Police

Station 1 – Introduction to the Exhibition Tour

In this interview, eyewitness Kai Reinecke recounts the confrontation between the police and demonstrators in Schanzenpark following the “Stonewall” demonstration on June 28, 1980. So, the demonstration ended in Schanzenpark; it was damp and cold. We were all wearing parkas because it was damp and cold, and back then parkas were in style, even in the gay scene, in weather like that. And we didn’t know how we were supposed to have a picnic on that wet grass in Schanzenpark, and we just stood there somehow—I don’t even know if there was anything to eat for a picnic. I have no idea. I never really noticed—it probably got lost in the rain or the chaos, since it wasn’t exactly cozy either. And a lot of people had already left. And then people must have spotted that VW bus again; it was parked less than 40—well, I can’t say exactly—I’d say less than 40 meters from where we were all standing, and [those people] had approached Corny. Who did they approach? Corny. I don’t even know if he was one of the organizers of the demonstration; that could very well be the case. In any case, they asked him if he could get the films handed over. So, to go over to the bus, because he’d been taking photos throughout the demonstration. Then he went over there—as far as I could tell. I think I just caught that in passing at the beginning. Then the two police officers in the bus immediately rolled up the windows. Because of the rain, they didn’t want to take photos through the raindrops on the windows. They kept taking photos, though. And then they rolled up the windows, and in response to Corny’s polite—or not-so-polite, since he isn’t always polite—question about whether he could have the film, they rolled up the windows, didn’t respond, and kept taking photos. And then we—well, I certainly wasn’t one of the first; I don’t want to put myself in the spotlight here—but a lot of people went over, and I did too, and we surrounded the bus; we hung our parkas over the windows so they couldn’t take any more photos. We started rocking the bus, and then—though I only realized this later—they were really scared in there because they didn’t know what was happening. They couldn’t see anything anymore. And the left-wing extra-parliamentary opposition—what was it called? Not the APO, the really bad ones… I mean the RAF! The RAF hadn’t been around for very long. And the police probably still had some memories of that, and they didn’t know: Is this that kind of thing? Or what’s going on, what’s happening here? And they didn’t dare do anything anymore. And while we were working on the bus, Corny made his way to a superior, but they had all disappeared. The police officers were nowhere to be seen; they were behind the hill, and [Corny] negotiated with the supervisor and came back and—as far as I know—I don’t know if you can always rely on Corny, but that doesn’t matter—he said the supervisor, the squad leader—maybe there were only fifty people, I don’t know—promised to hand over the films. By then, we’d customized the bus so much that it was way lower to the ground—someone had let the air out of the tires, someone else had unscrewed the spark plug wires in the back, and some guy in platform shoes—which were still kind of in back then—was dancing on top of the roof. And I, even though I’m actually a pretty good kid and not really the rebellious type, I bent the windshield wipers. *laughs* Let me put it this way: as if that were some great feat. Anyway, then this hundred-strong unit—or maybe a group of fifty—of police came down, visors up, batons in one hand and shields in the other, came over the hill, and headed toward the bus. And what do gay guys do—at least most of them: they back off, they’re cowards, not ready to fight. That’s exactly what happened, and the police started pushing the bus out of the park—as I’d argue, almost by the longest route. They could have actually pushed it down there, to the former Kiel train station, which would have been right below. No, they were basically heading toward Schulterstift—that’s across from the park behind, so to the right of the Schlump subway station—they were pushing it in that direction. And just before that, there was a path leading out, almost toward Schulterstift, and there are bushes to the left and right of the path, which means they wanted to push through there. And then someone said: “Come on, let’s all sit down on the path!” And then some people, two rows—I think five or six people in each row—sat down on the path in two rows. And I joined them, and I kept thinking: I’m not sitting on the path. It’s wet, it’s cold, and besides, I feel defenseless when I’m sitting. So I stood behind them. And everyone else then went behind us. Yeah, and then the police came, and they were already moving in front of the bus in full gear to clear the way. And it was pretty clear where things were headed, and then it happened. I didn’t know what Chemical Mace was, but they just shoved me. So what they did to the people sitting down on the path, I didn’t even notice that anymore. They shoved me into the bushes, somehow, and at the same time fired chemical mace at us. Normally, I think you’re not allowed to use that from a distance of half a meter—they just did it anyway. Young, naive cops who just did it because they couldn’t think of anything better—no idea! Then you’re lying there in the bushes—I didn’t stay there long—and you can’t see anything anymore; it’s burning everywhere. I think the effect is the same as tear gas. I don’t even know if it has any other effects. I also don’t know if the police have to maintain a different distance with tear gas than with chemical mace. I think after two years at most, the police stopped using chemical mace. It doesn’t matter; I couldn’t see anything anymore, and then people pulled me out of the bushes and took those of us who couldn’t see anything to the nearest bar in the sports center on the corner—it’s basically a sports bar. It’s not a community center, but a clubhouse, run by the sports association or something like that. And in the bar, they had lemons, and you could use those to neutralize the effects of the chemical mace. That probably took about half an hour, then I could see again, and so could the others. And then I didn’t really notice much else that happened after that. They took the bus—I still remember that—they pushed it out onto the street and then parked it properly. *laughs* So it wasn’t exactly ready to drive.

The British gay eccentric Quentin Crisp writes the following about police decoys in public restrooms in his 1968 book The Naked Civil Servant (translated into German in 1988 as Crisperanto): CW: racist stereotypes, the N-word The main area of operation for this particular strategy was the dimly lit public restrooms in the less densely populated areas of London. While a plainclothes detective paced back and forth across the street with watchful indifference, his accomplice—selected by superiors for his natural, job-appropriate physique—stood there at the urinal and “showed off”—he displayed his DIY apparatus to anyone who happened to walk in. (One cannot imagine what an equipment inspection—which would, after all, have to take place before every shift—would look like.) The trap worked well, and many of the most unbelievable people were lured to their doom in this manner. More recently, now that everyone is familiar with these maneuvers, they have fallen out of fashion. Common knowledge robs them of their effect. They also offend the sporting instinct of the British people. They are seen as a trick, like placing a diamond bracelet on the sidewalk and pouncing from ambush on anyone who bends down to pick it up. Almost exclusively, it was borderline cases that were caught. Those whose idea of a pleasant evening consisted of wandering from one “gentleman” to another quickly learned to recognize a cop even by touch. People who had never heard of homosexuality but whose natural curiosity was aroused by any manifestation of strange human behavior were put in such danger by these police techniques. Even if you had a good night, asking the officer what on earth he was doing there would certainly lead to arrest; if it was a bad night, a brief glance in his direction was enough. The worst consequence of the decoy system , however, was that for a police officer assigned to such a post who happened to have no sympathy for gay men, aversion quickly turned into the most savage hatred. Conversely, gay men who originally feared the police—which some might consider a good thing—now developed contempt for them. From the perspective of the law, the only weakness of the decoy system was the fact that it took two police officers to catch a sex offender. That was a waste of manpower. The police viewed homosexuals the way the Native Americans viewed bison. They racked their brains over how to exterminate them in herds. With the help of informants, they found out where the big gay parties were held, and that’s where they focused their attention." – Quentin Crisp: “Crisperanto,” Amman Verlag 1988, p. 96ff.

Station 10 – Surveillance of Gay Venues by the Hamburg Police from 1960 to 1980

In the 2001 film »Gefängnisbilder« Harun Farocki shows excerpts from Jean Genet’s film “Un Chant d’Amour” (1950), in which a prison guard develops a voyeuristic fascination with the prisoners’ masturbation, “their love life.” The prison is a place of prohibitions, and thus of secrets and transgressions, at least those hoped for and fantasized about. – Harun Farocki, »Prison Images«, DE 2000, Min. 08:05 Filmmaker Farocki juxtaposes these excerpts with documentary footage from U.S. prisons, in which prisoners attempt to cover the transparent barred doors of their cells with their mattresses in order to create some semblance of privacy. These attempts are regularly and violently quashed with tear gas and physical force.

The title of the film “Tearoom” by filmmaker William E. Jones plays on the term tearoom —which in slang refers to a place for quick sex. In 1962, the police department of Mansfield, Ohio, shot an instructional video documenting their methods of prosecuting gay men. The door of a janitor’s closet in the public men’s restroom was fitted with a one-way mirror, allowing an officer to use a 16mm film camera to secretly monitor and film the men who met there for sex. The footage was subsequently used as evidence in court, resulting in all the accused men being found guilty and serving at least one year in prison. What is striking about the surviving recordings is that some faces have been burned out of the footage, rendering them unrecognizable. The artist suspects that these individuals may have been police officers who were covered by their colleagues. In 2008, William E. Jones released this educational film in its unedited form—as a radical example of using a film “as found”—thereby, on the one hand, making visible the police surveillance practices of the 1960s, while on the other hand highlighting the shift and, consequently, the mutability of the discourse over the past 50 years.