Door of Club Café Werner Anonymous, n. y.

On the Way to Equal Rights

Until 1971, homosexuality was punished with incarceration as “sodomy”. Already at that time, there was a venue in Reitschulgasse 20 with mainly homosexual male guests. Run by Werner and Peter, the Club Café Werner was a fixed element of gay-lesbian subculture from 1979 to 1997. Even in the late 1980s, you had to ring the doorbell and wait in front of the locked door until you were let in. Only as recently as 2002, homosexuality disappeared from criminal law as a separate article (with 18 as the minimum age for men). Same-sex partnerships were acknowledged and treated equally in 2010 and eventually, in 2019, “marriage for all” followed.