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[–]xanditAGAB (Assigned Gay at Birth) 14 insightful - 1 fun14 insightful - 0 fun15 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

At the same time, this history should caution us that there is nothing inevitable about the conjunction of capitalism, democracy and gay liberation that we fete this time of year.

Just seems like the whole point of the article is to say capitalism and democracy bad.

[–]usehername 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

democracy bad.

The mask slipped.

[–]hinterlands 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

WaPo, "Truth dies in propaganda."

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yes. The article points to Germany as an example. Okay, so East Germany was more progressive than West Germany. That doesn’t mean that every communist country is more progressive than every capitalist country. As it stands, we have five communist countries: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea (de facto) and Vietnam. None of these countries allow gay marriage, none recognise civil partnerships, and only Cuba includes sexual orientation in its anti discrimination law. Cuba could legalise gay marriage in the near future, but would the other communist countries do the same? Fat chance China will.

If you look at Europe more broadly, and look at the European map on gay marriage, you can clearly see the iron curtain lingering on. None of the countries on our continent that have legalised gay marriage were ever communist, except for Germany having had some of its territory under communism. Meanwhile, only six former communist countries have civi partnerships: Czechia (2006), Slovenia (2006 - expanded in 2017), Hungary (2009), Croatia (2014), Estonia (2016 - not fully implemented) and Montenegro (2021). In Czechia and Estonia, civil partnerships give only a fraction of the rights of marriage, and only Croatia, Slovenia (since 2017 only) and Montenegro do civil partnerships give all the rights of marriage. Only Croatia allows same sex couples to adopt children, although stepchild adoptions are allowed in Slovenia and Estonia as well, and Montenegro allows guardianship rights. In other post-communist countries in Europe, there is no legal recognition of same sex unions, although Poland and Slovakia do grant a small number of benefits to cohabitating couples. And even in a country with civil partnerships, societal acceptance is not guaranteed: most Montenegrins see homosexuality as a mental illness, and most Hungarian institutions are strongly critical of homosexuality.

To be fair, the form of capitalism employed in America and in most western countries is bad. It’s called neoliberalism, and neoliberalism is basically socialism for large corporations and billionaires, while the middle class and the working class cannot rely on social services like healthcare or education, because these services are either prohibitively expensive or they are terrible and unreliable. I even consider neoliberalism to be worse than communism. But communism is still bad, and it’s still a dangerous and unnatural system. There are alternatives to both these economic models, like free market industrial capitalism, the Nordic-model (which works only for small, homogeneous countries that have a strong culture), feudalism, or strong, tightly-knit communities.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 13 insightful - 1 fun13 insightful - 0 fun14 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

Is there an archived version of this webpage. I refuse to support the Washington Post.

[–]xanditAGAB (Assigned Gay at Birth) 14 insightful - 1 fun14 insightful - 0 fun15 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Pride month is upon us. Aside from the street festivals, corporate platitudes and sex parties, LGBTQ Pride is meant to be a living embodiment of queer history. The tradition started in June 1970 as a commemoration of the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, when queer people rebelled against police harassment in New York City. But the history we remember remains myopically focused on the United States. The queer past on display each June is a heroic one with familiar, American milestones: the tragedies of the Lavender Scare and the AIDS crisis offset by the triumphs of Stonewall and marriage equality. This story has even been dragooned into progressive narratives of American democracy. In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama declared, “the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”

This heroic narrative is, of course, incomplete. More troublingly, centering American experiences implies a necessary correlation among democracy, capitalism and queer liberation. This U.S.-centrism suggests that sexual minorities abroad must hit the same milestones to be liberated. But when we look beyond the United States, it becomes clear that liberation is far from the inevitable end of a progress narrative. Rather it is a local, subjective and ever-changing project.

Germany is a particularly compelling place to interrogate these concerns, for the nation divided by the Cold War charted two very different paths when it came to gay liberation. In 1949, the country formally split into democratic West Germany and communist East Germany. Yet, of the two, it was the liberal democracy that continued Nazi-era persecution of gay men. Over the course of the 20 years between 1949 and 1969, West German courts convicted more than 50,000 queer men under Nazi statutes that remained on the books. Groups of same-sex desiring men who labeled themselves homophiles (a word they thought sounded more respectable than homosexual) cropped up in West Germany in the early 1950s. Unlike similar groups in the United States and other western European countries, however, they quickly faded. By 1960, they had all but disappeared. There was no Stonewall moment in West Germany, no memorable stand against the oppressive policing and sexual morality of those early postwar decades.

Instead, West German politicians reformed the laws banning homosexual conduct in 1969 as part of a broader revision of the penal code. After this legislative change, new gay and lesbian bars, saunas and periodicals soon arose. A radical liberation movement also appeared in those years. But it was strikingly different from its cousin in the United States. Its members opposed the commercial gay scene, viewing it as a barrier to the kind of solidarity that would be necessary to win real social and political change. The groups attacked gay publications, denouncing them as nothing more than “masturbation templates.”

When it came to politics, the movement also diverged from the center-left alliance that arose between queer activists and the Democratic Party in the United States. Over the course of the 1970s, West German activists enjoyed their greatest support from the centrist Free Democratic Party. But activists ultimately had little success pushing their policies in the federal government and grew cynical about the possibilities of parliamentary politics. As a result, LGBTQ West Germans never fully coalesced behind any of the major parties, even after German reunification in 1990, and they continue to divide their votes across the political spectrum. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, West German history also diverged from the U.S. path. Whereas the Reagan administration stayed silent and let LGBTQ Americans perish, the West German government, in particular federal health minister Rita Süssmuth, partnered with AIDS self-help groups to circulate information about the disease and safer sex. West Germany never shut down its gay saunas and still managed to bring infection rates down dramatically over the course of the decade. Because of the government’s success fighting AIDS, radical groups like ACT UP played a much smaller part in the German activist scene.

If, by the end of the 1980s, West Germany’s activists were far less politically radical than those in other countries, they had nonetheless managed both to preserve their subculture and find ways to collaborate with politicians and bureaucrats. West German queer activism was not characterized by the same triumphal moments or catastrophic setbacks as the American version, but nonetheless forged a kind of liberation no less real than that in the United States.

Yet this distinctive West German history is largely forgotten, submerged beneath the dominant U.S. narrative — even in Germany. The annual Berlin Pride celebration is known as Christopher Street Day, named for the Stonewall Inn’s address. Even by the mid-1980s, activists and historians, dispirited by a lack of parliamentary political victories, had begun to compare West Germany’s liberation movement unfavorably with that in the United States. The East German experience with gay liberation was yet more surprising. Although most Westerners assumed such activism could not possibly have been successful in a communist state, by the end of the 1980s, East Germany could realistically lay claim to being one of the most sexually progressive countries on Earth. In the 1970s, gay men and lesbians began to organize together in East Berlin. While the Stasi, the secret police, denied the group the right to organize in public, these tenacious women and men coordinated house parties, steamboat cruises and birthday dinners. In the middle of the decade, they met Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a trans woman who ran a museum in one of East Berlin’s outer neighborhoods. She offered them the museum’s basement to host their activities, and for several years they “bopped and danced like it was 1904.” This arrangement lasted until 1978, when the East Berlin police forbade the group to continue meeting.

But only a few years later, lesbian and gay activists mobilized again, this time under the umbrella of the Protestant Church, the only nominally independent organization in the communist state. Spreading rapidly across the country, they pressured the regime to change laws and social policies, such as allowing gay men to serve in the military, repealing a law that set a higher age of consent for gay and lesbian sex and making it easier for same-sex partners to find housing together. The government tried cracking down on the groups, but to no avail: They continued to grow in size and number. So worried was the Stasi that its functionaries convinced the East German government to accede to activists’ demands. Stasi officials began circulating memos in 1985 insisting that government bodies address gay men and lesbians’ “humanitarian problems,” that is, taking their complaints seriously.

As a result, change came rapidly. The government equalized the age of consent, years before most other countries, including West Germany and the United States. It promulgated a policy allowing openly gay men to serve in the military. Queer people were given the right to seek sexual and mental health counseling. The regime greenlighted the first gay feature film, “Coming Out,” which premiered Nov. 9, 1989 — the night East Germans breached the Berlin Wall. Local governments began sanctioning queer organizations and staging gay disco nights. In the years after reunification, these two distinct German paths converged. The principal LGBTQ organization in Germany today was founded by East German activists in 1990 and the West German federal states abolished the last vestiges of their antigay statutes as a direct result of East Germany’s more progressive lawmaking. The West German subculture began to bleed into the Eastern lands, in particular East Berlin, which has become synonymous with queer nightlife in recent decades.

The point is not that East or West Germany achieved a liberation better than that in the United States, but rather that queer life and activism take distinctive forms in different local and national contexts. At the same time, this history should caution us that there is nothing inevitable about the conjunction of capitalism, democracy and gay liberation that we fete this time of year. The American version of LGBTQ liberation is not the only path that sexual minorities can travel.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 16 insightful - 1 fun16 insightful - 0 fun17 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I find the excessive use of the word "queer" in the article to be unsettling. But it’s Washington Post, so I should have expected this. The word queer is extremely offensive to me.

[–]xanditAGAB (Assigned Gay at Birth) 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah it is for me too, all the pride articles on yaho feed are all titled with queer, like its normal.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

I liked the word "queer" better when it was only used as a slur.

[–]julesburm1891 9 insightful - 3 fun9 insightful - 2 fun10 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

  1. I’m impressed that you took one for the team and copied this entire article into a comment.
  2. I would absolutely love to watch OP reason through things irl. He’s heavily invested in TQ crazy but also recognizes that gay people are homosexual. Please, tell me more.
  3. Never really thought I’d see the day where someone claimed East Germany was a bastion of human rights, but here we are.

[–]xanditAGAB (Assigned Gay at Birth) 5 insightful - 4 fun5 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

I’m impressed that you took one for the team and copied this entire article into a comment.

When we speak of what makes lgb people a community, we mean people willing to copy/paste an article for you.

[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks.