On June 28th, 1969, the cornerstone of the pride movement around the world was laid at the Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street in New York, USA.

In the 1960s, police raids, harassment and abusive language were commonplace in and around Christopher Street, then a meeting point for the queer* scene. These were the catalyst for the first serious resistance to arbitrary discrimination against queer* people on the night of June 27th to 28th, 1969. Street battles and protests against the police followed and lasted for several days. They were led by BIPoC, drag queens, trans* people, gays, lesbians and other queer* people. Early activists included people like Marsha P. Johnson, Joseph Ratanski, and Sylvia Rivera. These were people who were outcast from society and had no safe spaces.⁠⁠ 

In memory of this violence and the awakening moment of the queer community, annual demonstrations called Christopher Street Day (CSD) or Pride parades took place around the world in the following years and decades and still continue to this day.

In memory of this violence and the awakening moment of the queer community, annual demonstrations called Christopher Street Day (CSD) or Pride parades took place around the world in the following years and decades and still continue to this day.

The first queer demonstration in Germany took place in Münster, three years after the Stonewall Uprising. Similar demonstrations followed in Berlin and Bremen in the late 1970s. Many of the participants wore masks as they feared social ostracism. 

The Transsexuellengesetz (TSG) (Transsexual Act) was introduced in Germany as the “Act on forename changes and determination of gender affiliation in special cases”. For the first time, it allowed transgender people to change their first names. The law contained numerous highly discriminatory provisions, which were gradually overturned by the Federal Constitutional Court. Even after more than 40 years, the TSG still fails to reflect the reality of trans* people’s lives and urgently needs to be abolished and replaced by a self-determination law. You can read more about this under point 10 of our demands.

The first CSD in Leipzig – and also the first CSD in the new German states – took place only around three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and 23 years after the Stonewall Uprising. About 100 people met at the Moritzbastei cultural centre under the militant motto Lesben und Schwule in die Verfassung! (include lesbians and gays in the constitution). The demonstration was organised by courageous people like Kathrin Darlatt, Peter Thürer, Eddy Stapel, Detlev Hüttig, Dr. Cornelia Matzke and Marion Ziegler. Members of the Bundestag were invited to attend along with “citizens and not just lesbians and gays”. The city of Leipzig and their representatives for same-sex lifestyles of the city were already involved as co-organisers of the very first Leipzig CSD.

We are especially proud and grateful that some of the original activists are still actively involved in the CSD Leipzig and in championing the concerns of the queer community in our city.

The World Health Organization (WHO) removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses during the 10th revision of the ICD. The new version came into force worldwide from 1994 onwards.

The WHO had already passed the resolution on 17th May 1990. The International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) is also held every year on this date.

For more than 120 years, paragraph 175 of the Germany penal code criminalised homosexuality and legitimised the persecution of homosexual and bisexual men. First introduced in 1872 at the time of the German Empire, this paragraph remained in place until after reunification. The paragraph was tightened by the Nazi regime in 1935. For instance, the restriction to acts similar to coitus was deleted and thus even kisses and later also “lustful intentions” became punishable. By the end of World War II, approximately 50,000 gay men had been convicted on the basis of para. 175. About 5000 to 6000 of them were deported to concentration camps. There, they were made to wear a pink triangle emblem and treated extraordinarily cruelly.

Paragraph 175 remained unchanged in the FRG until 1969. The severity of the restrictions decreased slightly over the decades that followed. During the reunification of Germany, para. 175 of the StGB was temporarily reintroduced in the territory of the former GDR, which had already abolished the paragraph in 1968. It was finally deleted without replacement throughout Germany in 1994.

What followed was a decades-long struggle for the exoneration of wrongfully convicted men. It was not until 22nd July 2017 that the act to exonerate men convicted after 8th May 1945 came into force. For many it unfortunately came too late.

On the occasion of the international day of remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust on January 27, 2023, the German Bundestag explicitly commemorated queer victims of the Nazi regime for the first time. For further information you can find our news post here (German).

The CSD Leipzig was held annually (see below) in the years following 1992. However, more and more young queer people were drawn to the West as a result of reunification. Due to a lack of interest and the shrinking community in Leipzig, the CSD movement therefore came to a standstill for a time at the end of the 1990s.

For more information on the origin of Leipzig CSD and the events of the 90s, why not listen to Episode 21 of our podcast Inside CSD Leipzig.

Colloquially referred to as “marriage light” or “gay marriage”, the Act on Registered Life Partnerships was introduced in Germany in August 2001. It enabled homosexual couples to give their relationship a legal basis for the first time. While the Netherlands had already introduced marriage for all in the same year, Germany only provided a compromise. It did not fully equate same-sex registered partnerships to heterosexual marriages and thus continued to discriminate against them.

After an interval of some years, the Leipzig CSD movement started up again in 2004 initiated by the student council (StuRa) of Leipzig University. They organised a week of 22 events. A street party was held in Nikolaikirchhof at the end of CSD week. About 400 people marched through the city centre demonstrating. At this time, the crowd of participants was less colourful and smaller, but they still made important political demands.

In the preceding year, the student council made a stand for equality and the visibility of the queer* community by raising the rainbow flag in front of the university’s old administration building. This put the CSD movement back in the spotlight in Leipzig.

Thanks to a resolution of the city council, the rainbow flag was hoisted on the New Town Hall for the first time in 2006. However, it was not displayed on the flagpoles directly in front of the main portal like the other flags. Instead it was slightly hidden away at the side of the building at the transition to the Town House. Not until 2009 was the rainbow flag also allowed to fly in front of the main entrance to Leipzig’s administrative headquarters.

In 2009, more than 2000 guests took part in CSD Leipzig for the first time – twice as many as in the previous year. In the lead-up to CSD, we ran a poster campaign in cooperation with the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. The aim of the campaign was to confront the public with their prejudices. Posters with inscriptions such as “Would you water your neighbour’s plants even if you knew she was born a boy?” were hung throughout Leipzig and were designed to encourage people to consider and rethink their stances.

Queer* visibility throughout society is one of the main concerns of the CSD movement. At CSD 2013, the focus was entirely on the I in LGBTQIA, which stands for intersex and intergender people. This was furthermore reflected by the motto L(i)eben und l(i)eben lassen (love and let love).

After registered civil partnerships were introduced in 2001, the rights bestowed by same-sex partnerships were aligned ever more closely with those of traditional marriages. This mostly came about as the result of constitutional challenges made by queer individuals.

In June 2017, the German Bundestag finally voted on opening marriage to same-sex people and passed the corresponding law with a majority of 393 votes. Even some members of the conservative CDU/CSU party voted in favour of the law in addition to the parliamentary groups of SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and DIE LINKE. On 1st October 2017, marriage for same-sex partners became legal and the first same-sex couples could finally tie the knot after many years of fighting for equal rights.

However, even with same-sex marriage in place, we are still some way from complete equality. Lesbian mothers have been and continue to be disadvantaged under parentage law.

In a resolution passed on 10th October 2017, the highest German court stated that the general right of personality is a fundamental right that also protects the gender identity of those people who do not belong to either of the binary genders (male/female). The court called on the federal government to create a third gender option in civil status law documentation for nonbinary people. As a result, people can now choose “diverse” as a gender option.

Attendance numbers reached five figures for the first time fifty years after the Stonewall Uprising. Under the slogan 50 Jahre Stonewall – wir sind noch nicht fertig! (50 years of Stonewall – we’re not done yet!), more than 10,000 people demonstrated in Leipzig for equal rights and the visibility of queer* people.

In the beginning of 2020, people’s lives in Germany, Europe and around the world were turned upside down. The COVID-19 virus spread rapidly forcing people to avoid contact and severely restricting their social lives and other activities.

One group particularly affected by these restrictions was queer* people, especially in rural areas. Safe spaces were closed and some single queer* people suffered from loneliness The city of Leipzig launched the campaign Du bist nicht allein (you are not alone) in cooperation with the CSD to show people, especially in the rural regions around Leipzig and throughout Saxony, that they had not been forgotten. Rainbow flag posters were hung – in some villages for the first time ever. In addition to a great deal of hate, we received an overwhelming number of positive messages, some of them very emotional, from queer* people from all corners of the Free State of Saxony. 

However, social distancing rules unfortunately also meant that CSD had to adapt. We wanted to show that the queer* community sticks together even if we couldn’t have the traditional big demonstration at the end of the event week. Due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, the CSD Leipzig refrained from holding a demonstration, as did many other CSDs. Instead, we organised an exhibition of pictures from past decades on Leipzig’s market square and installed a small stage for speakers. A few people gathered – wearing masks and adhering to social distancing guidelines – and marched through the city centre carrying Pride flags. We rounded off the day with an online evening of political discussion and entertainment.

The 11th revision of the ICD issued by the World Health Organization in 2018 removed gender identity disorders from the catalogue of mental illnesses, effective 1st January 2022. Transsexuality is now finally recognised as a natural form of gender.

Again and again, we are asked whether the CSD is still needed at all. You can get married now, adopt children, change your gender, what more could you want? To this, we can only say: Quite a lot!

Our list of demands is growing rather than shrinking.

From the complete ban of conversion therapies, to the abolition of the Transsexual Act, to the end of discrimination in blood donation. Even 30 years after the first CSD in Leipzig there are unfortunately still many issues that must be resolved if there is to ever be an end to discrimination against queer* people. CSDs and queer demonstrations are also needed to maintain what has been achieved so far. Sadly, one look at our neighbouring countries is enough to see just how fragile equality and human rights still are.

When right-wing movements attempt to revert our society back to the bad old days, we must be all the louder and more visible!