I first encountered Manfred on the blanched walls of the Berlinische Galerie during its 2008 retrospective on the photography of Herbert Tobias. There was some thing captivating about the photo. A friend thought so, too, for he quickly bought a copy of it to pin on a corkboard in the loo of his London apartment. This is ironic in so many ways, not least because this photo of Manfred, crisply displayed on page 241 of the gallery's exhibition catalogue, actually began its life as an artful expression of a random meet-up in the streets of West Berlin in the middle 1950s. 1 Manfred was a rent boy, one of Tobias's many pickups from the bars, train stations, and tea rooms of the divided city. This trophy photo, immortalized in the exhibition as high art, began its life as a stylized token of that erotic adventure, a personal archiving of one night's bliss. That it would grace my friend's bathroom wall is itself amusing, since it was there that his own friends and lovers encountered the photo, bringing the history of queer desire full circle. A short time later, after some digging, I learned more about Manfred—not from Tobias's extant private papers, but from the pages of a 1970s men's magazine published in Hamburg on the heels of the 1969 decrim inalization of Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which for close to a cen tury outlawed same-sex acts between consenting adult men. The concomitant re laxation of censorship statutes allowed Hamburg chronicler Hans Eppendorfer to