Abstract
Facing the simultaneous deradicalization of queer social movements and the ascendency of a political right that seeks to roll back any and all gains of sexual emancipation, the stakes of writing queer history are high. In her pathbreaking new book, Jennifer Evans faces these stakes head-on. Taking postwar German history as an entry point, Evans offers a conceptually rich exploration of the pleasures and desires that shaped queer lives, past and present, that reaches across time and place. Indeed, this book is not a typical piece of German history. Attuned to but not constrained by rigid periodization or nationally specific concerns, Evans’ intervention is vast and multidirectional. Together, it coheres around an elaboration of queer kinship as historical method. For Evans, kinship calls into view the relational, as well as the situational and emotional dimensions of queer experience, and, in so doing, “divulges queer's multiple horizons” (6). Kinship stands in contrast to a focus on “siloed identities,” both in political practice and historical analysis, enabling us instead to “think more capaciously about queer and trans* lives, loves, struggles, and journeys in the past and the experiences that might be possible in the future” (214). Evans’ project is therefore to offer a united history that draws on queer of color critique to consider those who have been “differently queered” (5). At the same time, the emphasis moves from injury and redemption to one that considers desire in all of its complexity. The sources have shifted too. Following the lines of kinship through media ranging from mid-century erotic photography to pandemic-era audio guides, Evans offers something fundamentally different from a social movement history, asking the reader what it might mean to “live in good relation to the queer and trans* past” (20). Indeed, the answer lies not in inhabiting a queer or trans* subject position in the present or requiring those in the past to inhabit similarly rigid positions. Instead, Evans charts a mode of kinship that reaches back and forward through time, considers ancestors in all of their messiness, and is, most importantly, “singular plural” (186).
The first chapter turns to the ruins of Berlin to examine the entangled experiences of transgression and community that shaped the shared fate of those living in the city. Here, Evans combines her strengths as an urban, cultural, and media historian, working with care but without hindrance to trace the lives of those who challenged dominant notions of gender, sex, and citizenship, yet who are not always readily or enthusiastically embraced as queer ancestors. Berlin serves as a particularly fruitful spot to begin this project. A city with a robust and mythologized queer past that then became the seat of the Nazi's genocidal regime, Berlin in the immediate postwar years was physically marred by division and destruction. The scenes that emerged in the rebuilding city consisted of spaces, ranging from train stations to drag bars, in which sex workers of all genders, lesbian, gay, and trans* Berliners interacted with each other. As Evans carefully shows, multiple hierarchies shaped experiences within these spaces, as policing sex work was deeply gendered, and arrests of queer and trans* people often (but not always) depended on the ability to perform class and gender convincingly. Although subject to raids, some spaces, like Elli's Bier-Bar, founded by Görlitzer train station in 1946, or Cabaret Chez Nous, the city's oldest drag bar established in more upscale Charlottenburg in 1958, evaded closure and carved out space for patrons.
Retaining a focus on the postwar years, the second chapter turns to queer erotic photography through a close analysis of the work of Herbert Tobias. Working between Paris and Frankfurt in the 1950s, Tobias offers another path into the complex networks of kinship in postwar West Germany. Evans mines his series depicting Manfred, a sex worker whose photograph Tobias took in 1955, for new ways of understanding and historicizing desire. For Evans, Tobias’ Manfred series is instructive of a new way of reading queer kinship through photographs. Pushing us to “ask new questions of the image both as an object and a text, one that constructs new social realities as much as it also reflects them,” Evans argues that photography played a crucial role in white, gay male kinship in ways that bucked normativizing impulses of both homophile movements and the New Left (55). However, Tobias’ work is not unequivocally liberatory. His portrayals of Manfred, an underage sex worker, as well as of other street sex workers and pickups can also be read as exploitative. Drawing on the work of Kobena Mercer and his successive analyses of Robert Mapplethorpe's images of Black men, Evans works through such uneasy tensions to argue that Tobias’ photographs of sex workers and pickups offer “insight into post-1945 illegality as icons and emblems of a defiant desire in a deeply homophobic age, something we fail to appreciate if we view them solely as forms of violence and coercion” (71). Bucking normativizing impulses, even within homophile movements, rested on levels of exploitation, but also did not erase the possibility for agency.
Evans widens the historical scope in her third chapter, charting the breadth of twentieth-century trans* photography and concluding with the 2015 joint exhibition Homosexualit*ies between the Schwules Museum* and the German Museum. Here Evans argues that trans* visualization played an important if fraught role in the more fulsome representation of trans* lives. Beginning with sexological photographs, used for the documentary and medicalizing gaze, Evans pushes beyond simple readings of coercion and resistance. Such a reading becomes particularly compelling when Evans shifts her focus to Nazi mugshots, an important tool for visualizing and regulating gender nonconformity. Examining the photographs of Fritz Kitzing, who was arrested and imprisoned in 1933 on charges of prostitution, Evans shows how the Nazis attempted to depict gender nonconformism through clothes and acts. However, even these pictures are complicated. Kitzing holds an “unyielding gaze,” clenching his fist while staged into awkward images of gender nonconformism. Evans insists on carving out an expansive role for Kitzing, about whom we know little, although we do know that Kitzing retained the unequivocal support of his biological kin. Portrait photography, the subject of the next section of the chapter, offered new opportunities for self-representation. However, the emphasis on the aesthetic and the surreal of photographers, including Tobias, stood in tension with 1970s gay liberationists focus on the documentary. In both East and West Germany, however, photography continued to serve as an important tool in developing kinship networks while capturing moments of friendship and festivity. Spaces both siloed and widened with the fall of the wall, as queer nightlife became an important locus for racialized and migrant kinships to emerge, such as the Gayhane party at SO36, which too was documented through individual photography. These traditions, and the necessity of reading images for the polyvalent lives they depict, seeped into the 2015 exhibition, which emphasized the constructed nature of identity and affective experiences to decenter both the hagiography of Magnus Hirschfeld and the “hallowed place” of Nazi persecution in visualizing trans* lives (122).
Despite the book's overall shift in focus away from social movements, in the fourth chapter Evans does indeed return to activism. Here, Evans uses kinship to argue for an approach to politics that emphasizes “overlap and interconnectedness” that structured activist networks, troubling accepted fault lines (124). Evans looks across the Iron Curtain, pointing to moments when the Wall became porous. At the same time, Evans discusses intersectional forms of kinship, arising between environmentalists, feminists, peace activists, and queer people in the East, and between feminists, lesbians, and gay men (effeminate and not) in the West. Certainly, these connections were not without tension. Many in the emergent gay liberation groups in the West bucked both the conformity of previous generations of self-described homophile activists and the perceived superficiality of sexual subcultures, while running into conflict with lesbians and feminists. While scenes were more integrated in the East, lesbian feminists felt excluded from groups like the Homosexual Interest Community and the Sunday Club, while their own approach to transwomen was ambivalent at best. Across the board, state-sponsored homophobia hampered memory work, and legal regimes continued to police unequally queer relationships and scenes. Despite the unifying potential of discrimination, some forms of intersectional kinship were relatively short-lived. Evans argues, following the work of US historian Roderick Ferguson, that the early 1980s saw queer activism in West Germany jettisoning its “multidimensionality” in favor of more liberal and assimilationist approaches to politics.
The fifth chapter functions as the upshot to the fourth, in which Evans lays out her unequivocal criticism of queer investments in liberalism. Focusing on the debates around the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism, Evans argues that kinship framed in identitarian terms—here, who gets to claim victimhood and who does not—fails to nurture solidarities around difference. In a context in which Germany can marshal the memory of persecution to claim a particular responsibility to address all forms of homophobia around the world, and in which the imagined victim of Nazi persecution is cis, male, and white, the siloing of identities most drastically fails to account for race and gender nonconformism. Space is particularly important here, Evans explains, as the creation of a queer space of such national importance unleashed a “full-scale crisis of representation, mobilizing in its wake a cacophony of voices that transcended the boundaries of city and nation, lesbian and gay, past and present” (164). After weathering light aesthetic disagreement, the unveiling of the plans for the monument launched a debate about the exclusion of certain victim groups, particularly queer women, that had its roots in long-standing disagreements about commemoration. Evans carefully charts the debates as they played out following the introduction of the memorial's design in 2006. Just as these debates bore echoes of the past, such as Alice Schwarzer's denigration of cruising, so too did they resonate across borders. The international queer reporting helped create a kinship based on the symbology of Nazi violence, out of which Berlin emerged as a “rainbow capital.” What was lost through the development of kinship based on shared identity and memories of suffering were solidarities that could challenge the racisms that pervaded 2000s Germany, especially against Muslims, and in service of which queer rights couched as human rights were sometimes marshaled.
The sixth chapter opens up new possibilities for thinking through what the eponymous queer art of history could be. It is here that Evans moves beyond a close reading of images and embraces art in its fullest sense. In particular, Evans details the radical potential of Canadian-born artist Benny Nemer, whose art project, I Don’t Know Where Paradise Is, “brings the listener into a relationship with the past in all its libidinous glory” (190). An audio guide originally conceived with the Carleton University Art Gallery useable in any setting, Paradise was refigured through COVID into a series of vignettes, told through different narrators, to be downloaded to a personal device. Through these vignettes, Nemer provides the listener a “touch across time,” which steps away from a relationship to the past conceived only through trauma and suffering (199). These vignettes are accompanied by sculpted libraries, extrapolated from Nemer's visits to the homes of queer elders, construed as sites of longing, comfort, lust, and sex, to find new ways to appreciate queer lineage. In piecing through multiple affiliations, at once rarified and exclusionary, Nemer creates a critical nostalgia that calls for more intersectional, embodied memories. It is here that Evans sees a key potential in Nemer's work. A somatic, sentimental, and empathetic approach to history is, for Evans, “vital to rendering marginality visible and thus better understood” (196). Only in so doing can we map new paths into the present and future in which we are connected to and stand in good relation with each other.
A radical and inspiring take on not just the past, but on the practice of history writing itself, The Queer Art of History runs full force toward the emotionality of encountering queer ancestry. The solidarity in difference, or a relationality beyond familial bonds, that Evans’ elaboration of kinship centers creates possibilities for queer history-making that encourages the historian to feel complicated about their subjects as kin. The most inspiring moments come when the reader can reach, through Evans’ evocative writing, across time to feel the textures of the past. Evans plumbs the depths of queer lives to describe a world in mid-century Berlin full of passion and intimacy, rather than conformist homophiles on one side of the wall or drab dictatorship on the other, and invites the reader to feel both the pleasures of the past (and present) and the discomfort of the present (and past) in the photography of Herbert Tobias. In so doing, Evans jettisons much of the guiding structure of monographs to which historians have become accustomed. Indeed, such an approach is crucial for Evans to accomplish this project. At the same time, the necessary disorientation that Evans’ winding through time and space engenders dislodges assumptions that the reader might bring to queer history. A powerful intervention, Evans’ work also sits in kinship through citation with current and previous generations of queer historians, theorists, writers, and artists. Evans' contribution serves to bolster a field that feels, in Germany, on the verge of breaking through decades of institutional hostility, and will generate new methods for understanding the past in ways that we cannot yet predict.