Minorities, Civil Rights, and Political Culture

Gay and Lesbian Rights in Germany and the United States

MICHAEL DREYER

The persecution of minorities has been a persistent fact of history. The modes of persecution have changed over time, and the minorities that were persecuted and the reasons forwarded for the persecution have varied greatly.

This chapter focuses on the gay and lesbian minority in the United States and Germany. The emphasis here is on the political and legal strate­gies employed by this minority to change its legal and social situation in both countries. Because I try to cover developments in two quite differ­ent political entities over the course of a century, a few shortcuts are inevitable. This means, mainly, that current debates are covered only in passing.¹ First, I establish an analytical framework that provides the ^[561] conceptual means of comparing the subject matter at hand. Second, a his­torical overview establishes a time frame that outlines the obstacles gays and lesbians have had to overcome on the way to equal protection. Third, the respective strategies of the German and American movements are closely scrutinized. This leads, fourth and finally, to a few structural con­clusions that shed some light on the political cultures in Germany and the United States.

tools for analysis

The concept of political culture has been one of the most successful the­oretical approaches in political science. Ever since the groundbreaking study by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, political culture has been used as a means of analyzing and classifying political entities.² Broadly speak­ing, Almond and Verba distinguished three different ideal types of politi­cal culture: parochial, subject, and participant. Basically, these ideal types correspond to different stages of historical development, from crude beginnings to sophisticated civilizations. In real life, democratic political systems should be accompanied by a civic culture, which is based pri­marily on the participant political culture, with some more-or-less visible remnants from the subject and even parochial political cultures. The United States is the prime example of such a civic culture, whereas Germany during the mid-1950s, the time of Almond and Verba’s origi­nal research, could still be classified as basically a subject political culture. Although the political system had been democratized since the days of the Kaiser, the German political culture did not keep pace with these changes.

However, the situation changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. A later study under the same auspices revisited the civic culture and, with regard to Germany, came to the conclusion that Germany had undergone developments that had generally replaced the subject culture with a civic culture, not unlike those of the Anglo-Saxon world.³

These changes are bound to deeply influence the political strategies of minorities looking for betterment in their legal and social situations.

Robert Wintemute, Sexual Orientation and Human Rights: The United States Constitution, the Euro­pean Convention, and the Canadian Charter (Oxford, 1995); and Didi Herman and Carl Stychin, eds., Legal Inversions: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Law (Philadelphia, 1995).

2 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ., 1963).

3 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, 1980).

Whereas a civic culture, dominated by the ideal “participant” type, expects its citizens to participate in political affairs and to converse freely in com­munal affairs, a subject political culture as a rule discourages political involvement. Open forms of protest, such as demonstrations, petition drives, or civic initiatives, are seen as disturbing the societal order. Con­sequently, the gatekeepers of the political system (to borrow David Easton’s concept) will see to it that certain issues are never allowed to enter the political domain.^[562] It should be expected that minority movements (or, for that matter, majorities) are aware of the constraints of the political system under which they operate. Strategies that offer bright prospects in a civic culture will run aground in a subject culture - and vice versa.As the polit­ical culture undergoes changes, as on the level witnessed in Germany since the 1960s, political strategies will change accordingly.

For over a century the gay and lesbian movements in Germany had to carefully map out appropriate political maneuvers in furthering their cause on the way to legal recognition. Gays and lesbians are probably the only minority that is common to both Germany and the United States, and to all other countries as well. Their percentage of the population is basically constant over time and place, but their situation within society has been anything but constant. Liberalism and tolerance on the one hand and repression and persecution on the other have taken turns in German and U.S. history, and still do on a worldwide scale.^[563] The treatment of its gay and lesbian citizens can serve as an indicator of a political system’s overall liberalism, and, conversely, the political strategies employed by that minority offer a good insight into the country’s political culture.

A closer look at such strategies has to be prefaced, however, by a brief evaluation of the time frame and the main events in the German and American history of the gay and lesbian movement.^[564]

from persecution to prominence, 1897-1997

Germany: The Infamous Paragraph 175

The (first) unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 brought in its wake a common penal code that superseded the individual penal codes of the different constituent states. Germany, unlike the United States, tolerated only minor legal differences among the states. This meant, for all practical purposes, the extension of the Prussian penal code throughout the Reich and the abolition of contrary provisions in the individual state laws.

This meant the universal application of the new Paragraph 175, which prohibited male-male sexual intercourse and made it punishable by imprisonment.^[565] Paragraph 175 was identical to Paragraph 152 of the short-lived North German Federation’s penal code, which in turn was based on Paragraph 143 of the Prussian penal code of 1851. In the years before Paragraph 175, however, the legal situation in the different German principalities had been anything but uniform. In 1813 Bavaria, one of the most liberal German states at that time, had decriminalized male homo­sexuality under the influence of Napoleon’s Code penal (1810), which, apparently for the first time in modern history, lifted the legal sanctions against homosexual acts. Other German states followed the Bavarian lead, but when Prussia imposed its harsher view, liberal legal traditions ceased in these states as well.^[566] Still, it is worth noting that Bavaria experienced no fewer than fifty-eight years of liberalism with regard to male homo­sexuality in the nineteenth century.^[567]

Paragraph 175 was directed exclusively against male homosexuality. Lesbian behavior was not criminalized, not necessarily out of some enlightened respect toward women but rather because women were not important enough to penalize for deviant behavior.

(and threatening) role. Consequently, lesbians and the women’s movement at large could concentrate on opening up educational and employment opportunities for women, in a legal situation that did not touch them. The right to vote, the abortion issue, and employment chances beyond teach­ing were the more urgent issues of the day.^[568] But even for male homo­sexuals Paragraph 175, as interpreted by the courts, was not (yet) an all-out criminalization. Homosexuality as such was not a crime, and even acts like mutual masturbation remained outside the criminal realm. The law applied only to a limited range of behavior, mainly to completed male-male sexual intercourse. Naturally, these acts were hard to prove if both parties agreed to keep them secret. However, male prostitutes who, as a rule, had much less to lose than most of their clients, could always resort to blackmail. Paragraph 175 threatened to ruin the lives and reputations of many dig­nified citizens, even if a trial did not result in conviction.

The legal situation remained basically unchanged during the eras of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic. Neither efforts for reform nor conservative attempts to tighten the law (for example, by extending it to lesbian acts) were successful, even though the general climate changed considerably during the Weimar era. Because the law proscribed only certain clearly defined acts of sexual behavior, the mere expression of homosexual feelings was outside the realm of police inquiry. Conse­quently, in the liberal, permissive atmosphere that characterized the first German democracy and especially its capital, Berlin, books and magazines were freely published and bars and nightclubs flourished. The books of Christopher Isherwood and Klaus Mann portray this subculture eloquently.

Once the Nazis came to power in January 1933 the status quo changed dramatically.

But a prison term was not the worst fate. Often the end of a prison term did not result in freedom but rather in transfer to a concentration camp. After the war started, this treatment became a matter of course. There is still no agreement on the number of homosexuals who perished in the camps, but it was clearly considerable.¹¹ Next to the Jews, gays con­stituted the lowest order in the hierarchy of inmates. They were routinely subjected to the most severe work assignments, and although there was no extermination policy toward homosexuals, the general conditions in the camps exerted an immense toll. It did not help that Heinrich Himmler, overseer of the camps, was obsessed with wiping out homo­sexuality. His hatred can only be described as pathological.^{[569] [570]}

Generally speaking, all of this applies only to male homosexuals. Although the Nazis discussed extending the laws to lesbians, they decided against it on the grounds that lesbianism did not preclude women from reproducing - another key goal of state policy. Individual lesbians, however, could find themselves in concentration camps, charged with antisocial behavior, which also covered prostitution. This lumping of behaviors into categories makes it quite difficult to estimate the number of lesbians sent to the camps, let alone the number who died there. In any case, estimates put the number much lower than that of male homosexuals.^[571]

For homosexuals in Germany the ordeal of the concentration camps ended with their liberation by Allied forces. However, this was the only improvement in the general situation of homosexuals. After the war, per­secution went on unchanged, quite often at the hands of the same offi­cials. There still has not been meaningful financial compensation for homosexual victims of the Nazis, and even moral recognition of their plight has come about only recently.^[572] The German Democratic Republic adopted the original and more lenient version of Paragraph 175,^[573] whereas the Federal Republic of Germany retained the Nazi version of 1935.

In 1957 the Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court, dealt with a complaint brought by two men who had been arrested and tried under Paragraph 175. They claimed that Paragraph 175 constituted a part of the Nazi system of injustice and as such was void in the Federal Republic. Moreover, they claimed that Paragraph 175 violated the equal protection clause under Article 3, Paragraphs 2 and 3 of the West German Basic Law because it pertained to men but not to women. When the court handed down its verdict, it sided squarely with existing law.^[574] Its arguments may be summarized as follows: (1) Male homosexuals seek to seduce innocent youths and are thus a menace to society; (2) this is not the case with les­bians, who are more interested in women of their own age. Nor are les­bians exclusively same-sex oriented, and therefore the equal protection clause does not apply;^[575] (3) treating male and female homosexuals differ­ently is justified because “the position of men in public life gives their decisions more social impact than a woman’s choices in life”; (4) the per­secution of homosexuals is justified because “same-sex activities are against the moral law.” Thus did the highest court clarify the law of the land. The “moral inferiority” of gays for the first time in German history was imbued with a stamp of approval by the legal system of a democratic republic whose language in this regard borrowed heavily from Nazi vocabulary and concepts.

With this verdict, the road to persecution was cleared. Until 1957 the lower courts had rendered inconclusive verdicts. But now they were bound by precedent, and the jailing of gay men rose to new heights. As a direct consequence, convictions reached post-Nazi highs in 1958 and 1959.

Table 12.1. Number of convictions under Paragraph 175 over time

Convictions of male Kaiserreich Weimar Republic Third Reich Federal Republic homosexuals (§175) (1882-1918) (1919-1933) (1934-1941) (1950-1965)

Source: Hans-Georg Stumke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte (Munich, 1989), 26, 90, 147.

the composition of the government had changed as well, and the Social Democrats, who had advanced from maligned opposition to junior partner (soon to become senior partner), took a somewhat more liberal view. Although the idea of the moral repugnancy of homosexuality was still very much alive, its criminalization was basically a dead letter.^[576] In two steps, in 1969 and 1973, the substance of Paragraph 175 was gutted. The last step was finally taken in 1994, when the age of consent for het­erosexual and homosexual acts was made the same and when the rem­nants of the infamous Paragraph 175 were altogether eliminated from the penal code - to the extent that no new section got listed under the now permanently tainted “175.”^[577]

The United States - Federalism at Work

The legal situation in the United States for the same period is both more complicated and easier to deal with. It is more complicated because a unified penal code does not exist for the entire country; rather, there are fifty state legal systems. And whereas the individual states differed sharply in their penal codes, they invariably had some form of criminalization of homosexuality on the books. Illinois, in 1961, acquired the distinction of being the first state to formally decriminalize homosexuality by adopting the model penal code drawn up by the American Law Institute.^[578]

But laws and penalties on the books have never been the main concern when it comes to the individual American states. That makes the analy­sis less complicated because it shifts the focus from strictly legal questions to the political arena. Unlike Germany, the American legal tradition allows for a gradual change in the application of the law up to the point where a law may still be on the books but is not enforced.

These informal changes can lead to rather absurd situations in which some of the most liberal American states might still carry in some for­gotten corner of their penal codes sections that are clearly outdated but that for some strange reason are still technically in force.^[579] The perils of the law-making process in bicameral states with no real party discipline and numerous paths to an untimely death for most bills may have con­tributed to a benign disregard for outdated laws.

This necessitates for most of the time under review here a concentra­tion not on legal questions in the narrow German sense but rather on discriminatory employment practices, on censorship of gay publications, on police raids on gay bars, and on general discrimination.^[580] This focus from the outset has prompted a different strategy for gay rights activists in the United States.

the penal code and society at large

The differences with regard to the law point to even more pertinent dif­ferences between Germany and the United States, which leads us once again to the concept of political culture.

Historically, legitimacy in Germany is attached to legality, that is, a social movement has to rid itself of a legal outlaw status before it can embark on legitimizing whatever goals it might have.^[581] The idea of Rechtsstaat, which roughly but not entirely coincides with the American concept of “the rule of law,” has been much stronger in Germany than the idea of political democracy. Consequently, given the existence of Para­graph 175, activists for the homosexual rights movement knew they had to work predominantly for the abolition of this law. Social acceptance would not be the necessary precondition for the abolishment of Para­graph 175; rather, it would be its consequence. That does not mean that there were no activities to educate the public and generate support. On the contrary, the movement included such measures from the very begin­ning. But the major step had to be accomplished in another sphere: The political elite in the Reichstag had to be induced to scrap Paragraph 175, and everything else would subsequently fall into place.

This had far-reaching consequences. Most important, chances for coalition building are much slimmer when a group focuses on a single section of the penal code (as in the German case) instead of on a broad range of social issues (as in the American case). In the latter case, each group that has experienced similar discrimination and whose discrimina­tion might be attributed to the same sources (broadly speaking, a repressive state or society) is a potential ally for the cause. In the former case, the quest for reform is so particularized that only the immediate victims can have a genuine interest in it. This still leaves room for soli­darity or for strategic alliances of mutual support for the respective in­terests of different groups. Indeed, the women’s movement and the homosexual rights movement did cooperate in Germany, but their spo­radic cooperation was to no avail, as could be expected, because it lacked the politically indispensable binding force of enlightened mutual self-interest.^[582]

The situation could not have been more different on the other side of the Atlantic. The participatory civic culture of the United States invited political activism to the point of expecting it. At the same time, the well- established practice of letting parts of the penal code fall into disuse called for a substitute goal. Although it may have seemed impossible early on to think about changing the penal code, this also was not the most promis­ing path available. If reformers could create a climate of tolerance and social acceptance, the discriminatory sections of the criminal code would no longer be applied. Practical day-to-day discrimination would end along with the disappearance of harassment by law enforcement officials. This fact placed the issue squarely into the arena of general political and social problems.

In this realm each minority could become a potential ally. Discrimi­nation can be manifold, but tolerance and liberalism provide answers to many a grievance. Theoretically, therefore, when minorities band together, or perhaps even just learn from each other, they all stand to gain in the process. And there was (and is) certainly no scarcity of minorities with their own grievances in the United States.

Differing political cultures and the accompanying divergent goals high­light the reasonable expectation that gay rights movements in Germany and in the United States would find it in their interest to pursue differ­ent paths both with regard to long-term strategies and with regard to tactics in the realization of these strategies. So far we have looked at the legal settings and at the structural variables shaping the political landscape in which the gay movements had to operate in Germany and in the United States. Now we must turn to the movements themselves, and to their leaders.

strategies and tactics: petitions, propaganda, protests, and parades

The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee

The starting point for the German gay rights movement can be dated quite clearly: On May 14, 1897, a small group of men founded the Sci­entific-Humanitarian Committee. Its first location was in Charlottenburg (Berlin) in the flat of a young doctor and psychiatrist, Magnus Hirschfeld, who was to become the most prominent spokesman for gay rights until 1933.

The founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was not the first gay rights initiative in Germany. As early as 1867 the lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs tried in vain to interest the German Bar Association, at its annual conference in Munich, in the impending criminalization of homosexuality in the penal code of the North German Federation. His colleagues ignored his arguments. He was not allowed to deliver his speech, even though Munich, the capital of Bavaria with its longstanding tradition of legal tolerance toward homosexuality, might have been a logical place to cry “danger” - even more so as the danger was actually at the doorstep. Ulrichs could not make himself heard; nor could Hein­rich Hossli and Karl Maria Kertbeny impress mid-nineteenth-century Germany with their calls for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Today, they are rightly regarded as pioneers, but to their contemporaries they were unknown.^[583]

This disregard changed when the energetic and versatile Hirschfeld assumed the reins of the gay rights movement.^[584] He was a well-known medical doctor, and even though he was questionable in more than one respect, the Jewish Social Democrat Hirschfeld nevertheless came to be known as one of the leading experts in the relatively uncharted area of human sexuality, including deviant sexual behavior.^[585]

The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee set out to accomplish three goals: to educate the public on the nature of male and female homosex­uality, to define the scientific debate by editing a yearbook that would comply with the highest standards of modern science, and to petition the Reichstag for the abolition of Paragraph 175 in light of abundant medical and legal evidence demonstrating its baselessness and harmfulness.

These goals remained on the agenda from 1897 to the demise of the committee in 1933 - which attests to both the stubborn tenacity of its efforts in the face of constant difficulties, including financial problems, a world war, a revolution, hyperinflation, and a lack of success with regard to its main objective.

The educational goal was pursued with public lectures and popular, cheap brochures written by Hirschfeld and others explaining the facts about homosexuality as Hirschfeld saw them. One of the most success­ful endeavors of the committee was the publication of its scientific journal, the Yearbookfor the Intermediate Sex³ The title came straight out of Hirschfeld’s theory of homosexuality, which postulated the existence of a group of virile women and effeminate men standing between the normal sexes as an intermediate group - put there by nature. Homosex­uality was inborn, although Hirschfeld did not go so far as to declare it “natural.” In any case, the criminalization of homosexuality was not a punishment made to fit the crime but rather unnatural in itself. Hirschfeld’s theory became known as the theory of the “third sex,”^{[586] [587] a theory obsolete today. Most of his contemporaries did not follow the doctor in his beliefs, but the yearbook was open to competing theories as well, provided that they held a basically sympathetic point of view. The committee succeeded, indeed, in establishing the yearbook as a well- respected forum for debate and information. Its heavy, leather-bound, gold-embossed exterior breathed an aura of respectability essential to the committee’s work. Anyone who peered into the yearbook hoping to find juicy stories or pictures would have been disappointed. It contained arti­cles on medicine and psychology, on criminology and history, on foreign countries, and on past, impeccable dignitaries in the arts and sciences and from the realm of politics who were homosexual. The occasional article on lesbian interests could not hide the fact that the entire endeavor was definitely male dominated. There were illustrations to some of the arti­cles, but they were almost clinically decent. The only more or less general informational parts of the yearbook were stories on famous homosexuals in history. Two other permanent columns in the yearbook deserve to be mentioned: Each volume contained a lengthy list of attempted or successful blackmailings, of persecutions, and of suicides related to real or imagined fears stemming from Paragraph 175. The other column was an annotated bibliography of nonfiction that demonstrated the large amount of scientific research on homosexuality at the time. Its sheer scope is impressive; there can be little doubt that the topic was in the air and that it was discussed both in medical and criminological circles. The scientific debate was launched in no small measure thanks to the endeavors of the committee and its yearbook, and it was conducted open-mindedly and with a seriousness befitting the Wilhelmine professors and intellectuals who partook in it.}

But debate was only a preliminary goal of the committee. Its main goal was to influence the Reichstag toward abolishing Paragraph 175. Its main tool was a petition presented to the Reichstag in 1897, which asked for the decriminalization of consensual homosexual acts, provided that both partners were at least sixteen years of age and that public decency laws were obeyed. The petition offered a whole array of medical and crimi­nological arguments that were well known from Hirschfeld’s writings. It deliberately de-emphasized the sexual aspects of homosexuality, main­taining that “according to the investigations of all specialists coitus analis and coitus oralis occur comparatively rarely in homosexuals. In any case, it is not practiced among them more often than among �normal’ people.”^[588] The Reichstag was not convinced by these somewhat misleading tactics; Paragraph 175 was not altered. The changes advocated by the committee’s petition remained a desideratum for nearly a century. They were almost identical with those enacted into law in 1994, when Paragraph 175 was finally abolished.

More interesting is the way in which Hirschfeld presented his petition. For starters, petitioning the Reichstag was not necessarily the means of the political activist but rather the cautious citizen’s way of dealing with politics. The wording of the petition was chosen very carefully to empha­size the orderly, respectable, and highly scientific objectives of the peti­tion. When Hirschfeld and his allies went looking for signatures, lists of which were regularly published in the yearbook, they did not seek volume. Instead, they took pains to solicit exclusively well-respected, impeccable figures of Wilhelmine society. Because the argument was pre­sented mainly along the lines of medicine (homosexuality is not acquired but inborn) and criminology (the dangers of blackmail) it made sense to invite mainly doctors and lawyers to sign the petition - and several thou­sand of them did, in addition to professors, artists, merchants, teachers, and all other conceivable authority figures. There are no women or workers among the signatories; Hirschfeld’s committee was not interested in them.

Respectability through science and reform through apolitical means were the strategies employed. Such strategies were narrowly tailored to capture the benevolence of the upper-class bourgeois culture that consti­tuted Wilhelmine society, much of the Reichstag, and, one should not forget, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee as well. Admittedly, Hirschfeld himself was an outsider in more ways than one. But he was a respected scientist, and so were all his companions who united in the cause of gay liberation. They did not demand it as a political right, nor did they refer to a bill of rights in the German constitution (there was none); rather, they stuck to science and quiet educational work. There is no reason to assume that, apart from their homosexuality, they did not share the basic set of beliefs, agenda, and chauvinism (both male and national) that characterized their “normal” compatriots of comparable standing. The petition and the general aims of the committee do not seem to be born out of a desire to foster a separate gay identity but rather to join Wilhelmine society in a complete and meaningful sense.

There seems to have been just one political action (in the narrower sense) in the twenty years between the founding of Hirschfeld’s com­mittee and the end of the Kaiserreich: In 1912, before the Reichstag elections, the committee sent out a questionnaire to all the candidates inquiring about their position on reforming Paragraph 175.^[589]

Hirschfeld had no use for anyone who threatened to rock the boat, but not everyone fighting for gay rights liked this careful approach. As early as the turn of the century, some activists took issue with the strat­egy of the committee. The dissidents, led by the author and publisher Adolf Brand, finally separated from the committee when it included lesbians and women’s rights advocates among its allies; to Brand this amounted to treason against the ideas of homosocial friendship and culture.^[590] He founded the Community of the Special, whose very title alluded to the anarchic writings of Stirner.^[591]

One of Brand’s favorite tactics was the exposure of well-known society figures, and when he (falsely) included then Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow, he wound up in jail. This anarchist firebrand was exactly the type of individual Hirschfeld had no use for. There was no love lost between the movement’s two wings, some brief periods of cooperation notwithstanding.^[592]

The committee’s strategies remained virtually unchanged during the entire Weimar era. It agitated more openly during that period, its public education efforts intensified, and the state granted nonprofit tax-exempt status to the organization, which made it eligible for tax-exempt contri­butions. New organizations enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame as well. The short-lived Action Committee for the Repeal of Paragraph 175 tried to embrace all factions of the movement with rather limited success.^[593] But the most remarkable attribute of the continuing political culture was to be found in the continued employment of the same political strategies by the movement. The political system had changed, but the political culture had not. The gay rights movement continued to employ the same tactics, to use the same personnel in its pursuits, up to the day the Nazis stormed Hirschfeld’s institute.

After World War II, theoretically speaking, the gay rights movement could have picked up the reins and continued from where they had stopped in 1933. However, this did not happen, for four reasons: First, most of the earlier leaders of the movement were either dead or in exile. It was, therefore, less a question of resuming the quest than of relighting the flame with a new generation of leadership. But where would they come from? Second, the years of the Third Reich had amply demon­strated the perils of being openly gay in GermanyThe leaders of the early movement trusted the benevolence of the state; the experiences of the immediate past made it clear that this trust was dangerously naive at best, suicidal at worst. Third, the persecution continued in postwar Germany. True, the concentration camps were abolished, but discovery of one’s homosexuality could still mean either the ruination of one’s career and life or a few years in prison. The Nazi law of 1935 remained intact; who would dare come out and establish himself as a leader under these cir­cumstances? Fourth, the breakdown of a relatively homogeneous bour­geois society took away the kind of class solidarity that, all things con­sidered, had still shielded Hirschfeld and his kind. The veil of silence, which had covered up so much for the elite few, was no more.

It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that there was no gay rights movement in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Some individuals tried to revive the spirit of the 1920s, but their efforts were in vain.^[594]

However, in one respect Hirschfeld’s strategy belatedly paid off: When the reform bill of 1962 promised to tighten existing laws instead of reforming them, it was doctors and lawyers, Hirschfeld’s main target audi­ence, who rose in protest. Science finally had its say. The reform of 1969 was brought about not by political pressure but rather by expert sci­entific opinion in the areas of medicine and law. It is amazing how Hirschfeld’s keen judgment finally bore fruit - seven decades late yet still the way he had envisioned it in 1897, parliament following the concerted scientific advice of the professors. This is also a profound tribute to the change in Germany’s political culture over time.

It might be expected that the American movement proceeded in other directions. And so it did.

From Mattachine to Stonewall

As an organized human rights effort the American gay movement started much later than its German counterpart. Only after World War II did the Mattachine Society organize to advance gay issues within the political arena. Earlier efforts had proven to be ephemeral. One remarkable fore­runner was the Society for Human Rights, founded by German emigre Henry Gerber in Chicago in 1924.^[595] Although the police soon discov­ered the “perverted” nature of this society and moved in quickly to shut it down, it is remarkable on two accounts: First, the driving spirit was a German and one familiar with Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitar­ian Committee; second, although the German group obviously served as an inspiration to Gerber, the title he chose for his group alluded neither to science nor to humanitarianism, but instead to human rights. This emphasis, from the outset, indicated the different political culture in which the American groups operated.

Although Gerber’s efforts proved to be futile at the time, recent research has demonstrated the perseverance of a gay subculture far more elaborate than previously thought. George Chauncey’s seminal work, Gay New York, presents an array of gay entertainments, businesses, and social networks thriving in a hostile legal, social, and law enforcement environ­ment that had only one missing aspect: politics.^[596]

It is hard to speculate why the political movement came into being half a century after its German counterpart. One might argue that the gatekeepers of the political system kept all minorities out of it, not just gays and lesbians. In addition, one should bear in mind that outright attempts to work on political improvement and organization, as Brand had tried in Germany, had failed dismally in the United States as well. Hirschfeld’s committee, after all, had cloaked its objectives in scientific and legalistic arguments. The political arena of the United States, however, had no use for that type of argument in the struggle for human rights. Because gays and lesbians could not enter the political arena cloaked in science, it took them longer to enter it at all. At the same time, there was no gal­vanizing single “enemy” like Paragraph 175. The legal situation varied from state to state, and even within the states enforcement of the law was by no means uniform.

All this is a symptom of the degree of federalism and political decen­tralization in the United States that surpassed German federalism by far. One therefore could assume that the gay rights movement would be plu­ralistic, regionally diverse, and fragmented from its very beginning. And so it was. From its very beginning in the early 1950s there were differ­ences as to its objectives and its means of attaining them. The Mattachine Society, named after medieval, masked jesters, with its most important chapters on the two coasts,^[597] dealt mainly with the needs of gay men. Lesbians formed their own organization, the Daughters of Bilitis.^[598] A major area of activity was the fight against job discrimination. Gays were thought to be unfit and were seen as security risks not only in the armed forces but also in the federal government. Known homosexuals were rou­tinely dismissed from their jobs, and the courts upheld this practice.

It is significant that the Mattachine’s fight was not so much against one abstract paragraph of the penal code but against existing governmental practices. This suggested tactics that had proved effective in other labor- related disputes. Scientific brochures could serve in addition, and they were certainly used, but the prime activity had to be of a political nature.

One of the great risks for gay men looking for sexual encounters was the possibility of encountering undercover police agents who were out to entrap them. This practice was well established by vice squads in numerous cities, although enforcement varied greatly both from city to city and over time.⁴⁴ Again, a look at the American and German responses to this problem is revealing. Hirschfeld’s committee did not deal with this problem at all - it was part of the larger legal problem that would be solved by the abolition of Paragraph 175.

In the United States, in Los Angeles, the guiding spirits behind the Mattachine formed the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment in 1952, once again with a clear civil rights emphasis.⁴⁵ It proceeded with letters and resolutions aimed at local political leaders, and with articles and brochures that stressed the aspect of rights being violated.

The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis developed a vast array of activities, most of them in the realm of politics. The journals of the two groups, One and The Ladder, respectively, did contain some sci­entific (or pseudo-scientific) articles on the origins of homosexuality, on its natural, unthreatening features, and the like. But it never came any­where close, nor was it intended to do so, to matching the weighty sci­entific orientation of Hirschfeld’s yearbook. These journals were meant to inform activists, not enlighten a broad public.⁴⁶ Letters to elected officials were routine, as was the mailing of the journal to public figures. It is a well-known story that J. Edgar Hoover, himself a deeply closeted homo­sexual, begged to be taken off the Mattachine’s mailing list, apparently for fear of being discovered. At the same time, the leaders of the Mattachine were rightly afraid that the FBI would try to infiltrate their organiza­tion.⁴⁷ They had all the more reason to fear so because several of the leaders, including Harry Hay, the most active member from Los Angeles, were avowed communists.⁴⁸ Internal disputes over the movement’s aims, commitments, and tactics were inevitable, and as early as 1953 the society removed Hay from his leadership position.⁴⁹ In a way, this split can be

44 See Chauncey, Gay New York, 86.

45 See Miller, Out of the Past, 335; and D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 70.

46 The same is true for the organization’s later publication, the Mattachine Review, 12 vols. (1955-66), whose individual issues contain a mixture of news, law, medical news, and much on literature. The layout clearly indicates the amateurism of the editors.

47 Frank Kemeny, the foremost activist of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Mattachine, relates the Hoover story in Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945—1990:An Oral History (New York, 1992), 100-2.

48 For a brief discussion of the background, see Adam, Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, 60-5. Hay was the guiding spirit behind the organizing efforts in Los Angeles. See Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay, Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston, 1990).

49 See D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 80-1.

compared to the split within Hirschfeld’s committee. In that case Brand and his followers left the larger organization out of disgust with Hirschfeld’s relations to other emancipation groups, most notably the women’s movement. In this case the argument was purely political in nature. In moving away from its left-wing origins, the Mattachine opted for an assimilationist approach.^[599] This did not happen without a challenge. Society activists associated with the journal One formed a rival organiza­tion that took a much more radical view than both the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis; they “projected an image of defiant pride in their identity; they intentionally tried to shake their readers out of a resigned acceptance of the status quo.”^[600] One focused increasingly on the question of homosexual rights, and the criticism of its rival’s apolo­getic tone foreshadowed, although on a much smaller scale, the activist groups of the post-Stonewall era.

More radical chapters of the Mattachine on the East Coast opted for a targeted political approach, which is best illustrated by the picketing of the federal government, resorted to several times by the Washington chapter in the mid-1960s.The pickets against discrimination were a major step, but they were still a far cry from the later flamboyant gay pride parades. In a sense, the Hirschfeldian aura of respectability was on public display here.^[601] The men usually wore conservative business suits, the women wore equally conservative dresses. The orderly fashion of these protests, the conservative attire, and the nonthreatening behavior of the few people who attended them was borrowed to a large degree from the successful beginnings of the black civil rights movement.

It was the rapid success, albeit against tremendous resistance and odds, of the black civil rights movement, and the generally changing atmo­sphere of the 1960s, that allowed the gay rights movement to emerge solidly as a thoroughly political movement. The watershed year was 1969, both in Germany and in the United States. And it is once again telling how the different political cultures brought about different changes. In Germany the federal parliament rendered Paragraph 175 ineffectual as part of an overall reform of the penal code. There was little debate, no homo­sexuals participated in what debate there was, and there was most assuredly not the feeling among politicians that the decriminalization of male homosexual behavior put anything akin to a moral seal of approval on that behavior. On the contrary, the representative who had the duty to report on that part of the reform bill made his discomfort known to his sympathetic colleagues.^[602] Nevertheless, the legal and scientific arguments together with a changed political climate (and a gradually emerging civic political culture) brought about the quantum leap from the earlier dic­tates of Paragraph 175 and the Nazi-inspired illegality after 1935 to the legal expression of deviant sexuality.

The corresponding catalyst in the United States was the Stonewall Riots of late June 1969 in New York CityThe patrons of a gay bar fought back against yet another of the nearly constant police raids. The spirit of civic unrest and rebellion, already quite manifest in the black civil rights struggle, the antiwar movement, and the women’s movement, now embraced the gay rights movement as well.

In Germany legalization meant that organizations could now mush­room, periodicals and books could be published more freely, and gay bars and a gay subculture could emerge from hiding. In the United States the Stonewall Riots, celebrated yearly in ever-growing gay pride parades all over the country, triggered the emergence of a new civil rights move­ment. Platforms, protests, and parades quickly superseded the picket lines.

stonewall and beyond

It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to examine closely the tac­tical and strategic developments of the political gay and lesbian civil rights struggle after 1969.^[603] The most important feature within the analytical framework employed here is the evolution of German political culture since the early 1970s to the point where it now resembles the American civic culture. This has been noted time and again by political scientists, and the consequences have been immense. The emergence of civil protest movements, Burgerinitiativen, has continued to expand. Their scope has been wide-ranging. Anti-nuclear power groups were the first to emerge, and they were soon followed by groups for all sorts of local or larger environmental concerns, by women’s groups, and by civil rights groups that were (and are) often religiously inspired and that might deal with anything from individual rights in Tibet to child labor in India, to the plight of asylum seekers in Germany. This vast array of causes would not have been thinkable in the 1960s, let alone the 1950s.Although the largest of these movements, the peace movement, was not successful in its fight against NATO’s stationing of Pershing II missiles in Germany, it never­theless created an atmosphere of citizen participation, which, ironically, although directed mainly against American policies, looked like American participatory movements. A lasting result of the changes in the political culture and the change to a more postmaterialist value structure is manifest in the success the Green Party has enjoyed in German electoral politics.

The gay and lesbian movement in Germany was not at the forefront of these changes, but it undoubtedly profited immensely from them. And it borrowed its strategy and tactics even more directly than most other social groups from the United States. Although a certain amount of anti­Americanism was - and is - quite common for the German Left, this was generally not the case among gays and lesbians. The rapid advances of their American counterparts, not to mention the burgeoning gay sub­culture, gave cities like New York and San Francisco the character of a promised land. It is significant that the main annual event, the gay pride parade, has a different name in Germany: It is called Christopher Street Day, after the Greenwich Village street where the Stonewall Riots took place in 1969.

The partial convergence of political strategies has led to an organiza­tional framework in Germany that in some ways resembles its American counterparts. Gay lobbying groups are now part of the German political scene. One can summarize these developments in seven closing state­ments, which at the same time serve as an outlook.

(1) The term civil rights was only appropriate for the American gay rights movement. The earliest German groups chose the path of scientific and legalistic persuasion, not the assertion of civil rights. Since the advent of a participatory civic culture in Germany, however, civil rights can be used to describe the movement’s goals in both countries.

(2) The AIDS crisis dramatically politicized the movement during the 1980s. It forced public officials and politicians to deal with homosexual­ity in an open-minded way in order to contain the epidemic. At the same time, it revealed the homosexuality not only of numerous prominent public figures but also of seemingly “normal” neighborhood people, thus giving homosexuality a human face. It may sound cynical, but it remains a fact that the tragedy of AIDS enhanced the visibility of gays as no other event has done.

(3) The collaboration between male homosexuals and lesbians took on different forms. Whereas the gay rights groups in the United States usually boost some form of co-equal double leadership, in Germany lesbians tend to be active in the general women’s movement.

(4) The goals to be achieved still vary somewhat.Whereas the German movement is bent on full equality and integration into society, the Amer­ican movement seems to be headed toward the assertion of some kind of minority status. This reflects their different social climates and environ­ments. Although there is a tradition of minority representation in the United States, there is nothing even remotely comparable in Germany. Hence, the different agenda.

(5) The means to achieve these goals are still imbedded in the histo­ries of the respective countries’ political cultures. Whereas the movement in the United States seems to rely on the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights, in Germany science and scholarship still claim front­row seats in the arguments of the gay rights movement. Civil rights argu­ments in the American tradition are quickly gaining in Germany, however.

(6) In the United States, given the complicated and protracted law­making procedures, the medium of choice by which to advance goals in the political realm are mainly the courts. In Germany, although law­suits have gained prominence, change occurs mainly via legislative action. The Green Party, itself a child of the protest movements of the late 1970s, has become a staunch advocate of gay rights, fostering numerous parlia­mentary initiatives. The most prominent spokesperson for the gay rights movement, Volker Beck, has become a member of Bundestag for the Greens. It should be noted, however, that there is a certain irony in these political venues: The American movement chooses the courts for a gen­uinely political, civil-rights-oriented argument, whereas the German movement uses the legislative body to argue in a legalistic and scientific manner.

(7) The issue that promises to hold center stage both in Germany and in the United States seems to be the question of same-sex marriage.^[604] It will be interesting to see whether this will lead to a further convergence of political styles and tactics.

The growing number of similarities between the goals and strategies employed by groups in Germany and in the United States highlight the similarities that exist in two modern - or, rather, postmodern - highly pluralistic societies. The dissimilarities, however, remain just as striking even today and point to differences in national political heritage and po­litical culture.