Gray Activism: Lesbian Media, Everyday Life, and Archives in and after the German Democratic Republic, 1982 to the Present

My dissertation, “Gray Activism: Lesbian Media, Everyday Life, and Archives in and after the German Democratic Republic, 1982 to the Present,” examines how queer East Germans used media practices to build and sustain social networks, political communities, and collective memory across the 1980s and into the decades following unification. Focusing on the production and circulation of samizdat publications, newsletters, correspondence networks, event calendars, and activist archives, the project shows how these materials functioned as infrastructures of queer life rather than merely as records of it. Produced within church groups, informal networks, and transnational exchanges, these media practices rendered queer communities legible to themselves and, at times, to state institutions. After 1989, they took on renewed urgency as activists confronted unification’s shifting political and economic conditions. By tracing these media networks across the Wende, my dissertation foregrounds the persistence and transformation of queer organizing practices over time. 

I argue that media infrastructures sustained queer activism in and after the GDR, and that heeding these practices complicates narratives that equate queer emancipation with liberal capitalist democracy. East German activists primarily sought recognition through mobilizing the state’s own promises—access to housing, social services, and collective institutions—to articulate claims as sexual minorities. They framed queerness as compatible with, and often dependent upon, socialist forms of social provision and collective life. These media practices functioned simultaneously as political strategies and social experimentations, shaping how queer communities imagined themselves and their futures. After unification, many of these activists continued to pursue socialist and feminist commitments, even as the infrastructures that had sustained their work were dismantled or transformed. Attending to these dynamics reveals how different political economies produce distinct horizons for queer life and challenges teleological accounts of progress that position liberal capitalism as the endpoint of queer history.