Current Project
My first book, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023) asks how Islam came to be understood in many German gay and lesbian activist scenes as inherently homophobic, when, claims that Islam was in fact more progressive than West German law and society predominated prior to the late twentieth century. I argue that racialized desire together with international activism enabled this swift yet incomplete transition. Articulated desires for men of color that hinged on their perceived racial difference proved a potent site for gay men to make sometimes contradictory claims about gay politics in the Federal Republic, claims which often had very little to do with the position of people of color or with race itself. Simultaneously, many gay and lesbian activists increasingly advanced an international political project after 1970 that rested on assertions that western Europe was more sexually progressive than much of the world.
Beginning in 1970, I show how race was a central organizing theme of queer activism and politics. In the 1970s many same-sex desiring men continued a long-standing tradition of travel in search of sexual and intimate contacts abroad. However, the decolonization of North Africa during the 1950s and 1960s brought with it the institution of anti-homosexual statutes in countries that were once favorite destinations of homosexual Europeans. Although West German gay men continued to pursue sex with "exotic" Muslim men and boys in North Africa, they were reportedly met with police harassment, corruption, and prostitution making these places much less appealing than in the decades (and centuries) prior. At the same time, the guest worker program, which lasted until 1973, brought millions of foreign nationals, notably Muslim Turks, to West Germany to provide labor for the "economic miracle," both allowing for encounters between white homosexual Germans and same-sex desiring Turkish men and raising anxiety about racial diversity within the borders of the Federal Republic during the 1970s. Interactions with the gay rights movement and Civil Rights Movement in the United States imported U.S.-American understandings of blackness to the burgeoning West German gay rights movement, as well as offered new strategies for organization and direct-action protest.
As shown in this June 1971 issue of the gay magazine him applaus, the West German gay rights movement drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement and gay liberation in the United States.
During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, AIDS organizations, most notably the German AIDS-Help, which was founded largely by white gay men, attempted to forge alliances with immigrant groups to counter possible government repression and the spread of HIV/AIDS in marginalized communities. At the same time, the 1980s saw the emergence of queer of color organizing, particularly in lesbian scenes. However, the internationalization of gay politics through the International Lesbian and Gay Association helped firmly situate Western Europe and North America as centers of sexual progress in contradistinction to many places in the Eastern Bloc and Global South. Following German unification in 1990, a reported surge in homophobic and xenophobic hate crimes elicited calls on the part of the German AIDS-Help, queer of color organizations, and national umbrella lesbian and gay organizations to fight homophobia, xenophobia, and racism together. By the end of the decade, however, certain LGBT rights groups reconceptualized the image of the perpetrator away from the white, East German youth to the young Turkish man, helping to ossify both Western Europe's global status as a leader of LGBT rights and the incompatibility of supposedly homophobic Islam within the borders of the EU.
My next book project will take up the topic of hate criminality. In The Color of Desire, I explain how beliefs white queer activists developed new ideas about “hate criminality” to explain post-unification violence, ultimately framing beliefs about Muslim homophobia through violent criminality. However, questions remain. Specifically: How did “hate criminality,“ a US concept that was codified under the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, cross the Atlantic? And further: what did activists, including Black, anti-racist, immigrant, Jewish, and feminist activists, working sometimes, but not always, in collaboration with white, queer activists, do with hate criminality? This new project, tentatively titled Hate Crimes: A Transatlantic History of Germany’s Violent ‘90s, will take up these questions to explain the flows across national borders and between groups as they tried to address the urgency of post-unification violence.
My third book project will take a similarly transnational approach. Guides like Spartacus International Gay Guide, which moved its operations from the UK to the Netherlands and finally to West Germany, worked along with travel agencies and multinational gay communication networks to offer European and North American men access to new travel destinations in the Global South. The Color of Desire explains how predominantly white, German men used these guides. However, the question remains of how publications and communication networks, based in North America and western Europe, gained access to knowledge about destinations in a diverse range of countries. Further, and more pressingly, what did men in popular destination countries do with expanded networks of gay travel? Focusing on the 1970s and 1980s, this project will follow these men as they traveled, provided information, and developed transnational intimacies during dramatic changes to queer politics and global economic systems alike.
In summer 2019, I began a collaboration with Dr. Ulrike Schaper of the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin on West German discourses of sex tourism in the aftermath of the so-called sexual revolution. Together, we argue that many West Germans negotiated their contradictory yearnings and discontents with the ambivalences of the sexual revolution on the terrain of sex tourism. Through discursive constructions of paradise abroad, some West Germans sought escape from anti-eroticism, loneliness, sexual frustration, and - for homosexual men - discrimination in the Federal Republic through fantasies and sexual practices abroad which often hinged on racial difference. At the same time, a range of actors including feminist activists, Christian conservatives, mainstream media, and international governments offered multifaceted and sometimes contradictory critiques of sex tourism, further underscoring how the sexual revolution continued to be contested into the 1970s and 1980s. Although literature on international sex tourism tends to focus on heterosexual and homosexual sex practices separately, our research includes a wide range of sexual identities and practices, highlighting the multiple overlaps between discourses of sex tourism within different scenes as well as the ways in which these discourses were entrenched in concerns that permeated West German society. This project has received the generous support of the Dahlem Humanities Center of the Freie Universität of Berlin through the Dahlem Junior Host Program.
My research is deeply indebted to the wonderful archivists at the Gay Museum in Berlin and at the Feminist Archive FFBIZ in Berlin. I have also conducted research at the State Archive of Berlin, the Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany in Cologne, and the Federal Archives in Koblenz. There I have examined publications, police records, and activist materials, including flyers, brochures, and protocols. In the United States, I have worked in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.