It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives 
Screening as part of Imagine! Festival of Ideas & Politics, this is the film that made Rosa von Praunheim "famous and notorious" (as he likes to call it), and it is often credited with kickstarting the 1970s gay liberation movement in West Germany.
It caused uproar and outrage and not only amongst the heterosexual majority, but equally if not even more so amongst gay men, because the film did not indict majority society for oppressing the LGBT community, but it indicted the gay community itself arguing that its oppression was self-inflicted.
Praunheim’s film puts sexuality centre-stage and argues: ‘we don’t want to be respectable, we don’t want to be bourgeois, we are sexual beings, our sexuality is an essential part of our identity, and we are no longer willing to deny it or hide it.’ At the core of the film is the as yet unresolved issue as to how the LGBT community reacts to the pressure of mirroring and submitting itself to the values and norms of mainstream heterosexual society.
Organised with OUTing the Past. Introduced by Professor Rainer Schulze, University of Essex, followed by a Q&A with Declan Meehan, Deputy Director, Cara Friend.
Screening as part of Imagine! Festival of Ideas & Politics.
EVENT DURATION: 2 HRS 30 MINS
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