Hollywood Detective Agency
Report, 1951-61

My client has let me know that there’s a new journal for our kind: Wir Freundinnen. Even upon closer inspection, there’s no trace of lesbian women with children. There are only personal ads placed by gay men looking for women to forge a “marriage of convenience.” Camouflage is urgently needed, for the old political forces were now calling for the expansion of Section 175 to women. Wir Freundinnen reported on that, but it then ceased publication. In 1957, the Federal Constitutional Court confirmed the more rigid version of Section 175 from the Nazi period, but rejected extending its purview to apply to women. In 1961, the divorce law was made more restrictive. Now lesbian women could hardly end their marriage, because they would lose custody of their children and the right to alimony.

But I don’t want to serve love as such. Not the love that Nietzsche called his “feeling in my dressing grown,” which made the woman a res, a thing that belongs to the man, just like ox and ass and everything that is his.

No! I want to lend my voice and my heart to that other love which, so easily misrecognized and yet so beautiful, once serenaded a woman who understood how to “combine female tenderness with masculine strength,” and thus became the greatest women poet of all time. You, immortal Sappho, I want to serve.

Mr. Gatzweiler calls for the “introduction of penal law” for us “lesbian women!” We need to respond effectively and decisively to the danger that this agitation poses for us!

The court found that the constitution here is not applicable, because the “nature of the woman as a female gendered being and the nature of the man as a male gendered being shape the deed in such an essentially different way that the comparable element—the abnormal use of drives towards the same gender—moves to the background and lesbian love and male homosexuality do not appear to be comparable acts in a legal sense.”