I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany

Dr Samuel Clowes Huneke (George Mason University)

Thursday 5 March, 11am to 12.30pm

Geoffrey Manton, room 229

Sam will discuss his soon to be published book I Will Not Abandon You. The book brings to life the unrelenting defiance of queer women in fascist Germany, showing how love, queer resistance, and collective action survived in the harrowing circumstances of Nazi rule. Drawing on a decade of archival research, the book takes readers into a hidden world, from the wartime balls that lesbian activists continued to organize to the concentration camps where women accused of loving women were imprisoned. Following a diverse cast of characters, it reveals both the oppression that queer women faced and how they resisted fascism in solidarity with one another. Arguing that this solidarity – which transcended race, class, and gender – offers a compelling alternative to today’s fractured identity politics, I Will Not Abandon You is a new history of queer life under fascism and a call to rethink the foundations of progressive politics today.

Samuel Clowes Huneke is associate professor of history at George Mason University. A historian of modern Germany, he is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), A Queer Theory of the State (2023), and I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026) as well as the co-editor of Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe (2025). He is presently at work on a new book, tentatively titled Queer: A History of the World.

All welcome and no need to book.