Samuel Clowes Huneke and Hugh Ryan: Queer Histories in Fascism and the Nineties
Two historians in conversation: queer women's resistance in Nazi Germany and a personal history of queer life and AIDS-era activism in 1990s New York.
Why we picked this
Two very different registers of queer history — fascist Germany and New York in the nineties — in conversation, which makes the differences in visibility, survival strategy, and community formation unusually legible.
Samuel Clowes Huneke’s “I Will Not Abandon You” recovers the lives of queer women in Nazi Germany — a history that has been harder to document than the persecution of gay men, partly because lesbianism was not criminalized under the same laws, and partly because survival often required invisibility. The book traces how women navigated that terrain: the relationships they maintained, the networks they built, the strategies of concealment and occasional defiance they developed under a regime committed to their erasure.
Hugh Ryan’s “My Bad” operates in a very different register — a personal and historical account of queer life in New York in the 1990s, a decade defined by the AIDS crisis, the emergence of ACT UP, and a generation coming into political and cultural identity under conditions of both liberation and catastrophe. Ryan’s approach is more explicitly autobiographical, weaving his own experience into a broader account of what that decade made possible and what it cost.
The pairing is deliberate and productive: two historians, two periods, two very different forms of queer survival. Free at Politics and Prose.