Openly Gay Politicians
As of October 2009, there are several prominent German politicians who are openly gay. Among them are Berlin's mayor Klaus Wowereit (from the Social Democratic Party, having outed himself with the famous words "Ich bin schwul – und das ist auch gut so!" ), Volker Beck and Gerhard Schick (from the Green Party), Johannes Kahrs (from the Social Democratic Party), Stefan Kaufmann (from the Christian Democratic Union), Michael Kauch and Guido Westerwelle, the current Foreign Minister and former head of the liberal Free Democratic Party. In addition, Hamburg's former mayor Ole von Beust (Christian Democratic Union) didn't deny anything when his father outed him but considered it private matter. After leaving office he began talking about his homosexuality. In July 2007, Karin Wolff, then Minister of Education for Hesse, came out as a lesbian.
Read more about this topic: LGBT In Germany
Famous quotes containing the words openly gay, openly, gay and/or politicians:
“You can feel it, in a hundred little ways year after year. It is so certain and inevitable, that the next century will be a time in which it is not simply safe, but commonplace, to be openly gay.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“You can feel it, in a hundred little ways year after year. It is so certain and inevitable, that the next century will be a time in which it is not simply safe, but commonplace, to be openly gay.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)