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- Title
Bahnhof Boys: Policing Male Prostitution in Post-Nazi Berlin.
- Authors
Evans, Jennifer V.
- Abstract
This article discusses the challenges faced by officials responsible for identifying, policing, and prosecuting callboys and their clients, known as johns, and examines some of the twists and turns that characterized the process of regulating homosexual sex in postwar Berlin, Germany. A careful reading of police and court documents demonstrates not simply the confusion that Berliners faced in defining societal values at the war's end by the contours of a defiant homosexual subculture, one that had not been completely destroyed by Adolf Hitler and that was being restored to public view by the disorder of daily life. The case of Otto N., a forty-nine year old cashier, bears many of the hallmarks of confusion that marked the policing same-sex sexuality in the city, when men and youths frequently crossed over the internal sector boundaries for evening liaisons, tempting fate and risking possible incarceration under the slow-to-be-reformed, Nazi-era anti-sodomy legislation. Whether negotiated obliquely through knowing glances at the waiting room of the Friedrichstrasse train station or the Bahnhof or over a few drinks and a bit to eat in one of the city's bars and cafes, intergenerational paid sex was a key feature of the Berlin gay scene, one that baffled police and welfare workers grappling with increasing numbers of endangered youth, contradictory legal interpretations, and an ever-worsening political situation that would divide municipal departments as early as 1948.
- Subjects
BERLIN (Germany); GERMANY; LAW; HOMOSEXUALITY; SODOMY; SEX workers' customers; SAME-sex relationships
- Publication
Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2003, Vol 12, Issue 4, p605
- ISSN
1043-4070
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/sex.2004.0026