Gay in Uniform - From Fetish to the Affairs of Prussian Officers

The Fetish: Why Uniforms Excite Gay Men

There is hardly any garment in gay subculture that is as consistently erotically charged as the uniform. Not despite its meaning – but because of it. The uniform stands for hierarchy, command and obedience, for power and submission, for the man who shows discipline outwardly and hides something underneath. This is precisely the core of the fetish: the forbidden behind the façade.

In the gay leather and uniform scene, this fetish has had fixed organizational structures since the 1970s. Clubs and associations first emerged in San Francisco and Amsterdam, later in Berlin and other European cities. The best-known international association is BLUF – Breeches and Leather Uniform Fetish, a worldwide organization of gay men who live out uniforms and leather as an erotic and cultural expression. BLUF has members in dozens of countries, including Germany, and organizes meetings, rides, and events.

The uniform fetish is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a part of gay culture that combines power and desire – and has deep historical roots, even if these roots were long kept secret.

Prussia: The Silence Behind the Discipline

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The Prussian military was one of the most disciplined, harsh, and strictly hierarchically organized institutions in European history. It was also a world exclusively among men – barracks, campaigns, officers' mess, sleeping quarters. Forced proximity, absolute dependence, clear power dynamics. What emerged there was consistently suppressed by official historiography.

Sodomy – the term used to criminalize sex between men – was severely punished in Prussia. And yet: reality was different. Desire cannot be abolished by decree.

The best-known and most tragic example is the most famous of all: Frederick the Great. As a young man, he loved Hans Hermann von Katte, an officer, his closest confidant. When the two tried to flee Prussia together, Frederick William I – Frederick's father – had von Katte arrested and executed. Frederick was forced to witness the execution of his lover. He was twenty years old.

Frederick later became king. He led Prussia to military greatness, wrote philosophy, corresponded with Voltaire – and, as far as is known, never again lived in a close emotional bond with a woman. What he was, he never spoke of. History, however, did not completely conceal it.

He was not the only one. In the barracks, in the officers' messes, on campaigns – everywhere men were among themselves for months, what happens when people live close together emerged: affection, desire, love. Sometimes also power and abuse. The Prussian army never documented this. It lived it and kept silent.

The Reckoning: Gay Men in Prussian Uniform

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The self-image of the Prussian army was clear: toughness, discipline, masculinity – a specific kind of masculinity that categorically excluded weakness, softness, and desire for other men. This self-image was the foundation of a militarism that shaped Germany up to the Second World War and cost millions of lives.

Two men in Prussian uniforms, desiring each other, loving each other, surrendering to each other – this is not a homage to this militarism. It is its dismantling. It is a provocative attack against the self-image of this army, a reckoning with Prussian-German militarism that was built on a lie: the lie that the men who wore these uniforms were as the uniform was supposed to portray them.

They weren't. They were people. Some of them loved other men. And that's what we show.

The Images: What the Army Was Never Allowed to Show

Our History Collection shows gay men in historical uniforms – in moments of intimacy, desire, surrender. These images do not exist as a glorification of militarism. They exist as its opposite: as proof that what this institution feared most was always within it.

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