It is often noted that Heiner Carow's film Coming Out, the only gay film ever produced by the East German state-owned film studio, premiered on the night East German officials opened the Berlin Wall. Some might assume that the film's scenes of gay life had been nearly impossible under communist rule. This was not so. Recent scholarship has shown us that LGBTQ movements existed and thrived in the Eastern Bloc. Samuel Clowes Huneke's parallel history of West and East German gay activism contributes to this history and makes bold claims that will stir up debate for years to come. States of Liberation offers a much-needed corrective to the commonly held beliefs that gay liberation was – and is – only possible in Western consumer-capitalist nations and that liberal democracy is the only political system in which gay life and gay rights can flourish. The author debunks these myths. Drawing on oral histories and archival material, Clowes Huneke has written the first history of the gay movement in the two German states from the 1950s until reunification.

While many scholars contend that biopolitical concerns or political scapegoating are at the root of homophobia, Clowes Huneke claims that neither was the sole reason for the persecution of gay men in East and West Germany. “Anti-gay animus,” a term the author likes better than homophobia, was the factor that justified the ongoing criminalization of gay sex in both Germanys after the war. West Germany continued to enforce Nazi legislation that criminalized adult male same-sex acts. The Federal Republic persecuted gay men out of the fear that they were participating in a conspiracy within the military and government agencies to overthrow the state, a belief that had its origins in Nazi anti-gay hostility.

By contrast, the German Democratic Republic opted for indifference, in part to distance itself from that same fascist past. The most important reason to keep homosexuality criminalized in the 1950s was not the East German state's inherent anti-gay animus. Most East Germans, like their West German counterparts, simply disapproved of homosexuality. Nevertheless, gay East Germans did gather in private; the police became more tolerant; and, already in 1957, the state chose not to prosecute gay men as long as their behavior was not harmful to the state, a policy that liberalized homosexuality before official decriminalization in 1968. Clowes Huneke does not sugarcoat life for gay men in East Germany, though. He stresses that, like in West Germany, gay men were considered outsiders and points out that the army and the Stasi were bad places for gay men. The state's inaction on violence against gay men, moreover, corroborated the general disregard for gay life.

A series of reforms in the late 1960s and 1970s led to the emergence of a gay subculture in both German states. In West Germany, the first attempts to decriminalize homosexuality followed the path paved during the Weimar Republic. Activists relied on scientific and liberal rights to make the case against criminalization. The state, by contrast, focused on the protection of juveniles and the prevention of gay cliques – two obsessions with a longer history. Sexual mores changed in West Germany in the 1960s at the same time as there was a further push to denazify the state. West Germans had become less religious, more accepting of extramarital sex and birth control as well as homosexuality. In light of these social and political changes, gay activists started to make the case that homosexuals had been victims of the Nazi state, something that the government failed to recognize. By the end of the 1960s, lawyers, sexologists, and activists convinced lawmakers and the public that there was no good reason to criminalize male same-sex acts. These efforts were ultimately successful when same-sex acts between adult men were legalized in 1969.

Gay activism flourished in the 1970s in West Germany, and the movement pushed for comprehensive social reform. Yet it lost most of its luster by the 1980s due to internal divisions, political scandals, and its transformation into a more commercial subculture. The AIDS crisis reactivated some of the movement's old political commitments, but it never achieved its lofty ambitions from the past. West German gay men had become complacent. Conversely, East German activism reached new heights in the early 1980s. The first East German gay group, the Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin (HIB), emerged out of conversations with West German activists – a fact that points out the transnational nature of gay activism east and west of the Berlin Wall. Initially, a semblance of a gay community existed in private residences, such as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's stately home on the outskirts of Berlin, which became the epicenter of gay community organizing. Gay activists hoped to persuade the government to grant gay people rights and privileges, but their demands were lost in all-too-typical East German bureaucratic muddle. Gay activists increasingly moved from the private to the public realm. Like the civil rights groups in East Germany in 1989, gay groups met in churches, but they were not interested in overthrowing the communist state – gay people wanted to be an integral part of it. Through complex and serendipitous brokering with the state and the secret police, gay groups achieved many of their goals, including the opening of cultural centers and LGBT-positive sex education. Their successes, the author stresses, demonstrate that gay life and rights were possible within an authoritarian context.

States of Liberation highlights how East and West German gay activists faced setbacks, adapted, and enjoyed some successes. It shows that there was and is more than one path toward gay liberation. The enduring animus against queer people after reunification proves that progress is vulnerable. This book's unstated optimism is very poignant in light of contemporary authoritarian threats and culture wars. Queer people have always found ways to live, love, and foster community in private and to engage fully in public life despite hatred and prejudice. Written in clear, engaging prose, full of insight, and carefully researched, States of Liberation is a must-read book for everyone interested in German history and in LGTBQ activism today.