The Hamburg Tuntenchor is representative of the artistic groups active in the Hamburg gay scene around 1980. It was founded by Gunther Schmidt, a church musician who had been unemployed since coming out. The choir performed a total of eight shows in Hamburg and Berlin with its in-house ballet “Alsterelsen” and the subgroup “Budaschwestern,” including at the Tunten- und Narzissenball on April 21, 1980, at the Hamburg Markthalle. They were known for rewriting well-known pop songs and hits, which they always performed on stage together with new lyrics—some bawdy, some political. On the occasion of the Spiegel scandal, they rewrote Mike Krüger’s then-current hit “Der Nippel” to reference the Spiegel and presented the “Hammersong” to the audience:
Photographer Rüdiger Trautsch plays an important role in preserving this legacy. His publication “Hardly anyone did it out of love!” follows the openly gay protagonist Reinhold through various moments of his daily life and unpretentiously portrays the life of a completely “normal” gay man.
Rüdiger Trautsch’s estate, including many of his photographs documenting gay life in Hamburg in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is now accessible to researchers at the Archive of the Gay Museum in Berlin.