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This article contributes to a reassessment of gay liberation by focusing on how matters of sex and desire featured in the gay press and the gay movement in 1970s West Germany. Gay liberation has often been viewed through an affirmative lens, contrasted favourably with the supposed shame-filled conformism of the postwar homophile movement. I problematize this perspective by analysing ambivalence about homosexual desire and gay (male) sexual practice, both in the pages of the commercial gay press and in gay activist publications. Using case studies of intergenerational desire--or 'paedophilia'--and sado-masochism, I question the extent to which the 1970s saw a transition towards the ideal of mutual, reciprocal relationships. In so doing, I argue that historians of homosexual politics should not only analyse questions of ideology and strategy but also sex, desire and ambivalence about self and society. Concluding through a consideration of the interrelationship between 'pride' and 'shame', this article shows that gay liberation was anything but a mere hedonistic interlude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SPD's 1976 election slogan,Modell Deutschland(‘the German model’) became a catch-all term for all that the New Left rejected about the Federal Republic. This article will focus on how gay activists attempted to situate cases of gay oppression as part and parcel of wider political oppression against the New Left, and how the invocation of the National Socialist past was crucial to this aim. Gay activists' efforts culminated in the gay movement's interaction with the Third International Russell Tribunal, held in West Germany in 1978 and 1979 to consider alleged human-rights abuses. Analysing gay activism around the Tribunal reveals underlying tensions in gay liberation, with activists facing competing demands, the need to address contrasting constituencies, and caught between public and counterpublic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]