From 1961 through 1980 Hamburg police observed and registered homosexual men in public toilets. From 1964 on, spy mirrors were installed on public toilets and used for surveillance. Along with the first lesbian-gay demonstration in 1980, activists smashed these mirrors, published images of the intervention in magazines and newspapers, making the illegal registers public. Producing the images was essential to build pressure on the city government, and abolish the registers.
The intervention’s effect heavily relied on the narrative ‘the citizen vs. police as a system’, and on a general critique of militarisation of the police, that jeopardised individual rights against safety by ‘law and order‘.
The campaign
- produced images as a visual or ‘viral’ argument,
- used the political discourse of the time #abolitionism,
- led to a strong solidarity in the general media, and
- abolished both surveillance and registers targeting gay people.