On 9 November 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany’s only gay-themed film premiered. Competing Utopias recounts how this moment became possible, tracing the media, cultural, and information networks through which LGBTQ people made themselves visible in a society that often preferred they remain unseen.

Tracing the history of queer life in the German Democratic Republic from the immediate postwar years through the 1980s, Kyle Frackman highlights activists who challenged homophobic laws and policies through petitions and complaints; the Stasi’s systems of surveillance; queer representations in film and cabaret; and strategies of queer protest. Shifting attention from individual and institutional actors to the transmission of information itself, Frackman draws from vast archives to demonstrate how LGBTQ people’s lives were shaped not only by what is conventionally understood as media but also by medial environments such as public toilets, activist meetings, databanks and lists, fiction and nonfiction, theatrical scripts, and photographs. Together these examples reveal contradictory understandings of who belonged in socialist society, underscoring how media and technologies were not neutral tools but active forces in the development of queer rights in East Germany.

Competing Utopias offers readers a groundbreaking and intellectually immersive new account of sexuality, authority, and cultural life during the Cold War.