In Europe, the first demonstration was held in November 1970 as a torchlight procession with 80 participants in London. Two years later, when about 2,000 people moved through Oxford Street to Hyde Park, it was first called the Gay Pride March. In Germany in 1969, with the amendment to Section 175, the total ban on homosexual acts fell. In 1971 the provocative film Not the homosexual is perverse, but the situation in which it lives was premiered and first broadcast on television in January 1972, among other things against the will of the Hamburg branch of the IHWO (International Homophile World Organization - Group Northern Germany eV) who feared more harm than good because of the image of male homosexuals shown therein. Homosexuals were still being treated psychiatrically, one had to fear for one's job and there was initially strong criticism of the commercial subculture from the new movement, whose bars usually only allowed admission after the doorbell. It has been described as a commercial sex ghetto, where "the petty bourgeois who are willing to adapt willingly allow themselves to be reduced to the sexual, become incapable of conversation, lose emotion and communication and behave repressively towards themselves with pleasure, although the oppression of society has long since lost its effectiveness." Praunheim therefore said: “The situation that drives gays in clubs and saunas is the schizophrenic subculture.” Many only had brief sex experiences, for example on their hatches, and hid during the day.
