It is not the homosexual who is perverse: Lessons in authenticity and solidarity
Remembering the 1971 film that kick-started a movement.
At the beginning of Pride month, I think it’s helpful to reflect on our history; in the U.S., the community recognizes the Stonewall riots or the Compton’s Cafeteria riots in the 1960s. In West Germany, the event largely recognized to have kick-started the radical homosexual emancipation movement occurred only two years after Stonewall: Rosa von Praunheim’s It is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives came out in 1971 in collaboration with Martin Dannecker, a prominent sexologist at the time.
It is Not the Homosexual takes a critical stance toward homosexual culture in West Germany, arguing that homosexual men are trying too hard to assimilate with heterosexual culture and need to own their own nature. The important context here is that the previous gay movement in West Germany was a series of homophile organizations who distanced themselves from sex work and feminism and attempted to assimilate. These homophile organizations utilized a respectability politic and did not challenge contemporary views on homosexuality, even going so far as to characterize homosexuality as a disease or a condition in which they had no part (“it was wrong for the law to penalize them for a natural condition they could do nothing to alter,” as Samuel Clowes Huneke explains in States of Liberation). They leaned into the pathologization of homosexuality.
In the beginning of It is Not the Homosexual, the narrator describes the protagonist of the film as trying to simulate a middle-class heterosexual marriage, but it won’t work; he claims that it just becomes a narcissistic self-love, that homosexuals become materialistic because they deflect their need for human relationships and are instead promiscuous. He argues that because there is so much shame and stigma around homosexuality, homosexual men reduce their sexuality just to sex, cruising and sleeping with hundreds of partners (the protagonist has slept with 2,000).
Actually, the narrator argues that the Tunten (or fairies) are more authentic than the bougie homosexual; he argues that Tunten challenge societal expectations and show what it means to be homosexual.
At the end of the film, our protagonist finds a group of homosexual men who respect each other; they tell him that gay men need to come out, organize, and live with each other, not objectifying one another. They encourage him to stop pretending to be a “real man” and instead to embrace his homosexuality and to be more gay.
While much of this rhetoric was controversial and remains difficult (becoming a “real man”, the idea that homosexual men are highly promiscuous), the film started discussions across the country about the status of homosexuals. Radical homosexual groups sprung up, and the film is largely recognized as the start of the radical homosexual emancipation movement in the 1970s.
I think the thesis of the film presents an interesting argument during a Pride month when it is often dangerous for queer people to be out: I saw someone say on Twitter that this year, queer people are “celebrating life in the face of death,” and I think it’s as important a reminder as ever not to tone ourselves down for the sake of cisgender heterosexual people. Like Daniel in It is Not the Homosexual, I do think it’s a useful lesson that we shouldn’t try to assimilate and fit ourselves into molds, and while some may have to stay quiet out of safety in the U.S. this month, I think the queer call to action remains similar: remain true to yourselves and stand in solidarity with your queer siblings.
Further reading:
It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse but the Society in which He Lives
States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany
A Tale of Two Movements? Gay Radicalism in West Germany, 1969-1989
"History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities." - Marsha P. Johnson