Gay spies
Gay spies and espionage….absolutely one of the most incredible topics you can study about the GDR. On today's episode of Radio GDR, we are going to dive into the topic of LGBT espionage, life and fight for equality behind the Iron Curtain. We have the honor to be joined by Dr. Samuel Huneke, assistant professor of history at George Mason University and author of the riveting book States of Liberation - Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. In the book, Huneke traces the path of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to gender non-conforming politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted queer men - and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as skillfully as
The challenge of being queer and an MI6 spy
Security correspondent
Earlier this month the chief of MI6 issued a universal apology for the historic treatment of LGBT employees. Until , there was a ban on openly gay staff serving inside the intelligence agencies, which Richard Moore called "wrong, unjust and discriminatory". One former member of MI6, who is gay and served before the forbid was lifted, tells the BBC that the apology was welcome but overdue.
Being a spy can mean leading a double life - maintaining your cover by telling friends you work at the Foreign Office when in fact you head to MI6 in the morning. Or when you are abroad perhaps taking on an entirely new culture to meet an forwarder.
But being a homosexual spy in the Cool War meant leading a triple life. There was an additional layer of secrets, a clandestine existence hidden even from your colleagues in the nature of espionage.
That was because even though homosexuality had been legalised in Britain in the s, it was still banned within the secret service because of a presumpti
Huneke, Samuel Clowes. "5 Gay Spies in Cold War Germany". States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Frosty War Germany, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, , pp.
Huneke, S. (). 5 Lgbtq+ Spies in Frosty War Germany. In States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (pp. ). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Huneke, S. 5 Gay Spies in Cold War Germany. States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Urge, pp.
Huneke, Samuel Clowes. "5 Gay Spies in Cold War Germany" In States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Frosty War Germany, Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
Huneke S. 5 Homosexual Spies in Icy War Germany. In: States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; p
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By the late s, the East German secret police (the Stasi) started to see Germany’s gay subculture as both a threat and an opportunity for intelligence work. Western espionage services had long sought to exploit this subculture, recruiting agents and informants from Berlin's gay bars and cruising locales. After 20 years of run-ins with gay Western agents, Stasi officials began to recruit their own queer spies, men who they hoped could use their sexuality as a means to meet new contacts, penetrate Western society, and gather intelligence.
Join us for a talk by Samuel Clowes Huneke, author of States of Liberation: Lgbtq+ Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. He will center on how both Eastern and Western intelligence agencies sought to recruit male lover men because they believed that they were naturally more conspiratorial and would thus make better agents. They also came to see the class-crossing same-sex attracted subcultures of German cities, especially Berlin, as preferred sites from which to extract information about politics and military matters. Huneke explores previous