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At the beginning of February, a multi-page article appeared in the magazine of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” under the hashtag ActOut, in which 185 actors came out as lesbian, gay, transgender, intersexual or non-binary.
The tone of this joint appearance was impressively calm.
And yet this appearance has been causing dramatic conflicts and heated discussions in cultural life for several weeks, between actors, journalists, the lesbian and gay association and of course on Twitter - and most recently even ex-Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse found himself in the middle of a heated debate social media again.
What has changed so that more and more people meet with hatred today?
People who up to now have actually advocated tolerance, understanding and democratic values together - of course, each in his own way, each in his “bubble”, driven by the individual's will for freedom and yet united by solidarity.
The initiators of ActOut had thought a lot about how to reach people in order to convey their concerns as clearly as possible.
Because even today, in 2021, it is not yet a matter of course in Germany to live openly, only a third are outed at their workplace - in all professions from teacher to carer.
There is still not a single active German professional footballer who has addressed his homosexuality in public.
Former national player Philipp Lahm has just advised active footballers against coming out again.
As a result, 800 players joined a declaration to support and protect those who should muster the courage.
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And yet: in the last twenty years, life for gays and lesbians has changed a lot.
We are allowed to marry, we are allowed to adopt children, we are legally (almost) equal.
Under the term “identity politics”, however, many concerns and initiatives are currently being criticized which are intended to help minorities gain more justice.
Conservatives fear that support will turn into favoritism.
The ActOut action can now also be found in this extremely nervous debate.
The allegations include: They are fragmenting society, promoting a victim competition.
So what about the socio-political mood today, here and now, how about discrimination on a small and large scale?
45 percent of LGBTI people state that they experienced aggression, insults and attacks in everyday life in 2019.
From the small attacks on the street, the shoulder that is extended when passing and used like a punch to the more serious, physical attacks and violence.
Walking hand in hand through the streets of the German capital is still not or no longer a given in many places, on the contrary.
You prefer to leave it because you feel uncomfortable, have had bad experiences.
In some parts of the population, clarification is still at the very beginning, as one could see from the shocking case of "kweendrama" in Frankfurt am Main in autumn 2020.
During a conversation with the YouTuber “BrEso” about homophobia, another discussant told the trans woman openly in the face that if she were his son he would beat her up.
Then she was brutally attacked in the middle of the Zeil shopping street - and the videos of the crime were cheered on the net.
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In a so-called debate “on hatred and agitation against LGBTI people” in the German Bundestag last week, all parties expressed their concern about the sharp increase in criminal and violent offenses recorded.
According to official statistics, their number rose by more than 60 percent in 2019 compared to the previous year.
Only a fraction of the acts of violence are recorded as hostile to LGBTI.
A cruel truth, about which very little is written: In 2020, the first murder attempt by an Islamist in Germany out of hatred of homosexuals occurred in Dresden.
Who are the actors who have now dared?
And why does your supposedly self-evident concern keep causing arguments?
There are celebrities like Ulrich Matthes, born in 1959, undoubtedly one of the best actors we have.
Or Heinrich Horwitz, who one might still know as Miriam Horwitz from the Cologne “Tatort”.
Or Bettina Hoppe, a permanent member of the Berliner Ensemble, who says she played 47 roles, three of which were lesbian characters.
The actor Jannik Schümann, born in 1992, had already shown himself on Instagram with his friend in December.
185 dared, many others did not.
Nothing in their contribution actually offers a reason to trigger aggression.
And yet there was heated discussion in my environment.
The mailbox was quickly full of messages, mostly related to the spread of the topic on social media: “Well, 90 percent of these are completely unknowns who otherwise would never have made it onto a cover.
That doesn't discredit the cause, but makes personal motivation suspicious.
That is not meant badly, just find it funny not to point it out. ”It usually always came down to the same thing: What kind of interest do these people pursue?
You are allowed to do everything.
Cover of the SZ magazine for the ActOut campaign
Source: dpa
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What does it say about a society when a collective outing is turned against those involved?
Despite these behind-the-scenes debates, almost all of the other major media, from the “Bild” newspaper to “Spiegel”, praised the action as historic.
The shitstorm ignited a single text, a 70-line gloss.
The features head of the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", Sandra Kegel, expressed a fundamental mistrust of the desire for more visibility: the doors were already open, they only squeaked a little.
The heterosexual Scarlett Johansson is also not allowed to play a trans man, Ulrich Matthes has got all the roles of his life, Ulrike Folkerts suffers from overestimating himself.
The headline in the printed edition was "Sex".
Online: "Self-confidence and calculation".
She denied the actors the need for this public act by stating patronizingly: "To be passed over in a role may be annoying and certainly offensive, but it is not life-threatening."
The reactions were immediate.
But Kegel was not pilloried by ActOut - Bettina Hoppe, for example, rather expressed her disappointment with various factual errors, Heinrich Horwitz criticized the lack of solidarity.
The Lesbian and Gay Association Germany (LSVD), however, asked the SPD Fundamental Values Commission, chaired by Gesine Schwan, to take the journalist out of a planned digital event “Culture creates democracy”.
The social media machine set in motion, which is known to always go ad personam.
The gloss, undoubtedly worthy of criticism, was kicked in the bin with maximum force.
At the event, the situation finally escalated - and the journalist drew the red card: That was "Cancel Culture", with which she wanted nothing to do.
In fact, it is like this: Videos are now circulating on the Internet in which she is presented in a supposedly satirical form, old texts are unearthed, and she is exposed to defamation.
The publisher Helge Malchow compared the tone of the debate with a “Stalinist show trial”.
Since the beginning of the dispute, Kegel has been branded as new right, racist, homophobic, anti-emancipatory and, most recently, even anti-Semitic.
Anyone who knows her and her journalistic texts from the past twenty years knows that these labels are absurd.
She had equated sexual orientation (homosexuality by Ulrike Folkerts) with sexual identity (in relation to the trans role that Scarlett Johansson wanted and did not get).
It's like comparing apples to oranges, but not homophobic.
She speaks of having operated "ideology criticism" with her gloss.
Applied to people who are discriminated against because of their sexuality, it acts more in an environment in which opposites are constructed, efforts to achieve diversity such as in the Berlin Gorki Theater are brought against a supposed ideal of a "total society".
There was also talk of a “re-education of mass taste”.
There speak authors who are convinced that they represent society as a whole and who know how many representatives of disadvantaged minorities can be brought in - and when that is enough and the common good is endangered.
The classification in the field of "identity politics" is fatal for an action like ActOut.
The Jena sociologist Silke van Dyk once aptly described this shift: By reducing the movements to being hip expressions of aesthetic preferences, the existential dimension is being misunderstood.
The discussion was once again heated up after an actually simply conservative text by Wolfgang Thierse, former President of the Bundestag and SPD member.
But even he is now in the middle of a shit storm, he is denied any competence with the homicide argument as an old, white man.
He had expressed his "concern" in the face of increasing "identity politics".
The politician warns of an impending split in society: “The goal must rather be to be able to live the accepted diversity peacefully and productively.” Achieving this requires the willingness and ability to think one's own in relation to the common, the common good and to practice, that is, to relativize one's own, writes Thierse.
A suggestion that hardly anyone would contradict.
The violent reactions to Kegel and Thierse do not get us any further, but we should not forget the existentially important basic impulse of ActOut - because a democratic society is held together by belief in the common good of all.
The question of the hour is: How do we define the common good?
How do we fill the places?
And who determines who and what belongs to it if the basic principle of solidarity towards minorities no longer applies, if the need for change is not seen?
In any case, the concerns of queer people do not conflict with the needs of everyone else.
But on the contrary.