After the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969, time emerged in many countries almost the same for homosexual emancipation movements. How did it come about? And how has it changed the fight for visibility and equality?
Visitors to the Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv on may 14. June, in the tens of thousands of people took part
If in July, the visitors of the two Germany’s biggest Christopher Street Day (CSD) parade through the streets of Berlin and Cologne, will remember the rainbow flags, show trucks and outrageous costumes even more than usual on a summer night in New York 50 years ago.
In the early hours of the morning of the 28. In June 1969, the police stormed the Stonewall Inn in Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The seedy Mafia-Bar was in this time, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder – the meeting point of often non-white Gays, lesbians, Trans people and Drag Queens. Although the guests were at the routine harassment by the authorities accustomed to, it was Extraordinary: she put up a fight.
The discussion moved to days-long riots between the homosexual Community and the police, and went to work as a major catalyst of the modern Gay and lesbian movement in the United States in the story: Within a few months, activist, founded the inner and activists in New York and later throughout the country, organizations that wrote the “gay liberation” on the Flag. On the anniversary of the riots, the “Christopher Street Liberation Day”, drew the first Gay Pride Parade through the Big Apple.
New, radical self-awareness – from Finland to Japan
In fact, homosexuals were sexual even before the uprisings, organized, for example in the “Homophile groups”, the “wanted to achieve something, such as recognition for a certain gay life style in the society of the majority”, as Carina wise Bauer from the Schwules Museum Berlin says.
The commitment to Stonewall is radical “in the sense that you have not sought this recognition, and other Pride behind it was. Coming out as one of the moving or normal moments in a LGBTIQ-life, for example, is a Post-Stonewall Moment,” so wise Bauer, the exhibition “Love at First Fight! Queer movements in Germany since Stonewall” was a co-curator. (The acronym LGBTIQ stands for “Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans Intersex Queer”)
August 1970: police officers against participants in a “Gay Power”Demonstration in New York
Soon, the fight is also far beyond the United States was conducted. In the first years after the riots, the Christopher Street scho political gay shot sexual groups and organisations in the UK, Finland, Iceland and Germany, but also in Israel, Australia and Japan out of the ground. The events in New York were not always a part. “I think it was mainly running in parallel movements, because you can’t at least show for the German history, that you knew in 1969, and the beginning of the Seventies, not so much of the Stonewall Riots,” says wise Bauer.
The liberation movements were developed in a similar political context, but by different events have been triggered. “In the case of Stonewall, it is the attempt to defend himself against the Assault of the police and against police violence. In Germany you go to the cinema and founded the homosexual emancipation groups,” explains wise Bauer, referring to the West German Stonewall Moment: The world premiere of Rosa von Praunheims “it is Not the homosexual a pervert, but the Situation in which he lives” at the Berlinale in 1971.
Two years earlier, the so-called gay section, § 175 of the penal code, sexual acts between men under punishment had been liberalised. Praunheims Film that focused on gay life in the subculture and the scene called for, to fight openly for their rights, caused a sensation.
In the wind shadow of the student movement
After the premiere of lesbians and Gays, founded in Germany, political action groups. In one of them, Elmar Kraushaar engaged. “We sailed in the wind shadow of the student movement,” recalls the Journalist today.
At the beginning of the abstract debates about “our place as a homosexual in the world revolution had” determined the agenda – until you’ve realized that these are in contradiction to a life in hiding. It was followed by: self-experience, the preoccupation with the fate of Homosexuals under national socialism, the founding of the gay Collective, cafes, bars, publishing houses and book shops. “It was mainly about visibility, therefore, to develop a self-awareness and a strength that you could also return to the outside,” says Kraushaar.
Participants of the first gay demonstration in Germany in 1972 in Münster, Germany
I can confirm that Cristina Perincioli. The Bern-born film Director and writer was in the early Seventies in Berlin in the lesbian movement. “We have said: We are different, we want to discriminate, we don’t want to be loved, we want no marriage, we find family terribly. These were the Slogans,” says the 72-Year-old.
A never-before-seen, publicly demonstrated self-awareness – just one of several Parallels to the U.S. movement. An intensive exchange between Homosexuals in both countries took place, according to Carina wise Bauer but only at the end of the Seventy years, as in Germany, the first CSDs were organized after the model of the Pride Parades.
“The recourse to Stonewall started, as you saw these crowds in America on the street,” says Elmar Kraushaar. “Because you suddenly discovered this date. You didn’t know but more than what you could read in Germany in the newspaper: That it was the first Time that Gay is massively against the police have fought back, what had taken place in this way in any other country. This has operated as a sort of symbolic history.”
“Everything after that was shit”
The curly hair and Perincioli have witnessed all the major progress of the movement in Germany since Stonewall: The first gay demo in Germany in 1972 – ironically, in the pious, conservative Münster. The deletion of paragraph 175 in the year 1994. The introduction of marriage for all by 2017.
For Perincioli the beginning of the emancipation, has, nevertheless, until today the most weight the time, “as the women and men from the Hide came out, and have the courage to come out of the closet in their village or their small town.” It was “incredibly Central, if you can stand to his / her identity or must do, as it was someone else. And that affects really millions,” says the feminist. “Everything after that was shit.”
A lively atmosphere at this year’s Pride Parade in Naples
And today? “The themes and struggles within the queer movement has diversified,” says Carina wise Bauer. “There are now more initiatives that will address, for example, racism in the movement, or of People of Color supported. There is much more Trans-activism than 20 years ago.” In addition to citizens, legal commitment, there is a queer, feminist groups, trying, for example, “wide Sex write-UPS and spot rolls in question”.
Will continue to encounter discrimination – also in Europe
Elsewhere in the battle vital remains – despite recent success stories such as the decriminalization of homosexuality in Botswana and the introduction of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Currently, homosexuality is in 70 countries, most of them in Africa, under penalty.
But in Europe, too, there is reason for concern. The non-governmental organisation ILGA-Europe speaks of an “increasingly uncertain and non-sustainable environment for LGBTIQ organisations and human rights activists in a growing number of countries”. There was a noticeable relapse in terms of the laws and guidelines for the protection of the equality of the LGBTIQ people, for example, in Serbia, in Hungary and in Turkey.
The Stonewall Inn, since 2016 is the first LGBTIQ-a national monument in the United States, is still in operation
Least of all homophobic attacks in the UK and Austria hit the headlines but. In Germany, the number of crimes committed against LGBTIQ has been increasing for years. “If we listen more carefully what politicians and Church representatives say, we notice: Under the surface, it simmers still,” warns curly hair. With a view on the part of LGBTIQ-enemy rhetoric of the right wing, you could not do the most “as if we can rest now.”
Many do not, show the CSDs and Pride parades in Cologne, Berlin and countless other cities around the world. To have the world pride celebrations, which take place 50 years after Stonewall the whole of June in New York, expected in the run-up to more than three million visitors.