*As a result of converting these pages into html from Word processing formats, some formatting items  have been lost and are in the process of being corrected. All papers are works in progress.

Abstract: none available
 

Different cultures come up with different ways of describing or categorizing sexual phenomena. When those descriptions or categories are imported by other cultures, interesting tensions arise between indigenous sexual cultures and the newly imported discourses. The term “homosexual,” for instance, traces its origins as “Homosexualität” to the activist Karl Maria Kertbeny’s political tract of 1869. This document was written in German against the backdrop of the impending unification of Germany, with the specific purpose of preventing the spread of Prussia’s stringent laws against sodomy to states like Bavaria that did not criminalize consensual sexual activity between members of the same sex. Thus “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” terms which went on to structure the world’s understanding of sexuality, clearly emerge from mid-nineteenth-century central Europe. In 1968, almost a century after the coinage of the term “Homosexualität,” the German Democratic Republic began moving in the direction that Kertbeny had desired, decriminalizing consensual sexual acts between members of the same sex. A year later, the Federal Republic of Germany also decriminalized sex between adult men, although the age of consent remained higher for male-male activities than it was for heterosexual acts. (This was finally changed in 1994.) Since this liberalization, the vocabulary of sexuality has undergone considerable change, much of which was fomented in the United States. How has the Federal Republic of Germany, once an exporter of sexual vocabulary, taken to importing conceptualizations of sexuality? Some of the American vocabulary has been deeply foreign to German language and culture, but the word “queer” will transfer quite well, grafting itself on to German roots.

A plethora of American concepts and words inundates the German sexual realm nowadays, with affects on sexuality that cannot be taken for granted. Among these concepts are: “gay community,” [1]    “Stonewall,” “Christopher Street Day,” “Coming-Out,” “the closet,” “outing,” and “queer.” These terms must have an effect on German conceptualization of sexuality, just as the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” have influenced the way the rest of the world thinks about sexuality.  A concrete example of this cross-pollination can be seen, for example, in the work of Jim Baker, who with Ilona Bubeck has co-founded the “Querverlag,” which has just published a directory of German gay and lesbian organizations called the Regenbogen Seiten. The vocabulary of “quer” and the notion of “Regenbogenseiten” both suggest American interference from the word “queer” and the ideology of the rainbow flag. The index to this directory shows over a hundred organizations sticking with the indubitably German “schwul,” plus 19 using the originally German if now international “homosexuell” (which represents a considerable drop from earlier years), 46 using the word “gay,” and another 22 using some form of “queer” or “quer.” Thus, while German words remain in the majority, there is nonetheless a sense that German inadequately describes contemporary sexuality, which motivates a strong interest in Anglo-American vocabulary. 

In academic circles a host of words are considered untranslatable. The collection of essays entitled Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten, edited by Sabine Hark, who has written some of the earliest German publications on queer theory, has a glossary explaining such terms as “butch/femme,” “closet,” and “queer,” all of which appear in English and are not translated in any of the essays. The Humboldt-Universität in Berlin has a quasi-official program in “Queer-Studien” [2]  within the Department of Cultural Studies. [3] 

Some institutions resist these foreign loanwords, of course. The department of Neuere Deutsche Literatur at the venerable Albert-Ludwigs-Universität of Freiburg refused to let a visiting American professor use the words “queer theory” in the title of his course because it wanted to keep the catalog German. The department settled on “Homosexualität und Literatur,” recognizing the Teutonic nature of homosexuality. In their insistence on the term “homosexuality,” the Freiburger Germanisten had for many years allies in the German government, which also exclusively used the word “homosexuell.” The Bundestag only permitted vocabulary of “schwul” and “lesbisch” in the 1990s (Schenk 190).

Outside of the academic arena, many aspects of the American gay rights movement have also been imported by Germany. Some of these “imports” should actually be considered German projections on to America. Since 1979, there have been gay pride parades in Germany called Christopher Street Day Parades, or CSD-Paraden, although relatively few parades in the English-speaking world are so named (Theis 290). Volker Woltersdorff observes that the emphasis on Christopher Street Day is producing a mythic history of the gay movement:  “die 69er Revolte in der New Yorker Christopher Street [wird] als ein Gründungsmythos der Schwulenbewegung inszeniert und alljährlich reinszeniert” (82). Sabine Hark comments upon the importance of the founding myth of Christopher Street for the German movement, bemoaning the fact that the acceptance of “Stonewall” as the zero hour of gay and lesbian history devalidates any prior queer history indigenous to Germany (“Magisches Zeichen” 109). When Berlin’s Akademie der Künste hosted an exhaustively comprehensive exhibit on gay male history, it chose Christopher Isherwood’s title, “Good bye to Berlin,” suggesting that even this remarkable demonstration of the significance of gay Germany was looking to the Anglo-American world for confirmation and legitimation. This is all the more ironic, given that it is unlikely that in the United States or England such a major exhibition would have been funded with public monies and with so little public outcry.

Moving from the level of politics and activism to the more personal and psychological level, one of the most fundamental stages of gay identity in the United States is the closet, which is an entirely untranslatable notion in German. One can’t speak of the “Schrank,” in which sexuality is hidden. Indeed, most European houses don’t have built-in closets.  One certainly can’t make verb forms comparable to “closeted” either. English-language critical texts based on “closet” as a noun and a verb, with frequent usage of the terms “closeted” or “closeting,” disintegrate in the process of translation, which must render these terms with the less metahorical language of “verstecken,” “verhüllen,” “verbergen,” and “verklemmt.” Certainly, sex between members of the same gender has often been hidden in German history, but the absence of the metaphor of the closet has lent this German hiding of sexuality an undeniably different character.

As Butler points out in the translated essay (originally written in English) that anchors Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten, the metaphor of “out” is completely dependent upon the metaphor of the closet (19). Thus it is not surprising that German imported the vocabulary of “coming out,” as well as that of the “closet.” Not only German has perceived this necessity, if Helga Pankratz is to be believed: “So häufig und so selbstverständlich wird der Ausdruck gebraucht weltweit! … Aber in jeder Sprache der Welt außer dem Englischen ist und bleibt ‘Coming Out’, wenn wir es recht bedenken: ein Fremdwort!” (177). It is an American export article, she continues, one that has achieved the respectability in Germany of being recognized by the Duden. The “Coming-out Erzählung” has become a term that is standard enough to receive academic attention by scholars such as Volker Woltersdorff. Even in the German Democratic Republic, it gained acceptance, becoming the title of a major film there on the subject of homosexuality: Heiner Carow’s “Coming Out” was the last major film produced in the GDR. The film might have made a bigger splash, had the Berlin Wall not come down the very day that it was released.

Despite its success, the term “Coming Out” is clumsy in German. While German is no stranger to separable verbs like “coming out,” it has not proven possible to use “aus kommen” to mean “to come out” in the sexual sense. Thus Germans have stayed with the foreign term “Coming Out” as a noun, producing sentences like “Ich hatte mein Coming-Out 1989.” Fortunately, another Anglo-Americanism appeared on the scene to rescue the Germans out of this awkward linguistic situation: “Outing.” Outing, which provoked enormous controversy in the Federal Republic, partially because of Rosa von Praunheim’s efforts to expose hypocritical public figures, flowed smoothly into German. It lent itself to an incorporation into German as the verb “outen,” which could be used gracefully in a number of verb forms, including the reflexive “sich outen.” Here was a way out of the problems with the ungraceful “Coming Out.” One could “out oneself”: “sich outen” became the more fluent way to talk about openly announcing one’s sexuality. Indeed, in Germany “outen” soon came to be used to reveal any unusual, surprising, remarkable, hitherto unsuspected aspect of a person’s personality, just as the verb “to out” is used in the United States. Pankratz lists examples of people in the public eye “outing themselves” as rollerbladers, sufferers of migraine headaches, lovers of classical music, or natives of the Vorarlberg (189). “Sich outen” works more easily in German than “Coming Out,” but it alters the understanding of sexuality, which is no longer the organic growth or development of the subject that one associates with “coming out,” and instead has a somewhat violent relationship between subject and object that is associated with the controversial practice of “outing.” [4]  Indeed, one of the reasons that Pankratz ultimately likes “sich outen” is its somewhat harder edge that comes from its connections to “outing.” 
Pankratz points out that the reflexive verb, “sich outen,” has become confusing for many native speakers of German, including journalists, who now use the word “Outing,” without the “sich,” for “Coming-Out.”As an example, she cites the following sentence from an article about the openly lesbian singer Melissa Etheridge, “Immer mehr schwule und lesbische Stars riskieren es, durch ihr Outing straightes Publikum zu brüskieren” (192). In addition to the striking use of “straight” as an adjective, the sentence is remarkable because “Outing” is no longer something done to a star, but rather something that a star does to herself or to her public.

A number of German cultural critics have made reference to a subtle distinction between “coming out,” understood as a personal recognition of one’s sexuality, and “going public,” understood as the public announcement of that sexuality. They point out the associations of the phrase with the stock market as an example of the kind of double meaning that gets lost in the wholesale importation of sexual terminology. While the distinction between “coming out” and “going public” makes sense to me, as does the analysis of the latter term’s economic meaning, I have to say that I personally have rarely, if ever, heard or read the phrase “going public” in this sense.

Once one comes out, what does one become? Immediately after the 1969 liberalization of laws concerning sexuality, German terminology prevailed and one became “homosexuell” or “schwul.” The currency of the term “homosexuell” is perhaps surprising, because it is today frequently rejected as overly clinical, medical, and pathological. But just as it was originally coined and embraced by activists, only to be appropriated by medicine, so too was it also embraced by the post-69 generation of gay activists. A great many student groups included the word “homosexuell” in their names, including the “Homosexuelle Aktionsgruppe Bochum” (which appeared as a student group in 1970 and became a city-wide organization in 1971), the “Homosexuelle Studentengruppe Münster,” the “Homosexuelle Aktion Westerberlin” (1971). There was also a “Homosexuelle AktionsGruppe” or HAG in Munich, which had to change its acronym, when a coffee firm of the same name protested. It became HAM for “Homosexuelle Aktionsgruppe München.” Various organizations came to represent the cause of gay rights on a federal level, including the “Deutsche Aktionsgruppe Homosexualität,” founded in 1972, and the “Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft” (1974).

Clearly, then, a large majority of the organizations that formed in the early 70s chose vocabulary having to do with “homosexuality.” Rosa von Praunheim’s film, “Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt,” which appeared at the Berliner Filmfestspiele in 1971, and appeared for the first time on television in 1972, used the vocabulary of “Homosexuelle,” albeit with a great deal of alienating distance. Homosexuality also showed up in the chants of the street marchers, as in the following example: “Brüder und Schwestern, ob warm oder nicht, Kapitalismus bekämpfen ist unsere Pflicht!” (Kraushaar 139). [5] As this jingle indicates, the groups using the discourse of homosexuality were on the cutting edge of left-wing radicalism, which is somewhat surprising given the current rejection of the term “homosexuelle” by many activists.

Indeed, the “Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft” started in Berlin as a replacement for the “Internationale Homophile Weltorganisation” (IHWO), according to Wolfgang Theis (285). The word “homosexuell” radically emphasized the sexual, while the term “homophil,” which had been more popular in the 50s and 60s in the Federal Republic, had diluted the sexual with a vaguer kind of love: “Die Verwendung des Begriffs ‘homosexuell’ in den Namen der neuen studentischen Gruppen war als programmatische Abkehr von der Praxis der bürgerlichen Verbände gemeint, die sich schamhaft ‘homophil’ nannten, weil die Betonung des Sexuellen nach ihrem Verständnis nur Vorurteile bestätigen konnte” (Theis 279-80). Thus, the word “homosexuell” should receive more credit than it does. The Foucauldian attack on the role of medicine in the construction of sexuality probably led to a widespread discrediting of this term, which had become a medical, as well as a political, concept. But in the critique of the medical establishment, the activists who did promote this terminology have been forgotten.

In the early 70s, “schwul” seems to have been used alongside “homosexuell.” Praunheim’s film entitled “Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt” states programatically, “Schwule wollen nicht schwul sein” (Theis 280). Generally understood as a pejorative, gay groups tended to avoid using it in their official names, although there were some exceptions, for instance Frankfurt’s “Rote Zelle Schwul” or “Rotzschwul.” Within the community, however, the pejorative connotations of the word had less weight, meaning that it was used in exclusively gay contexts, rather than in contacts between the gay and straight world. The gay newspaper Schwuchtel appeared in 1975; in the following year, an early gay drama appeared, entitled “Brühwarm – ein schwuler Jahrmarkt” (Theis 286-7).  Both the newspaper and the drama were intended for a primarily gay audience, which allowed for the use of the word “schwul.” The tension between the title of Praunheim’s film and its first words underscores this point as well. The title, “Nicht der Homosexuelle …,” would serve to mediate between the film’s content, which was by, for, and about the gay male movement, and the general public. The vocabulary of “Schwule wollen nicht schwul sein” then leads the public directly into an internal gay debate.

“Nicht der Homosexuelle …” is of course more complicated than that, for the repeated use of the word “schwul” not only introduces the audience to the film’s insider critique, but also forces the general public to confront its own negative associations with the word “schwul.” As Volker Bruns notes, “das Wort ‘schwul’ war ein so ungeheuerliches Schimpfwort, dass es selbst die ‘Normalen’ nur in Sekunden der Erregung über die Lippen brachten” (86). In 1975, the East German gay activist Michael Unger expressed the community’s desire to change the connotations of the word: “Wir verwenden es seit langem als selbstverständliche Bezeichnung auch für uns selbst, weil wir glauben, dass es ursprünglich einmal eine saubere Bedeutung hatte und erst später zum Schimpfwort wurde” (Kraushaar 147-48). [6]  In response to Unger, the Zentralinstitut für Sprachwissenschaft an der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR confirmed that the word had a negative connotation and presumed that there was little chance that word “schwul” would experience a positive reevaluation (Kraushaar 147). The magazine Schwuchtel pressed the point, by using an even more pejorative term to discuss practices, such as S/M and pederasty, that were taboo even within the gay community. The use of the word “schwul” mirrored the appropriation of the term “nigger” in the United States by rap groups like Niggers With Attitude and anticipated the reversal of meaning that took place when the word “queer” came into use by academicians and activists in the 1990s. 

By the end of the 70s, an increasingly self-confident gay movement in the Federal Republic began to replace “homosexuell” with the term “schwul.” In the 1977 the “Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin” dissolved and the space it had occupied became the “SchwulenZentrum” or “Schwuz” (Theis 288). In the same year, the “Nationale Arbeitsgruppe Repression gegen Schwule” was established in Hamburg (Theis 290).  In 1978, 682 men revealed themselves as gay in the newsmagazine Stern (#41) in the article, “Wir sind schwul” (Rimmele 138). In 1979 the student government of the Freie Universität in Berlin set up a “Schwulenreferat” (Theis 287). By 1990, there was a “Schwulenverband in Deutschland,” which attempted to unite gay political organizations. Shortly thereafter, the Bundestag began to accept the use of the word “schwul” instead of “homosexuell.” The term “schwul” had been objectionable enough in 1988 that a Green Party proposal for a “Schwulenreferat” had not even reached the floor, because of the word. The Greens refused to accept the word “Homosexuelle,” killing the proposal for the time being (Kraushaar 204-5). The subtitle of the publically subsidized Berlin exhibit “Good bye to Berlin,” “100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung,” was further evidence of the official acceptance of this term. 

The demise of the word “homosexuell” was related, on the academic front, to the general Foucauldian critique of medicine and its role in pathologizing same-sex desire. It also was a corollary of an increasing gap between gay men and lesbians. The word “schwul” generally refers only to gay men, although this was not always the case. None other than one of the founders of the German gay and lesbian movement, Magnus Hirschfeld, is said to have referred to “schwule Frauen und Männer.” And the Berlin group, Homosexuelle Aktion West, had in 1972 a “schwule Frauengruppe” (Winder and Telge 11). But these are rare exceptions; the vast majority of German speakers regard “schwul” as referring only to men. These exceptions, however, prove that the implicit masculinity of the word “schwul” is a result of decision-making by German speakers.

This separatism has had some noteworthy consequences. In particular, gay male events have often been much more sexually explicit in Germany than they would be in the States where the sexes have worked together more closely. The catalog for the mammoth exhibit, “Good Bye to Berlin, 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung,” which was in fact quite astonishing in its concentration on men to the exclusion of women, was filled with graphic depictions of male sexual organs and acts that would likely not have been present in an exhibit with a strong women’s presence. Indeed, when gay male organizations in Germany have attempted to solicit lesbian participation and contributions, the issues of pornography and the power of images have always quickly arisen as stumbling blocks. [7]
The loss of the inclusive term “homosexuell” went hand in hand with the development of separate identities around the terms “schwul” and “lesbisch.” The lesbian movement intensified its involvement with feminism and the women’s movement, as the gay men went their own way. Any cooperation between the camps was seen as a coalition between precisely defined categories: “schwul-lesbisch.” The Siegesäule, the gay and lesbian magazine coming out of Berlin, with the largest circulation of any gay/lesbian publication in Germany, has recently taken to styling itself as “schwul-lesbisch,” in order to be more inclusive, although it had traditionally been “schwul” and thus primarily male in its orientation, and to some extent remains so. Similarly the “Schwules Pressearchiv” has called itself since August 1995 the “Lesbisch-Schwules Pressearchiv” (Rimmele 132).

For those with a residual fear of the offensiveness of “schwul” or with a hankering for the inclusiveness “homosexuell,” there was always the prosaic “gleichgeschlechtlich,” which began to show up, especially in bureacratic contexts, in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1989, Berlin established a “Referat für gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen.”  In 1992, Brandenburg followed suit, with a “Büro für gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen” (Kokula 173-4). The term “Lebensweise” is additionally interesting, for it suggests a deemphasis on the sexual aspect that the early proponents of “homosexuell” had wanted to underscore, as well as a downplaying of the shock tactics that the initial champions of “schwul” had utilized. In these cases, the speakers wanted the most neutral, least offensive official term possible, with the least taint of colloquialism. In addition, they seem to have wanted to avoid the use of loan words, like the Anglo-Saxon “gay” or even the Greco-Roman “homosexual.” The German language was up to providing terminology that adequately covered the needs of its speakers! 

How about the Anglo-Saxon word “gay”? In the Regenbogen Seiten, there are actually more organizations using “gay” in their names than organizations using some version of “queer.” This is probably a passing phenomenon, because “gay” does not lend itself phonetically to appropriation in the German language the way that “queer” does. In the Romance languages constructions like “gai pied,” the title of the venerable, although sadly no longer surviving, Parisian gay magazine, can flow smoothly into the native language, but “gay” is a difficult word to use in German. The “ay” is not common at the end of a word, and the declension of an adjective ending with a “y” is uncomfortable.

In English, the word “gay” has a highly problematic positioning on two axes: the gay-lesbian axis and the gay-straight axis. When it is on the gay-lesbian axis it refers to men, but when it’s on the gay-straight axis, it at least attempts to represent homosexually-inclined men and women together. This uncomfortable double meaning has its reflections in Germany. As seen in the example of “schwul,” Germans have been more inclined to force vocabulary dealing with sexuality into a specific gender. The effort at inclusiveness in the American word “gay” has been something of a standing reproach to German groups. Dorothee Winden and Dieter Telge argue that the flood of documentaries out of the United States showing the cooperation between the sexes provided a model for many Germans. The concept of “gay” as including men and women together eventually shamed German gay groups into opening up to women, as the move by the Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft to include women in 1994 indicates. 

The other half of the gay-straight dichotomy has fared even less well, if that is possible, in the Germanic realm than the gay-lesbian dichotomy. I’ve already cited the one reference to a “straightes Publikum” (Pankratz 192). In general, however, there is not a good colloquial expresssion for heterosexuals that would correspond, say, to “schwul.” Generally, it seems that gays and lesbians refer to “Heteros” or “Heteras” in a slangy kind of way, when they wouldn’t necessarily use the term “Homos.” And while the words “schwul” and “lesbisch” have now achieved widespread currency, the terms “hetero” and “hetera” have not. This suggests that linguistically, German culture still finds the practitioners of same-sex desire as worthy of special note, while those who are in heterosexual relationships can pass by with relatively little scrutiny. 

Some might object to the relentless dichotomization between men and women, gays and straights, going on here, and one of the objectives of the word “queer” has been to escape such binary thinking. Although in many ways it had a militant edge to it, it blurred some of the boundaries that had existed, both along the gay/lesbian and the gay/straight axes. “Queer” emerged as a word with a signficant new ideology in the States in the 1990s and arrived in Germany shortly thereafter. In 1989,  Burroughs’s book with the English title Queer was translated into German as Homo, indicating that the term was relatively unknown in Germany. In 1992, the group Queer Nation made an appearance at the Berlin lesbian festival called “Lesbenwoche,” identifying itself as follows: “Queer Nation … versteht sich als undogmatisches Aktionsbündnis von Lesben und Schwulen aller Rassen und Klassen, die sich nicht mehr mit der Assimilationspolitik der etablierten Homobewegung identifizieren können und buntere und radikalere Aktionsformen entwickeln wollen” (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). Sabine Hark’s essay “Queer Interventionen” appeared in 1993 (in Feministische Studien 2), marking the introduction of the term to academic prose; it was reprinted in 1994 in a volume entitled Querfeldein: Beiträge zur Lesbenforschung, which is one of the earliest usages of the highly significant wordplay between “quer” and “queer” that I have located.

Since 1994, usage of the term “queer” has blossomed in the Federal Republic. The symposium entitled “Queering Demokratie” hosted by the Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation from October 9-11 of 1998 in Berlin sparked an intensive confrontation with the concept of “queer” in newspapers and weeklies like Freitag and Die Taz. The private television channel RTL reported in 1998 that at the Augsburg Christopher Street Day parade participants were chanting “queer und hier,” which the news program helpfully translated as “schwul und hier.” In the “Querverlag”’s Regenbogen Seiten one comes across such organizations as the “Queer Strikers Frankfurt” (a gay bowling club), the “QueerFlöten” (a gay and lesbian choir in Freiburg), and “Queer Klagenfurt,” which seems to be an umbrella organization with various functions in Austria. Berlin has the aforementioned “Queer-Studien,” Linz has a “Queery-Box.” There’s “Queerfilm” in Bremen, a “Queerfilmreihe” in Freiburg, a “queer-Filmfest” in Frankfurt, a “Queer Film Festival” in Vienna, and a cultural festival called “Queer im Ruhr.” You can tune your radio to a “Queer Kanal” in Bremen, and a “Queerfunk” in both Dresden and Kiel. 

Many of the organizations that have used the term “queer” in their names do not have an explicit agenda. When I spoke with founders of Berlin’s “Queer-Studien” and Freiburg’s “QueerFlöten,” they were unable to give a concrete explanation for their choice of a name. But nonetheless the term has significance. Part of the appeal of “queer” seems to be the way it fills the gender gap left by the demise of “homosexuell” and the rise of “schwul,” thus authorizing gay and lesbian cooperation. The manifesto in Queer Nation’s 1992 statement at the Lesbenwoche specifically referred to an alliance between “Lesben und Schwulen” (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). According to Winden and Telge, “Queer Nation” was the first integrated male-and-female political action group interested in issues of same-sex desire that had appeared in Germany in a long time (12-13).  Freiburg’s “QueerFlöten” was until recently the only integrated lesbian and gay choir in all of Germany, and there are plenty of single-sex choirs there. The “Queer-Partys” of SO 36, a nightclub in Berlin, brought together men and women; the presence of parties at which both gay men and lesbians could come together was itself political. So threatening to the established gay and lesbian identities were these “Queer-Partys” that they were accused of turning SO 36 it into a meeting place for hip bis, or “hippe Bi’s” as they say in German. 

While the founders of the Humboldt’s “Queer-Studien” did not have an expressed  ideology backing their name, other academics have thought about their terminology more strenuously. In their introduction to the series “Querdenken,” which was published in 1996, Sabine Hark and Stefan Etgeten define the name of the series  as an “Experiment lesbisch-schwuler Zusammenarbeit, in der Konflikte und Differenzen nicht verdeckt, sondert fortwährend artikuliert und untersucht werden sollen” (“Zu dieser Reihe” 8). In their volume, Freundschaft unter Vorbehalt. Chancen und Grenzen lesbisch-schwuler Bündnisse, published in 1997, Hark and Etgeten situate the possible coalition between gay men and lesbian women specifically under the aegis of “queer,” which they hope will be an end to separatism (“Zwischen Geschlechterschranke”).
Perhaps because “queer” counters the exclusionary force of “schwul,” it has proven particularly attractive to women theorists. It was in the context of “Lesbenwoche” and “Lesbenforschung” that the term was first introduced to the Federal Republic. In general, many more women theorists have published on this matter in Germany than men. In a private conversation, Alice Kuzniar suggested that this may have to do with the impact of Judith Butler on feminist thinking in Germany. Butler is clearly related to the emergence of “queer”in Germany. Gender studies and queer theory are of course ways of thinking often associated with the writings of Judith Butler, who has been such a success in Germany that one speaks of the “Butler-Boom.” Her lecture tour in Germany in the summer of 1997 was a triumphal march through a happily vanquished land. It was like the Beatles – 14-year-old girls fainting when they caught sight of her and so forth. Both of her public appearances in Berlin were completely packed. The public lecture at the Einstein Forum at the Staatsbibliothek filled two rooms to overflowing, whereupon loudspeakers were set up outside on the lawn for the fascinated public. All the serious newspapers carried reviews of her lectures. Butler’s tremendous success there fueled an enthusiastic sense of rebirth among feminist thinkers, which was lost on the gay male scholars who did not pick up on her as quickly.

In addition, “queer” is seen among German intellectuals and activists, in a way similar to its reception in the United States, as opening up the possibility of talking about non-essentialist identities (Engel 77). It offers possibilities to those who are exhausted with the boundaries of their identities (Etgarton and Hark). In her essay, “Queer Interventionen,” Hark describes queer theory as “eine politische und theoretisch-konzeptionelle Idee für eine kategoriale Rekonzeptualisierung von Geschlecht und Sexualität, mit der problematisch gewordene Identitätspolitik überwunden werden sollen” (211). Woltersdorff refers to “queer” as “neue Identität beziehungsweise Anti-Identität,” including transsexuals and transgendered people (90-91). Discussing the establishment of the “queer-Partys” at SO 36, Winden and Telge see “queer” as appealing to young party-goers because of its inclusivity and its rejection of constricting labels: “Mit dem Wort queer als Sammelbegriff für alles, was sich jenseits der heterosexuellen Norm bewegt, bieten die queer-Partys eine Identifikationsmöglichkeit, die weniger ideologisch-theoretisch bestimmt war, sondern dem eigenen Lebensstil entsprach” (21). Corinna Genschel see it as potentially including “alle ‘Perverse’ als Dissidenten herrschender Politik” (79). Roswitha Hofmann finds that “queer” is an “expression of a new way of thinking and living” and “Queer-Theory” the next step “in extracting oneself from the categories of identity that many feel are too narrow” (115). Jutta Hartman also sees “Queer Theory” as a “confrontation with the constructedness and thus relativity of identities” (270). 

Notable throughout the writings on queer is the ambivalence about the possibility that it could water down, depoliticize, and further commercialize sexuality. Engel is concerend that “queer” often merely serves as a fashionable guarantor of a “progressive attitude” (77). Genschel worries about the potential commercialization of the word “queer.” This mistrust, born of the long-standing leftwing tendencies of the gay and lesbian movements in the Federal Republic, is perhaps connected to the American origins of the term “queer.” The word has clearly been recognized as an American import since Queer Nation’s announcement at the 1992 Lesbenwoche that it was “eine Bewegung, die seit Frühjahr 1990 in fast allen US-amerikanischen und einigen kanadischen Städten Fus gefasst hat” (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). Ralph Poole wonders if the “queer-Szene” is “ein amerikanisches Phänomen” (99). Many of the speakers at the Green Party’s Queering Democracy symposium were Americans and spoke in English. [8]  An article from Die Taz asserts,  “unter dem aus den USA importierten Begriff ‘Queer’ soll nun die heterosexuelle Norm exorziert werden” (Krause and Meisel). The importation of “queer” from America perhaps the effect of validating West German conceptualizations of sexuality over East German ones, as the Westerners had more contact with the American scene that produced this vocabulary (see Thinius).

While “queer” has provided a good deal of food for thought for feminist scholars, some are concerned that it will dilute the specificity of women’s issues,once again subordinating women to the economically and socially more powerful men who will almost inevitably take over an organization that consists of both men and women. Lena Laps in any case sees the move from “schwul” and particularly “lesbisch” to “queer” as parallel to the move from “Frauenforschung” to “Geschlechterdifferenz,” in that in both cases, there is a loss of particularlity in favor of generality. Women in particular disappear behind the universals that she sees in the terms “queer” and “gender.”

In addition to concerns about commercilization and sexism, many of these theorists and commentators are concerned that the use of “queer” in German disconnects the word from its initial Anglo-American double-meaning of “homosexual” and “strange” or “weird.” By eliding these two meanings, American queer theorists can pivot same-sex desire into a paradoxically paradigmatic marginality. With the fortuitous existence of the verb “to queer,” one had the possibility for numerous linguistically pre-approved approaches to texts. Much of this is lost in the German appropriation of the word. Some have therefore argued for the use of the word “pervers” as a translation of “queer,” in order to emphasize the initial negativity of the term. But I think that, among queers, there have always been those who took pleasure in being queer, and I’m not sure that the same applies to “pervers.” That is to say, I’m not sure that the issue is exclusively one of reversing the meaning of a word, but rather one of determining whose evaluation of the term is considered binding. In any case, Germans are familiar with the concept of reappropriating negative terminology and giving it a positive twist – indeed that is what happened to the word “schwul.” “Schwul” would have been a model for “queer” if the only concern were to make positive an initially negative concept. 
 

Despite these concerns, “queer” seems to be taking root in Germany. Unlike “gay,” which has remained an entirely foreign word in German, the word “queer” can fit into another linguistic matrix in German. “Queer” is perhaps related to “quer.” Hence the “Querverlag,” with its series “querdenken,” and the lecture series in Vienna with the title “que[e]rdenken” (with the second “e” in brackets). By mobilizing this linguistic family, queer theorists are able to discuss, as Poole does, “verquerte Sexualität” (108). Antke Engel entitles her article “Verqueeres Begehren.” The Humboldt-Universität hosted a conference on sexology entitled “Verqueere Wissenschaft” in 1997. 

This usage has exciting possibilities, not only for the development of German conceptualization of sexuality. The importation of “queer” will facilitate German thinking on sexuality, but it will do so, not merely by forcing an American concept onto the German playing field, but also by allowing the German linguistic structures to contribute to this conceptualization. As “queer” anchors itself in German “quer,” the concepts of queer theory that arise in Germany will emphasize more the sense of crossing boundaries, a kind of reading or cutting against the grain that is inherent in “quer” rather than the strangeness or making strange that is inherent in “queer.” This is an exciting form of cultural cross-pollination, for it allows for cultures to affect each other while also recognizing cultural difference.
 

Buckley, J.F. “People and Publishing.” LGSN 25.3 (Fall 1998). 10.
Butler, Judith. “Imitation und die Aufsässigkeit der Geschlechtsidentität.” In: Hark 15-37.
Die lesbisch-schwule Presseschau. 17/11 (November 1998).
Engel, Antke. “Verqueeres Begehren.” In Hark 96-136.
Etgeton, Stefan and Sabine Hark (Hrsg.). Freundschaft unter Vorbehalt. Chancen und Grenzen lesbisch-schwuler Bündnisse. Berlin: Querverlag, 1997.
-----. “Zu dieser Reihe.” In: Hark 7-8.
-----. “Zwischen Geschlecherschranke und Begehrensbrücke. Einleitung.” In Etgeton and Hark 7-8.
Genschel, Corinna. “Umkämpfte sexualpolitische Räume. Queer als Symptom.” In: Etgeton and Hark, 77-98.
Hark, Sabine (Hrsg.). Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten. Aufsätze. Berlin: Querverlag, 1996. 
-----. “Magisches Zeichen.” In: Hark 96-133.
Hartmann, Jutta. “Die Triade Geschlecht, Sexualität und Lebensform – Herausforderungen an den Pluralitätsanspruch der Erziehungswissenschaften.” In: Hey, et al, 255-273.
Hey, Barbara, Ronald Pallier, and Roswith Roth (Hrsg.). Que[e]rdenken: weibliche/männliche Homosexualität und Wissenschaft. Vienna: Studien-Verlag, 1997.
Hofmann, Roswitha. “Homophobie und Identität I: Queer Theory.” In: Hey, et al, 105-118.
Krause, Reinhard and Paul Meisel. “Rückkehr ins Unaussprechliche.” die tageszeitung. 10 October 1998.
Meyer, Ulf, et al. Regenbogen Seiten. Das lesbische-schwule Adreßbuch. Berlin: Querverlag, 1997.
Pankratz, Helga. “Was heißt denn hier Comng Out? Versuch über die Be- und Abnutzungserscheinungen eines einstmals politischen Begriffes.” In: Hey, et al, 174-198.
Poole, Ralph. “Queer Porno? S/M-Fiktionen.” In: Etgeton and Hark 99-126.
Winden, Dorothee and Dieter Telge. “Eisbrecher. Die lesbisch-schwule Zusammenarbeit ist besser als ihr Ruf.” In: Etgeton and Hark 9-27.

[1] One of the more subtle points of interaction between language and content takes place with the word “community.” I myself stumbled upon this translation block as I was trying to give a talk in Germany and in German on the use of the American flag in the gay community. I kept wanting to say things like “in der schwulen Gemeinschaft” on “in der schwulen Gemeinde” but they always sounded wrong. I began to reflect that I had heard the English phrase “gay community” used by a German student in an academic discussion on gay identity. I actually settled with “in der Schwulenbewegung,” which I knew had a slightly different meaning than I originally intended, but which I thought sounded better. The glossary of Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten clarified – considerably after the fact – the difficulties that I was having: “Da das deutsche Wort ‘Gemeinschaft’ bzw. ‘Gemeinde’ generell wenig und im Zusammenhang mit lesbischen Kulturen nicht gebräuchlich ist und darüber hinaus durch andere Gebrauchsweisen überdeterminiert ist, wurde in den Übersetzungen der Begriff ‘community’ beibehalten” (187). 
[2] Sometimes “Queerstudien”
[3] In 1997, the Humboldt also became the first university to establish a chair in “Gender Studies,” provocatively breaking with the established German terminology of “Frauenforschung” and “Geschlechterdifferenz.” Some claim that, in fact, German lacks the linguistic possibility of distinguishing between sex and gender that exists in the English language. While I personally doubt this particular claim, it is precisely the interaction between language and thought that interests me in this paper.
[4] Dirk Naguschewski gave me this insight in a private conversation that we had at the Siegen Colloquium on Homosexuality and Literature in 1997.
[5] Another example: "Homosexuelle ob ja ob nein, im Klassenkampf heißt's solidarisch sein!" (Theis 285).
[6] It shows up in the 30s and 40s in Klaus Mann's diaries, as a slangy description of fellow homosexuals. See the entry of February 21, 1933 (1:119) and March 27, 1933 (1: 127), for instance.
[7] When the Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft, a Berlin organization that had been gay male since the 70s, opened up to women in 1994, one of hte first problems for the women were the "phallic nudes" hanging on the walls (Winden and Telge 17).
[8] Keynote speakers: Anna Marie Smith (Cornell), Lisa Duggan (NYU). Workshop leaders included Arlene Stein (University of Oregon) and Shane Phelan (University of New Mexico). Even Germans gave English titles for their talks: Sabine Hark, "Acting without banister. On the paradoxes of rights politics"; Corinna Genschel, "Transgender Rights. On the relation of gender and rights"; Bert Thinius, et al, "Two Queer Germanies: Subject formation and agency of lesbians in West and gays in East-Germany." For more, see Buckley 10.