‚Männer wie Du und Ich: Gay Magazines from the National to the Transnational
Print media has played a key role in the formation of queer culture since 1945. The popularity of gay print magazines in the German context was based to a great extent on their visual character and composition. After 1969 pornographic aesthetics played a key role in the production of meaning of German gay magazines and the forms of identification that they offered their readers. The history of gay magazines allows us to read the tensions between the national, the international and the transnational. In the context of German gay magazines, structural characteristics of porn were translated into a set of signs that came to signify ‘German’. While German gay magazines also related to an international code of representing gay masculinity, thanks to innovations in media technology since the 1980s, they had an alternative aesthetic to offer, which, in contrast to a more universal erotic code stemming from the gay US porn industry, functioned as ‘German’. This juxtaposition between international and German codes structures the field of gay publications in West Germany and remained a factor in publications in the reunified Germany into the 2000s. During the 2000s this paradigm partly dissolved in favour of a more universal gay aesthetics, which can no longer be positioned along the lines of national and international and therefore might be named ‘transnational.’
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/3/468?rss=1