Gay rights around the world wien

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4. Suggested Citation: Müller, Katharina. Audiovisual Traces, no. Memories cannot be conserved in drawers and pigeon-holes; in them the past is indissolubly woven into the present. As a history of subcultures, queer history is always also a history of spaces, whether analogue or virtual, in which alternative ways of living are made possible.

In Austria, this history unfolded within one of the most stubbornly hostile legal environments for queer people anywhere in Western Europe. Due to their diversity of themes, medium 8 or 16 mm film, video , and production context, and the various ways and reasons in or for which these media were consumed, I understand these spaces praxeologically as queer ephemeral media spaces.

Historically, Austrian film and TV in line with state-imposed broadcasting restrictions largely ignored queer forms of life, and where they did appear they tended to be depicted and reproduced either in terms of a history of oppression or Othering stories of individual lives.

My postdoc research is concerned with topics of archiving and curation. This raises a host of issues around media ethics, concerning matters such as the vulnerability of the people who appear in these films as members of a socially marginalized group , the fragility of the physical media which are stored in scattered locations, often in conditions not conducive to their preservation , the ontology of safe spaces, and approaches to privacy and metadata.

If we understand these queer ephemeral media spaces as a resource for queer history ies and future utopias of collective, connected communities , these issues in turn prompt questions about archival and curatorial agency with regard to these spaces: What strategic options are open to us between archival secrecy at the one extreme and indiscriminately uploading everything to the cloud at the other?

And what bearing do the audiovisual traces left by film and video recordings over time have on this question? This article is the first publication to come out of my research on this topic. It is also the first time that audiovisual traces from some of the films and videos have been made public.

The fragment shows the director and actor Faraz Shariat as a child, wearing a Sailor Moon costume and singing and dancing in front of the TV, and so gives a historical dimension to the character he plays in the film. We do not see the whole document i.

Gay rights around the world: eine globale übersicht mit fokus auf wien

And it is not just a history of oppression, contrary to how it has long been depicted in fiction and documentary films and as which it is often still structurally reproduced: 9 The use of the Sailor Moon archival fragment can be understood as a cinematic strategy of resistance to normative temporal regimes.

Extending this idea, there are also formal parallels to the safe spaces that a young generation of queer TikTok users have created with their videos as places to negotiate sexuality and provide mutual support. Vienna, May One day before the presidential election, members of the Vienna Homosexual Initiative HOSI, founded asked passersby on the street if they would vote for their preferred candidate if he were gay.

The project took place in the context of an audiovisual media landscape where two government-owned television stations got to set the agenda, with no space for marginal groups. The video relates itself to the public sphere by reproducing the style of a news format in this case, the anachronistic newsreel format.

Even before HOSI established a permanent base of operations, it had carved out a space for itself with the video and the temporary information stand that it documents : Media space preceded geographically situated space. Speaking to the camera, a member explains the broader social dimensions of the homosexual perspective: Without the liberation of homosexuality, she explains, true emancipation is impossible.

The objection, as the council chair never tired of repeating, was that the stand would lure people into being gay. As in the previous video, the opinions of passersby were canvassed, and we can observe a field of conflict and negotiation between different views.

The year following the Stonewall Riots is regarded as a turning point in queer liberation. Ever since, annual pride marches have taken place in cities across the world, subject to local political conditions. Just as is the case for Europe as a whole, different urban contexts produce different experiences and understandings of queer life, identity, and subculture.

In any case, no mention was made of Stonewall in the Austrian news. A strict pornography law also banned depictions of same-sex acts, which even led to safer sex brochures ordered from the German AIDS Service being confiscated. Reflecting hegemonic structures, the campaign was aimed at a heterosexual audience.

These campaigns are nonetheless significant in the context of queer processes of collectivization, and can still be found in community archives.