Chronicle

The events in New York also made waves internationally. The first gay pride marches and parades took place in numerous major cities in the USA and around the world in the months and years following the riots.

The first queer demonstration in Germany took place in Münster three years after the Stonewall riots. Similar demonstrations followed in Berlin and Bremen at the end of the 1970s. For fear of social ostracism, many of the participants wore masks.

The so-called Transsexuals Act (TSG) was introduced in Germany as the “Act on Changing First Names and Determining Gender Identity in Special Cases”. It made it possible for trans people to change their first name for the first time. The law contained numerous highly discriminatory regulations, which were gradually overturned by the Federal Constitutional Court. Even after more than 40 years, the TSG still ignores the reality of trans people’s lives and urgently needs to be abolished and replaced by a self-determination law. You can read more about this under point 10 of our demands.

The first CSD in Leipzig – and also the first CSD in the new federal states – took place just three years after reunification and 23 years after the Stonewall riots. Around 100 people gathered at the Moritzbastei under the militant slogan “Lesbians and gays in the constitution!”. The demonstration was organised by courageous people such as Kathrin Darlatt, Peter Thürer, Eddy Stapel, Detlev Hüttig, Dr Cornelia Matzke and Marion Ziegler. Members of the Bundestag and “citizens and not just lesbians and gays” were invited. Even back then, the City of Leipzig and the “Representatives for Same-Sex Lifestyles of the City of Leipzig” were co-organisers of the very first Leipzig CSD.

We are particularly proud and grateful that some of the activists from back then are still actively involved in CSD Leipzig and the interests of the queer community in our city today.

As part of the ICD-10, the World Health Organisation (WHO) removes homosexuality from the catalogue of mental illnesses. The new version came into force worldwide in 1994.

The WHO resolution was passed on 17 May 1990. The International Day Against Homo-, Bi-, Inter- and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), which also takes place every year, refers to this date.

For more than 120 years, Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code criminalised homosexuality and legitimised the persecution of homosexual and bisexual men. First introduced in 1872, at the time of the German Empire, the paragraph continued to exist until after reunification. In 1935, the paragraph was tightened by the Nazi regime, in which the restriction to acts similar to sexual intercourse was removed, making even kissing and later “lustful intentions” a punishable offence. By the end of the Second World War, around 50,000 gay men had been convicted on the basis of §175. Around 5,000 to 6,000 of them were deported to concentration camps. There they were labelled with the “pink triangle” and treated extremely cruelly.

The paragraph remained unchanged in the FRG until 1969. In the decades that followed, it was slightly weakened. On the territory of the former GDR, which had already abolished the paragraph in 1968, §175 StGB was reintroduced for a short time after reunification, until it was finally abolished without replacement throughout Germany in 1994.

This was followed by a decades-long battle for the rehabilitation of the wrongfully convicted men. It was not until 22 July 2017 that the law on the criminal rehabilitation of men convicted after 8 May 1945 came into force. Unfortunately, it came too late for many.

On the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust on 27 January 2023, the German Bundestag explicitly commemorated queer victims of the Nazi regime for the first time.

In the years after 1992, Leipzig Pride took place annually (see below). However, as a result of reunification, more and more young queer people moved to “the West”. Due to a lack of interest and a shrinking community in Leipzig, the Pride movement initially came to a standstill at the end of the 1990s.

Colloquially referred to as “marriage light” or “gay marriage”, the registered civil partnership was introduced in Germany in August 2001. It made it possible for homosexual couples to give their relationship a legal framework for the first time. While the Netherlands introduced marriage for all in the same year, only a compromise was reached in Germany, which did not fully equalise same-sex registered partnerships with heterosexual marriages and therefore continued to discriminate against them.

After a break of a few years, the Leipzig Pride movement started up again in 2004, initiated by the students council (StuRa) of Leipzig University. A week of 22 events was organised. At the end of the Pride week, a street festival was held at the Nikolaikirchhof. Around 400 people marched through the city centre. At that time, they were less colourful and numerous, but still had important political demands.

The year before, the StuRa had already made a statement in favour of equal rights and the visibility of the queer community by hoisting the rainbow flag in front of the university’s old administration building, thus bringing attention for the Pride movement “back” to Leipzig.

Thanks to a city council resolution, the rainbow flag was hoisted at Neues Rathaus for the first time in 2006 – although not on the flagpoles directly in front of the main entrance like the other flags, but a little hidden at the side of the building, at the transition to the town hall. It was not until 2009 that the rainbow flag was also allowed to fly in front of the main entrance to Leipzig’s administrative centre.

In 2009, more than 2,000 visitors attended Leipzig Pride for the first time – twice as many as the previous year. In cooperation with the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, a poster campaign was organised in the run-up to CSD to confront viewers with their prejudices. Posters with inscriptions such as “Would you water your neighbour’s flowers? – Even though you know she was born a boy?” were distributed in many places in Leipzig and were intended to provocatively encourage people to think and rethink.

Queer visibility throughout society is one of the main concerns of the Pride movement. At Pride 2013, the focus should be entirely on the I in LGBTQIA, which stands for intersex and intergender people. This should also be reflected in the motto “L(i)eben und l(i)eben lassen” (Live/Love and let live/love).

After the introduction of registered civil partnerships in 2001, individual rights of same-sex partnerships were increasingly adapted to “traditional marriage”. Mostly as a result of constitutional complaints by queer people.

In June 2017, the German Bundestag finally voted on opening up marriage to same-sex people and passed the corresponding law with a majority of 393 MPs. In addition to the SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and DIE LINKE parliamentary groups, some CDU/CSU MPs even voted in favour of the law. On 1 October 2017, the opening of marriage came into force and the first same-sex couples were finally able to marry – after many years of fighting for equal rights.

However, even with marriage for all, there is still no complete equality. Lesbian mothers were and continue to be disadvantaged in terms of parentage law.

In its decision of 10 October 2017, the highest German court states that the general right of personality as a fundamental right also protects the gender identity of people who do not belong to any of the binary genders (male/female). The court calls on the Federal Government to create the possibility of a third gender registration for non-binary people in civil status law. As a result, “diverse” can now be registered as a gender.

50 years after the Stonewall riots, our number of participants reached five figures for the first time. Under the slogan: “50 years of Stonewall – we’re not finished yet!”, over 10,000 people demonstrated in Leipzig for equal rights and visibility for queer people.

At the beginning of 2020, people’s lives in Germany, Europe and around the world were turned upside down – the coronavirus spread rapidly, forcing people to avoid contact and severely restrict their social lives and other activities.

One group of people particularly affected by these restrictions were queer people, especially in rural areas. SafeSpaces were closed and single queer people were sometimes lonely. In cooperation with the CSD, the city of Leipzig launched the “You are not alone” campaign to show people, especially in the rural regions around Leipzig and throughout Saxony, that they are not forgotten. In some villages, a rainbow flag in the form of a poster was displayed for the first time ever. In addition to a lot of hate, we also received an overwhelming number of letters, some of them emotional, from queer people from all corners of the state.

Unfortunately, limiting contacts also meant that the CSD had to adapt. Even without the traditional big demonstration at the end of the event week, we wanted to show that the queer community sticks together. Due to the dynamic infection situation, CSD Leipzig, like many other CSDs, decided not to hold a demonstration. Instead, an exhibition of pictures from past decades was organised on Leipzig’s market square with a small stage for speeches. Wearing masks and keeping their distance, some people gathered and marched individually through the city centre with Pride flags. In the evening, a political and entertaining evening programme via livestream rounded off the day.

With the ICD-11 adopted in 2018, the World Health Organization is removing “gender identity disorders” from the catalogue of mental illnesses with effect from 1 January 2022. Transgender is now finally recognised as a natural form of gender identity.