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Samuel Clowes Huneke is an assistant professor of modern German history at George Mason University. His research focuses on Germany after World War II and he is currently at work on a book that examines gay persecution and liberation in Germany during the Cold War. His essays have appeared in the Point, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
The pandemic may spell the end of many gay bars, but apps and increased acceptance for LGBTQ people meant most were already on the rocks. Should we mourn their passing?
West German witchcraft trials after World War II reveal how political rupture can fuel magical thinking. What lessons might we draw for our own age of QAnon conspiracies, anti-vaccination, and strange COVID-19 cures?
In 1961 Frank Kameny became the first person to ask the Supreme Court to protect the employment rights of homosexuals. The fact that the Court finally has—sixty years later—points to both the successes and agonies of a legalistic approach to activism.
Fixating on whether Trump’s response to COVID-19 is totalitarian makes it difficult to have a nuanced discussion about the role government should play in times of crisis.
Germany’s official policy of shame about its past is a model the United States should adopt. But it won’t protect either country from far-right extremism.
In our search for a useful past, we need to be careful whom we name as the heroes of queer history.
A gay golden age in East Germany reveals that Soviet politics were more dynamic than we admit—and that gay rights has less to do with democracy than we tend to assume.
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