1869, Ep. 148 with authors Christopher Ewing and Jake Newsome

9:56PM Mar 13, 2024

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Jake Newsome

Christopher Ewing

Keywords:

queer

history

book

germany

historian

people

writing

activists

work

ways

political

jake

historical

german

happened

important

racism

great

politics

political movements

Welcome to 1869 the Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode we brought together two Cornell University Press authors in the hopes they would have a lively discussion, and they certainly delivered. One was Christopher Ewing, author of the new book, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970 and the other was Jake Newsome, author of Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. Christopher Ewign is assistant professor at Purdue University. His research focuses on the intersections of queer history and the history of race in modern Germany. He has previously published in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Sexualities, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute and Sexuality and Culture. Jake Newsome is an award winning scholar of German and American LGBTQ+ history, whose research and resources educate global audiences. He is the founder and director of the Pink Triangle Legacies Project, a grassroots initiative that honors the memory of the Nazis, queer victims, and carries on their legacy by fighting homophobia and transphobia today, through education, empowerment and advocacy. You can find him online at wjakenewsome.com. We hope you enjoy their conversation. Hello Christopher and Jake, welcome to the podcast. Well, I'm excited to have you both together. I know you'll have a lot to talk about. Christopher, your book has just come out --The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970. And, Jake, you published with us a couple years ago, in September your book came out --Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. If you guys were -- I mean, obviously, you're meeting right now online -- but let's just imagine we're at a cafe we're sitting down, we're getting a cup of coffee or tea. What what questions you have for each other? Yeah,

Well, first, I'd love to hear from from Chris, you know, this is, you know, his book is just out. And it's a it's a project that I've been following with great interest. And I'm so excited to now finally see it reach the shelves.

Great. Thanks, Jake. Yes, it's exciting. It's also relieving to kind of be finished with the project and see it out in the world. But yes, no, I'm really excited to, to have be finished with it. And to sort of see the reactions and also to be talking to you, Jake, because I had the pleasure, I think of reviewing your book about a year or so ago. And for me, it was such a wonderful model of how to do queer history in a way that's widely accessible, and is written in a way that many people can access from the important history that you're writing. And I guess, like I wanted to ask a little bit about that in two ways. One, how do you take histories that are not only deeply complex, but also emotionally fraught, and present them in a way that people feel like they can engage with them, and gain something from them. And then also, I think sort of the work that both of us are doing, like we're connected to these communities in different kinds of ways, as queer people who are writing queer histories, but then also as us Americans who are traveling back and forth between Germany and the United States. So it's also curious to hear your thoughts about how you position yourself as a historian in relation to those who you study?

Oh, yeah, those are, those are great questions. I'll take the first. First actually, I guess that makes sense. You know, I it was really important for me from the beginning to write a book that sure I wanted it to make contributions to scholarship. But I really wanted this to be a, a book about queer history and about the queer community, but written for the queer community itself. And so I really tried from every draft, and the in the editorial process to avoid, you know, as much of the jargon as possible, I knew that I needed and wanted to engage with the historiography, for example, but also without having a section called historiography. So how were we able to, you know, how can I engage with the scholarship, but I chose to do it in a way of like, well, in my book, really, which was all about kind of the different manifestations of memory about the Nazis, persecution of queer people. The historiography really was kind of a subject matter in and of itself. So being able to kind of pay tribute to our fellow scholars, as participants in this history making, you know, as as well. I also had, I guess, you would say like non historians read pretty much every word word that I wrote, you know, I wanted to make sure especially passages that I was really trying to grapple with in terms of clarifying, you know, did I explain grafted memories clearly enough, for example, you know, having someone completely outside of the field outside of the discipline altogether, read and offer feedback on on clarity was really important to me, it often meant that I had to, I guess, sometimes make decisions that like, oh, well, I guess I would have never framed it that way, or I might not have articulated that way. But if that's how readers are, would would would take it, then that's, you know, it was really, really important for me. And so, in terms of positionality, I think that that's also related to why I chose to write in the style that I did, as well was, you know, when I first started this, this book kind of grew out of my dissertation. And so when, when I was a PhD student still had a lot of imposter syndrome, right. But had this, this idea of historians need to be completely objective and removed from what they're writing about. And so, you know, I would reach out to example, gay activists from from the 70s, in Germany, and just tried to remain very removed and kind of scientific about the whole thing. And I found that like that there was that didn't open a whole lot of doors. Because, right, it's, you know, here's this random historian and training from America wanting to like come in, and quote, unquote, study you and, you know, pick apart your memories in your life. And I found that really, once I kind of opened up and introduced myself kind of more as a, Hey, I'm part of the community, like, I'm not just some historian trying to write about the queer community, I'm part of it, this is me wanting to understand my history as well, then the doors opened, and then then the community opened up in a way and put me in contact with people that I would have never found otherwise. And so, you know, I really discovered that leaning in to my connections to the history leading into my positionality, actually didn't hinder my research as a historian but actually improved it, I think. And so that has just been something that I always felt then increasingly indebted, to the people who shared their memories shared their stories with me. And so I always wanted to make sure then to write in a way that that honored them but also uplifted, you know, their voices and their contributions to to the book as well. Yeah, thanks for asking that.

Yeah, I think that's really important. And that's something that I also try to tell my students a little bit, we've actually been talking just this past class about objectivity, sort of thinking about Hannah Arendt and her interrogation of that, and the ways in which we have this myth right of the historian as an objective social science scientist who can go into these communities study them, as one might imagine a 19th century anthropologist. And that didn't work then and it doesn't work now. And I think that one of the great advantages that we do have, as queer historians who are doing queer history is feeling through the connections to our community, both in past and present and developing those emotional relationships with the people that we're talking to. But either formally, in oral history interviews, we're also informally people who are gathering the sources that we might need to access some of the best sources that I have the best documentations that I have, are from people that I met, and I developed relationships with and who weren't associated with from archives, and certainly there are wonderful from archives in Germany-- the Schwules archive, the gay archive, is magnificent. It's such a wonderful repository. And at the same time, they've built the repository from people who have relationships with the archivists and with the curators who just donate their stuff, and donate sometimes even their apartments. And I think that's sort of one of the great pleasures of doing this kind of history is being able to not only have access to the material, but develop a sense, their emotional place within our historical subjects lives and within our friends lives as well. So I really appreciate you elaborating that because I feel very similar resonances with the ways that I study the past

And you know, I think that comes that shines through in your book so anyone who has not read it yet, absolutely go go get it, you know, is the the place of like individual stories, their own their own voices I loved you know, especially as you're talking about kind of sex tourism and the travels that people had and or sometimes when they were frustrated because they couldn't travel to these, you know, quote unquote, exotic places. And, and so I really, I really find myself drawn to these types of histories, especially when they are histories of communities that have been marginalized or silenced for so long. Of course, you know, all of the The kind of the theory is really important. But also, it's just like it is important to have these individual stories and kind of community centered narratives documented in, in, in books like yours. So one of the questions I had, and this is just one that I'm always interested in every single book, what was it that drew the historian and the author to the topic in the first place? You know, I know from from my own book, this is not the book that I sat down to write, you know, it was it of being completely different. So how, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about that process of what, what kind of stuck out to you What drew you to the topic? And then maybe what were some surprises along the way?

Sure. I mean, I think that's a pretty common experience, right? For historians, or just anybody writing a book, right? It's very hard to write a book quickly, I found and so this is the result of probably 10 years of work. When did you start to write this project that eventually became Pink Triangle Legacies?

It was a good, it took about 10 years. You're right, yeah.

And so I think the thinking about who I was at the start of the project, I was a 22 year old straight out of undergrad, and I wanted to write a dissertation on the internationalization and the LGBT rights movement, after 1945. And so that's part of the reason why I found your work so interesting is that you do touch on some of those themes that originally drew me to the field. And it began actually sort of before where this book begins in the 1950s and 1960s. Looking at magazines like Der Kriese, du&ich, and Der Weg magazines that were really important to homophile political movements, sort of views, early organizations that take shape in West Germany in the context of deep political repression, and try to carve out space to make claims about rights and the possibility even of state protection in the aftermath of National Socialism, the process, so you also document Jake. And what really kind of struck me, in addition to the political claims making was the proliferation of images of men of color, and men of color in often cast in deeply exotic sizing visual terms. So like black men wearing Zebra print or set in the jungle, alongside poetry that talked about the deep eroticism that these men had for white central Europeans. And that surprised me in a few ways. One, it surprised me that this seemed to be completely compatible with or even supporting a liberal progressive way of doing sexual politics. And Laurie Marhoefer has sort of written a lot about the ways in which this is actually deeply embedded in gay rights from the very beginning. But then also, when we're thinking about the context of the 50s and 60s, nobody was really talking about it. And so it seemed like something Okay, racism seems really important in sexual relations, racism seems really important to these political movements as they're starting to coalesce after 1945. How do we think about that relationship? And how do we think about that relationship, especially when so many of these stories about like sex tourism, right, which is a category that I use, very cautiously, since it takes on deep political meanings in the 90s? These stories that are often set in North Africa, and depend on the idea that Islam is conducive to same sex sexual encounters? Like this seems to be completely counterintuitive to the way they European political formations think about Islam right now in which Islam is supposed to be threatening to sexual minorities and sexual rights and freedoms. And so that was sort of the the two driven questions how do we make sense of a racialized desire and politics together? And what does that tell us about this reversal? And how Islam is conceived as being going from conducive to him eroticism to threatening same sex desiring people in Western Europe and across the world? So that's kind of how I came to the project. And I kept digging and digging and realize that okay, the answer, well, it's not only racism, but it's also anti racism, that there were activists of color who are constantly like pushing back against this, there are white anti racist activists who are working in organizations like the Jewish aids have, but also white lesbians, people like Dagmar Schultz, who are working in line with black German feminists and queer black German feminists in order to create new political identities and spaces. So it becomes this entangled mass of racism and anti racism together, and I found that we can't really hold the two apart. But when we pay attention to the two together, we start to understand, okay, how it became possible to re conceive of Islam within this framework, and also the ways in which these assumptions that we're currently operating with are themselves very unstable.

Wow. Thank you. Thanks for walking us through that. Because even just hearing you kind of re re summarize, it really kind of drives it home. And I'm glad you mentioned Laurie more hofers work because as I was reading your, your book I just kept I had just maybe a few weeks ago finished Laurie's the book on Hirschfeld and like race, and, you know, gay rights and so that was kind of already in my head about how racism and and queer rights are so often intertwined, especially in in Germany. And so I loved your point about how there's nothing inherently, you know, anti racist about being queer, or even queer, queer activism, that, as you've just demonstrated through throughout your book, that it takes these moments of conscious not only reflection, but But you know, continuous action of defining, who are we talking about who's in this community, who's in this new, you know, radical movement and who's not? It made me two things, and I hope that can remember the both of them. It made me think that when I was in the archives, and trying to, you know, trace the post Holocaust life of the pink triangle, and its role in activism, you know, it was repurposed and used, really, in a lot of ways as this, you know, progressive liberation symbol, kind of a rallying cry for not just queer liberation, but really, it was kind of enmeshed in a lot of leftist politics. And, you know, I kind of just almost fell victim to like the Oh, yeah, it's, it's liberatory for everyone. And so it wasn't until like, I followed the path of the pink triangle over to the United States where I think racial politics and racism was much more kind of on the forefront of activist minds more generally. But even in the queer movement, and I started, you know, finding stories of queer activists of color talking about the pink triangle, what it meant to them, or what it didn't mean to them that I kind of stopped, I was like, I'm gonna go back to this to the German context, because, you know, I see all of this kind of very explicit discussion of race, and the pink triangle in the US context, I don't think I saw that back in the German context. And so it became apparent to me that, while this symbol in a lot of ways was a symbol of liberation, what is just as important or striking is who's not included in that, and there just was this kind of huge absence of this discussion of race and queerness, when it came to, for example, the connection to National Socialist history. And so, you know, I really just find your book as like, a perfect kind of puzzle piece or like companion to, to a lot of the work that I did, because it's actually putting that gap or that like that lack of context, like is now being filled in by by your work. And I just keep reading your book, like going back from pages to pages being like, Yes, this is exactly what I, you know, I was trying to say that, but I didn't know how to say it. And so it just I really, I'm excited that both of our works are through Cornell, and relatively close together. And I, I hope that hope that folks kind of use them as companion pieces.

I hope so too, because your book was absolutely a reference point, as I was writing my own and thinking through the contested politics and memory, which are so important to queer politics across the board, in post war, West Germany, and post war, the post workout a republic, because precisely as you document, memory becomes an important site, where identity is negotiated, where all of these different kinds of political claims making happen. And so it was really useful for me to think about that and think about the use of symbols. And one thing that I thought that you did really beautifully with your book was also think about the use of literature and stage as a site where the politics and memory really come for, because that was also that was a challenge for me. And I think this also just has to do a little bit with my own scholarly background in which I can do really well with like political documentation, activist texts, those makes sense to me. But literature doesn't in the same way. And staged doesn't in the same way, not in an historical frame. I enjoy both those things. I love both those things. But trying to put those together and in conversation with the political history I was writing was a challenge. And so thinking through what you do with your book, and how you think through stage and literature that was really helpful for me and developing frameworks that I needed to position these different works in their political context. So yeah, I think that these two are companion pieces in so many different ways. They even look aesthetically a little bit similar, which I really enjoy. But yes, no, I think that that's entirely right. And I was also curious to if we're thinking about the politics and memory because these are so fraught, um, where do you see sort of those tensions lie because one of the insights sort of, again from Laurie Marhoefer, but we also have this from Tiffany Florvil as well in terms of who gets to be incorporated into sort of a queer identity framework and who doesn't? And who gets to be incorporated into the narrative of queer political history and who doesn't? How do you see the politics of analogy working here, as queer activists are starting to develop new frames for talking about themselves, talking about the memory of persecution, when they're, of course, one of many groups that are subjected to Nazi violence in specific and also generalizable ways? Have you seen analogy working in this? And was that also a challenge to kind of work through, as we think through sort of inclusions and exclusions as they operate within queer scenes as you're trying to tell a story? And I think it tells a story that really does need to be told about the place of queer people in the history of Nazi persecution and its aftermath.

Yeah, that I'm really glad you asked, because that was a really difficult theme, and and topic for me to, to navigate. And I feel like it's actually one of the themes that I've grappled with all the way through the 10 years of researching and writing is how, you know, in the 70s, queer activists beginning in Germany, but then then, especially once the citric history kind of jumped the Atlantic and made its way into the, into the US context, begin in their process of crafting a history book, right, because this history had not been written by professional historians, there weren't books about it, there weren't studies about it. So these activists, and even actually, to your previous point, through kind of stage plays through literature, and even then, through political fliers, or you know, chants and marches in the street, begin piecing together their own history, because there is this, this lack of history with a capital H. And so they're, they're trying to figure out how they, as a community, can look back to the history of the Holocaust, and understand what happened to people like them under the Nazi regime. And part of what comes out of that. I think some of it is accidental, and some of it is quite intentional, or these inflated numbers of you know, that the Nazis really tried to murder every single LGBTQ person in occupied Europe, they were successful in murdering, I've seen numbers of up to 2 million gay people murdered. And once the academic history that kind of the academic history field began, actually confronting and studying this history and primarily led by queer people themselves, those numbers of victims actually were, like, revised. And we now know that somewhere between like 10 and 15,000, gay men were sent to concentration camps, and so quite a lot lower than, you know, estimates of 2 million. And I think that at first, there was like, a lot of blowback on the activists for intentionally inflating these numbers for political gain, or, you know, political expediency. And, you know, at first I kind of found myself as an author in that camp of like, well, let's go back and correct all of these past activists for giving the wrong numbers or for a lot of times they they classified what happened, the Nazis policies against queer people as genocide, whereas now, the historical research suggests that it actually wasn't like there was no plan for mass genocide, that these these policies, yes, they were deadly. But they weren't genocidal in the way that the Nazis policies against Jews or against the Roma and Sinti were. So as I said, at first, I felt kind of this need knee jerk reaction almost to say, Nope, they were all wrong. And this is this is the real history, this is the truth. And it then occurred to me right that these activists, these playwrights, these queer community members are trying to piece together a past at a time when the historical profession has remained intentionally quiet about this. And so there is like there's there is a lack of access to information that is evidence based or archival based rather. And so in a way can, in a community be blamed for getting things wrong when the arbiters of the past professional historians have refused to provide evidence or to put it into the quote unquote, archive. And so really, what I've tried to then do is, is actually just show that historians are just one player and the politics of memory. They are just one voice in collective meaning making about the past. And so while they are one source, and they're clearly their sources near that you and I put trust in that communities piece together their understanding of the past Using multiple sources, including novels, including plays, including movies, and so I've just I've tried to kind of step back in terms of my authorship as it's like judgment of what's right or wrong, but actually show this is what's happening. And these are how people are trying to make sense, not only of themselves, but other places in the world.

Absolutely. I mean, I really loved your insight that you provided in the book as to the role of the historia. And in conversation with all of these other actors who participate in the creation of history, right? It's not just the professional historian who does that. And I think that's really important to bear in mind. Both just kind of get us out of our own sort of futuristic ways. But then also to think too, about, okay, what maybe even the historical profession is or just what doing history is, it is a constant process of revision, right? We are in conversation with each other, just as we're in conversation with the communities of which we are part, we are in conversation with our historical subjects. And we're engaged in a process of revision such that we can explain change over time, and do it in a way that is also empathetic to our historical subjects. And I think for me, that was very important and a very important part in writing this history, because I do try to take a very critical approach to what I see as being the harms of racism and racist thinking with in queer politics. And I think that's important story to tell. But it can only be told also in thinking that okay, in what context? Are these people working? And more importantly, what does that also mean for people of color, as they're simultaneously engaged in a queer political movement as diverse and fractured as that might be? And what does that going to mean to in our understanding of queer politics, as we try to integrate queer people of color into sort of these whitewashed narratives, there are storylines that I draw on and fingers that I draw on who are working within the United States, there's sort of this very explicit conversation that's been going on for a long time in the United States. And much of that conversation has been largely ignored in some circles of German history writing, even as it's been happening in Germany as well. And so thinking about okay, what does that actually mean? Because there is a way of writing queer history that says, well, queer people of color were there too. And that doesn't actually do a whole lot of work. What that does that can bolster success stories and say that, okay, great queer people of color, were there too, we don't really have to think about it anymore. It's like no, actually, when we do pay attention to what does that mean? And what racial exclusions were persistent and meaningful for group political movements? And what ways do people of color push back against those in what ways did some good people color also invest in those as well, then the story becomes a lot messier. But I think also a lot more, maybe accurate is the wrong word. Because I didn't want to buy into a narrative of okay, historical truth, there's just one. But it becomes, I think, more attentive to the complexities of people in the past, which is a much more humanistic way of writing, writing history. And that's something that I also really enjoyed about your book as well, is the actor centered approach that you take and attendance to the ways in which people are messy, there's no there's no story of heroes and villains in the past, which was the story of people who are the best part are trying their best and in so doing as each other arm and and so doing, create inspiring stories? And it's our job to kind of think about what does that mean for historical change? And how do we do that in a way that, you know, pays attention to people as people. I've

I've been a fly on the wall here, but I've enjoyed listening to both of you. It's been amazing. Both of you spent over a decade working on these two books, man, it clearly shows you are a wealth of knowledge. And it's just so great to hear about this history that you, you it was hidden, and you had to unveil it and reveal it. And there's a constant exploration even now. And so that's that's why I wanted to bring up the president. You know, we're, you're well versed in the history now. And there's always more to explore. But as you know, in January, there were some historic protests in Germany against the far right. And one of the slogans I saw was, never again is right now. And on top of it, we're now at the 30th anniversary of the abolishment of paragraph 175, which was the law that regulating and criminalize sex between men. So just throwing it out to both you and maybe this is this could be a long answer, in and of itself, but where do you see Germany in 2024? Can there be a slide backwards? Can there be a repeat of the past? Or what are your thoughts of what's going on in Germany in the next 10 years? Let's put it that way or five years. That's maybe pretty tough.

No, I you know, I think it's I think it's a great question. And I think that the answer could be applied, of course to Germany but also to to the United States. Because I think that one of the lessons of the of the pink triangle that has resonated with me more so now even after publication is about how progress and LGBTQ visibility is always fragile. Right, we saw the end of the Weimar Republic, the ushering in of the the right wing fascist dictatorship, and the reemergence of homophobic rhetoric and violence happening at such a staggering pace, in the transition from late 1920s, to early 1930s. That I think that that, to me is a profound message for today, because we are witnessing a, in a lot of ways you kind of asked, Can we go backwards in a lot of ways, at least in the United States, we are moving backwards in terms of LGBTQ rights already, you know, since 2016, but especially in the past few years, I think it's like 2021, set the record for the most anti LGBTQ laws on on the books in the United States, which was broken by 2022. And then again, by 2023, and already, again, by 2024. And so we are finding ourselves in this, this kind of backwards progression. And I think that this history, both mine and the one that Chris writes about, can show us how, just because some progress has been made for a particular subset of a group that's been marginalized, right. And Chris writes so powerfully about homo nationalism, this idea that as long as the state kind of views you as respectable, that you're allowed into the benefits of citizenship, but then those that are considered outside that bounds of of respectability are going to be for further marginalized. And I think we've grown a little bit. I don't know if complacent might be a strong word. We've grown accustomed to that right. We've we've won marriage equality, right. Like things are good things are, are great. But we're also seeing now the the really coordinated attack on LGBTQ rights. And so I think what we can take away from these histories are a reminder and warning of how far homophobia transphobia has gone in the past. And that's really a call for us to decide how far we are willing to let it go

today. Yeah, I think that's entirely right. And that's something that we see. And it's a very distressing feature of both German and US political landscapes right now, is the slow rollback of gay LGBTQ rights gains, often first targeting trans people and doing so in ways that draw on the language and very long standing historical language of trans people as constituting and queer people more broadly as constituting a threat to the family and a threat to kids, right. And this has been sort of like targeting some, like most marginalized people in our community already. And that's been sort of a test balloon, I think, to sort of a broader rollback of sexual rights and freedoms. And that was actually that was something that kind of drove this project from the beginning actually, like from the middle, right. So if I began this project in 2012, that was a very different moment from right now. But after my dissertation defense in 2018, is having drinks with my advisor, and my partner and the committee and my partner, he turns to my dissertation advisor, and he's like, Dagmar what happened to him at Nationals, because this is 2018. This is the middle of, of the Trump presidency. And that's actually what I titled the epilogue, what happened to her nationalism, because in 2015, when marriage equality is instituted at the federal level, in the United States, that seemed to many people to be the triumph of a broad LGBTQ rights movement dating back to Stonewall to 1969. And, you know, moving ever closer to full equality as realized through the institution of for marriage equality. And then a lot of these assumptions get rolled back very, very quickly, both in the United States where the following year Trump gets elected, and that, you know, really does sort of institute a lot of views on sexual politics that we're seeing now. And then also in Germany, where marriage equality is instituted in 2017. Three months later, if I'm doing the math, right, that's may 2017. Then in September of 2017, the Alternative for Germany party, which is a radical right wing party, gets elected to the Bundestag under the first party to the right of the Christian Democrats. The ruling Christian Democrats will be elected to goondas tag since 1961. And people are shocked, right people are absolutely shocked. This could possibly happen. They're also shocked that one of the lead candidates is a lesbian, which is sort of a fun like not to find a terrifying and curious, impairing, however, people are shocked that okay, this could happen. And I think this is sort of part of the history that I'm trying to bring forward as well, is that, despite this broad surprise, there have been people who have been telling us about German nationalism for a very long time. Right. So reflecting on the months around 1990, in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, may I aim, who's one of the leading voices of the Blacktron women's movement, she says, No, this, this Germany, this are the we that Chancellor Kohl is talking about, does not include all of us and black people at that moment, Jews, Romans, anti people of color, we're experiencing violence at this moment of national euphoria. And so a lot of this history that I'm working with has already been told the history of racism is something that people have been talking about, but are consistently marginalized and ignored from these grand narratives of German progress, often refracted through the lens of the apparent progress of sexual rights and freedoms. So just as we're seeing this terrifying rollback of sexual rights and freedoms in the past 567 years, these are also part of longer historical trends and are closely linked to those historical trends that have to do with both sex and race. And so for me, the story that I'm trying to tell us about the institution of nationalism, and also its simultaneous unmaking from the 1970s on the history of nationalism is always a story of its unmaking.

Wow, well, thank you so much for this illuminating conversation on your insights, taking your history, bringing it to the modern day. And I like that you, you both were saying, hey, this should be a companion set. We agree. Anyone that's listening to this, we encourage you to buy both Chris's new book, The Color of Desire and Jake's book Pink Triangle Legacies. That would be a great set, and it would be great reading. So we really appreciate you both coming on. And thank you so much for this great conversation.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks, Jonathan.

All right, take care. That was Christopher Ewing and Jake Newsome. Christopher Ewing is author of the new book The Color of Desire: The queer politics of race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970 Jake Newsom is author of Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. If you'd like to read both of their books, use the promo code 09POD to save 30% on a website, like Cornell press.cornell.edu If you live in the UK, you can save 30% By using the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast