On November 7th, Dr. Kyle Frackman presented a lecture on “Persistent and Deceptive Ambivalence: Queer East German Studies” at Stanford University.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR) had an ambivalent relationship with homosexuality. Under the principles of socialism, everyone was welcome to contribute to the greater good. The situation for lesbians and gay men was different: one of illegality or invisibility. A difficulty in analyzing these experiences is the theory and methodology necessary to find them and draw them together into some kind of an historical narrative. This talk offers a mode of analysis in which theories of ignorance, affect, and media illustrate long-term trends in East German conceptualizations of same-sex sexuality. Emerging before the East German state had been founded and continuing past the fall of the Berlin Wall, the powerful ambivalence toward same-sex eroticism left individual and collective expressions of queerness in a remarkably uncertain position. Referring to various texts and media, the presentation will discuss a number of points in queer East German cultural history in order to demonstrate the persistence and quirks of homophobic prejudice in the socialist state.
