States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany - Paperback

by Samuel Clowes Huneke (Author)

States of Liberation traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted gay men - and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as well as oral histories with witnesses and survivors, Huneke reveals that communist East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than democratic West Germany.

Author Biography

Samuel Clowes Huneke is associate professor of History at George Mason University. He is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany, awarded the David Barclay Book Prize of the German Studies Association and the Smith Book Award of the Southern Historical Association. He has written for Boston Review, The Baffler, and Los Angeles Review of Books.