It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (KINO)

Few films can claim to have started a revolution. Two years after West Germany decriminalised homosexuality, Rosa von Praunheim detonated this scabrous agit-prop fable on national television. Young, provincial Daniel arrives in Berlin and drifts through the gay subcultures of the era, from bourgeois coupledom to bar cliques to cruising grounds, while a merciless voice-over flays gay men for their assimilation, self-hatred and political apathy, demanding they come out and organise. The scandal was seismic: furious TV debates, walkouts, and the founding of dozens of activist groups. The modern German gay liberation movement traces its birth directly to this one film. Restored and as confrontational as ever, this is queer cinema as a molotov cocktail: crude, hectoring, frequently hilarious, and utterly foundational. Half a century on, its closing rallying cry “out of the toilets, into the streets!” still rings in the air.