The Hoover Institution Library & Archives invites you to a virtual book talk with Samuel Clowes Huneke, assistant professor of history at George Mason University on Wednesday, May 11, 2022 at 12 pm PDT / 3 pm EDT. Huneke will discuss his first book, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (University of Toronto Press, 2022). This event will be moderated by Matthew Sommer, the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University.

ABSTRACT
While the Nazi government imprisoned tens of thousands of queer people during its twelve years in power, Germany is today lauded as a leader in LGBTQ rights. This talk charts the country’s remarkable evolution in matters of sexuality, highlighting the brutal persecution that gay men and other queer groups continued to experience in the decades after World War II as well as their remarkable activist efforts during the Cold War’s later decades in both democratic West Germany and communist East Germany. Drawing on dozens of interviews and untapped archives, including the Hoover Institution Archive’s Germany collections, this talk reveals that East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than was West Germany.