Manfred Bruns

Bruns was born in 1934, in Linz am Rhein in Rhineland-Palatinate, and was brought up in a conservative Catholic household.[4] For years he concealed the possibility he might be gay.[4] In 1961, he got married and had three children.[4] Bruns worked as a prosecutor at West Germany's Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe.[4] He came out to his family in the early 1980s, and then to his work[5] He never initiated divorce proceedings with his wife.[4]

In 1985, he came out on live TV when he appeared on a TV show to talk about the subject of homosexuality.[4] The show's host inquired about his relationship with his wife, making an implication there was a "special arrangement" with her.[4] After he came out on the show, it was a turning point that helped to define Germany's political gay and lesbian movement.[4]

From then on, Bruns was determined to eliminate "paragraph 175", that was defined by law as "unnatural sexual offenses" between two men.[5] Together with Volker Beck and Günter Dworek, they worked to eradicate the so called gay paragraph, which could imprison men to a possible sentence of six months in prison.[5] The arcane law was established in 1871, under the German command.[5] When the Nazis were in power, paragraph 175 was strictly enforced.[4] On July 11, 1994, the paragraph was finally struck down.[4]

In 1994 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class, and in 2002, he received the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal.[6][5]