What cannot be made visible are the specific documents that document the registration of men who have sex with men in Hamburg. These “Pink Lists”—lists containing the names, registered addresses, and dates of birth of the men who were monitored—are held in the Hamburg State Archives but are restricted until 2040 due to the retention periods for the personal data of those affected. This applies to the files with the following reference number: 441-2 (Office for District Administration), 523 file number 646.90-1/1
Nor can the perspective of the surveillors be presented in this space. As part of the research for this exhibition project, in cooperation with Queer History Month Hamburg , an attempt was made to conduct an interview with a person who, in the 1970s, assisted with surveillance while serving in the police force. The police department became aware of the planned interview and intervened: the former employer prohibited the interview.
To mark this gap, we are showing the film “Tearoom” by filmmaker William E. Jones. In 1962, the police department of Mansfield, Ohio, produced an instructional video documenting their methods of targeting gay men. The door of a cleaning 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.