CHR Book Launch: "I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany" by Samuel Clowes Huneke
A conversation moderated by Rachel Jones
Friday, April 3, 2026 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM EDT
Hybrid- Horizon Hall 6325 and Zoom
Please join us for a CHR Book Launch!
I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany by Samuel Clowes Huneke
A conversation moderated by Rachel Jones
Registration required for virtual attendees
I Will Not Abandon You brings to life the experiences of queer women in fascist Germany. In his latest book, Samuel Huneke shows how love, queer resistance, and collective action survived under Nazi rule. Drawing on a decade of archival research, Huneke takes readers into a hidden world, from the wartime balls that lesbian activists continued to organize to the concentration camps where women accused of loving women were imprisoned. Following a diverse cast of characters, Huneke reveals both the oppression that queer women faced and how they resisted fascism in solidarity with one another. Arguing that this solidarity – which transcended race, class, and gender – offers a compelling alternative to today’s fractured identity politics, I Will Not Abandon You is a new history of queer life under fascism and a call to rethink the foundations of progressive politics today.
Samuel Clowes Huneke is a historian of modern Germany and associate professor of history at George Mason University. He is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), A Queer Theory of the State (2023), and I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026) as well as the co-editor of Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe (2025). He is currently at work on a new book titled Queer: A History of the World.
Rachel Jones is associate professor of Philosophy and program faculty in Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. She is the author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy (2012). Her current project, supported by a CHR Faculty Fellowship in 2024, deploys Kant's essays on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake as a lever to rethink relations between sexual difference, race, materiality, and the concept of the human.
