“We gay pigs finally want to become human beings and be treated like human beings!” This provocative demand comes from Rosa von Praunheim’s scandalous film It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But Instead the Situation They Live In from 1971. It was written by the screenwriter and later Frankfurt sex scholar Martin Dannecker, one of the most important co-founders of the German gay rights movement.
A year after the premiere of this controversial film that was made for the WDR, Dannecker, a Praunheim associate who was 30 at the time, received an invitation from the Homosexual Student Group of Munster (HSM). Together with all of the already existing homosexual groups, the HSM was planning the founding of a German umbrella association in the archconservative Westphalian bishopric. On April 29, 1972, the meeting ended with an historic public event: the first gay rights demonstration in Germany.
The perverse situation of the homosexuals began already with the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. After all, the infamous § 175 of the Nazi Penal Code, which cost thousands their lives during the Third Reich, entered the Penal Code of the Federal Republic unchanged in 1949. The German Federal Constitutional Court even confirmed it in 1957: “Same-sex activity clearly violates moral law.” It was not until 1969 that the socially liberal coalition deleted the threat of punishment for homosexuality between adult men. Sex between women was not yet discussed.
Most Germans, however, continued to condemn homosexuality as a perverse aberration. Homosexual thus continued to have to lead a double life or settle for a disdained existence at the edges of society. CSU chief Franz Josef Strauß got to the heart of the issue at a CDU party convention in 1970 with the statement “Better a cold warrior than a warm (gay) brother”, which brought about great laughter from the people. In New York, however, an event had recently taken place that would lastingly impact the gay and lesbian struggle in Germany as well. In June of 1969 on Christopher Street, homosexuals there defended themselves against chicane riots of the police with demonstrations lasting for days on end.
In West Germany, the politicized students were the nucleus of the gay rights protests. During the meeting in 1972 in Munster as well, the struggle against exclusion was propagated as part of the overall political engagement against the bourgeoisie-capitalist structures in the Federal Republic of Germany. This is why Martin Dannecker wrote “Brothers and sisters, “warm” or not, fighting capitalism is our duty” on his banner during the first gay rights demonstration, which took place on April 29 in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Munster’s shopping district.
The demonstration by a few dozen participants, mostly male, did receive a great deal of attention, but took place peacefully. Despite the sexual revolution, however, the movement still faced a long march to societal acceptance and publicly demonstrated gay pride. Still in the 1980s, cities could ban the information stands of homosexual groups due to alleged youth endangerment with the blessings of the courts. The tradition of the flashy colorful parades for Christopher Street Day first began in the 1990s and are now, in Cologne, for example, a kind of queer summer carnival that attract hundreds of thousands spectators of all sexual orientations.
“I’m gay and that’s a good thing”, declared the SPD politician Klaus Wowereit in 2001. The breaking out of lesbians and gays from isolation seems to have been achieved and the fear of discrimination overcome. And yet, still today, no active German professional football player has dared to out themselves as homosexual – probably for obvious reasons. The stigmatization and role assignments of homosexuals continue to be widespread. As “the other”, they continue to be societally marginalized.
