Histories of gay liberation are not relegated to the past. Narratives of closet doors being ripped off their hinges to unleash a period of pride and exuberance offer affirmation across national contexts yet miss the complexities of 1970s politics. The Federal Republic of Germany is not exempt from this narrativization, as the history of gay liberation continues to be imbricated in the decade's political afterlives. This relationship is not to be eschewed; however, it necessitates ever-closer attention to the contradictory ways in which gay liberation was lived.

Craig Griffiths’ book attends to these very contradictions. Griffiths asks how the emotional politics of gay liberation—here defined expansively as the intertwined network of homosexual activism in the 1970s—were experienced by its participants. In so doing, Griffiths arrives at answers which break down accepted dichotomies that frame popular and historical narratives, arguing that gay politics of the 1970s were characterized by ambivalence—ambivalence in sexuality, in political strategy, and in the very feelings of gay liberation.

At once indebted to and countering the standard narratives of gay liberation, Griffiths recognizes the work of activists-turned-historians like Michael Holy, Rüdiger Lautmann, Andreas Salmen, and Albert Eckert as crucial in uncovering queer pasts at a moment when German academia was hostile to such histories. However, Griffiths follows historians of contexts outside of the 1970s Federal Republic, including Julian Jackson and Laurie Marhoefer, in questioning earlier analyses. A focus on ambivalence destabilizes contrasting interpretations of the 1970s as either a departure from homophile activism or a parenthesis in a longer history of homosexual movements. Ambivalence can also deconstruct the idea of 1968/1969 as a caesura, which implicitly centers Stonewall, as well as the dichotomy between radical and moderate wings of the 1970s movement. To back his argument, Griffiths relies on an impressive range of sources, including ephemera, bulletins, pamphlets, minutes, correspondences, and oral history interviews. Griffiths supplements these sources with gay travel guides, commercial gay magazines, representations of gay liberation in the left-alternative and mainstream press, television, parliamentary proceedings, and prosecution records to uncover “how homosexuality was thought, felt, and spoken about” (13).

The first chapter examines the years immediately following legal reform, a moment when expanding scenes, political organizing, and print culture generated new possibilities and tensions. The decriminalization of sex between men over the age of 21 in 1969 was crucial to this expansion; however, the liberalism that legal reform represented simultaneously relegated sexuality to the private sphere. Gay liberation was therefore enabled by legal liberalism while also agitating against this relegation. The glossy magazines du&ich and him, which began publication in 1969 and 1970 respectively, navigated a similar tension between presenting a sanitized version of homosexuality to the public and appealing to the diverse sexual desires of their readership. However, gay liberationists held deep ambivalences about these magazines as well as expanding gay scenes. Viewing gay scenes as secretive and commercial, many activists nevertheless relied on scenes as important platforms. These scenes only grew as international guides like Spartacus Gay Guide offered West Germans new possibilities to make contacts while also fetishizing men of color abroad.

Turning to the emergence of gay liberation in the early 1970s, Griffiths questions dichotomies between “homophile” and “gay,” or “radical” and “liberal,” in the second chapter. Griffiths argues instead that “this ambivalence ran through the very heart of organizations, publications, and individuals themselves” (59). The start of the 1970s saw the formation of both organizations that used the moniker “homophile,” popular in previous decades, and early gay liberation groups. Both, however, developed new strategies of visibility, even as the terms they used remained contentious. When Rosa von Praunheim and Martin Dannecker's film It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives was first screened in July 1971, it entered a landscape marked by debates about the proper self-representation of homosexuality. The film's critique of homosexual scenes drew both praise and ire, as some feared it would perpetuate further prejudices. However, even as direct-action groups proliferated following screenings of the film, Griffiths rejects the idea that the film was Germany's “Stonewall moment,” since social conformity retained distinct appeal across political and generational lines (71).

Despite this appeal, gay liberation was indebted to both leftist and feminist political movements of the 1960s, even as it held a sometimes-tense relationship with 1970s left-alternative scenes and lesbian feminism. In the third chapter, Griffiths examines this relationship, cautious of drawing a dichotomy between leftist politics of the 1960s and the alternative left that developed in the following decade. Griffiths further explains the contradictory tendencies within the alternative left by similarly rejecting dichotomies between Marxist-Leninist and militant camps, or dogmatic and non-dogmatic approaches. Gay leftist politics reflected this ideological diversity; however, gay activists developed their own strategies. The tension between engaging with the wider public, an alternative left counterpublic, and creating a gay counterpublic was, according to Griffiths, a productive ambivalence, shaping gay politics and its participants’ identities. Leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s, as diverse and slippery as they were, were therefore crucial to gay liberation, despite the uneasy place of homosexuality within them.

Griffiths places a similar emphasis on “productive ambivalence” in the fourth chapter's discussion of the political uses of the pink triangle (151). Many gay liberationists used the symbol of Nazi persecution to claim status as a victim group, discuss ongoing victimization, and forge solidarities. The pink triangle therefore never served as only a marker of victimization or a symbol of pride but represented both tendencies that shaped gay liberation. Griffiths positions this oscillation between pride and victimhood against the backdrop of the so-called Weimar syndrome. Fears that the Federal Republic might meet the fate of Weimar had generally abated among the general public yet remained ongoing in homosexual politics, facilitated by the attention to contemporary mechanisms of state repression within the alternative left. Often a means to assert difference, the pink triangle also served as a parallel to the red triangle, referencing Nazi persecution of political dissidents, to claim resemblance to other leftists. Appeals to belonging and visibility meant that “the most radical exclusionary act committed against homosexuals in German history became, 40 years on, a key means of their inclusion” (128).

The final chapter discusses debates about gender performance, sex, and emotional politics to reveal the feelings of gay liberation. Following the 1973 Pentecost Meeting in West Berlin, gay liberationists engaged in a fierce debate about whether interrogating gender norms was necessary to the revolution, or if Tunten (“queens” or “fairies”) threatened overtures to the left-alternative counterpublic. Sexual practices like anal sex, sadomasochism, cottaging, and cruising generated further concerns that some forms of gay sex were incompatible with a growing emphasis on sexual reciprocity. These concerns filtered into ongoing antipathy about gay scenes, as activists across the political spectrum remained critical of these scenes, even if they held different ideas about the source of the negative emotions gay scenes seemed to produce. Some turned to politics as a way to contend with these and other negative emotions, while developing different forms of therapeutic offerings for homosexuals as part of the 1970s “psycho-boom” (194). However, these moves were unable to eliminate the feelings of loneliness, inhibition, and shame that troubled gay liberation.

The focus on ambivalence as permeating the politics of gay liberation allows Griffiths to unify seemingly disparate threads, from memories of persecution to anal sex. In so doing, through a careful study of one national context over the span of only ten years, Griffiths develops insights that exceed the national and chronological bounds of his book. Griffiths’ attention to the durability of feeling across 1968/1969 offers new possibilities for eschewing US-centrism while simultaneously creating room to consider how the politics of the 1970s shaped later developments. The project of destabilizing accepted categories and divisions is an expansive one, and certainly work is left to be done. However, Griffiths’ commitment to taking seriously the anxieties and longings of his historical subjects offers an important framework with which to answer these questions, one that moves beyond methodological and theoretical intervention and presents an example of how historians can encounter the past.