Digital Transgender Archive

Guide to the Douglas Conrad Eastern and Central European LGBT Interviews and Supporting Materials

Douglas Conrad was born July 25, 1958, in Omaha, Nebraska. Since the 1980s, he has served on several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and film arts organizations in the United States and Europe. Most notably, he helped coordinate several LGBT pride events and LGBT film festivals including many in Budapest. He has chronicled LGBT lives in Central and Eastern Europe since 1988. In 2007, he made Belgrade Pride, a short film about Belgrade's first LGBT pride celebration in 2001. He attributes his interest in LGBT people in Eastern and Central Europe to several events. In 1987 he served on the Northern California and San Francisco/Bay Area Steering Committees for the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Its slogan, “we are everywhere,” sparked his interest in the lives of LGBT people from other countries. His work for the 1988 San Francisco Freedom Day Parade and Celebration put him in contact with LGBT people from over 40 different countries, including Ilse Kornreich, founder of Argentina’s first lesbian organization. Kornreich told Conrad of a gay man who was kicked out of East Germany into West Germany for erecting a pink triangle in honor of holocaust victims. Though unsuccessful in finding the man, Conrad met other LGBT people whose stories he captured in a video archive he titled Shades of Red & Pink.

The collection consists of interviews and footage of events documenting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) life in Eastern and Central Europe from the 1992 to 2009. Interviews from the Shades of Red & Pink archives, Douglas' collective title for the project, and a small amount of printed material from the countries documented are included. Germany, Hungary, and Russia are particularly well documented.