gay in Stalder 2018


ersity and for the right to define oneself however one pleases. And
Europe sent this message in the midst of a crisis and despite ongoing
hostilities, not to mention all of the toxic rumblings that could be
heard about decadence, cultural decay, and Gayropa. Visibly moved, the
Austrian singer let out an exclamation -- "We are unity, and we are
unstoppable!" -- as she returned to the stage with wobbly knees to
accept the trophy.

With her aesthetically convincing performance, Conchita succeeded in
un


ice to their
complexity, I will treat them on different levels: I will depict the
rise of the knowledge economy as a structural change in labor; I will
reconstruct the critique of heteronormativity by outlining the origins
and transformations of the gay movement in West Germany; and I will
discuss post-colonialism as a theory that introduced new concepts of
cultural multiplicity and hybridization -- concepts that are now
influencing the digital condition far beyond the limits of the
post-colonial di


ccording to the needs of the knowledge economy and to privilege the
network over the institution. In times of social cutbacks and empty
public purses, especially in municipalities, this message was warmly
received. One mayor, who as the first openly gay top politician in
Germany exemplified tolerance for diverse lifestyles, even adopted the
slogan "poor but sexy" for his city. Everyone was supposed to exploit
his or her own creativity to discover new niches and opportunities for
monet­ization -- a



Especially effective was the critique of patriarchal and heteronormative
power relations, modes of conduct, and
identities.[^26^](#c1-note-0026){#c1-note-0026a} In the context of the
political upheavals at the end of the 1960s, the new women\'s and gay
movements developed into influential actors. Their greatest achievement
was to establish alternative cultural forms, lifestyles, and strategies
of action in or around the mainstream of society. How this was done can
be demonstrated by tracing, for example, the development of the gay
movement in West Germany.

In the fall of 1969, the liberalization of Paragraph 175 of the German
Criminal Code came into effect. From then on, sexual activity between
adult men was no longer punishable by law (women were not mentioned in
this contex


as a
homosexual outside of semi-private space without immediately being
exposed to the risk of criminal prosecution. This was a necessary
precondition for the ability to defend one\'s own rights. As early as
1971, the struggle for the recognition of gay life experiences reached
the broader public when Rosa von Praunheim\'s film *It Is Not the
Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives* was
screened at the Berlin International Film Festival and then, shortly
thereafter, broadcast on public television in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The film, which is firmly situated in the agitprop tradition,
[]{#Page_23 type="pagebreak" title="23"}follows a young provincial man
through the various milieus of Berlin\'s gay subcultures: from a
monogamous relationship to nightclubs and public bathrooms until, at the
end, he is enlightened by a political group of men who explain that it
is not possible to lead a free life in a niche, as his own emancipation
can only be ac


s own experiences, values, and reference systems, and to anchor
this identity within a society that not only tolerates it but also
recognizes it as having equal validity.

At first, however, the film triggered vehement controversies, even
within the gay scene. The objection was that it attacked the gay
subculture, which was not yet prepared to defend itself publicly against
discrimination. Despite or (more likely) because of these controversies,
more than 50 groups of gay activists soon formed in Germany. Such
groups, largely composed of left-wing alternative students, included,
for instance, the Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin (HAW) and the Rote
Zelle Schwul (RotZSchwul) in Frankfurt am
Main.[^27^](#c1-note-0027){#c1-note-0027a} One focus of their activities
was to have Paragraph 175 struck entirely from the legal code (which was
not achieved until 1994). This cause was framed within a general
struggle to overcome patriarchy and capitalism. At the earliest gay
demonstrations in Germany, which took place in Münster in April 1972,
protesters rallied behind the following slogan: "Brothers and sisters,
gay or not, it is our duty to fight capitalism." This was understood as
a necessary subordination to the greater struggle against what was known
in the terminology of left-wing radical groups as the "main
contradiction" of capitalism (that between capital and labor), and it
led to strident differences within the gay movement. The dispute
escalated during the next year. After the so-called *Tuntenstreit*, or
"Battle of the Queens," which was []{#Page_24 type="pagebreak"
title="24"}initiated by activists from Italy and France who had appeared
in drag at the closing ceremony of the HAW\'s Spring Meeting in West
Berlin, the gay movement was divided, or at least moving in a new
direction. At the heart of the matter were the following questions: "Is
there an inherent (many speak of an autonomous) position that gays hold
with respect to the issue of homosexuality? Or can a position on
homosexuality only be derived in association with the traditional
workers\' movement?"[^28^](#c1-note-0028){#c1-note-0028a} In other
words, was discrimination against homosexualit


t could never be fully resolved, but the second position, which
was more interested in overcoming legal, social, and cultural
discrimination than in struggling against economic exploitation, and
which focused specifically on the social liberation of gays, proved to
be far more dynamic in the long term. This was not least because both
the old and new left were themselves not free of homophobia and because
the entire radical student movement of the 1970s fell into crisis.

Over the course of the 1970s


of images, texts, and
sounds.[^29^](#c1-note-0029){#c1-note-0029a} Activists, artists, and
intellectuals developed a language with which they could speak
assertively in public about topics that had previously been taboo.
Inspired by the expression "gay pride," which originated in the United
States, they began to use the term *schwul* ("gay"), which until then
had possessed negative connotations, with growing confidence. They
founded numerous gay and lesbian cultural initiatives, theaters,
publishing houses, magazines, bookstores, meeting places, and other
associations in order to counter the misleading or (in their eyes)
outright false representations of the mass media with their own
multifa


mbers of the movement in which it would be possible to formulate and
live different identities; on the other hand, they were fighting to be
accepted by society at large. While []{#Page_25 type="pagebreak"
title="25"}a broader and broader spectrum of gay positions, experiences,
and aesthetics was becoming visible to the public, the connection to
left-wing radical contexts became weaker. Founded as early as 1974, and
likewise in West Berlin, the General Homosexual Working Group
(Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft) sought to integrate gay
politics into mainstream society by defining the latter -- on the basis
of bourgeois, individual rights -- as a "politics of
anti-discrimination." These efforts achieved a milestone in 1980 when,
in the run-up to the parliamentary election, a podium


auses and developing potential cures. The immediate
threat that AIDS represented, especially while so little was known about
the illness and its treatment remained a distant hope, created an
impetus for mobilization that led to alliances between the gay movement,
the healthcare system, and public authorities. Thus, the AIDS Inquiry
Committee, sponsored by the conservative Christian Democratic Union,
concluded in 1988 that, in the fight against the illness, "the
homosexual subculture is []{#Page_26 t


mportant. This informal structure should
therefore neither be impeded nor repressed but rather, on the contrary,
recognized and supported."[^32^](#c1-note-0032){#c1-note-0032a} The AIDS
crisis proved to be a catalyst for advancing the integration of gays
into society and for expanding what could be regarded as acceptable
lifestyles, opinions, and cultural practices. As a consequence,
homosexuals began to appear more frequently in the media, though their
presence would never match that of hetero­sexuals. As of 1985, the
television show *Lindenstraße* featured an openly gay protagonist, and
the first kiss between men was aired in 1987. The episode still provoked
a storm of protest -- Bayerische Rundfunk refused to broadcast it a
second time -- but this was already a rearguard action and the
integration of gays (and lesbians) into the social mainstream continued.
In 1993, the first gay and lesbian city festival took place in Berlin,
and the first Rainbow Parade was held in Vienna in 1996. In 2002, the
Cologne Pride Day involved 1.2 million participants and attendees, thus
surpassing for the first time the attendance at the traditio


ustice in the year 2000, which stressed "the similarity between
homosexual and heterosexual relationships" and, on this basis, made an
argument against discrimination.[^34^](#c1-note-0034){#c1-note-0034a}
Around the year 2000, however, the classical gay movement had already
passed its peak. A profound transformation had begun to take place in
the middle of the 1990s. It lost its character as a new social movement
(in the style of the 1970s) and began to splinter inwardly and
outwardly. One could say that it transformed from a mass movement into a
multitude of variously networked communities. The clearest sign of this
transformation is the abbreviation "LGBT" (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender), which, since the mid-1990s, has represented the internal
heterogeneity of the movement as it has shifted toward becoming a
network.[^35^](#c1-note-0035){#c1-note-0035a} At this point, the more
radical actors were already


d complex gender
constructions that went beyond the simple woman/man dualism. All of that
said, the assertion by Rüdiger Lautmann quoted above -- "homophobia
lives on in the depths of the collective dis­position" -- continued to
hold true.

If the gay movement is representative of the social liber­ation of the
1970s and 1980s, then it is possible to regard its transformation into
the LGBT movement during the 1990s -- with its multiplicity and fluidity
of identity models and its stress on mutabili


rin Köppert
(eds), *Privat/öffentlich: Mediale Selbstentwürfe von Homosexualität*
(Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2013).

[30](#c1-note-0030a){#c1-note-0030}  Such, for instance, was the
assessment of Manfred Bruns, the spokesperson for the Lesbian and Gay
Association in Germany, in his text "Schwulenpolitik früher" (link no
longer active). From today\'s perspective, however, the main problem
with this event was the unclear position of the Green Party with respect
to pedophilia. See Franz Walter et al


r Justiz* (Cologne:
Bundes­anzeiger, 2001).

[35](#c1-note-0035a){#c1-note-0035}  This process of internal
differentiation has not yet reached its conclusion, and thus the
acronyms have become longer and longer: LGBPTTQQIIAA+ stands for

lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, transsexual, queer,
questioning, intersex, intergender, asexual, ally.
[36](#c1-note-0036a){#c1-note-0036}  Judith Butler, *Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity* (New York: Routledge, 1989).


sign, for instance) are ubiquitous.
Established civic institutions are not alone in being hollowed out;
relatively new collectives are also becoming more differentiated, a
development that I outlined above with reference to the transformation
of the gay movement into the LGBT community. Yet nevertheless, or
perhaps for this very reason, new forms of communality are being formed
in these offshoots -- in the small activities of everyday life. And
these new communal formations -- rather []{#Page_80 typ

 

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