Eduard Stapel

Eduard Stapel, known as Eddi, grew up in Bismark in the Altmark region of East Germany. He studied journalism in Leipzig and then Protestant theology. He wanted to become a pastor, but the church refused to ordain him because he was openly gay and campaigned for gay rights. He refused a bishop’s offer of an exception that was not to become a precedent: either everyone or no one.

In 1982 he co-founded the first “Homosexuality Working Group” at the Protestant student congregation in Leipzig. Homosexuality was no longer a crime in the GDR, but there was no space for gay people to organise. The churches offered that space. Stapel travelled the country and helped set up further groups; by the end of the GDR there were working groups in more than twenty cities. From 1985 he coordinated them from Magdeburg.

The Stasi regarded him as the “main organiser” of an independent gay civil rights movement and set dozens of full-time officers and hundreds of informers on the groups. Their goal was to break them down. The groups nevertheless formulated demands that sounded utopian at the time: to marry, to adopt children and to live as equals.

In February 1990 Stapel co-founded the Gay Association in the GDR in Leipzig, from which today’s Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany (LSVD) emerged; he was its spokesman until 2006. Later he was a Green politician and from 2011 mayor of his hometown. He died there in 2017, aged 64, a few weeks after the Bundestag opened marriage to all.