The Church, the Stasi, and socialist integration: three stages of lesbian and gay emancipation in the former German Democratic Republic.

Organized groups of homosexuals began forming in the East German Protestant Church beginning in 1982. They constituted a rapidly spreading nucleus for a lesbian and gay emancipation movement. As such, they were viewed with suspicion by the state security apparatus which heavily infiltrated them. As an attempt to out maneuver the church groups and raise political capital, the East German state by the last years of its existence in the late eighties embarked on a program of tolerance and integration of homosexuals into socialist society.