Sex and Sexuality: 2004 Conference Programme

Session 9: Gay Sexualities II
Chair: Valerie Lehr

No Clear Line: Contending Views of the Criminalization Of Sex Between Men in the Soviet Occupied Zone and the German Democratic Republic, 1945-60
Erik Huneke
Berlin, Germany

In 1935, the Nazi regime expanded Paragraph 175 to encompass any form of intimate behaviour between men as a prelude to the internment of thousands of gay men in concentration camps. Yet it also introduced sub-paragraphs that many pre-1933 sex reformers had seen as the necessary pendant to the decriminalization of consensual sexual relations between adult males, namely the proscription of same-sex relations that involved the use of force, payment, the ''seduction'' of youth, and taking advantage of a relationship of dependence. This overlap of Nazi jurisprudence and sex reform advocacy was not intentional, but it did leave open the question of whether or not the 1935 alteration of Paragraph 175 was ''typically National Socialist'' for post-1945 Allied occupation authorities and German officials.
My paper will rely upon published and archival materials to explore the implications of this legal ambiguity for the fate of sex reform in the Soviet Occupation Zone (1945-1949) and the nascent German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1960). While the West German Federal Constitutional Court retained the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 in its entirety, the Highest Court of the GDR in 1950 rejected the Nazi extension of the law beyond ''intercourse-like'' behaviour even as it retained the sub-paragraph provisions. I argue that this divergent outcome was at least in part attributable to the efforts of Dresden-based psychiatrist Rudolf Klimmer, who in the immediate post-war years almost single-handedly foisted the decriminalization of consensual adult homosexuality onto the political agenda and whose attempt to revive the spirit and substance of pre-1933 sex reform was not entirely without resonance. He persisted despite official amnesia about earlier Communist support for decriminalizing homosexuality and the promulgation of a heteronormative ''socialist morality.'' Although the lifting of criminal penalties for consensual same-sex sexual activity between men in the GDR would not occur until 1968, Klimmer's advocacy lay the groundwork for the enhanced role of sex research during the ''scientific-technical revolution'' of the 1960s by legitimizing the position of the sex expert in a state-socialist system in which so-called relics of bourgeois society such as homosexuality were initially expected to disappear on their own.

“Staying Bush” – The Influence of Place and Isolation in the Decision by Gay Men to Live in Rural Areas in Australia
Ed Green
School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, Australia

Rural areas the world over are often portrayed as conservative, intolerant places where acceptance of difference is low and a fierce conformity and parochialism, if not abject bigotry, are the queens [sic] of a hierarchy of values. Yet gay men, arguably still the most marginalized and maligned of minority groups in our society, live in rural areas.
While there is increasing research into the lives of gay men, most of it focuses on gay men living in the cities and is underpinned by an urban context and an urban values system. There have been few studies of gay men living in rural areas. Iris Young suggests that the cities are the only places in which a tolerance of difference is sufficiently strong to allow those that are different to survive and thrive. In has been argued that the city is the place to where rural-born gay men have had to migrate in order to find acceptance and a sense of selfhood.
This paper contests that construction. Using interview data gathered from gay men living in small towns and on farms in Australia, it argues that these gay men have created a sense of place and space and a self-identity for themselves with little reference to the city. The gay man in the Australian bush is an amalgam of ‘demographic’ inputs. He takes from the rural world a style and sensibility and a sense of belonging to, and in, the bush. From the gay world, he acquires sense of difference and a sub-culture of resistance and struggle. Yet, these men’s expression of a gay sensibility and desire finds little compatibility with the city gay community and little acceptance within the small rural communities in which they live.
This paper, part of a larger work, uses the issue of isolation to illustrate how gay men use and adapt features of the bush to enhance their own lives. Isolation has been cited as the very factor of rural life that has been instrumental in forcing the decampment of many gay men from the bush. In contrast, this paper argues that gay men living in the bush use the natural geographical isolation to create a social isolation that enhances their lives.
It suggests that these gay men see the isolation in their lives as an asset on which to build the lives that they want to live. Far from forcing them to leave the rural environment that they know and like so much, isolation allows them to stay in the bush. It is their affinity with the bush that shapes their identity. And just as a sense of community and belonging gives gay men in the city a sense of selfhood, gay men in rural areas also find a sense of selfhood. They find it in belonging to the place and space that epitomizes both the bush itself and the extended gay community there.

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Homosexuality and Homophobia in the Caribbean
Suzanne Charles
Centre for Gender and Development Studies , the University of the West Indies

At the very least, the Caribbean has an inadequate understanding of its sexuality. Sex and sexuality are rarely problematical and are received as natural, with no questions being posed such as "What is sex, and is it for Pleasure or Purpose?" This assumed naturalness of one expression of sexuality has facilitated the development and maintenance of homophobic attitudes, which continue to be prevalent in the region.
If however, we understand that sex and sexuality are not merely natural behaviours and that they are socially constructed and political institutions, then we would see more readily that there is need for such questions to be posed, considered and answered.
The social dynamics, which deny this questioning, are the ones which also allow for legislation as exists in most of the Caribbean territories which considers Buggery a crime and an abomination (according to the law books of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago) attracting a sentence of up to ten years.
Inconsistencies in attitudes about sexuality do become evident however, when one examines the Caribbean ’s attitude towards male vis-à-vis female homosexuality, where female homosexuality is not considered such an abomination as male homosexuality, nor is it criminal.
This can perhaps be explained, as Hope (2001) suggests, by the fact that as a female-female discourse, female homosexuality does not affect the binary and hierarchical male-female gender relations on which homophobia insists, nor does it threaten the constructs of masculinity, heterosexuality or patriarchy, on which the region thrives. It therefore does not warrant derision or legislation.
This paper attempts to discuss homosexuality within the context of the Caribbean , and seeks to explore the causes and consequences of the existing attitudes of homophobia, while examining the inconsistencies within these very attitudes from which such aversion for what is considered immoral behaviour is spawned.