It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives

In tribute to the late queer filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, who passed away in late 2025, the išgirsti Queer Archive, Kreivės Queer Festival and the Goethe Institute are screening the auteur’s most significant film. The first screening is a part of the Deep Rivers Run Silent programme, coordinated by Meno avilys.

Released in 1971, It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives shook Germany in a similar manner as the 1969 Stonewall riots shook the US, the instigating event of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. This film, too, was a call for the community to organise and defend their rights. The story follows a young man who comes to the 1960s Berlin and is lured by the big-city gay scene, fashion and sex. Alongside its radicalism and utopian vision, the film presents a sociological argument and critique of the isolated and self-isolating homosexual community of the time.

Latvian-born Rosa von Praunheim was a German documentary filmmaker who is still relatively little-known in Lithuania. Like his contemporaries of the so-called New German Cinema, von Praunheim sought to shake the postwar West German society with his films, to raise political and social issues, to change as well as to show reality. His body of work includes over 150 films, five of which were screened by Kreivės Queer Festival in 2016 in the retrospective programme Rosa von Praunheim. Activisms.