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Mit Euren Spuren

Mit Euren Spuren (With Your Traces)
Living and Loving 30 Years after Paragraph 175

We’ve Always Been Around—Aging beyond Heteronormativity

When people talk about what it means to be queer, about same-sex marriage or other concerns of the LGBTQIA+ community that have long met with repression from mainstream society, they typically focus on young people. In the images in our heads as well as the ones that circulate in the media, queerness is closely associated with youth. Due to societal stigmatization and discrimination, many of today’s seniors long concealed their sexual identities and never got an opportunity to share their experiences with the public. Yet it is in fact to them and their struggles in the liberation movement that we owe milestones of equality such as the repeal of section 175 of the German Criminal Code in 1994. Making sexual acts between males a crime, it was in force for 123 years and provided the basis for the oppression and persecution of the LGBTQIA+ community.

To celebrate the anniversary of the repeal of section 175, the interdisciplinary photography project Mit Euren Spuren (With Your Traces), for which six young photographers collaborated with eight queer senior citizens, turns the spotlight on aging outside the norm. The result is an intergenerational exchange of ideas about queer life and the distinctive experiences of different generations. For over a year, Teo Apostolescu, Mara Fischer, Francesco Giordano, Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert, Florian Tenk, and Stella Deborah Traub documented their extraordinarily interesting and inspiring encounters with their partners. In photographs, writings, and an arrangement of selected archival materials, the book records very personal conversations, drawing attention the achievements won by the courage of earlier generations and helping to preserve a queer legacy. With a text by Kim de l'Horizon.