On the Origins of Queer Islamophobia in Germany: from Sex Tourism to Queer Fascism in The Color of Desire

Christopher Ewing

The evening of July 25, 2026, a van drove into Berlin’s Christopher Street Day pride festival, killing a woman visiting from Poland with her daughter and injuring at least 29 more. When news broke that the alleged attacker, Abdul Ballout, had ties to Berlin’s “Islamist scene,” reactions swiftly turned toward a facile prosecution of Islam in Germany. Members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party used the attack to argue that “Islam does not fit into a tolerant, colorful, cosmopolitan society,” smugly suggesting that the “migration fetishists” of the political left were reaping what they had sowed. Jan Feddersen, for the left-leaning die tageszeitung, similarly lambasted the left for being blinded by “fear of suspicion of racism,” while Ulf Poschardt, for the more conservative Die Welt, not-so-subtly suggested that “homophobic and anti-Semitic” migrants should leave Germany. Meanwhile, Family Minister Karin Prien of Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats promised that the queer community could rely on the federal government while simultaneously revoking funding for small-town prides. The political opportunism reeks. It is also not terribly new. On the contrary, such accusations represent the latest in a carefully crafted political formulation: that immigration threatens queer Germans because Muslims are homophobic.

Yet, when we jump back to the heady days of gay liberation, such a claim would have made no sense in the Federal Republic of Germany. Or anywhere else for that matter. How did this claim, billed as common sense in the present day, emerge? And, how did queer people of color resist its racist overtones in a white-led movement? My book, The Color of Desire, answers these questions together. In long form: The internationalization of West German queer politics – never itself a unified movement – combined with expressions of racialized desire to drive new political calculations about race. However, queer people of color, led first by Black and minority lesbian feminists, contested white racisms and created new political opportunities. Far from discrete political trajectories, they were deeply interconnected as activists worked with and against each other to build new worlds. In short: it was messy, and it has more to do with sex than we might think.

Queer fascism started with sex tourism. For decades, Morocco, and to a lesser extent Algeria and Tunisia, served as exciting destinations for European same-sex desiring men. A liberal colonial legal code mingled with Orientalist fantasies of sexual perversity to entice West German men to Tangier, Casablanca, or Tunis. Even after independent Morocco introduced an anti-sodomy statute in 1962, followed by Algeria in 1966, the effects were felt only slowly, such that West German men could write about libidinous experiences in the world of West Germany’s expanding 1970s gay press.

The 1979 Iranian revolution fundamentally reoriented international queer politics, including in West Germany. Reports of executions of alleged homosexuals in the new Islamic Republic triggered a wave of pan-European, coordinated action, and offered a new way to explain previously confusing reports of arrests of same-sex desiring men, or men soliciting commercial sex, across North Africa. International gay guides like Spartacus warned travelers to be careful when traveling to predominantly Muslim countries, while West German gay and lesbian magazines reported on the rise of Islamic terror.

The AIDS crisis domesticated panic about Islam in a roundabout way. During the crisis years, political gays and lesbians built new infrastructure – hotlines, switchboards, counseling centers – and entered parliamentary politics, above all through the Greens. In the early 1990s, these networks became critical to fact finding on a reported rise in violence against queer and trans people. When hotlines, first in Berlin, began to report that “foreigners” were disproportionately represented in perpetrator data, some queer activists and their legislative allies were swift to explain in the terms of the Iranian revolution: Muslim homophobes were hunting down gays, now at home rather than abroad.

So how do we make sense of this reversal? Contemporary German history is also replete with queer of color activism that offers both a counterpoint to and a set of analytical tools to unpack white racisms, queer and not. Drawing inspiration and support from Audre Lorde, who arrived in Berlin in 1984, Black queer and feminist Germans began to organize in West Berlin, then across the Federal Republic and internationally. Together they criticized the exclusion of people of color from white feminist spaces and built coalitions with other minoritized groups. These were crucial to untangling the mechanics of racism in a Germany that had completely disavowed “race” or Rasse as an official category in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Subsequent organizations in the 1990s and 2000s, like Schwule International, Gays and Lesbians aus der Turkei, and LesMigraS took a non-essentialist approach to race. They identified the cultural bases of racial exclusion, through which Islam and German identity were rendered incompatible. For some white queer activists and commentators, this was refracted through sexuality, such that queer desire and adherence to Islam were incommensurable.

However, queer articulations of white German racism are not explainable through (just) fabrication. It does seem likely that the Christopher Street Day culprit had Islamist ties. Data from the 1990s did indicate that anywhere from 30-50 percent of reported perpetrators were “foreign.” Iran executed same-sex desiring men, and Morocco instituted an anti-sodomy statute in 1962.

The answer is instead racial assumption. The legal landscape of postcolonial North Africa was incredibly complex. The definition of “sodomy” varied across states and legal cultures, and its penalty was a secular invention – nowhere in any preexisting Islamic jurisprudence are three years prison the prescribed punishment for sex between men. The Iranian penal code did not distinguish between non-consensual and consensual sex between men or reflect the reality of sex and gender systems. The 1990s Berlin data was based entirely on whether victims thought their attackers were in some way “foreign,” while rates of non-reporting were estimated at around 80-90 percent. Finally, that a man with Islamist ties allegedly murdered a woman says very little about the attitudes of diverse communities of Muslims in Germany, citizens and not, whose approach to sexuality, is much more likely to be personal and contextual than it is to be murderous.

Nevertheless, Islamic organizations were called upon to defend their religion. “As Imams we cannot emphasize enough: terror, hate, and violence have no religious justification whatsoever,” declared the Council of Berlin Imams. Unfortunately, the Council is correct. For opportunists on the political right, for pan-European “advocacy” groups using the Berlin attack to tout “remigration,” and for the gay man I passed last week in Schöneberg muttering “remigration today” under his breath, the point can never be emphasized enough.

Christopher Ewing is Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University working on the history of race, sexuality, and crime in Germany and Europe. In addition to The Color of Desire, his work has appeared in Rethinking History, Central European History, and Journal of the History of Sexuality, as well as Time, The Conversation, and The Washington Post. Together with Sébastien Tremblay, he co-edited Reading Queer Media in the German Speaking World (Palgrave 2025). He is currently working on a new project on the transnational history of hate crime in the 1990s.