Acknowledgments
Matthias Freihof and Dirk Kummer generously met with me multiple times to talk about their experiences in the GDR and with Coming Out. I thank the following individuals for their parts in helping me find information or moving the project along: at the DEFA-Stiftung Barbara Barlet and Gudrun Scherp; at the DEFA Film Library Hiltrud Schulz and Skyler Arndt-Briggs. Thanks to support from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Arts, I have worked with several invaluable research assistants: Jonathan Allen, Steve Commichau, Morris Ho, Olga Holin, and Anna Westpfahl. Helena Kudzia helped with a Polish translation. I appreciate the exchanges about this film I have had with many colleagues, including Katherine Bowers, Stephen Guy-Bray, Sebastian Heiduschke, Ilinca Iuraşcu, Gregory Mackie, Ervin Malakaj, Vin Nardizzi, Alessandra Santos, and Evan Torner. Finally, I am grateful for the support from Chris Beaubien, who has watched Coming Out with me numerous times and is always generously eager to hear about my discoveries.
Parts of this book appeared in different form in “The East German Film Coming Out (1989) as Melancholic Reflection and Hopeful Projection,” German Life and Letters 71, no. 4 (2018): 452–72, and “Persistent Ambivalence: Theorizing Queer East German Studies,” Journal of Homosexuality 66, no. 5 (2019): 669–89.
The book’s cover image appears by permission © DEFA-Stiftung/Martin Schlesinger.
This book draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The open access version of this book is made possible by the UBC Open Access Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Research.