The Surveillance of Subcultures: Gay Spies, Everyday Life, and Cold War Intelligence in Divided Berlin.

This article examines the recruitment of gay men by intelligence agencies in Cold War Berlin, focusing on the case of Joachim L., a gay East Berliner informant for the East German secret police (Stasi) in the early 1960s. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that surveillance of queer populations was solely disciplinary and repressive, the Stasi valued Joachim’s access to Berlin’s opaque, class-crossing gay subculture as a source of intelligence unrelated to sexuality itself. The article highlights a complex dynamic in which criminal police sought to suppress homosexuality while intelligence agencies exploited the same subculture permissively for espionage purposes, revealing limitations in Foucauldian models of surveillance. Ultimately, the study suggests that Cold War security states operated through multiple, sometimes conflicting logics of surveillance, with marginalized communities both targeted and instrumentalized in intelligence gathering, complicating traditional understandings of state power and queer life under surveillance.