How can liberal societies constantly talk about saving queer individuals from the yoke of oppressive regimes abroad and yet diabolise the same migrants once they have crossed the borders of the nation-state or transitioned from the “illiberal” world to “the west”. This working paper argues that this is not a paradox per se. It investigates ways in which borders are conceptualised inside the liberal script and reproduced in the dominant parts of society (Dominanzgesellschaft). It also underlines how processes of “doing borders” are entangled with liberal conceptualisations of time, highlighting how crossing borders is simultaneously a geographical and temporal endeavour. The paper uses the Federal Republic of Germany as a prism and analyses “othering” processes at the core of the liberal script, focusing on the queer community in Germany since the 1970s.