Josie McLellan’s talk ‘Glad to Be Gay Behind the Wall: LGBT+ activism in 1970s East Germany’ was based on her ground breaking oral history research among Germans who had been activists in East Germany. The Germans she interviewed had feelings of pride and nostalgia for what they had achieved. Josie looked at how these gay and lesbian Germans formed an organisation called HIB in the seventies which organised social gatherings both in private and in public. They made contact with and were inspired by gay groups in West Germany. Their slogan was ‘out of the toilets into the streets’. Peter Tatchell visited them at the time of the World Festival Games but the movement was infiltrated by the STASI and eventually forced to dissolve.

A fuller version is available in her book ‘Love in the Time of Communism’

Thanks to the 34 folk who attended our second Zoom event