The project "Queer as German Folk" took the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprisings as an occasion to examine the current status of the gender diversity discourse on the basis of the history of the Queer Movement. It focused in particular on the German LGBTQI* movements generated by the respective civil societies. It was also intended to correct historical perspectives and to question a traditional cis-male narrative.
In the participating Goethe-Instituts in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco and Mexico City, as well as the Goethe-Zentrum Guadalajara, the centerpiece of the commemorative event series was an exhibition developed in collaboration with the Schwules Museum, Berlin. With approx. 100 objects, it was intended to create a space of experience that allows visitors to learn about the history and present of movement.
In Chicago the exhibition were shown in three parts and neighborhoods: on the Southside at the Packingtown Museum at The Plant in Back of the Yards, in the Loop at the Goethe-Institut Chicago, on the Northside at the Leather Archives and Museum in Edgewater.
Further components of the project in Chicago were:
The film series Queer as German Folk, celebrating the 35th anniversary of Edition Salzgeber, one of the most important LGBTQI* film distributers in Germany, at Chicago Filmmakers/Reeling in Andersonville.
A website to provide background information, documentation of the exhibition stations the video series Stonewall moments,
Playful, committed and colorful like the queer movement itself: Documents and archive materials become objects that form ordered or anarchic installations and invite the public to interact.
The Protest Banner Lending Library is a space for people to gain skills to learn to make their own banners, a communal sewing space where we support each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests.
Mapping Queer Chicago: Past and Present looks to the past and the present to contextualize Chicago as a city with a rich queer history. It aims to decentralize queer history beyond the established queer enclaves of “Boystown” and position it with the Latinx and Black queer experience in the city of Chicago.
Taxi zum Klo of 1980, is the first “gay movie” in which gay life is shown as normality — not because it has become socially acceptable, but because the protagonists are not concerned with repression and sanctioned morality.
Freier Fall (Free Fall) is a film, which can be seen as a sign that emancipation has come a long way in this culture of origin. Two police academy students fall in love, one of them while in the midst of nest building with his pregnant girlfriend.
Siebzehn (Seventeen) is a high school genre film with girls flirting and on-screen messaging. Sensitive inner lives of emancipated young women in their Central European habitat.
The fall of the Wall tore West Berlin out of its post-punk slumber, in which at least part of the alternative scene had wrapped themselves up together like in a vulture’s nest right next to the wall. Deprived of this protection, the subculture must reorient itself: a haunting snapshot unfolds of an anarchic gay reality that is irretrievably lost.
Curators
Birgit Bosold has been a member of the Schwules Museum Berlin Board of Directors since 2006. She was instrumental in the strategic reorientation of the Schwules Museum also by means of (co-)curating exhibitions. She was project manager and co-curator of the exhibition "Homosexuality_en", which was initiated by the Schwules Museum* and shown in cooperation with the Deutschen Historischen Museum. Most recently, together with Vera Hofmann, she was project manager for the Jahr der Frau_en - a queer feminist annual program of the Gay Museum for 2018.
Carina Klugbauer is a research assistant at the Schwules Museum Berlin. In 2017 she was involved in the conception and curating of the travelling exhibition "Unverschämt" (shameless) on the persecution and discrimination of lesbian women and gay men in Hesse. In 2018, together with Birgit Bosold, she curated the queer art exhibition "Lesbisches Sehen" for the annual program Jahr der Frau_en.
Partners
Queer as German Folk is a project of the Goethe-Institutes in North America in cooperation with the Schwules Museum, Berlin, and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.
