This article argues that, in order to understand the expanding gay travel worlds of the 1970s and 1980s, it is necessary to follow both gay liberation politics and harmful practices. Just as expanding political opportunities for gay men opened up new possibilities for scene building, the networks of travel and communication that both resulted from and enabled this expansion also became useful tools for some men to skirt newly consolidated age of consent laws. A close examination Spartacus International Gay Guide, a guide for same-sex desiring men founded in the UK in 1970, and its head editor John Stamford, reveals the complicated ways in which this language could be used to navigate shifting legal regimes. In so doing, it created opportunities for white, Western European men to pursue sexually exploitative and harmful practices that were inextricable from wider networks of gay travel.

This book tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, the book charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations. Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected, as activists worked across groups to develop their visions for queer politics. The book describes not only how AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, and Black feminists were connected in unexpected ways but also how they developed contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. Out of these connections, which often exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic, arose new forms of queer fascism as well as their multiple, antiracist contestations. Both unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or “homonationalism,” on which many white queer activists based their claims. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking. The book explains how the importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Actors worked across different groups, making it difficult to chart separable political trajectories. At the same time, antiracist activists also used the fractures and openings in groups that were heavily invested in the logics of whiteness to formulate new, antiracist organizations and, albeit in constrained ways, shifted queer politics more generally.

This chapter elaborates on the interplay of AIDS work, queer of color activism, internationalization, and sex tourism. It explains the entangled engagement of activists who worked across AIDS work and queer politics establishing groundwork for homonationalist political claims and created new forms of queer, antiracist activism. In the context of AIDS, both the xenophobia and homophobia of West Germany's political right became issues of top priority for many white, queer activists. The chapter cites that the 1980s saw a continuation of international politics that bolstered some activists' investment in European institutions and governments as guarantors of sexual freedoms. It explains how right-wing attacks on queer people threatened growing claims of European sexual exceptionalism.

This chapter looks into how international solidarity affected gay liberation and the Iranian Revolution. It explains how Islam was marshaled as a repressive force threatening women and gays. The efflorescence of gay liberation in 1971 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 bore the fruit of the consequences of wider claims that Islam was incompatible with Europe. The 1970s marked the concerted efforts on the part of queer activists to push back against persistent legal and societal homophobia in the Federal Republic after activists developed transnational networks. The internationalization of West German queer politics in the 1970s was crucial to how white, queer West Germans racialized Islam.

This article argues that sexualized travel was a crucial site in which the ambivalences of the so-called sexual revolution were negotiated. Focusing on the experiences of white, West German men between the late 1960s and early 1990s, this article draws on a wide range of travel literature-as well as criticism of sex and travel-to document the ways in which tourists made sense of sexual ambivalences at home through discussions about sex abroad. Regardless of sexual orientation, white, West German men drew on overlapping languages of racialized desire to describe perceived pleasures abroad, revealing that race and racism are inextricable from the history of the sexual revolution in the Federal Republic of Germany.

This chapter explores sex tourism in the 1970s in correlation with the end of permissive Islam. It also cites how Casablanca became a paradise for same-sex desiring men. Decolonization and partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969 radically altered both the practice and representation of tourism. Moreover, the travel worlds and communication networks that primarily white, gay German men created in the 1970s fractured the consensus that North African states were permissive of homosexuality. The chapter clarifies that racialized desire cannot be disentangled from gay politics. It also mentions how pedophilia cannot be extracted from tourist desires.

This chapter explains how queer investments in the politics of normalization created an increased commitment to multicultural diversity and made racialized homophobia convincing. It starts with how neo-Nazis attacked one of East Berlin's most famous queer spaces, the Gründerzeit Museum. Focal points of violence prevention, rights-based politics, and sex tourism shaped how many white gay and lesbian activists and even some activists of color discussed immigration and racial difference. The development of new strategies for post-unification Germany coincided with the emergence of a new group, the Gay Federation in Germany (Schwulenverband in Deutschland, SVD). The chapter cites that attending to the German specificities reveals how strategies were entangled in the queer politics of race and how deeply fragile state-focused strategies were.

This chapter considers the side effects of homophobia in line with the antiracist gains and the emergence of queer fascism in the twenty-first century. It explores the contradictions inherent in the politics of race while considering the contemporary appeal of right-wing politics for predominantly white queer people. The inclusive multiculturalism of the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany (Lesben-und Schwulenverband in Deutschland) and the Greens differed in important ways from the Christian conservatism of the Christian Democratic Union and the explicit nationalism of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland). By the early 2010s, queer of color activism was an entrenched and highly visible feature of queer politics in Germany. The chapter also notes how the Refugee Crisis in 2010 transformed the ways white queer Germans understood their responsibility to rescue queer refugees, and generated confusion on how to differentiate legitimate queer people from non-queer people applying for asylum.

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).

D e p i c t i o n s o f s e x a n D t r av e l are impossible to avoid in West German gay print culture during the 1970s and 1980s. Magazines such as du&ich and him printed travel reports, images, letters to editors, personal advertisements, and travel bureau advertisements that enthusiastically described or depicted the “exotic” possibilities awaiting a predominantly white readership. Guides such as the Frankfurt-based Gay Reiseführer, Copenhagen-based Golden Key, and, perhaps most widely consumed, Spartacus International Gay Guide, which moved from the UK to Amsterdam in 1972 and then under new ownership to Berlin in 1986, offered travelers easier ways to access popular gay destinations, as well as information about the political, legal, and societal situation in countries of interest.1 Placed in a longer history of gay travel, these publications are not tremendously surprising.2 Not only were they relatively popular, but discussions of sex

The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany By Craig Griffiths. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 238. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0198868965. - Volume 55 Issue 2

This introduction to the special issue on the ‘sexotic’, reflects on the heuristic potential of the ‘sexotic’ lens. It situates this approach within existing research on the history of sexualization and exoticization and demonstrates how the ‘sexotic’ opens up fresh vistas on topics like mobilities and migrations, arts and media, as well as science and moralities.

This article examines racial discourses in (West) German gay publications between 1981 and 1992 as well as how issues of race and migration factored into AIDS activism during this period. While there were some attempts to organize against xenophobia in gay journals and gay-led AIDS activist groups, it was not until the 1987 Bavarian proposal that would limit the civil liberties of gay men and immigrants in order to fight HIV/AIDS that anti-xenophobia and anti-racism became major themes for AIDS activists. Throughout this period, highly exoticizing perceptions of men of color, particularly men from Muslim-majority countries, remained prevalent in many gay publications, pointing to the limited success of these efforts.

This piece analyzes the tensions between racial liberalism and erotic representations in West German homosexual-oriented magazines between 1949 and 1974. Relying primarily on publications such as Der Kreis , Die Insel/Der Weg , Amigo , and Du & Ich , this paper argues that as white West German homosexual men made a case for the end of legal discrimination and for social acceptance, they often constructed their arguments and identity as a persecuted minority in relation to the struggles and imagined experiences of colonized men and racial minorities. At the same time, however, many homosexual men still maintained a set of assumptions about racial difference that exoticized and essentialized men of color, assumptions that are particularly apparent in the erotic representations (both visual and literary) of men of color that appeared in these magazines. I further argue that, although historians of homosexuality in West Germany have traditionally viewed 1969 as a break, due to the radical changes in gay life that followed the 1969 reform of the anti-sodomy statute, the tensions between racial liberalism and exoticization continued well into the 1970s and in a remarkably similar published format. The contradictions within these magazines add to the growing literature on both homosexuality and race in postwar West Germany. Through the close examination of a medium that was crucial to the formation of homosexual communities and the development reformist politics, we can more fully understand the complexities and tensions on which minority politics were built in the wake of fascism.