What the Stasi could not break

On 3 September 2017, a man died in the small town of Bismark in the Altmark without whom the German lesbian and gay movement would look different today. Eduard Stapel, whom everyone called Eddi, was sixty-four years old.

Stapel was a journalist and theologian, and he actually wanted to become a pastor. It did not happen. His church refused to ordain the openly gay man. The bishop offered him a one-off solution: he could become a pastor, but please without turning it into a precedent. Stapel refused. Either everyone or no one.

Instead, from 1982 onwards, he built up something that was not supposed to exist in the GDR. In Leipzig he founded the Homosexuality Working Group of the Protestant Student Congregation, the first of its kind in the country, and a year later a second one in Magdeburg. From there he travelled through the republic and helped set up further groups. By the end of the GDR there were working groups in twenty-one cities. Homosexuality had long ceased to be a crime by then, but the ruling SED party regarded gay men as conspiratorial and as carriers of venereal diseases. The Stasi saw a hostile objective in Stapel's work and set around fifty full-time and two hundred unofficial collaborators on the working groups. The aim was "Zersetzung", the systematic breaking down of their targets.

The groups nevertheless became more self-confident and formulated demands that sounded utopian at the time: being allowed to marry, adopt children and live as equals. When the Gay Association in the GDR was founded in Leipzig on 18 February 1990, from which today's LSVD emerged, Stapel pulled out exactly these demands and became its first spokesman and managing director. In this case, unification ran from East to West.

When the Bundestag passed marriage for all on 30 June 2017, Stapel was honoured by name in the debate. By then he was already seriously ill. He did not cheer. There was still plenty to do, he said.