Red cell gay

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The Red Cell Gay , RotZSchwul or Rotzschwul for short , was an emancipation group of the newer German gay movement in Frankfurt am Main , which existed from the beginning to the middle of the 1970s. As an association of homosexual men , the RotZSchwul called for what was later called the "visualization of homosexuality" and advocated the emancipation of homosexuals on the basis of their otherness.

history

In the summer of 1971, Rosa von Praunheim's highly controversial and widely discussed film was shown in selected German cinemas . It is not the homosexual that is perverse, but the situation in which he lives . The slogan that von Praunheim propagated at the end of his film was: “Get out of the toilets and into the streets! Freedom for the gays ! ”In spite of all the controversies that the film sparked, it intensified efforts in the German gay movement to make itself heard in public and to stand up for the rights of homosexuals. After a corresponding discussion had been going on since the relaxation of Section 175 of the Criminal Code in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969, gay emancipation groups were formed, such as B. the Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin (HAW) in Berlin as the first left emancipation group of homosexuals and then one of the largest groups.

In Frankfurt am Main, too, in the course of this new, initially student and left-wing lesbian and gay movement in German-speaking countries, an emancipation group of gays, the Red Cell Gay (RotZSchwul), was spontaneously founded . The history of the Frankfurt RotZSchwul can be divided into two sections:

  • the period from its founding in autumn 1971 (September or November 1971 - this cannot be clearly proven from the current sources) to January 1973 - when the group was closed; about ten young men worked mainly theoretically in order to create a policy paper that would lay the foundations for a political platform for further emancipation work and on which everything basic about homosexuality should be dealt with;
  • and the period from February 1973 to the establishment of the gay communication center on Wittelsbacher Allee in the summer of 1975, when the group opened up to new members - in the early days of this phase there were more public actions.

The co-founder of RotZSchwul was the sociologist and later sexologist Martin Dannecker , who advised Rosa von Praunheim on his film Not the homosexual is perverse, but rather the situation in which he lives and worked on the script. Dannecker is considered the leading “head” of RotZSchwul and gave it a lot of impetus. The members of the first core group of the RotZSchwul included Dannecker u. a. the gay activist and later innkeeper (“Café megalomania” in Frankfurt am Main) Hans-Peter Hoogen . Later came u. a. also: The bookseller and brother of the RAF co- founder Gudrun Ensslin , Gottfried Ensslin (1946–2013), and the later poet and reciter Alfred Lörken, who died in 1992 of AIDS .

Activities and actions of the RotZSchwul

Conference and demonstration in Münster and “Whitsun meeting” in Berlin

In April 1972, members of the RotZSchwul took part in the first nationwide conference of homosexual emancipation groups in Münster , Westphalia , to which the Homosexual Student Group Münster (HSM) had invited all West German homosexual groups that already existed at the time. The main focus of this meeting was the establishment of a German umbrella organization for gay action groups, whereupon a total of ten gay groups joined together in a follow-up meeting in Bochum in the same year to form the German Action Group for Homosexuality (DAH).

During the conference in Münster, the first demonstration of gays and lesbians in the history of the Federal Republic took place in the city center there on April 29, 1972 . The Frankfurt RotZSchwul activists were also involved. “Brothers & sisters, warm or not, fighting capitalism is our duty!” Was the inscription on the poster that Martin Dannecker carried with him. Another slogan on a demo poster was referring to a discriminatory statement by Franz Josef Strauss in a CDU - party convention in 1970 by the former statement was reversed in: "Better a warm brother as a cold warrior." At the demonstration in According to various sources, around 200 gay men and some lesbian women took part in Münster, other sources speak of a total of 300 or 400 demonstrators.

In May 1972 RotZSchwul members took part in the first “Whitsun meeting” of the socialist-oriented homosexual campaign West Berlin (HAW) in West Berlin. They also put parts of their basic paper up for discussion. The appearance in Berlin strengthened the reputation of the Frankfurt emancipation group as "radical" within the gay movement.

"Hans is gay!"

In April 1973, the first nationwide action of all emancipation groups in the FRG at that time took place under the direction of the umbrella organization DAH, at which the now three Frankfurt emancipation groups, the RotZSchwul, the Homosexual Action Frankfurt (HAF) and the gay cell, had first come together and jointly involved. The motto was "Fight against discrimination in the family, at work, when looking for a place to live", with the aim above all to delete Section 175 of the Criminal Code without replacement and thereby equality with heterosexuals . The Frankfurt action alliance pasted up numerous posters in advance, set up a joint information booth on April 28, 1973 on the central square at An der Hauptwache in downtown Frankfurt, collected hundreds of signatures from supporters of the action and distributed thousands of leaflets with the title “Hans ist gay! ”, in which attention was drawn to the isolated and expensive housing situation of many homosexuals.

"Flap" actions

Both during the National Socialist era and in the Adenauer era , when homosexuals were persecuted and homosexuality was severely punished, public toilets were one of the places where homosexual men could meet and have quick and mostly more or less anonymous sex with each other. Such meeting points, known as flaps in the gay scene , were formed depending on use and were and are mainly to be found in large cities, including Frankfurt. At the beginning of 1973, the RotZSchwul launched a poster campaign against the increasing number of police raids on well-known Frankfurt flaps and took the view that such places are an important contact point for homosexuals and should not be ashamed of. These meeting places of the homosexual subculture are particularly important for gays who do not want to come out, such as family fathers, but also men who did not get same-sex sex so easily in other ways.

On June 30, 1973, the RotZSchwul organized a “Park and Flap Festival” next to the flap in Frankfurt's Grüneburgpark , in order to talk to the subculture gays about the alienated manners in the subculture and to show solidarity against the frequent police raids. This action in the vicinity of a public homosexual meeting point remained unique in the West German gay movement.

House fighting and own gay center

In the first half of the 1970s, several members of the RotZSchwul took part in the Frankfurt house-to-house fight , which included protest movements, rallies and demonstrations from the Frankfurt spontaneous scene at the time and was primarily directed against property speculation in Frankfurt's Westend and the associated displacement of the resident population. The activists of the house-to-house war that marked the beginning of the German squatter movement included a. Daniel Cohn-Bendit , today a Member of the European Parliament for the Greens , and Joschka Fischer , who later became one of the leading politicians in the Greens and was promoted to Hessian Environment Minister and Federal Foreign Minister. In this left-oriented movement, two gays were also active as squatters, whereby on the one hand the general objective of the left met with a special motivation of the group, namely with the idea of ​​gay residential communities. This residential model was one of the alternative life plans of the RotZSchwul: The gays shouldn't live in isolation and have to withdraw into the "loneliness of the expensive apartments".

In October 1973 the first RotZSchwul flat-sharing community with five members was founded until it was broken up in February 1974 in a tough police operation. “And then there really developed a solidarity in that we managed to organize something like this, e.g. E.g. a telephone list so that you can call immediately when something is going on, because we said that the people from the RotZSchwul go into the house to simply support the people who are there because the people were very insecure, so that we held our meetings there and the working groups met there [...]. ”There was also a representative of RotZSchwul at the so-called House Council of Occupied Houses, in which the strategy and practical steps for the“ house warfare ”were developed and were coordinated. During this period, the activities of the RotZSchwul concentrated on these house-to-house fights, there were no side-effects. At the same time, the emancipation group had opened up, they discussed a lot and had a new goal: an alternative communication center. This was actually created in September 1974 on Wittelsbacher Allee.

In retrospect, the transition to the communication center, which is open to a larger group of homosexuals, is named as the end of the RotZSchwul group.

Gay movie month in April 1975

In April 1975, RotZSchwul organized a month of film with the theme "Homosexuality & Society using the example of film" together with the program cinema pupille - kino in der uni , which used the ballroom of the student house of the University of Frankfurt am Main for its regular film screenings . It was the first film event of its kind in Germany. In addition to a fuzzy retrospective (with several western films such as Fuzzy's Fight Without Mercy , Fuzzy Against Death and the Devil or Fuzzy Accounts ) a. shown: Several films by Andy Warhol ( My Hustler , Couch or Love Making ), the avant-garde short film Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger , the short film Un chant d'amour by Jean Genet and several films by Rosa von Praunheim , in particular Not Who Is Homosexual perverse, but the situation in which he lives .

Processing and importance of the RotZSchwul

In 1975 the budding sociologist Barbara Wackernagel dealt with her diploma thesis at Saarland University , Faculty of Social Sciences, under the title Die Gruppe Rotzschwul. An in- depth analysis of homosexual subculture with the Frankfurt emancipation group. Your work was a. Based on interviews she conducted with the members of the original core group of the RotZSchwul in 1974.

The emergence as well as the actions and meaning of the RotZSchwul are regularly dealt with in several scientific publications on the history of homosexuality and the recent German gay movement. For example, the Bremen political scientist Sebastian Haunss stated in his dissertation Identity in Motion ( Uni Bremen , 2003), published in 2004 , that the Frankfurt Red Cell was one of the “new gay groups, primarily from the student milieu”, which in the early 1970s “ The term 'gay', previously only used as a swear word, [took up] as a self-designation and […] appeared increasingly self-confidently open as gays in public ”and also“ as leftists [understood] and […] their commitment to gay politics a Marxist analysis of society [connected] ”. Haunss points out in this context that this “connection between gay politics and criticism of capitalism ” turned out to be problematic, as “the left were only a minority among gays” and “the supposedly progressive K groups and parties are not necessarily were less anti-gay than the rest of society ”.

The Schwule Museum in Berlin has included various documents about the former RotZSchwul in its archive .

From the end of 2012 to the middle of 2014, the Frankfurt cultural activist and author Jannis Plastargias dealt with a historical work on the RotZSchwul as part of the “District Historians” program 2012–2014 of the Frankfurt Polytechnic Foundation . Plastargias assessed the importance of the gay red cell as follows: “The value of the work that the RotZSchwul did at the time is [...] to be called great, the entire gay movement has done a lot for the emancipation of homosexuals, but especially in Frankfurt one moved a lot within the left movement. Some of the protagonists remained [...] committed, others withdrew after these political years [...] ”. Plastargias wrote a book about the movement that was published in 2015 by Querverlag in Berlin under the title RotZSchwul. The Beginning of a Movement (1971-1975) came out.

literature

  • Barbara Wackernagel: The group snot gay. An analysis of homosexual subculture. Saarland University , Saarbrücken 1975 (diploma thesis, Saarland University, Faculty of Social Sciences, 1975).
  • Michael Holy: ROTZ SCHWUL HAF CENTER OTHER SHORE SCHWUF PINK POWER PINK ELEFANT. Little gay city history. In: Bruno Gmünder (Hrsg.): Frankfurt from behind with Mainz - Wiesbaden. Bruno Gmünder Verlag, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-924163-01-4 , pp. 51-68.
  • Sebastian Haunss: Identity in motion. Processes of collective identity among the autonomists and in the gay movement (=  civil society and democracy ). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-8100-4150-5 , pp. 194–199 (also dissertation, University of Bremen, 2003).
  • Ursula GT Müller : The truth about the purple dungarees. Ups and downs in 15 years of women's movement (=  psychosocial edition ). Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2004, ISBN 3-89806-259-7 , p. 53 ff.
  • Christa Spilling-Nöker : We won't let you, you bless us. For the discussion about the blessing and coexistence of same-sex couples in the rectory (=  gender - violence - society , vol. 6). Lit Verlag, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-8258-9610-2 , p. 15 ff. (Also dissertation, University of Dortmund, 2006).
  • Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, Beatrice Michaelis (eds.): Queer futures. Reconsidering ethics, activism, and the political (=  Queer interventions ). Ashgate Publishing, Burlington (Vermont / USA) 2013, ISBN 978-1-4094-3710-9 , pp. 87 ff. (English).
  • Jannis Plastargias : RotZSchwul. The beginning of a movement (1971–1975). Querverlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-89656-238-8 .

Radio

  • Der Schwule und die Spießer - Historien- radio feature by Ulrike Heider , Deutschlandradio Kultur (DKultur) 2007, length about 55 minutes, first broadcast in DKultur on December 5, 2007. (The radio feature includes earlier statements by the protagonist of the feature, Albert Lörken, who died in 1992, and an interview with Gottfried Ensslin. Both were members of the RotZSchwul, which is reported in the feature and in the contributions of the two.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Christiane König: Queer desire - reified in terms of signal technology. In: Marie-Luise Angerer , Christiane König (Eds.): Gender goes Life. The life sciences as a challenge for gender studies (=  gender studies ). Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-832-2 , pp. 181-200, here in particular p. 188.
  2. ↑ a b c d RotZSchwul ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the online project Queer History Frankfurt am Main ; Retrieved September 15, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / lgbtiq-history-ffm.jimdo.com
  3. ↑ a b Short biographies of the members of the first core group of the RotZSchwul ( memento of the original from September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the online project Queer History Frankfurt am Main ; Retrieved September 16, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / lgbtiq-history-ffm.jimdo.com
  4. ↑ In memoriam Gottfried Ensslin , Taz Blog, December 10, 2013
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Michael Holy: Chronology of the group "RotZSchwul" (ie "Red Cell Gay") 1971 to 1975 ( Memento of the original from September 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the online project Queer History Frankfurt am Main , 2013; Retrieved September 28, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / lgbtiq-history-ffm.jimdo.com
  6. ↑ cf. The other world. Independent monthly newspaper not only for lesbians and gays. Verlag die Andere Welt, Berlin, 1977, issue 8, ISSN  0940-5186 , p. 61.
  7. ^ Photo of Martin Dannecker at a demonstration in the 1970s at Dropbox (www.dropbox.com); Image rights to: "Pink Stories" (gay and lesbian archive in Münster; contact: Gregor Wind); Retrieved September 15, 2013.
  8. ↑ April 29, 1972 - Germany's first gay demo in Münster: Out of isolation . On: WDR website (www1.wdr.de), as of April 29, 2012; Retrieved September 16, 2013.
  9. ^ Marie Rövekamp: Beginning of the gay movement in Münster. "Dear warm brother than cold warrior" . In: Westfälische Nachrichten of April 27, 1972; Retrieved September 16, 2013.
  10. ^ Call of the snot gays to the "Park and Flap Festival" on June 30, 1973 in Frankfurt's Grüneburgpark , at Dropbox (www.dropbox.com); Retrieved September 15, 2013.
  11. ↑ cf. Barbara Wackernagel: The group snot gay. An analysis of homosexual subculture. Thesis. Saarland University, Saarbrücken 1975, p. 86.
  12. ↑ cf. Barbara Wackernagel: The group snot gay. An analysis of homosexual subculture. Thesis. Saarland University, Saarbrücken 1975, p. 87.
  13. ↑ The active role of homosexuals in gentrification itself was not researched until the 1980s, cf. Manuel Castells : Cultural identity, sexual liberation and urban structure. The gay community in San Francisco. In: Manuel Castells: The City and the Grassroots. A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (=  California series in urban development , Vol. 2). University of California Press, Berkeley (California / USA) 1983, ISBN 0-520-04756-7 , pp. 138-170 (English).
  14. ^ Program of the "Schwulen Filmmonats" in April 1975 in the pupille cinema in the university in the student house of the University of Frankfurt am Main , on Dropbox (www.dropbox.com); Retrieved September 15, 2013.
  15. ↑ See e.g. B. at: Sebastian Haunss: Identity in Motion. Wiesbaden 2004, pp. 194-199;
    Ursula GT Müller : The truth about the purple dungarees. Wiesbaden 2004, p. 53 ff .;
    Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, Beatrice Michaelis (eds.): Queer futures. Burlington (Vermont / USA) 2013, pp. 87 ff. (English).
  16. ↑ Sebastian Haunss: Identity in Motion. Wiesbaden 2004, pp. 194-195.
  17. ↑ Sebastian Haunss: Identity in Motion. Wiesbaden 2004, p. 196.
  18. ↑ cf. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, Beatrice Michaelis (eds.): Queer futures. Reconsidering ethics, activism, and the political (=  Queer interventions ). Ashgate Publishing, Burlington (Vermont / USA) 2013, ISBN 978-1-4094-3710-9 , Appendix: Sources from Schwules Museum Archive, Berlin (Germany) (English).
  19. ↑ Gernot Gottwals: Scholarship holders write history ( Memento of the original from October 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . The fourth generation of district historians has now officially started their work. In: Frankfurter Neue Presse (fnp.de) of December 10, 2012; Retrieved September 18, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fnp.de
  20. ↑ Thorben Pehlemann: Book by district historian Jannis Plastargias. A subjective journey into the past ( memento of the original from September 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Frankfurter Neue Presse (fnp.de) of August 7, 2015; accessed on September 24, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fnp.de
  21. ↑ The gay and the philistines (original broadcast) , feature by Ulrike Heider. On: Website of Deutschlandradio Kultur (www.dradio.de) from December 5, 2007; Retrieved September 15, 2013.
  22. ↑ Martin Reichert: The "no topic" topic . In: taz of December 5, 2007; Retrieved September 15, 2013.
  23. ↑ The gay and the bourgeois (event) , feature presentation in the theater of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences . On: Website of Deutschlandradio Kultur (www.dradio.de) from May 17, 2011; Retrieved September 15, 2013.