Styles of Masculinity in the West German Gay Scene, 1950-1965

Abstract

Since the end of the 1990s, the study of masculinity within German scholarship has made considerable progress, especially in moving beyond the close association made between German manhood and militarism.¹ While the figure of the soldier remains crucial for an understanding of masculinity in Germany (as well as the rest of the Western world) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars have increasingly recognized that any culture includes multiple definitions and representations of manhood—even one so thoroughly saturated by the figure of the soldier as Germany was during the Nazi era.² Increasingly, the goal of research has been to uncover how masculinity is not only represented in official discourse, but also constructed through social interaction and “performed,” to use Judith Butler's term, in the context of everyday life. Moreover, this research has increasingly taken into account “the relations between the different kinds of masculinity,” in the words of the sociologist Robert Connell—especially the relationships of power.³ In short, recent work has increasingly recognized that the meanings of manhood are constructed within a complicated socio-cultural matrix of gender whose points of reference include not only women and cultural definitions of femininity, but also various versions of masculinity that themselves very often reflect class distinctions and other kinds of social fissures.