Queer and a Refugee in Germany
Germany serves as a haven for gay people all around the world, and refugees hope to claim it as their new home — most wanting to settle in Berlin.
By Richelle Boyd
Asha E., a 37-year-old HIV researcher and activist, came to Germany in November 2019 to study for a course in practical biology and neuroscience. While studying here, he got a call from his mother: the Iranian authorities believed he was gay and had raided his apartment.
They took his laptop, something that showed messages with LGBTQ+ activists and private photos he had saved and shared with men he was dating.
“I understood it would be dangerous if I came back,” Asha said, who spoke on a Zoom call from an apartment in Düsseldorf. He asked that his full name not be used to protect his identity. “Sometimes in my country when something bad like this happens you can wait and ignore it. But I knew for me there was no way.”
Much as he missed home, Asha felt he had no choice but to seek asylum in Germany.
Germany grants refugee status to people who face persecution for their sexual identity in their home countries or are up against significant risk. But it is not easy. They must supply proof that they could suffer degrading acts or punishments, or even a risk to their lives if they return home.
Along with others fleeing war, political persecution, and threats of violence or death, many gay people seek asylum in relatively tolerant Germany. For the moment, most are coming from Georgia, the Middle East, and in previous years Africa and Russia according to Berlin’s State Office for Refugee Affairs.
Under the Iranian criminal code, same-sex sexual activity is prohibited and violators can be subject to the death penalty. According to Human Dignity Trust, a human rights group, there have been four men legally put to death for homosexual acts in the past two years.
“I never spoke about the people I talked to or what I was doing with my family,” Asha said. “When my father was questioned by police and told me they knew the activists’ names, it felt like the end of my life.”
Asha began to search for ways to stay, looking online and finding that going through the asylum process would keep him in Germany and safe. He then joined fellow asylum seekers in a refugee shelter housing Iranians.
At the shelter, he felt isolated and ostracized, not speaking German. He often overheard homophobic comments. At another location, he got in contact with organizations that help gay refugees and they informed him that he could get extra help if he was vocal about being gay.
Though Asha had so far presented himself as straight through his refugee process, he finally told officers he was gay. This allowed him to be sent to a camp with only women, children and other gay men, away from those who raised threats towards him.
After two years, he was refused asylum by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Court officers told him that he didn’t “seem gay” when he arrived in the shelters, and that he would have to prove that he is.
But Asha has not lost hope in the German asylum system, even after his application was denied. “I believe that this system will work,” Asha said. “Because I believe it’s not like my country where they will just shut you up and make you silent.”
Other refugees have a similar hope, looking to Germany for safety and acceptance. Some conservative-leaning cities can still have a homophobic culture, but cities like Berlin offer a gateway to acceptance. Berlin provides ample resources for people who are queer, and the state government runs two refugees hostels specifically for LGBTQ+ claimants.
One local resource is MILES, which helps refugees find safe spaces to live, provides psychological and legal counseling, and helps queer people seeking refuge through the court system.
Berlin is a favored location for queer refugees, according to 27-year-old Lucina Akintaya, project manager for a mentoring program run by MILES.
“I think many people are coming to Berlin because they are looking for a more diverse place,” she said.
Projects and resource centers have also popped up in other parts of Germany offering counseling, lawyers, and community support such as cafés and groups associated with the Lesbian and Gay Association.
Their brochures are found in refugee camps, where many gay people are placed with no regards to their personal identities. They are often too afraid to speak about their sexuality and gender identity in fear of violence from people from their country of origin. They also fear discrimination from the migration officers in the camps.
The steps needed to obtain asylum are confusing and long, even more so with the court system now flooded with incoming Ukrainian and Russian refugees. Though being part of the LGBTQ+ community does allow special consideration for refugee status, it doesn’t make the process any easier.
Ahmed, 43, who worked in information technology in Egypt, came to Germany in 2017 following a series of arrests at a rock concert in Cairo in September of that year. Ahmed, who wishes to be known only by this name for his protection, came to Germany to raise awareness about his home countries’ persecution of gay people and to seek asylum, based on these arrests.
A country such as Egypt has no law that overtly criminalizes homosexuality. It uses a back-door charge of prostitution to persecute gay people, which can then lead to jail time of up to 14 years.
Ahmed recalls ways police would entrap gay men for prosecution. “A police officer creates a fake profile on a gay dating app, and when you go to meet up with him, he arrests you,” Ahmed said. “To prove the accusation, if you have 200 pounds in your pocket, they’ll say you were doing prostitution.”
Countries in Africa and Eastern Europe have the harshest outcomes for queer people, with criminal codes calling for prison terms and a few with the death penalty —including Mauritania, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Even in countries with no specific law against homosexuality, the attitudes of local people could lead to violence or death.
This is something the Federal Office for Migration looks at when granting asylum. But making sure workers will not be biased against gay claimants is something the system has been working to improve over the past five years.
The Lesbian and Gay Association provide workshops for officers, in which people like project creator Lilith Raza teach staff how to be understanding — or at least tolerant — of queer people in camps.
Raza has trained over 1600 workers in the past five years over the course of almost 300 workshops through her project Queer Refugees Deutschland.
Raza says court officers are not necessarily sympathetic to gay people, and some cannot understand the reasons the refugee claimants hide their gay identities.
“They have lived their entire life under the fear that once they accept their homosexuality and talk about it openly, they might get killed. How do you expect that?”
Raising awareness among Germans about communities they may be unfamiliar with is something that Raza believes will help ease the process. And workshops to educate migration officers are key.
“You need to have four hours to discuss this because a lot of the participants even have no clue what transgender means,” said Patrick Dörr, co-founder of Queer Refugees Deutschland. “Or more complex questions, like what’s the difference between transsexual and intersex? All these questions need to be asked and answered.”
In addition to training, Queer Refugees Deutschland provides interpreters, literature with its contact information, and help throughout the entire process of seeking asylum.
The group receives funding from the federal government and still lobbies for more to be done for the LGBTQ+ community. Refugees are the highest priority and Queer Refugees Deutschland says change is on the horizon, with promises from the German government that it will improve guidelines for queer asylum.
A broad interpretation of the asylum law is what has prompted so many gay people to make their way to Germany in hopes of finding a more accepting environment. Even more than getting into the country, queer refugees want to make their way to Berlin, a city known for its long history of tolerance and acceptance of queer culture.
As early as 1896, Berlin saw the first gay magazine published, which ran until the Nazis closed it down in 1932. The first-ever gay rights demonstration took place in Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz in 1922 and ten years later the film Girls In Uniform premiered, one of the first positive lesbian portrayals in cinema.
The Nazi period ushered in severe persecution of LGBTQ+ individuals, who were forced to wear pink triangles and sent to concentration camps. As many as 15,000 men were murdered by the Nazis for being gay. Although gay victims of Nazism were overlooked in the years after World War II, A “pink triangle” plaque has been displayed outside the Nollendorfplatz subway station since 1982 and a larger monument memorializing the homosexual victims of Nazism was installed in the Tiergarten park in 2008.
In the former East Germany, a celebrated transgender woman known as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf lived openly under Communism and started a museum of every day artifacts in 1960 that from 1970 became a meeting place for the East Berlin gay community. The East German government attempted to take over the museum but eventually relented.
In West Germany, a law making homosexual acts a crime was finally abolished in 1968 and Schwuz, the city’s largest queer club, opened 1977. In post-unification Germany, equal rights laws for those in civil unions were passed in 2001 and 2013 and parents can register intersex infants as ‘third gender’ on their birth certificates. The city’s Schwules museum has a major archive and a just opened a new exhibition documenting riots at an LGBTQ+ squat in eastern Berlin after German unification in 1990.
Protecting gay people, as well as connecting gay people with the community is an essential part of Berlin’s queer culture, says Lucina Akintaya, 27, project manager at MILES. The mentoring program she runs from her Berlin office that has currently connected more than 120 people in mentor and mentee fashion to help refugees settle into their lives in Berlin.
A large challenge facing refugees is housing in a city with quickly rising rents. “Sometimes they can come with specific questions, or they need very quick housing. Housing is a big topic, it’s hard to find in Berlin,” Akintaya said. “But sometimes we’re lucky and we’ll get a call from someone who wants to rent out their flat for cheaper and give it to people who need it the most.”
Non-governmental aid to LGBTQ+ refugees goes beyond MILES since other
umbrella groups seek to help refugees when and where they can. An online activist group called voices4berlin regularly tries to support refugees and give them connections when they can.
An offshoot of the original voices4 movement started in New York, the group hopes to support and uplift queer people, organizations, and movements in Berlin. “Queer people anywhere are responsible for queer people everywhere,” said Adam Ely, creator of voices4.
Some refugees, like Ahmed who was placed in Düsseldorf, wish they could have been placed in the capital. “I don’t get to choose where I live,” Ahmed said. “It’s a beautiful wish; I would choose Berlin but I can’t.”
Now, as hundreds of thousands of new refugees have just arrived, activists are urging people to write letters to their members of parliament, encouraging officials to believe refugee claimants who say they are in danger, and educating the public to better understand why queer refugees come to Germany in the first place.
“Push the queer political agenda,” said Lilith Raza of Queer Refugees Deutschland.
They and an array of organizations, refugees, and supporters are urging Germans to be more compassionate. This, they say, will raise tolerance in an asylum claim system that questions them and often doesn’t trust their testimony, only isolating refugees more at a time when they want to feel accepted somewhere.
“I told myself that I was so unlucky,” said Asha, the Iranian researcher whose application was denied.
He is still hoping to get asylum in Germany and eagerly awaits an appointment for a court date. “I don’t know if it was genetics or my nature or whatever that made me gay. I even have problems. In Iran I should hide myself, I should pretend to be straight. Here, they don’t believe me.”
Compared to other countries, it may appear that Germany’s migration office gives special consideration to queer people. But a more welcoming environment is still needed going forward, according to Asha.
“I hope I can get a court date quickly,” he said. “Because it is really tough to be in a place that’s supposed to be accepting and welcoming, but it doesn’t feel that way.”
Richelle Boyd is going into her fourth year in English and Journalism at UC Santa Barbara, and is reporting from Berlin this summer.
