The click of a camera’s shutter and a blinding flash: the moment is captured. He is twirling away from you, eyes skimming the sundry faces and a grin underneath his moustache. A wide-brimmed hat perches over his thick hair, encircled by a polka-dot scarf. He wears a frilly summer dress held by an enamel clasp. Behind him is another man, dressed in an open vest and fedora, with a long strand of beads cascading down. His chest glistens, his lips are pursed. All around these two dancers are men – seated, contemplative, jovial men, chattering away as their eyes linger over the dancers. It is a happy picture. It is a gay picture.

Taken in 1977, the photograph depicts a gay carnival. The party takes place in the basement of a suburban villa and is humorously called Hibaré, a portmanteau of cabaret and the group’s name HIB, short for Gay-Interest-group Berlin. The hostess is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, one of Germany’s most famous trans women. She runs the villa as a museum for furniture and curios from imperial Germany and lets these rambunctious gay men – and women – use it for their festivals.

But they do not gather just for fun; they are also a political group. They believe that the state has an obligation to help them overcome the prejudices that still make many of their lives unlivable. They gather at the Mahlsdorf villa not only to don silly costumes, perform skits, and recite poetry but also to plan their next petition to the government, to discuss the stigma they all face, and to find more gay men and lesbians. They are, in fact, their country’s first gay liberation movement.

It just so happens that that country is East Germany, a communist dictatorship.

Fast-forward almost exactly forty years and Berlin, now reunified Germany’s capital, is awash in rainbow flags. It is 30 June 2017, and crowds celebrate in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate. After a week of political squabbling, the German parliament has voted to legalize marriage equality, seeming to set a coda on the country’s decades-long gay struggle.

The only genuinely surprising thing about that vote was that it took so long to happen. By the time marriage equality was fact in Germany, over 80 per cent of the population supported it.1 After all, the country, and in particular its larger cities, had rapidly become a hub of global gay life. Every year, throngs of gay tourists descend on Berlin, where more than half a million people crowd the streets every summer for the city’s pride festival. When The New Yorker covered the capital’s nightlife in 2014, it exclaimed: “Berlin’s gay culture is the city’s most essential and distinguishing element.”

What that flourishing culture belies is that less than sixty years ago Germany still criminalized gay acts and imprisoned tens of thousands of gay men under its anti-gay laws. Less than a century ago Germany sent gay people to concentration camps, where around six thousand of them died. Although it may seem intuitively obvious that Germany – along with much of the Western world – should accept gay today, it is breathtaking that a country that so brutally persecuted minorities would, only decades later, celebrate their existence.

Which brings us back to the Hibaré performance in an East Berlin basement in 1977. The picture offers startling commentary on both the idea of gay liberation and our conception of what life under state socialism looked like. Gay liberation – in the traditional telling – is something easily definable with concrete milestones. It is often supposed to come out of Western, consumer-capitalist democracies and to have been largely absent from authoritarian states. The arc of gay liberation has been closely tied, in scholarship and popular imagination alike, to the fate of liberal democracy. Whatever the East German state was, it was not supposed to have been a hospitable place for gay liberation activists. And whatever gay liberation was, it certainly was not supposed to have come out of the cellar of a furniture museum in a communist dictatorship.

The HIB was only one of numerous gay activist organizations that sprang up in the two Germanies in the decades between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Confronted as they were with the German legacy of imprisonment and murder, these activists strove in ever-changing ways to win rights from and assert privileges against the East and West German governments. At the same time, those states, which had inherited anti-gay laws from the National Socialists, sought to stamp out, to police, and, eventually, to understand gays in their societies.