as lesbians in the 1980s and early 1990s and whose voices are not recorded in the archive of white German gay and lesbian history.
Ipek Ipekcioglu was also involved in non-movement activities. She (they) is a German DJ, music producer, and author. As a social pedagogy student, she wrote her MA thesis in 1995 on lesbians and the self-perception of lesbian feminist immigrants from Turkey living in Germany who belong to the second generation. She is openly lesbian, from a family who has immigrated from Turkey. In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), she represented the second generation of lesbian immigrants. She came out in the 1980s. Her mother’s presence as a warm shoulder is central for her story which she shared with me in 2022. Her mother asked Ipekcioglu if she was gay as soon as she saw her hitting gay shops. As a migrant child, she grew up in the Red Wedding neighborhood, surrounded by intellectuals and artists. Her mother’s parties were full of queer people and can be considered as some of the very first private gatherings of migrants concerned with sexuality in West Berlin.[5]
There was also ADEFRA e.V. – a Black women’s organization in Germany. The black lesbian feminist movement arose during the transition between Fordism’s collapse and neoliberalism’s reorganization of the world economy. These upheavals, however, took a long time to register with white Germany. As a Berlin-based cultural and political organization for Black women, the organization had a crucial impact on perceptions of racism, feminism, and sexuality. ADEFRA made the political aspects of queerness and institutionalized racism more visible. With the public presence of black lesbian leftist American feminist Audre Lorde and Afro-German feminists and lesbians, with intellectual vigor and an internationalist outlook, the women at ADEFRA were able to push beyond whitewashed normativity, according to Tiffany Florvil.[6]
Schwule Internationale (Gay International) was another organization founded in 1989 by second generation people with Turkish and Kurdish backgrounds. The organization then also included Iranian, Arab, Latin American, and African members. “While our group’s name comes from Marx’s Das Kapital, it was not really international, let alone transnational,” says Birol Isik in a conversation with the author in 2022. Isik was one of the founding members of Gay International along with Hakan Tas.[7] Despite emerging when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunified, most of the group’s activities occurred later. In 1993, they attempted to organize the first CSD in Turkey, together with other German gay activists and Lambda Istanbul, a Turkish LGBT organization. They were forced back to Germany over night after being denied permission to hold a parade. Gay International continued to challenge institutionalized racism and homophobia in Germany.
Although they interacted with activists in East Berlin, French debates, and the US mainstream gay and lesbian discourse as well as with British socialist-feminist critiques during the Thatcher years,[8] in terms of transnational QPoC anti-capitalist politics, West Berlin ‘s diaspora communities did not engage with the Global South in the 1980s. However, within the rights discourse of the hegemonic center, efforts to organize a CSD in Turkey may be considered transnational activities. Looking at the anti-imperialist protests on the west and east coasts of the United States, in the UK, France, and the Netherlands, the story of West Berlin turns out to be quite peculiar.
Groups like Akarsu have never addressed questions around transnational solidarity. And within ADEFRA, there is but one of the very few moments of transnational solidarity in 1980s LGBTQIA+ West Germany. Carol Gammon, a Canadian author and lesbian activist, and Katharina Oguntoye, an Afro-German historian and Gammon’s longtime partner, were influential figures in the PoC movement. Gammon recalled in our conversation in 2022 the following occurrence: “During the International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal, Katharina and I met. When Katharina visited Montreal with her book Farbe bekennen which would translate as Afro-German Women on the Trail of Their History (black bewegt),[9] we lesbians hosted her in our homes and performed other acts of solidarity.” Gammon mentions, too, that Audre Lorde was collaborating with lesbians from West as well as East Berlin. Considering Lorde’s involvement with anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles in the Caribbean, this arguably also generated some transnational and solidary links between Black and PoC lesbians in Berlin and in the Global South.
Another influential platform was the Shabbeskreis (the Lesbian Feminist Shabbat Circle) an organization bringing together lesbians from Black, migrant, and Jewish and non-Jewish feminists in the FRG of the 1980s and the first feminist group in post-war Germany to focus on a Jewish perspective and to address anti-Semitism within the women's and lesbian movement.[10] As Gammon points out in our conversation: “There were a few moments of queer transnational solidarity in the 1980s in West Berlin.” The example of Oguntoye’s, Gammon’s, and Lorde’s Caribbean connections are a few moments of indirect connectivity with the Global South. These are the quick flames of transnational queer solidarity. It is significant that the children of the so-called guest workers who arrived in Germany since the 1950s to fill the labor demand of the post-war economy and create its so-called ‘economic miracle’, did not establish a space for transnational solidarity on the question of liberation and sexuality with the Global South. Several of them never left Germany, became what some non-white Germans have sarcastically called ‘plastic Germans’ (non-ethnic Germans ‘mit Migrationshintergrund’ (with a migration background), and created communities that have forever changed the demographics of Germany.[11]
The FRG’s laws on migration make the migrant community appear uniformly heterosexual, as Lauren Stokes shows in her research on the so-called guest workers and family migration. According to her, politicians and scholars who complain about migrant homophobia rarely mention that Germany only introduced same-sex civil unions in 2001, which meant migrants who wanted to live together as same-sex partners were not able to migrate legally through family reunification for decades.[12]
Birol Islik, queer child of ‘guest workers’ from Turkey was not feeling like an ‘Ausländer’ when he arrived in Berlin. “It was the island of liberty before German reunification in 1990.” After this event, he realized that there were at least three types of citizens in Germany: West Germans, East Germans (‘Ossis’, a pejorative West German term for residents of the German Democratic Republic) and finally Germans with ‘Migrationshintergrund’. In the 1980s, Islik did not “come out” as a gay man, as he was skeptical of US-American culture, including the notion of ‘coming out’ and how it interfered with German society. In the 1990s, however, he ended his “double life” and came out to fight the racist and homophobic atmosphere in Germany. Islik also does not recall any transnational actions among diaspora communities, including Turkish communities, in the 1980s. “Fighting the racist German society and our homophobic family made us much happier than paying attention to the rest of the world in my opinion.”
Other places where one can trace transnational solidarity and queer of color activists during the 1980s include the autonomous women’s movement and the West Berlin squatting movement. They rejected the state, capitalism, patriarchy, any forms of rule, domination and exploitation and they mobilized for countless protests and activities. Kurdish and Turkish migrant women contributed as well to lesbian and autonomous women’s resistance, blocs, and public manifestations in migrant working-class neighborhoods like Kreuzberg and elsewhere in West Berlin. Important locations, projects and events included the women’s cafe on Jagow Street, a women’s squat at chocolate factory on Mariannen Street, and the massive protests the World Bank congress in 1988.
As the child of two ‘guest workers’ who originally resided in Germany’s suburbs, Anna Lazaridou has been an active leftist activist for decades. It was in the 1970s that Anna moved to West Berlin. She told the author in 2022: “We had many dreams, even if they were difficult to realize in Greece.” Lazaridou was a member of the autonomous lesbian group within the Greek homosexual association E.O.K. Due to the group’s only brief existence, they did not develop a unified viewpoint on lesbian issues. “At the height of the Greek women’s movement in 1979, the then existing lesbian group published the first and only lesbian magazine, Labrys. It was discontinued after three issues.”[13] Yet Lazaridou’s narrative nevertheless offers another glimpse of the often-precarious threads that linked activists in West Berlin with questions around transnational solidarity.
Lazaridou was involved with the squatting movement which in early 1980s West Berlin also comprised the Tuntenhaus (House of Queens), a squat whose participants describe themselves in retrospect as “coming from more than 10 countries, sometimes cis, sometimes trans, sometimes non-binary, sometimes gay, sometimes straight, and sometimes undecided”.[14] Students, craftswomen, freelancers, artists, welfare benefit recipients (Sozialhilfeempfänger*innen) and social workers made up most of the group. However, there are hardly any traces of PoC queer activists. According to Anna, she emphasized her political identity over her sexuality within the squatting movement: “It wasn’t about looking at the issue from a sexuality perspective. Even though it was only a small part of our identity, we participated in anti-capitalist political activities with gay men and women from Greece, Italy, and Latin America. In any case, we had no problem identifying ourselves as gay men or women in the diaspora.” So militant leftists in the 1980s were deeply committed to liberation and solidarity with the global South, while their sexual identifications were not necessarily highlighted within that activism.
The Roots of Homonationalism
Analyzing the assumption that migrants were homophobic while Western societies were accepting sexual diversity, the US-based queer theorist Jasbir Puar coined the term homonationalism to describe how nationalist forces align themselves with the claims of the LGBTQIA+ community to justify racist, xenophobic, and anti-Muslim prejudices.[15] This analytical framework can be linked with what Lisa Duggan has described as “homonormativity”[16] to shed light on the privatization, depoliticization and domestication of queer life within a neoliberal paradigm since the 1990s. Yet elements of this homonationalist-homonormative complex can, as we have seen, be traced back to way before the early twenty-first century ‘War on Terror’, namely to 1979, when the US-imported CSD was introduced to West Germany and the Iranian Revolution occurred. It is arguably then that a process began to unfold in the course of which integrationists who aimed for the integration of LGBTQIA+ communities into mainstream society gained the upper hand over a more radical queer politics. As heterogeneous and multi-voiced West German gay and lesbian movements may have been in 1979,[17] ultimately ‘liberation’ and anti-capitalism were swallowed up by rights discourse and an emphasis on ‘equality’.
As the 1980s were a turbulent and transitional time in global affairs, upheavals in the Global South challenged the perception of masculinity in the Global North. Yet these entanglements were not really acknowledged and gay and lesbian movements in the West were not aware of these connections. As the 1979 Iranian revolution was crushed, Islamists rose to power, and thousands of anti-imperialist revolutionaries, both Muslim radicals and communists, were killed in prisons and buried in mass graves. The previously dominant Western perception of the Iranian male as an exotic object of desire became gradually replaced by the stereotype of the terrorist, who was still exotic enough to be saved by ‘Western civilized nations'.[18] A former gay activist and Islamic scholar, Thomas Ogger wrote about gays during the Iranian Revolution in the Berliner Schwulen Zeitung in 1979. In contrast to many other texts about gay and lesbian life in Iran at the time in the West German mainstream media, Ogger’s piece is less homonationalist, Euro-centric and orientalist in its outlook. To a certain degree he even welcomed Khomeini’s anti-American rhetoric.
In 1978, Ogger had visited Isfahan to study Iranian classical music. This year is exactly the year Michel Foucault and his partner Daniel Defert, French sociologist, and HIV/AIDS activist, traveled to Iran and wrote enthusiastically about ‘Islamism’ and ‘political spirituality’ for the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. Ogger’s views on the Iranian Revolution and Islamism were similar to Foucault’s. As Ogger said in our conversation in 2022: “the leftists in Iran had a different reason to act than the leftists here. Thus, there was a revolution with a lot of constructive ideas from Khomeini himself.” His explanation is more or less consistent with the narrative of the clash between postcolonial and Western-centric approaches. It must be noted that the 1979 Iranian Revolution and its historical continuity had different meanings beyond their mere objectification by both sides of the intelligentsia in the Global North. As a strategy for decolonization and socialist transformation based on the ‘non-capitalist way of development’ (NCWD),[19] some leftist parties and organizations, particularly the strongest ones at the time, embraced the falsehood of the so-called ‘democratic and national’ character of Khomeini’s forces. The 1979 Revolution and counter-Revolution and their very complex dynamics in the context of political Islam and Communistphobia during the Cold War have mostly been reduced to the dichotomy of ‘Islamism versus modernism’ in Western public discourse. Despite the importance of anti-imperialist internationalism and solidarity in the 1980s, this complexity was mostly not understood.[20]
Nevertheless, the media battle between Michel Foucault, the postmodernist anti-Marxist French philosopher, and his Eurocentric colleagues over their hot topic ‘Iranian Revolution’ in the 1980s subsided without a deeper exploration of how Foucault or Ogger searched for ‘political spirituality’ in revolutionary Tehran in the late 1970s as well as at a BDSM gay club in San Francisco in the same era. How different or similar are the approaches of both authors to these phenomena? Having recently learned about the concept of ‘homonationalism’ in our conversation, Ogger readily picks up on its critical potential. Since visiting Iran in 1978, he has distanced himself from the German gay movement. While he lived in Berlin for many years, he recently moved to a suburban area in North Rhine-Westphalia with his longtime partner. Currently, he is most concerned about environmental issues.
It is essential to distinguish between the assumption that Islam is intrinsically homophobic, which gained popularity after 1979, and homonationalism as a set of political strategies and goals, which were ushered in largely, but not exclusively by the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany (LSVD) in alliance with the Greens during the 1990s. In the course of time part of the LSVD’s agenda came to embrace the notion that Muslim migrants were homophobic and to use this sentiment as a motivating force for their homonationalist politics. Ogger instead proposes a very different understanding of Islam. He believes that Islam today is just as homophobic as any other religion, while in the Middle Ages it was “more open-minded”.
PoC in West Berlin and the Aids movement
In the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS crisis was repoliticizing the gay and lesbian movement. The US Act Up movement and other influences inspired major attempts to address the fundamental problems caused by capitalism. Joanie Marquardt, who lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1980s, emphasized that the early organizers of the HIV/AIDS protests were veterans of the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Before they joined Act Up and other groups, they had protested the Vietnam War and the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Queer AIDS activists had also participated in the 1979 White Night Riots, following Dan White’s acquittal of murder charges for the assassination of Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.
While the slogans “Fight AIDS, not Nicaragua,” and “Condoms, not contras” circulated across the nation, also at the first AIDS protest in front of the White House, the politics linking antimilitarism to direct action against AIDS reached a powerful scale in the fall of 1987 during the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and through civil disobedience manifestations at the Supreme Court Building.[21] Sarah Schulman’s history of the AIDS movement also chronicles the early years of a vigorously oppositional group riven by discord and factionalism.[22] Many members of this diverse group of queer activities in the United States had roots in anti-war and anti-imperialism protests. However, “Act Up was predominantly white and male,” Schulman acknowledges. “But its history has been whitened in ways that obstruct the complexity.” Act Up also comprised affinity groups, including the Majority Action Committee, for people of color, and the Women’s Caucus. Therefore, the argument that Act Up was white and male and the fact that Aids history has long focused on Act Up have sidelined the much more diverse nature of AIDS activism. This social movement went beyond what is inscribed in the mainstream memory that dominates public discourse.
Following the first AIDS cases in 1981, Deutsche Aidshilfe e.V. was founded in West Berlin on September 23, 1983. Despite this, the connection between AIDS activists of the 1980s in West Berlin and PoC activists was not particularly strong. According to one of the directors of Deutsche Aidshilfe e.V. Thomas Oh, there were significant differences between the AIDS movement in Germany and those in the United States and France. He describes the 1980s as a decade of shock. Even though the German Act Up movement emulated the American model, it lacked the original’s anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist spirit. Hence West German activists did hardly link Aids policies with political and economic issues and neither with criticisms of Western militarism nor with upheavals in the Global South. Many HIV positive queers of color had to flee Germany as the institutionalized racism in German society put their lives in danger. During the AIDS epidemic in West Germany, 1981-1992, many gay men assumed that West Germany was more sexually liberal than the rest of the world. But Christopher Ewing shows us that is not the case. There was a lot of concern about whether Turkish immigrants in particular would be compatible with ‘liberal’ West German society. Ewing provides a detailed analysis of differently racialized groups of gay men during the epidemic. In particular, concerns were raised about migrants from the “Islamicate” countries of North Africa and the Middle East.[23]
Yet anti-racist voices in the German AIDS movement remained isolated at best. Critiques of Militarism and of NATO did not figure within AIDS activism. It did also not link up with the protests of immigrants and their struggles outside of the homosexual world. One reason for this reluctance to forge cross-issue and cross-group alliances may have been that the German welfare state and state-funded institutions were relatively quick, especially when compared to the US, in supporting infected persons. A very small number of PoC people appear in German mainstream media stories about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The queer children of so-called ‘guest workers’ from Turkey and Arab countries who were part of West Berlin’s sex worker scene hardly surface in official records. AIDS and PoC in West Germany were the subject of a report published in Der Spiegel on 1 December 1985 titled “Horror vor Zwang” (“the horror of coercion”). The article was about a young civil engineer from Central Africa who came to Germany on a student scholarship. After testing positive for HIV, he was forced to return home. According to German-Turkish queer scholar Zülfukar Cetin, similar cases had already occurred earlier.[24] Yet there was no mobilization against such deportations in the name of queer transnational solidarity with the Global South.
That QPoC activists played clearly less prominent a role in the German AIDS movement in the 1980s than they did in the US movement partly explains this lack of mobilization. The scarcity of anti-capitalist voices can also account for this as these could have pinpointed how global injustices imposed larger risks on non-Western persons with HIV, thus generating transnational solidarity. Ultimately, both the German and the US movement were outmaneuvered by capitalist forces. Across the Atlantic economic elites used the AIDS crisis as an alibi to impose structural adjustments within an incipient neoliberal regime of accumulation, which also led to the demise of queer social spaces in cities like New York and San Francisco through privatization, urban development, and financialization. As Alexander Stoffel puts it against the destruction of these lifeworld’s and against the privatization of sexual life, the AIDS activists insisted upon promiscuity and erotica (not domesticity and sexual conservatism) as the solution to the AIDS pandemic.[25] From this vantage point, parts of the German as well as the US-American movement invoked Eros, albeit unsuccessfully, as a means to reconfigure social relations towards human flourishing, bodily autonomy, pleasure, desire and sociality – as opposed to accumulation, profit, and atomization. These dreams could only have become true through a radical change in the existing social-political system.
Conclusion
An analysis of archival records and oral history interviews with non-white Germans, migrants, and exiles in Berlin’s diaspora communities can provide insights into their struggles against institutionalized racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. During the 1980s, non-white, non-heterosexual people living in West Berlin had a hard time surviving, and many of my interlocutors were forced out. Therefore, they were less likely to engage in organized political activism and to act in solidarity with struggles in their own countries of origin. As a result, queer migrant communities in West Berlin during the 1980s rarely participated in transnational anti-imperialist solidarity actions.
Politics is all about survival. It is important to note that during the 1980s in Germany, identity politics played hardly a significant role beyond what is known as ‘gay and lesbian activism’. The kind of identity politics we know today, of non-heterosexual (queer), non-white (PoC), and non-citizen (refugee, exiled, fugitive) people, was practically non-existent in 1980s Germany. The hegemonic US queer liberation model, which involved QPoC who adhere to Blackness as well as to a category of the Euro-American regime of sexuality (LGBTQIA+) as their points of identification, has not been implemented in Germany, with all its pros and cons. Consequently, there was a lack of anti-imperialist solidarity among QPoC in West Berlin, while gay and lesbian identifications in diaspora communities did not follow the US model.
As a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the shift towards the 1990s, this situation has changed. As the fresh voices of QPoC studies in contemporary German history on both sides of the Atlantic remind us, ‘queer’ and ‘of colour’ are contingent, contested, and unfinished categories. The majority of these policies tend to reinforce US-centricity and eliminate differences between and within gendered, sexually non-conforming, racialized, and colonized populations across the North and the South. In Europe, the term ‘people of color’ is often used in a fashion that maintains the US hegemony and dismisses the local antiracist and anti-imperialist movements as unauthentic and derivative.[26]
In 1980s West Berlin, queers of color and fugitives were essentially disconnected from transnational forms of queer anti-imperialist solidarity. Their diverse experiences were far beyond the purview of the dominant Western understandings of LGBTQIA+. Even though they were removed from the records, they did exist.
[1] “Island of Stability” was the phrase that Jimmy Carter used to describe the circumstances of Iran under the leadership of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the Christmas period of 1977, just one year before the 1979 Revolution.
[2] The true leaders of the Iranian revolution were the general strikers. Without the strike, the Shah would not have been toppled, and the revolutionary movement would have ended in defeat or bloody civil war at best. Oil industry workers had a strong communist tradition, which was the basis of the strike. The clash between the promise of revolution and counter-revolution is ongoing. There is still debate among political actors and historians about the permanent nature of the 1979 Revolution. For more check: “A portrait of Iran's incomplete revolution” by this author and “The “problem space” of the historiography of the 1979 Iranian Revolution” by Naghme Sohrabi.
[3] Stoffel, Alexander. “The Dialectic of the International: Elaborating the Historical Materialism of the Gay Liberationists.” International studies quarterly 66 (2022), no. 3, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac054.
[4] When it comes to terminology, it is notable that the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ were among the most used terms to identify with the Western regime of sexuality (LGBTQIA+) in Germany at the time. ‘Queer’ was the queerest term in 1980s West Berlin. In this study, queer refers to a broad spectrum of non-normative identities and politics. Check Caroline Cottet and Manuela Lavinas Picq, eds. Sexuality and Translation in World Politics. E-International Relations, 2019.
[5] Voß, Heinz-Jürgen, ed. Westberlin – ein sexuelles Porträt. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2021.
[6] Florvil, Tiffany Nicole. Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
[7] Check also Sekuler, Todd (26.7.2020): Birol Isik Video Interview. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Medien-Repositorium, European HIV/AIDS Archive, DOI: 10.18450/ehaa/228.
[8] Colpani, Gianmaria; Isenia, Wigbertson Julian; Pieter, Naomie. “Archiving Queer of Color Politics in the Netherlands: A Roundtable Conversation.” Tijdschrift voor genderstudies 22 (2019), no. 2: 163–182.
[9] Ayim, May; Oguntoye, Katharina; Schultz, Dagmar Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, Berlin: Orlanda Verlag, 1986.
[10] Jacoby, Jessica; Adler, Sharon. "Lebenslanges Engagement für die Sichtbarkeit von Jüdinnen.“ Deutschland Archiv, 15.12.2020.
[11] Check Stokes, Lauren. “The Permanent Refugee Crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949—.” Central European History 52 (2019), no. 1: 19–44.
[12] Stokes, Lauren. Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
[13] See the contribution on “’Die Unsicheren Frauen’. Die autonome Lesbengruppe im Homosexuellenverband EOK.” in: Frauen Anstiftung, ed. Frauen in Bewegung zwischen Berlin, Athen und Thessaloniki. Dokumentation der griechisch-deutschen Tagung zu autonomen Frauenprojekten. Ohne Verlag, 1991, page 39.
[14] Tuntenhaus & KA86 (last accessed 20 June 2023).
[15] Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
[16] See for example Duggan, Lisa. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” In Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson, eds. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, 175–194. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
[17] Check Griffiths, Craig. The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany. Oxford: OUP 2022. Van Cleef, Ronald. A Tale of Two Movements? Gay Liberation and the Left in West Germany, 1969- 1989. Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collections, 2014.
[18] Bracke, Sarah. “From ‘Saving Women’ to ‘Saving Gays’: Rescue Narratives and Their Dis/Continuities.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (2012), no. 2: 237–52.
[19] Check Amirahmadi, Hooshang. “The Non-Capitalist Way of Development.” Review of Radical Political Economics 19 (1987), no. 1: 22–46.
[20] Check Matin-Asgari, Afshin. Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
[21] Hobson, Emily K. Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.
[22] Schulman, Sarah. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
[23] Ewing, Christopher. “Highly Affected Groups: Gay Men and Racial Others in West Germany’s AIDS Epidemic, 1981–1992.” Sexualities 23 (2020), no. 1-2: 201–223.
[24] Cetin, Zuelfukar; Attia, Iman. “Der Schwulenkiez Homonationalismus und Dominanzgesellschaft.“ In Köbsell, Swantje; Prasad, Nivedita, eds. Dominanzkultur reloaded: Neue Texte zu gesellschaftlichen Machtverhältnissen und ihren Wechselwirkungen, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015.
[25] Stoffel , Alexnader. “Politicizing Eros: Queerness, Pleasure, and the Modern Capitalist State.” London School of Economics, England, September 2022.
[26] Bacchetta, Paola; El-Tayeb, Fatima; Haritaworn, Jin. “Queer of Colour Formations and Translocal Spaces in Europe.” Environment and planning. D 33 (2015), no. 5: 769–778.