Not Special People: Lesbian and Gay Men’s Encounters with the East Berlin Government, 1983–90

Abstract

In the 1980s, East Germany granted gay people extraordinary new rights in an attempt to neutralize them as a threat to the communist regime. Within this context of change, though, the East Berlin municipal government refused gay activists permission to form a state-sanctioned club for homosexuals. Speaking to the place of civic life in the country and the history of everyday life of East German lesbians and gay men, this article has two goals. First, it builds on existing historiography by illustrating the precise dynamics of the interactions between gay activists and East German authorities, revealing a familiar modern bureaucratic landscape. Second, this article seeks to explain why municipal officials who demonstrated sympathy toward these activists nevertheless denied this group the right to form a club. This analysis argues that the denial of a club was ironically driven by authorities’ conviction that gay East Germans indeed faced discrimination. Officials believed discrimination in the German Democratic Republic had isolated its gay citizens, rendering them targets of Western enemies of the state and potential fifth columnists as the West could galvanize their resentment into antistate action. To officials, the activists’ attempts to overcome such isolation via a state-sanctioned club actually promised to reinforce isolation and make Western infiltration and subversion more likely.