Introduction

This introduction briefly places the 1970s into a longer history of homosexual emancipation in Germany, before moving onto the different ways historians have conceptualized gay liberation. The chapter calls into question the significance of the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969. For West Germans, the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality that same year was more important. Even so, 1969 was not a clear-cut turning-point. This introduction sets out the book’s central lens of analysis, ambivalence—the simultaneous attachment to conflicting feelings and attitudes. Drawing on queer, sociological, and psychoanalytic theory, the introduction advances three axes of ambivalence: pride/shame, normal/different, and hope/fear. This framework allows us to explore the tensions and complexities of the 1970s, as well as appreciate continuities in homosexual politics. Gay liberation was never simply the result of the more radical or the more confrontational outlook winning out over the forces of respectability and moderation.