States of Liberation

Despite gay liberation’s close associations with political leftism, historians have long debated whether or not political liberation is indebted to the proliferation of consumer choice in liberal capitalist democracies. Answering this question often involves making a simultaneous claim about the political merits of capitalism, and the apparent greyness of rainbow life under state socialism can put left-leaning historians in an uncomfortable position. Samuel Clowes Huneke’s comparative look at gay life in postwar Germany, divided between a liberal capitalist West and a state socialist East, offers a unique opportunity to think through this history in more complicated ways that will resonate in many national contexts. Huneke advances a set of three, interlinking arguments: 1) homophobia is a more malleable concept than previously understood, 2) gay liberation is historically contingent and not wedded to consumer capitalism, and 3) a focus on gay men unsettles the assumption of a West German, capitalist success story. In so doing, Huneke is elegantly able to “weave together and to compare the trajectories of male homosexuality in the two German states across the span of forty years”—an ambitious project which constitutes his primary intervention (5).

Capitalism · Democracy · Dictatorship · Economic history · German · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · European history and politics · German History and Society · German Social Sciences and History · History · Law