Josh Armstrong on LGBTQ+ Life in East Germany
Historian Josh Armstrong discusses the origins of a gay movement in East Germany and how its members thought about socialism.
Historian Josh Armstrong studies queer life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also known as East Germany). I spoke to him earlier this year while writing a profile of Queer Voices for the summer issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Queer Voices is a series of audio walking tours that explore LGBTQ+ histories in Leipzig and Halle, two former East German cities. I joined a tour in Leipzig last summer and was guided through parks, squares, and past the New Town Hall (located around the corner from a historical cruising zone, apparently), listening to oral histories transmitted through a glowing headset. One of my favorite interviewees was Elke, who spoke about life as a lesbian in East Germany and how she met her first great love, Nanni, at a house party in 1975.
After Germany was divided following WWII, the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany, took different approaches to legislating LGBTQ+ life. One of the most obvious differences was that East Germany reverted to the pre-Nazi era version of Paragraph 175, a nineteenth-century law that criminalized consenting sex between men. It all but stopped prosecuting gay men under the law in the 1950s and struck any mention of same-sex relations from its penal code in 1989. Meanwhile, West Germany retained the stricter Nazi-era version of Paragraph 175 until 1969, and only decriminalized same-sex relations in 1994.
“From a limited, legal perspective, it was better to be a gay man in East Germany than in West Germany,” says Armstrong. “But there was no infrastructure and no community, so in other ways, it was not as advantageous.”
In this week’s newsletter, Armstrong and I discuss contradictions like this one, which challenged his thinking during his research. We also discuss the origins of a gay movement in East Germany, how East and West Germany influenced one another on LGBTQ+ issues, and the spaces of queer joy and mutual aid that sustained LGBTQ+ communities under authoritarian rule.