A conference paper for The Pasts and Futures of Queer German Studies, hosted online by the University of British Columbia in spring 2020.

Abstract:

Transnational histories of gay and queer identity formation have mostly examined the production of identities under shifting economic conditions on a mass scale. Small-scale studies of transnational individuals and the intellectual and cultural lifeworlds they connected have the potential to trouble broad narratives of the formation and production of same-sex-loving identities. Hans Heinz von Twardowski’s case provides one such example: it is possible to trace ideas from American gay liberation movements back to Weimar expressionisms (linking late 20th-century gay hippie self-understanding to Weimar concepts of ‘geistige Arbeit’) through a close reading of his limited archive and his associations with crucial figures in the history of German and American left-wing, gay, and bohemian movements; all of which are haunted by troubled relationships with notions of “primitivity” produced in the colonies. This queer transnational history helps, in Jennifer Evans’ words, to “chip away at the progress narrative” and move towards “critical and self-reflexive histories” of how “same-sex desire has been conceptualised on both sides of the Atlantic.”