States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany by Samuel Clowes Huneke (review)

Despite gay liberation’s close associations with political leftism, historians have long debated whether or not political liberation is indebted to the proliferation of consumer choice in liberal capitalist democracies. Answering this question often involves making a simultaneous claim about the political merits of capitalism, and the apparent greyness of rainbow life under state socialism can put leftleaning historians in an uncomfortable position. Samuel Clowes Huneke’s comparative look at gay life in postwar Germany, divided between a liberal capitalist West and a state socialist East, offers a unique opportunity to think through this history in more complicated ways that will resonate in many national contexts. Huneke advances a set of three, interlinking arguments: 1) homophobia is a more malleable concept than previously understood, 2) gay liberation is historically contingent and not wedded to consumer capitalism, and 3) a focus on gay men unsettles the assumption of a West German, capitalist success story. In so doing, Huneke is elegantly able to “weave together and to compare the trajectories of male homosexuality in the two German states across the span of forty years”—an ambitious project which constitutes his primary intervention (5). Due to the scope of his project, Huneke marshals a diverse set of sources. Most notable are the many oral history interviews that Huneke conducted, with leading gay and lesbian activists, the only democratically elected prime minister of the GDR, and anonymized individuals who experienced gay life and attendant repression in both states. These testimonies fill in gaps left in the written record, which here includes documents from state and regional archives, the East German secret police, and gay activist organizations. This range allows Huneke to engage in both historical scholarship on Germany as well as in European and US queer historiography. Huneke’s project therefore follows recent works in queer German history, including those of Benno Gammerl, Craig Griffiths, and Laurie Marhoefer, among many others, in interrogating reductive narratives that still haunt the field and engaging in international scholarship to do so. The book is organized into nine, thematically-oriented chapters, which also progress chronologically, alternating in focus between East and West Germany. The first chapter offers an overview of queer life in the first half of the twentieth