The Pink and the Brown: LGBT Politics and the Radical Right in Germany, 1990–2018

In September 2017, Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) party became the first radical right-wing party to enter German parliament in sixty years. Running on an anti-immigration, anti-gay marriage platform, the AfD was nevertheless represented by Alice Weidel, a lesbian women with a Sri Lankan-born partner, and supported by a significant contingent of LGBT German voters, who saw the AfD as their best protection against allegedly homophobic Islam in Europe. This support is particularly surprising when situated in historical context. In the early 1990s, a string of homophobic and xenophobic attacks across Germany caused many gay and lesbian activists to claim that xenophobia and homophobia originated from the same source: right-wing radicalism. This paper will investigate this shift to argue that the racialization of Islam in Germany played a key role in this process of collective forgetting, which has impacted not only LGBT supporters of the AfD, but voters across the political spectrum, who see Islam, as a fundamental threat to European sexual freedoms. This argument has gained increased resonance in recent years given the so-called "refugee crisis," allowing right-wing politicians to seize on racialized anxieties in order to make electoral gains. Using published and unpublished party documents, activist papers, and popular publications, this paper will chart both the treatment of LGBT politics by right-wing parties over the last thirty years and the contradictions in LGBT activist discussions about the relationship between right-wing politics and emancipatory goals.