Christopher Ewing. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 32, Issue 1, January 2023.
Depictions of sex and travel are impossible to avoid in West German gay print culture during the 1970s and 1980s. Magazines such as DU&ICH and Him printed travel reports, images, letters to editors, personal advertisements, and travel bureau advertisements that enthusiastically described or depicted the “exotic” possibilities awaiting a predominantly white readership. Guides such as the Frankfurt-based Gay Reisefiihrer, Copenhagen-based Golden Key, and, perhaps most widely consumed, Spartacus International Gay Guide, which moved from the UK to Amsterdam in 1972 and then under new ownership to Berlin in 1986, offered travelers easier ways to access popular gay destinations, as well as information about the political, legal, and societal situation in countries of interest. Placed in a longer history of gay travel, these publications are not tremendously surprising. Not only were they relatively popular, but discussions of sex tourism were largely seen as commensurate with diverse political goals, and sexualized travel tips proliferated across publications expressing markedly different political orientations. Even as feminist critiques of the exploitative elements of sex tourism emerged during the 1980s, these critiques were most often issued at men who pursued sex with women and girls in the Global South rather than at men who sought sex with men and boys.
However, during the first half of the 1990s, a shift took place. In 1994, faced with accusations of condoning pedophilia, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), established in 1978 as an umbrella organization to support gays and (eventually) lesbians around the world, found its consultative status at the UN revoked. That same year, the founder and former owner of Spartacus International Gay Guide, John Stamford, was arraigned in Belgium on counts of promoting child pornography, causing the guide forcefully to refute any suggested ties to child exploitation. The Gay Federation in Germany, which was founded just before unification and emerged as a leader in gay activism during the early 1990s, echoed Spartacus in its unequivocal rejection of pedophilia, calling sex tourism—gay and straight—complied in the global exploitation of children.
Why did this swift rejection of sex tourism happen when it did? More specifically, why did gay activists and guides reject sex tourism as abusive of children in the 1990s when in earlier decades publications enthusiastically printed reports of sex with underage boys abroad? I argue in this article that gay activists’ rejection of sex tourism was the result of a series of transnational processes that narrowed approaches to addressing sexual abuse from structural to individual in postunification German law. First, some international NGOs began paying increasing attention to European men traveling abroad in order to have sex with underage boys beginning in the early 1980s. Concerned about sexual abuse of boys under the age of eighteen in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, organizations such as the Switzerland-based Terre des hommes began to criticize gay travel practices in new ways, specifically along the lines of age. Second, feminist activists were simultaneously engaged in an international debate about sex trafficking and sex work, including at the level of the United Nations. (West) German AIDS government initiatives, particularly the parliamentary special commission on AIDS prevention, established in 1987, combined arguments in favor of stronger measures to prevent sex trafficking with proposed strategies to address sex tourism as a driver of HIV infection rates. Finally, these combined strategies laid the groundwork for revisions to the German sexual penal code, necessitated by unification in 1990. Lawmakers sought both to eliminate Paragraph 175, which set a separate age of consent for men who had sex with men, and to expand extraterritorially Paragraph 176, which criminalized sex between adults and minors under the age of fourteen. This sequence of interrelated steps caused leading German gay activists and publishers to accept a narrow definition of sex tourism as criminally exploitative in order to ensure gay rights gains in the newly unified Federal Republic.
There is a growing amount of scholarship that critically engages with the troubling question of age in German gay movements. Javier Samper Vendrell’s account is particularly illuminating of the tensions between respectability politics and the eroticization of youth in homosexual periodicals at the start of the twentieth century. This tension persisted through the twentieth century, as Samper Vendrell notes, requiring further investigation into how activists navigated the rocky terrain of politics and desire. Tackling the tense relationship between gay liberation and pedophilia, historians including Benno Gammerl, Craig Griffiths, and Samuel Huneke have brought needed complication to narratives of both success, which Gammerl and Griffiths both point out can have multiple exclusionary effects, and failure. Griffiths, as well as Alexander Hensel, Tobias Neef, and Robert Pausch, additionally details how pedophilia was a controversial but not taboo topic for many gay activists through the 1970s, which came to a head in the Beethovenhalle podium discussions in Bonn in 1980. Although many contemporaries saw this moment as marking the end of euphoric liberation, Gammerl and Huneke both explain how this moment was by no means a clean break. The question remains, however, of what did cause (West) German gay activists to distance themselves from self-identified pedophiles. This article argues for a transnational approach to this question. The 1990s were a key juncture in this shift precisely because of activism and sexual practices that exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic.
Much of the transnational activism that effected this change had little initially to do with gay organizing but instead stemmed from international feminist debates. Scholars such as Kamala Kempadoo and Jennifer Suchland have charted how international antitrafficking agendas adopted an abolitionist approach to prostitution that became a crucial part of the international women’s movement in part through the UN Decade for Women (1975-85). Jo Doezema further explains that antitrafficking and antiprostitution politics of the late twentieth century are rooted in a much longer political and discursive history, particularly of white slavery, which historians such as Magaly Rodriguez Garcia have shown shaped early antitrafficking initiatives. Taking a long-term approach, Sonja Dolinsek has explained the historically contingent ways in which the category of the “prostitute” has figured into antitrafficking and human rights debates. This historical work adds important context to critical feminist scholarship on sex work, trafficking, and tourism. Together with the work of Elizabeth Bernstein, Elena Shih, Cynthia Enloe, and Kimberly Kay Hoang, among many others, this research details the interconnectedness of antitrafficking, antiprostitution, and anti-sex tourism politics, which often missed structural and economic factors contributing to sexual exploitation by adopting individualized criminal/victim dichotomies. Still unanswered, however, is what transnational feminist debates about sex and sexual exploitation actually did to queer politics. Different national contexts will produce different answers to this question, and the complexities of a global answer well exceed the space constraints of this article. This article therefore focuses on Germany to place the queer and feminist politics of unification within their necessary transnational context. In so doing, I untangle the relationship between these political threads.
Finally, the categories that govern this work must be understood as murky and historically contingent. Borrowing from Joan Scott, Philippa Hetherington and Julia Laite argue that “sex trafficking” may be a useless category of analysis precisely because of its inherent ambiguity. “Sex work” as well, as Amalia Cabezas points out, is a similarly ambiguous category that does not easily reflect the experiences of all who engage in different forms of sexual labor. The ambiguity of “sex tourism” and its rapidly shifting meanings in the period under investigation here warrant a similar approach. By the mid-1990s, sex tourism was often shorthand for child sex tourism, thereby both obscuring structural inequalities that shaped practices of sex and leisure travel and constraining attempts to address interconnected forms of harm. Sex tourism is therefore important as a historical, discursive category and as one that has shaped the literature; however, as a category of analysis, it ultimately holds little weight.
Gay Travel and the Emerging Problem of Age in the 1980s
Gay ambivalences about sex and travel were not new to the early 1990s. Reports of repression through the establishment of new antisodoctomy statutes in popular tourist destinations in North Africa had generated concerns for West German gay tourists already in the 1960s. However, it was not until the early 1980s that some West German gay men began to link reports of arrests and legal intervention not only to the gender but also to the age of their sexual partners. This linkage came out of the specific attempts of the local and national governments in the Philippines and Sri Lanka to address the sexual exploitation of minors by men identified as Western. Additionally, the Swiss humanitarian organization Terre des hommes issued a report on underage boys providing sexual services to foreign tourists in Sri Lanka. Spartacus International Gay Guide linked escalating police activity back to this report, as well as to misunderstandings of tourist practices generally. However, reports of police activity that reached West German gay media outlets, many of which gay tourists used to gain information about different travel destinations, were often contradictory and confusing. Furthermore, sexual abuse of underage boys was not yet a central concern for West German lawmakers or international feminist activists. Therefore, as this section explains, despite new attempts to connect gay sex tourism to child sexual abuse, few West German gay men condemned sex tourism as necessarily abusive of minors abroad.
During the second half of the 1970s, the Philippines emerged as an increasingly popular travel destination for gay West German and European men. The 1975 issue of Spartacus contained the guide’s first detailed discussion of the country, calling it a “paradise for Europeans, Americans and Australians,” a claim based on “many rave reports” from both tourists and unnamed “Filipino friends” living in Germany. That same year, John Stamford decided to visit the country and described how he had “thirty to forty boys calling on [him] every day to offer themselves.” Stamford published this review in the 1976 issue of Spartacus, along with his determination to return that year. In August 1977 DU&ICH followed suit with a lengthy discussion of tourism in the Philippines titled “The Sweet Youths of Manila, or: A Paradise Comes Closer,” which described the country as a place where, “wherever you look, [you will see] sweet youths with tight pants that betray everything worth knowing on the first glance.” Both Stamford and DU&ICH continued to publish favorable reports on the country through the end of the decade.
In September 1981, however, DU&ICH published a letter to the editor with a strikingly different tone. Under the title “Warning against the Philippines,” K. Haunder of Karlsruhe referenced the 1977 DU&ICH article “The Sweet Youths of Manila” and explained that, even though this article might entice readers to visit, “according to what [Haunder] heard, Manila is no longer a homo paradise.” The reasons for this were clear. Haunder wrote that employing prostitutes under the age of twenty-one was now punishable with multiple years in prison, and, according to an unnamed newspaper report, one German man had been imprisoned several weeks prior. However, in January 1982 another reader, Erik Bock, wrote into DU&ICH direcdy refuting Haunder’s claims. Bock reported that Manila was still a “paradise for pedos” and that he had experienced little harassment when making contact with local “youths.”
The matter remained unsettled. In April 1984 DU&ICH published a report from Hans Behring with the ominous title “Vacation Destination Philippines: A Paradise, but for How Long?” Behring described his nights out in the April 1984 issue of DU&ICH with “a handsome rascal” named June and his two young friends Robert and Josef. The group traveled around other parts of the country and had such a nice time that when Hans returned to Hamburg, Josef “wiped a tear from his face.” That October, a “Group of Gay’s [sic]” responded to Behring’s report in an open letter that was also to be sent to the Manila Ministry of Tourism, the mayor of Manila, the police chief, and Manila’s five largest newspapers. In this letter, a group of “tourists, businessmen, and foreigners of many nations” wrote that, although one could previously speak of the Philippines as a “gay paradise,” recent events had dramatically changed that possibility. Over the past weeks, according to the letter, the police had been cracking down on foreign men having relationships with Filipino men and boys reportedly by sometimes offering to young sex workers a portion of arrested tourists’ fines if they would turn in their clients.
For Stamford, the reason for escalating police activity was European children’s rights activism. Stamford pointed to the documentary Lestrottoirs de Manille by Francois Debre, which aired on French television in 1981 and focused on child prostitution in Manila. According to the 1983 edition of Spartacus, the documentary embarrassed the Filipino government so much that it set up a special police force dedicated to arresting foreign men caught with a male Filipino lover. In 1984 Spartacus declared that “the ‘paradise days’ are over, almost certainly forever,” because “Philippine authorities of every description have learned quickly that most Westerners come from nations that are, by Philippine standards, barbaric when it comes to matters of male-male sex, especially where younger partners are concerned,” a warning that it repeated in 1985. The question of age remained ambiguous in many of these reports; however, it was becoming clear to some travelers that not only the gender but also the age of their chosen partners could attract the attention of the authorities.
The problem of age became even more explicit in reports on Sri Lanka. In the 1982 edition of Spartacus, Stamford reported that Sri Lanka had now become dangerous for gay tourists as the government had started cracking down on gay tourists seeking relationships with Sri Lankan men and boys. Behind this sudden attention to tourism, according to Stamford, was the organization Terre des homines. Founded in 1960 in Lausanne as a humanitarian organization, Terre des hommes developed national chapters that took on projects ranging from public health to water infrastructure in the Global South. The organization was part of a wider professionalization of Swiss and European development work, as Andrea Muller explains, and adopted a Christian approach to child welfare. By the early 1980s, the organization had turned its attention to sexual exploitation and sent researcher Tim Bond to Sri Lanka to study Sri Lankan teenage sex workers. In 1981 the organization published Bond’s findings, which concluded that sex work led to crime and, in the case of interactions between male sex workers and male tourists, could lead to familial rejection. According to Stamford, this report had convinced the Sri Lankan government to take action against sex tourism, including gay sex tourism. At the same time, Terre des hommes was reportedly campaigning in the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland against proposed revisions to the penal codes that would decriminalize sex between men or lower the age of consent, blending its focus on exploitation in the Global South with attention to European legal change.
In response to these actions, Stamford made two moves that at once rebuffed the generally antigay repercussions of these arguments while refusing to reject the possibility of adult tourists making contact with teenage, potentially underage, boys. The first move was to deny the association between sex tourism and exploitation. Stamford wrote to his readers that “gays traveling to foreign countries for their vacations, and making sexual contacts there, have suddenly become ‘sex tourists’ who are ‘exploiting’ the locals and ‘infecting’ the indigenous culture with our cynical, degenerate ways.” Stamford then argued that “we should not let the Nazi types and the virtue-vendors hang a guilt trip on us,” clarifying that travelers should avoid “agreeing with the virtue-vendors that teenagers shouldn’t be allowed sex contacts with older people or with foreigners when they seek it.” Stamford positioned the “Nazi types” and “virtue-vendors” of Terre des hommes against “gays traveling to foreign countries,” a category that included rather than rejected travelers who sought contacts with teenage boys. Although Stamford made no explicit reference to age of consent, the report focused on boys under the age of eighteen, whom Stamford blamed as the instigators of sexual contact with older partners rather than the other way around.
The second move was to blame the backlash partially on gay tourists who were exploitative while making a distinction between exploitative tourists and respectful tourists. Stamford wrote that “part of the problem here … is that there is a bit of truth to all of this. Some visitors (gays included) do behave badly.” However, Stamford clarified that “this is really a tourist problem” rather than a gay tourist problem and that “we doubt that, on the whole, gays make worse tourists than their straight counterparts.” Some gays nevertheless still played into the hands of organizations such as Terre des hommes. According to Stamford, “Probably the biggest nuisance is the gay (usually paedophile) amateur pornographer” who sells films and photos involving teenage subjects from “the Third World” to porn shops in Europe. The mistake of these men was not, in Stamford’s opinion, their participation in the production and distribution of pornography involving children but rather the fact that these men sell and distribute media “without even waiting a decent interval for the actors to become unrecognizable.” Governments might then get a hold of these films and images, viewing them as examples of “callous exploitation of local youth” and leading them to institute “anti-gay, repressive measures.” Stamford therefore advised readers to “take their cameras to the lovely places of the world—but the time has come to stop using them in the bedroom.”
Even as organizations like Terre des hommes started to associate sex tourism with child exploitation and as gay publications began reporting on the consequences of this association, this dynamic did not mean a wholesale rejection of sex tourism as child exploitation in the first half of the 1980s. Instead, Spartacus and DU&ICH maintained an ambiguous treatment of the question of pedophilia while framing government crackdowns and their European backers as moralizing and antigay. However, local laws and European activism forced these publications and some travelers to consider age and gender together in ways that would presage escalating debates at the turn of the 1990s.
New Approaches to Sex Tourism in the UN and the AIDS Enquete Commission
As these reports of alternating possibility and arrests circulated in West German gay publications, feminist activists were paying closer attention to sex tourism in debates about sex trafficking and sex work. The 1980s saw fierce international contestations over whether sex work qualified as exploitation, debates that often ignored (and were ignored by) gay men. As many antitrafficking activists claimed that prostitution was the clear result of patriarchal exploitation, sex worker activists countered that a nuanced approach was needed to address multiple forms of structural inequality that contributed to different kinds of sexual harm. The United Nations was an important site for these debates and, as Sonja Dolinsek explains, largely adopted the abolitionist approach to prostitution favored by antitrafficking activists by the early 1990s. However, in the late 1980s the topic was still debated in the UN, holding ramifications for German law and activism. The enquete commission known as Dangers of AIDS and Effective Ways to Its Containment (Enquete-Kommission “Gefahren von AIDS und wirksame Wege zu ihrer Eindammung,” hereafter AIDS enquete commission) of the West German Bundestag was an important vehicle for bringing both UN antitrafficking politics and sex worker activism into German legal debates about sex tourism and eventually activist debates as well. Established in 1987 to develop strategies to curb HIV infection rates, the AIDS enquete commission presented a series of recommendations to the German Bundestag in 1991 that included both structural and carceral solutions to the problem of sex tourism. However, Bundestag representatives across the political spectrum would focus on the latter in developing legislation. It was during this subsequent process that gay sex tourism would come under greater scrutiny.
The association between sex trafficking, sex tourism, and child sexual abuse that would become critical to German legal change and German gay activism was part of a concerted strategy on the part of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). Jennifer Suchland details how CATW, founded in 1988 to politicize the issue of sex trafficking on an international level, rejected the notion that prostitution was legitimate labor. The First Global Conference Against Trafficking in Women in 1988 saw activists such as Dorchen Leidholdt, founding member of CATW, make the argument that the human rights violation of sex trafficking and sex tourism in fact stemmed from the harm inherent to prostitution. Dolinsek further explains that this construction was part of a longer history of debate about prostitution, as activists on both sides attempted to bring the language of human rights into conversation with sex work, alternately framing prostitution as a human rights violation akin to slavery or defending sex workers as engaging in legitimate labor and deserving of human rights. In 1985 and 1986 two World Whores Congresses were held in Amsterdam and Brussels, respectively, out of which came the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights and the World Charter of Prostitutes’ Rights. Nevertheless, CATW collaborated with UNESCO to hold a meeting of “experts” in 1991 in the United States in order to propose a new convention against sexual exploitation, by which point the UN had adopted the discourse of antiprostitution favored by antitrafficking activists. This move followed the 1989 establishment of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which similarly used the language of human rights to develop international protections for children. The measures outlined in the convention included an obligation to “take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures” to prevent the sexual abuse of children, child prostitution, and child pornography. Although much of the work of organizations such as CATW linked child sexual abuse to sexual abuse of women, the convention adopted more gender-neutral language, linking sexual abuse to child labor and trafficking as well. This approach was important. When German lawmakers took up the question of sex trafficking, they used both the category of gender and the category of age to advance their claims. The latter would allow gay sex tourism to come into view more fully, even as anti-sex tourism arguments continued to be linked to feminist claims.
The AIDS enquete commission functioned as an important link between UN and German legislative debates. The commission was originally proposed by the center-Left Social Democratic Party, which continued to form the opposition in the Bundestag after the 1987 elections alongside the Green Party. However, as Henning Tummers carefully charts, the ruling Christian Democratic Party took a generally more liberal approach to addressing AIDS after 1983, even as many on the political Left continued to criticize their approach as ambivalent, and the option of restrictive preventative measures remained on the table. After 1985 fears that HIV was no longer restricted to certain “risk groups” but could be widely contracted by heterosexuals as well caused federal and local governments to address the epidemic in a more concerted way, as Sebastian Haus-Rybicki details. There was a further shift in governmental strategy in 1987, as both Tummers and Haus-Rybicki explain, particularly after the Bavarian state government, ruled by the conservative Christian Social Union, departed from the nonrestrictive strategies advanced by its sister Christian Democratic Party at the federal level. At that point, it was not yet fully clear to the government of Helmut Kohl and Christian Democrats in the Bundestag whether an emphasis on education and cooperation with nonstate organizations would be the ultimate answer, particularly after the Bavarian state government departed from an emerging liberal consensus. An enquete commission was therefore established, consisting of nine representatives of all political parties in the Bundestag and eight nonparliamentary experts.
In many ways, the organization of the commission also included liberalizing attitudes toward sex. As in other countries, media outlets and rightwing politicians had used the AIDS crisis in the Federal Republic to foment homophobic and anti-sex work sentiment, as well as racism, drug stigma, and multiple forms of otherization. Scholars such as James W. Jones and Brigitte Weingart in particular have shown how panicked discourses of AIDS permeated different West German media outlets. The commission was certainly not free of moralizing politics. Norbert Geis of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union was among the parliamentary representatives selected for the commission. Furthermore, the eventual move toward institutionalization of cooperative AIDS work was by no means easy or predetermined, as Martin Reichert explains. However, nonparliamentary experts included Manfred Bruns, a federal prosecutor who would take a leading role in the Gay Federation in Germany in the 1990s, and Dieter Riehl of the German AIDS-Help, an organization established in 1983 to work against AIDS-related discrimination and social marginalization of groups such as same-sex-desiring men and sex workers, among others, and to offer counseling and prevention services to those living with HIV. The commission also sought council from experts, including then twenty-four-year-old Stephanie Klee, representative of the Berlin-based sex work advocacy organization Hydra, which was helping advance views that were markedly pro-sex work.
The political and organizational diversity represented on the commission was evident in the spectrum of its recommendations. Although the commission initially left on the table the possibility of establishing mandatory registration of those who tested positive for HIV, a staple of Christian Social Union proposals that AIDS activists and gay activists and commentators argued would only perpetuate discrimination, the commission generally supported legal liberalization during the three years of its existence. In its 1988 interim report to the Bundestag, the commission recommended that Paragraph 175 should be abolished and that “the situation of professional prostitutes should be improved through the elimination of social and legal discrimination.” These measures included supporting self-help groups such as Hydra, establishing help centers, advertising safer sex tips from official prevention agencies in contact ads, offering job and apartment search assistance, and placing on all “HIV test certificates” a notice that a negative test does not constitute a “safety certificate [Unbedenklichkeitsb escheinijjunji].” Although perhaps paternalistic in tone, the commission generally took a structural approach to the question of sex work, aligning with sex worker activists and in contrast to organizations such as CATW.
Sex tourism remained a problem for the commission both as a vector of HIV transmission and as an exploitative practice. In its 1990 closing report, the AIDS enquete commission offered the Bundestag a series of recommendations on how to combat the spread of HIV, recommendations that included proposals addressing sex tourism and combined impulses present in both antiprostitution and sex workers’ rights activism, particularly through blending an emphasis on the individual morality of tourists and necessary structural changes. The commission suggested that the Bundestag “make clear in political statements as well as in educational actions that sex tourism can not only lead to HIV infection, but also that it is ethically and morally questionable,” proposing a “discrediting campaign against sex tourism that does not shy away from drastic examples.” At the same time, however, the commission also proposed to investigate the “motivation structure” of sex tourists traveling from the Federal Republic to the “Third World,” to work with travel unions and agencies to excise implicit and explicit promotion of sex tourism, to develop policies to prevent the exodus of people from rural areas in destination countries, and, finally, to criminalize the sexual abuse of children by German citizens when traveling abroad. It was this final recommendation that proved both to be successful in the Bundestag and to generate the most controversy within and between German gay activist groups.
In gathering information for these recommendations, the AIDS enquete commission turned to two organizations within the UN. First, the commission sought council from representatives of the World Health Organization and cited data produced by the WHO in its report. Additionally, the commission cited an August 1989 report of the Norwegian justice minister before the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, working under the auspices of the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. According to the WHO, the number of HIV-positive sex workers in Bangkok alone was estimated to be about eight thousand. The AIDS enquete commission reported that these numbers meant that “a time bomb is ticking in Thailand through the further growth of sex tourism,” as HIV was being spread by sex tourists who refuse to use a condom “but rather shove the responsibility onto their victims.” The commission brought this into conversation with the exploitation of children, writing that tourists pursued increasingly younger girls, believing them to be “AIDS-free,” and turned to the Norwegian justice minister’s testimony before the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. The justice minister’s report was made as part of the working group’s chosen theme of that year on “the prevention of the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography.” According to a study commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and presented before the working group, “at least one million children from Third World countries are forced into prostitution and participation in pornographic films and magazines.” One month later, in September 1989, Norway carried out its first charges against two men alleged to have abused a minor in Thailand, which the AIDS enquete commission noted was “without precedent in Europe,” despite the fact that the Norwegian Ministry of Justice’s report was also presented to the Council of Europe. Although the commission viewed the problems of sex tourism, child exploitation, and HIV/AIDS in the Global South as having structural roots, and although the commission continued to advocate for the improvement of the situation of German sex workers, it simultaneously relied on the close associations between sex trafficking, prostitution, and sex tourism favored by antitrafficking, antiprostitution activists.
Another political shift occurred that would drive lawmakers to focus on criminal law: German unification. When the commission issued its final report, the two German states were in the process of unifying, necessitating the revision of the Federal Republic’s sexual penal code to account for the discrepancies between the two legal codes. At issue were laws governing the age of consent. In addition to proposing that Germany adopt new legal provisions criminalizing sex with minors abroad, the commission also proposed that Germany abolish Paragraph 175, the law that had fully criminalized sex between men until 1969 and that had since set a higher age of consent for men who had sex with men. Criminal law emerged as a useful tool for addressing both gay rights and (some) feminist concerns; however, doing so required resolving the underlying question of age.
Changing the Law
The process of legal alignment saw the convergence of international feminist advocacy, AIDS work, and gay activism. Discussions on changing the German sexual penal code, which brought together trafficking, child pornography, and sex tourism, coincided with and drew on the interim and final reports of the AIDS enquete commission and on developments at the level of the UN. Both were crucial to a revision of the penal code that combined feminist organizing and gay rights concerns. While many women representatives in the Bundestag sought to prevent abuse of women and girls at home and abroad, gay activists and Bundestag representatives in favor of the abolition of Paragraph 175 sought both to prevent exploitation and to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in German law. These were not mutually exclusive camps; however, the challenge rested in drafting workable age of consent laws that could do both, made necessary by unification. It was here that gender and age cohered as joint categories of protection that could elicit interparty support for legal change and generate heated controversy.
Even prior to the 1989 UN adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, representatives in the Bundestag argued that women and children were particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses. In 1988 Bundestag representative Hildegard Hamm-Brucher of the liberal Free Democratic Party led an interparty group of seventy-four women representatives to petition the Kohl government to address particular human rights abuses against women, including forced prostitution and human trafficking. Although the Kohl administration issued a generally noncommittal response to the petition of the so-called women’s initiative and rejected additional claims from the Social Democratic Party that asylum laws needed to be liberalized to serve women and children fleeing (sexual) violence, it agreed with the idea that women and children, here understood to be primarily girls, were particularly vulnerable.
In light of this minimal response, Hamm-Brucher brought to the Bundestag floor the question of human rights abuses against women and children in March 1989, arguing in her opening statement that “human trafficking in women and girls” was often synonymous with “prostitution tourism.” The federal government, reasoned Hamm-Brucher, should therefore work toward establishing “a special rapporteur for human rights violations against women at the UN Human Rights Commission.” This position again enjoyed interparty support. Social Democrat Cornelie Sonntag-Wolgast began her remarks with a story about being accosted while waiting with her husband for their flight to Bangkok by a group of men who mocked her husband for taking her with him to Thailand. Sonntag-Wolgast argued that the practice of viewing “so-called exotic women as goods whom one could test for themselves abroad or request for household use” was a “human rights abuse” requiring “concrete countermeasures.” Representative Hannelore Ronsch of the center-Right Christian Democrats replaced the term “prostitution tourism” with the more vague term “sex tourism,” arguing that “everyone—we women but also especially our men—are called to develop awareness, so that human trafficking, which happens in sex tourism, changes.”
The link between sex tourism and trafficking under the UN-supported rubric of human rights abuses proved convincing. In October 1990 the Bundestag voted unanimously to adopt a resolution titled Human Trafficking with Foreign Girls and Women, So-Called Marriage Sales, and Prostitution Tourism, sponsored by Hamm-Brucher and the interparty group of women representatives. The week prior, the same group compiled a list of measures to combat child pornography, which was submitted to the Bundestag in June 1991 and took an ostensibly more gender-neutral approach in its efforts to protect children. The group argued that “this form of sexual abuse is to be seen also in relation to other forms of sexual exploitation, especially trafficking in children and women as well as sex tourism to countries in the Third World.” When the proposals were brought to the Bundestag for debate that October, Alliance ’90 / Green Party representative and women’s speaker Christian Schenk argued that expanding criminal provisions against child pornography and sex tourism was necessary because “60 percent of all German tourists in Thailand are sex tourists. Around one hundred thousand German men travel per year to Thailand in order to purchase sex with children there.” Social Democratic representative and former member of the AIDS enquete commission Eckhart Pick followed this claim by citing the clause referring to exploitation in pornography of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as justification for an expansion of German criminal law. Both statements were in full agreement with the interparty group’s original proposed measures, which concluded that the possession and consumption of child pornography should be criminalized under an expanded Paragraph 184 instead of only production and distribution. Additionally, the proposal stated that Paragraph 184 should be applied extraterritorially, as should Paragraph 176, the law criminalizing sex with a minor under the age of fourteen. To support this suggestion, the proposal cited the AIDS enquete commission’s same recommendation.
However, the revision of Paragraph 175 proved more contentious. Although Schenk and the Green Party advocated for greater protections against sexual abuse for women and girls through the strengthening of Paragraph 176 and Paragraph 184, they sought a lower age of consent for the Federal Republic. In the early 1990s Germany’s age of consent laws were a legal soup consisting of four sections: Paragraph 175 held that the age of consent for sex between men in the West German states was eighteen, Paragraph 182 set the age of consent for women at sixteen in the West German states, Paragraph 149 set the gender-neutral age of consent at sixteen for the East German states, and Paragraph 176 criminalized sexual contact with minors under the age of fourteen regardless of gender across the entire Federal Republic. The ruling Christian Democrats and Free Democrats had established in their 1990 coalition agreement that they would abolish Paragraph 175 while leaving the East German Paragraph 149 in force for the former East German states in the interim, but they made no promises about changes to Paragraph 176. Schenk and the Greens, however, with the support of the left-wing Party of Democratic Socialists, sought the abolition of all sections except Paragraph 176. Although this proposal was in some ways in line with earlier Green Party advocacy for lowering or even abolishing the age of consent, Schenk was affiliated with the East German Greens, which had not yet merged with the West German Greens, and his incorporation of feminist concerns about violence constituted an additional break. For the Greens and Democratic Socialists, that section should criminalize sexual contact between adults over the age of twenty-one and children under the age of fourteen and be expanded extraterritorially to combat sex tourism. By strengthening Paragraph 176 and lowering the age of consent across the board, Schenk attempted to combine feminist and gay rights concerns.
The Ministry of Justice was slow to recommend any revisions to the sexual penal code. For Schenk, this was both a feminist and a gay and lesbian rights issue. Schenk’s remarks on sex tourism followed a December 1991 Green Party proposal to revise the penal code. The proposal argued that criminal laws defined rape too narrowly by not extending to sexual violence in marriage and that the statute of limitations on Paragraph 176 was too short, in addition to failing to protect children abroad. At the same time, a revised Paragraph 182, set to replace Paragraph 175 by setting a unified age of consent at sixteen, would be disproportionately applied to gay men and would now extend to lesbian women, to whom Paragraph 175 never applied. Following no movement from the Ministry of Justice, in October 1992 Schenk argued that the Kohl administration was postponing necessary legal revision that could protect women and children both in the Federal Republic and abroad. Schenk argued that the Kohl administration understood the problem of “prostitution tourism,” as the Federal Ministry of Health had published a brochure on how German tourists could protect themselves from HIV/AIDS while traveling. However, according to Schenk, “Protection of foreign children from mass sexual abuse by German citizens apparently interests the federal government less.” Schenk continued to argue that women and children were groups in particular need of protection. However, Schenk’s and the Greens’ attempt to detach age of consent from pedophilia, a strategy that international gay activists had also employed, was unconvincing on the Bundestag floor.
The Green Party’s attempt to bring feminist concerns together with gay and lesbian rights concerns proved unconvincing precisely because of the unresolved questions surrounding age. Responding to the Green Party’s proposal in 1993, well over a year after it was made, Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger argued that the government had to follow the “current state of scientific knowledge,” which posited that youths between the ages of fourteen and sixteen “regardless of gender” had not yet completed their sexual development, so “sexual abuse by adults with detrimental consequences for sexual development of young victims is possible.” Further, the ministry supported the extension of Paragraph 176 extraterritorially as a “very important contribution to the domestic adoption of the UN Convention on [the Rights of] Children.” Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger jettisoned the language of homosexual seduction and seduction of girls in favor of the gender-neutral scientific language of sexual development to argue for a higher age of consent. Such an approach necessitated the criminalization of sexual abuse of children through international sex tourism in line with the UN convention. Despite the fact that the Kohl administration had been slow to adopt any proposal that could strengthen Paragraph 176 and eliminate Paragraph 175, Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was able to take the moral high ground by adopting gender-neutral language of protecting children. The lack of gender specificity in these reforms further meant that Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger and the ruling Christian Democrats could make popular legal changes without attaching themselves to the feminist politics that had made them necessary.
Criminalization of sex tourism and decriminalization of homosexuality had become inextricable. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger’s remarks in April 1993 followed the Kohl administration’s official proposal to change Germany’s penal code, eliminating Paragraph 175 completely. The proposal also made changes to Paragraph 176 and Paragraph 182. The latter was to become the law setting the age of consent at sixteen regardless of gender, and Paragraph 176 was to be expanded extraterritorially, criminalizing sexual contact with minors under the age of fourteen abroad, provided that the perpetrator was a German national at the moment in which the crime was committed. The proposal cited the recommendations of the AIDS enquete commission in justifying all three changes. Revision of Paragraph 176 had stemmed from feminist concerns to protect girls and women from sexual abuse by male tourists, concerns that activism and policy at the level of the UN had brought into fuller view. However, through simultaneous consideration of Paragraph 175 as an age of consent law, age had eclipsed gender as the primary determinant of protected status in all three legal changes. The ministry’s proposal garnered the support of the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats, and the Social Democrats, who passed it into law despite the continued opposition of the Greens and the Democratic Socialists. The revised Paragraph 176 came into force in August 1993, and the revised Paragraph 182 replaced Paragraph 175 and Paragraph 149 the following year. It was this shift, combined with and enabled by the previous work of the AIDS enquete commission, that changed how gay activists and publishers considered sex tourism.
Gay Condemnations of Sex Tourism
The narrowing of the definition of sex tourism left little space for debate about the use of criminal law to regulate tourists’ sexual practices, space that was further constrained by the simultaneous abolition of Paragraph 175. This final section explains what happened after 1993 and 1994, when it became clear that the path to formal abolition of Paragraph 175 entailed a higher age of consent and the codification of sex tourism as inextricably linked to child sexual abuse. Not only did gay activists consolidate their new gains in part by subscribing to this association, but opponents of sex tourism expanded their work in new ways that fully jettisoned earlier structural approaches in favor of an emphasis on criminalization. Both continued to be entangled in international debates about tourism, child sexual abuse, and gay rights, which had deep consequences for Spartacus International Gay Guide. By the mid1990s, the ways in which German gay men talked about international travel had fundamentally changed from only a decade prior. However, in accepting the logic of criminalization, gay activists and publishers failed simultaneously to reckon with the complicated structural roots of sexual abuse, which allowed for overlapping forms of exploitation to continue.
By the time the commission made its closing report, gay activism had shifted drastically on account of unification. In February 1990, eight months prior to official unification, the Gay Federation in the German Democratic Republic (Schwulenverband in der DDR, SVD) was founded in the East German city of Leipzig. The organization emerged out of the East German democratization process, in which many of its founding members had participated, as well as out of more limited forms of gay and lesbian organizing in East Germany through the 1980s. At the same time, unification presented an opportunity for West German gay activists. The West German gay organization, the Federal Association on Homosexuality (Bundesverband Homosexualitat, BVH), was experiencing a divide between radical and reformist members. Reformist members, including Manfred Bruns (a member of the AIDS enquete commission), Volker Beck (the advisor on gay issues to the Green Party), and Gunter Dworek (a member of the Green Party), broke away from the BVH to join the SVD. The SVD’s investment in democratization through legal reform and the new members’ entanglement in federal governance informed how the SVD received the commission’s closing report.
In addressing the recommendations of the commission, the SVD brought together international anti trafficking language with criticisms of sex tourism to denounce the sexual exploitation of children abroad. Volker Beck, who had been a Green Party member since 1985 and would be elected to the Bundestag in 1994, led this criticism. In the SVD’s 1991 circular, Beck wrote of the recommendation that “the SVD welcomes this step. Where the option for children is ‘starve or put out your ass,’ there is no consent!” The SVD, closely linked to Alliance ’90 / the Green Party through figures such as Beck and Dworek, radically departed from both earlier suggestions within the Green Party that the age of consent in Germany should be abolished and attempts to incorporate self-identified pedophiles into a larger gay movement. For Beck on behalf of the SVD, there was a distinct continuity’ between the abuse of children and sex tourism more broadly, particularly as it was defined as “ethically and morally questionable” by the AIDS enquete commission. This continuity meant for Beck that sex tourism “is only exploitation” consisting of men from the Global North traveling to the Global South in order to engage in transactional sex, often with underage boys and girls. At stake for Beck and the SVD was not only exploitation but also the eventual abolition of Paragraph 175.
In 1993 the BVH attempted to criticize the planned revision of Paragraph 176. The organization argued that it was not the responsibility of German criminal law to regulate sex abroad, as even some countries that shared a border with Germany had a lower age of consent. The SVD was not convinced. In an open letter to the BVH in May 1993, Beck asserted that “child sex tourism” was “sexist and racist” and that “the general relationship of exploitation between the First and the Third World is reproduced by sex tourists on the bodies of the weakest.” Beck then lambasted the BVH, stating that “you have with this [argument] discredited the struggle of the gay movement for equal human and civil rights of gays and profiled yourselves as defenders of sexual exploitation of the Third World through the First World.” Furthermore, because the BVH had worked with the SVD on a revised penal code that would eliminate Paragraph 175, “through your actions the SVD is brought close to your position on child sex tourism.” Not only was sex tourism morally indefensible on grounds of exploitation of children, according to the SVD, anything other than outright condemnation could serve to fully discredit the gay movement and its century-long fight to end Paragraph 175.
The ability of the BVH, however, to offer any sort of convincing critique or to complicate understandings of sex tourism was undermined by its own membership, which generated controversy even within the organization. As tensions flared between the BVH and SVD over the issue of sex tourism, the Work Group on Pedophilia, a special interest group in the BVH, vocally condemned Germany’s 1992 ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to the anger of some of the BVH’s other members. The Work Group of Gay and Lesbian Social Democrats in the BVH quickly distanced themselves from the Work Group on Pedophilia, stating in no uncertain terms that “the pornographic representation of sexuality by and with children, child prostitution, the exploitation of children, and sex tourism are stridently rejected by us!” For activists within the BVH, like the SVD, there was no clear boundary between sex tourism and other forms of sexual exploitation of children, requiring an unequivocal rejection of the former category to avoid being accused of supporting the latter.
In a much more limited way, debates within German organizations about the role of pedophilia made their way back to the level of international activism the following year, specifically involving ILGA’s role in the UN. As David Paternotte details, in 1993 ILGA gained consultative status in the UN Economic and Social Council after fifteen years of lobbying. However, once the antigay US newspaper the Lambda Report made public that the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was a member of ILGA, conservatives in the US Congress seized on the report and longstanding views that homosexuality and pedophilia were synonymous to move that the United States would not support ILGA’s consultative status and would withdraw funding for the UN as long as propedophilia groups remained members of ILGA. Already, many activists in ILGA had distanced themselves from pedophilia as they imagined new and often more pragmatic ways of doing gay politics. Although ILGA expelled NAMBLA and two other organizations—Martijn and Project Truth/Free—in 1994, it was the continued membership of a German organization, the Munich-based Union for Sexual Equality (Verein fur sexuelle Gleichberechtigung, VSG) that caused further scandal. Once additional screening discovered that the VSG hosted a working group on pedophilia, ILGA’s consultative status was suspended and would not be reinstated until 2011.
Importantly, the expulsion of the three organizations reinforced the SVD’s position on sex tourism. As the SVD reported in its July 1994 newsletter, “Gays and lesbians from different Third World countries contributed to the debate and reported on sexual exploitation and abuse through Western child sex tourism in their home countries.” Certainly, the suspension of ILGA’s UN status was motivated by antigay sentiment from US Republicans rather than exclusively by concern for children in the Global South. It was in fact US religious conservatives who blocked the Convention of the Rights of the Child from even being referred to in the Senate. However, the debate over ILGA’s suspension also created space for some activists from countries frequented by European and North American tourists to issue harsh critiques of exploitative sexual practices that had largely been ignored in mainstream German media outlets in decades prior. At the same time, these claims and the majority motion to expel the three groups offered international legitimacy to the position of the SVD toward sex tourism.
Nevertheless, criminal law took primacy in German efforts to end sexual exploitation. Not only did the SVD adopt this logic, but so too did a new organization, the Campaign against Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism (Kampagne gegen Kinderprostitution und Sextourismus). Established in 1991, the campaign consisted of forty organizations ranging from church groups to development organizations and included the organization Terre des homines. According to coordinator Juliane von Krause, the campaign understood “sex tourism not as a harmless vacation adventure but as a crime against children.” Krause explained this focus on children specifically, writing in 1993 that “since the 1980s social workers and experts in some Asian countries have observed that the demands of sex tourism from the entire world has changed. Tourists scarcely have interest anymore in contact with adult prostitutes.” Krause offered the same explanation as the AIDS enquete commission, arguing that this change happened “possibly because of the confused perception that risk of AIDS is lower,” but confirmed that “prostitutes and hustlers [Stricher] who are older than twenty are seen as past their prime [alten Eisen].” The shift in tendencies required a commensurate approach through criminal law.
The 1993 revision of Paragraph 176 marked a significant victory for the campaign. However, as Krause pointed out, there still remained the problems of cooperation with authorities in destination countries, as well as preventing travel agencies from tacitly or explicitly condoning sex tourism. To address the latter issue, Terre des hommes developed an agreement for travel agencies to sign, such that travel agencies would only work with hotels that forbade child prostitution, would inform customers about the background and mechanisms of child prostitution, and would train employees appropriately. In August 1993 the agencies Ikarus Reisen and Tjaereborg signed the agreement, followed by the travel giants NUR Touristic and the International Touristic Union. In so doing, Terre des hommes, in collaboration with the campaign, effectively divorced the structural-economic concerns from individualized solutions. This approach marked a further shift away from the recommendations of the AIDS enquete commission.
The national and international attention to sex tourism and child sexual abuse put increased pressure on Spartacus International Gay Guide to reckon with its past and present. Although Spartacus had jettisoned much of its information about possibilities for sex with underage boys after it was acquired by Berlin-based Bruno Gmtinder Verlag in 1986, the guide came under renewed fire in 1994-95 when John D. Stamford was accused of promoting pedophilia. Stamford, who had moved to Belgium from Germany after the revision of Paragraph 176, was arrested in 1994 on criminal charges of distributing pornographic material. Stamford also faced a simultaneous civil prosecution brought forward by four Switzerland-based organizations, including Terre des homines, which hoped to use the trial to extend Belgium’s law on child sexual abuse extraterritorially. Stamford died before he could stand trial; however, the charges continued to hold serious ramifications for Spartacus.
It was only in adopting the position that sex tourism, child prostitution, and child pornography were overlapping forms of abuse that the guide could distance itself from accusations of its ongoing complicity in the exploitation of children. Facing attacks that Spartacus-was a “pedophile’s bible,” Helmut Ladwig, the guide’s production manager and coordinator, introduced the 1994-95 edition of the guide with a statement forcefully refuting these claims. Ladwig wrote that “on behalf of both the spartacus International Gay Guide and Bruno Gmunder Publishers, I would like to make it quite clear that we consider forms of exploitation such as child prostitution, child pornography and child trading as being particularly despicable.” At the same time, Ladwig pointed out that “ignorant and foolish” heterosexuals had misinterpreted the guide and that “the target of the attacks is indeed no longer just one publication, spartacus International Gay Guide and Bruno Gmunder Publishers, but the entire gay community, whereby the concepts ‘homosexuality’ and ‘paedophilia’ are mixed up in a way that is totally unreflected and merely designed to drum up sensation.” In order to avoid further confusion, the guide changed its code “YC,” or “young crowd” (which Ladwig insisted had never implied the presence of underage boys), to “YG,” or “younger gays.” Ladwig concluded by clarifying, perhaps in reference to Terre des homines’ travel agency agreement, that it was unable and unwilling “to monitor the places listed in this guide 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” although it asked readers to inform the guide of any institution listed that “violates our principles.” Through replicating the equivalence between child pornography, child prostitution, and child sex tourism, a necessary move given the fact that Stamford was accused of engaging in all three, Spartacus rejected in no uncertain terms the association between pedophilia and homosexuality. While the guide did not remain free from critique in subsequent years, it was able to continue operations, offering users ongoing possibilities to find gay spaces—and with them, sexual contacts—abroad.
Conclusion
Sex tourism didn’t end. Regardless of how it is defined—whether as the criminal abuse of children that Terre des hommes, CATW, or Juliane von Krause identified or as the nebulous intersection of sex and travel that has garnered the attention of critical feminist scholarship—the early 1990s were not a conclusion. Instead, this moment constituted a critical juncture in the ways in which sex tourism could be used to marshal contradictory viewpoints. When we focus on debates about law and sex tourism in Germany, the transnational dynamics of unification come into fuller view. More specifically, unification opened up space for transnational feminist debates about sex tourism and domestic debates about gay rights to cohere in criminal law. At the same time, pinning criminalization of sex tourism as child sexual abuse to the abolition of Paragraph 175 offered an important tool for German gay activists to remove, however tenuously, pedophilia from a new program of rights-based politics. We also see a shift in what could be said about sex and travel, what harms needed to be addressed and how, and what forms of exploitation could continue to be blithely ignored. In 1995 it was no longer possible for the editors of Spartacus to complain that “virtue-vendors” were ruining things for men who sought sex with teenage boys. However, emphasizing criminalization did not resolve other inequalities involving Sri Lankan boys in sex work. Instead, it made it more difficult to determine what coercion and culpability looked like and develop complex solutions that were not rooted in a neoabolitionist logic that continued to harm (adult) sex workers. At the same time, understanding sex tourism’s only harm as abuse of children obscured the ways in which gay travel continued to rely on colonial logics and the exploitation of labor and resources. Even if Paragraph 175 was ultimately abolished and it was no longer acceptable to casually talk about child sexual abuse in some gay publications, the process of dealing with sex tourism between the early 1980s and mid-1990s is far too fraught to be a gay success story.
This is a difficult history to write exactly because of its political and personal ramifications. Rachel Hope Cleves argues that historians need to pay attention to the feelings that researching the history of pedophilia generates in us. In researching this history, I very much wanted to find heroes or some moral compass to guide me through this work. Doing so would help to fend off old claims that queer people are predatory, which right-wing movements are articulating anew. It would also be comforting to believe that, amid all of these overlapping harms, there were those who handled them with objectivity and nuance. However, engaging with history in this way is a practice of looking away. John Stamford’s enthusiasm about sex with young teenagers often went unchecked, and Stamford continuously tried to justify the moral superiority of practices that were multiply exploitative. DU&ICH is riddled with similar discussions by a number of different men—many of whom are effectively anonymous—in ways that also overlap with casual yet ugly racism. However, the myopic approach of Terre des homines and the Campaign against Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism was also disorienting. More “empirically” speaking, the ways in which their goals lined up with those of Christian conservatives and their focus on carceral solutions raised suspicion as well. At the same time, Christian Schenk attempted to reconcile protections for women and queer people, but that was predicated on accepting that fourteen-year-olds could be consenting adults. The Green Party’s troubled history with pedophilia merits further caution. Similarly, Volker Beck’s fears that pedophilia could derail a century-long legal project were correct, even if the SVD’s later attempts to address racism and sexual exploitation were limited at best.
Maybe it is therefore helpful to refrain from drawing moral equivalencies or comparisons, which such a search for heroes invites us to do. This practice involves what Kadji Amin terms “deidealization,” in which scholars must “inhabit unease” in order to examine subjects and figures that fail to meet liberal and liberatory expectations. Instead I want here to lay bare the harm that happened while also taking seriously how people in the past tried to define and address that harm in all of their contradictions, as Javier Samper Vendrell’s work on the Weimar era exemplifies. Addressing these dynamics is critical for the history of sexuality, as doing so can bring queer history’s skepticism of liberalization narratives into conversation with the history of sexuality’s attention to the imbrication of sex and power. However, pedophilia seems to exceed other instantiations of power inequality in both its viscerality for historians and the delicateness required in its research. Abuse cannot be denied, and so historians must look upon its manifestations and all of their messy complications.