Queer history should not always be about the fear and the disgust of straight, cisgender societies. It can be inspiring to learn about not only the existence but also the flourishing of queer lives that came before ours. Post-WWI Germany was one of those times, serving as a haven for the queer community as late as 1933. Berlin before the Nazi rise to power was known as the “homosexual capital of Europe,” according to historian Sarah Cushman, with a thriving nightlife. There were so many gay establishments that some clubs even catered to different sects of the community and had nights for gay women to socialize. Magnus Hirschfield, a personal hero, was able to set up and run the “Institut für Sexualwissenschaft” (alternatively translated as “sexology,” “sex research,” or “science of sexuality”) for over twenty years to try to compile research and advocate for not just gay and trans rights, but also for contraception, sexual education, and women’s emancipation. There were multiple openly queer publications such as Der Eigene, for men, and “The Girlfriends” or Die Freundin, for women. Despite its complex social networks, it only took four years to erase the progress that LGBTQIA+ Germans made and send them to either hide or die.
Legal persecution built slowly but steadily, primarily by a widening of the legal definition of illicit homosexual acts. It began with a revision by the Ministry of Justice on the statue criminalizing homosexuality (Paragraph 175) by expanding the category of “criminally indecent activities.” Before the revision, a conviction required that police prove the occurrence of either anal, oral, or intercrural sex between men, as historian Geoffrey Giles outlines in his book Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Once the phrase “An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex” was changed to “A male who commits a sex offense with another male,” Giles explains, actions such as kissing, love letter writing, and mutual masturbation became crimes. The courts were given leeway in the prosecution of queer Germans because a “sex offense” was not legally defined. For an understanding of the prevailing attitude of the legal system, however, we know that the other statue that could be applied, “criminal indecency,” was broadly defined as defying “public morality” or “arous[ing] sexual desires in oneself or strangers.” An untoward glance between men in public is punishable by these standards. By 1937, there were no places left in Germany that were legally hospitable to assigned male at birth (amab) queer people. An estimated 50,000 to 64,000 amab prisoners were interned in the camps for being convicted under Paragraph 175, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The treatment of amab queer people—both gay or bisexual men and trans women, as they were convicted under the same laws—is horrifying. The statistics alone would have been bad enough: a study by German LGBT scholar Rüdiger Lautmann found they died in camps at a rate of 60 percent—the highest of any non-Jewish population interned—and were brutally murdered by prisoners as well as guards for sport along with their own planned extermination through hard labor. Unlike many other social groups, however, most “pink triangle” prisoners were not freed when the camps were liberated but instead directly transferred to regular jails; they were freed from the trauma of labor camp and conversion therapy, complete with “medical” experimentation and forced heterosexual encounters, only to be imprisoned once again for the same consensual sexual acts. Nazi homosexuality laws were maintained until 1968 for East Germans and 1969 for West Germans; in other words, no queer Holocaust survivors were decriminalized until over twenty years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Even after 1969, though, there were still Holocaust survivors who had not been decriminalized under the legislative reform since the laws only legalized actions of men over the age of twenty one. Germany did not issue an apology until the 1990s and the “homosexual” prisoners who were still alive did not receive reparations until 2017. Paragraph 175 was not removed from the law until 1994.
It is even more difficult to ascertain the experience of queer assigned female at birth (afab) people—lesbian or bisexual women and trans men grouped together for the same reasons as above—during that period since “female homosexuality” was not systematically criminalized in the same way as “male homosexuality.” If a queer afab person drew too much attention from the state, they were labelled by the Nazis as “asocial” internees and only sometimes were noted as “lesbians” during the process. This does not mean, however, that afab queer people avoided the Nazi persecution of LGBTQIA+ people or were unburdened by the conservative shift in politics. As is often the case with the history, the persecution of queer people is usually framed by what happened to men, with little interest in understanding history from the perspective of women and non-binary folks. I have come across a single historian that focuses on afab concentration camp prisoners, Sarah Helm, who worked with survivors of the Ravensbrück camp. The stories that are recorded compensate for their scarcity with their tragedy: many were forced to work in camp brothels and birth children who would then die of starvation.
Despite the numerous historical sources that detail the suffering of queer afab people during this time, including memoirs like The Men With the Pink Triangle (Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel), written by a male survivor of Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg forced to have sex with lesbians as “therapy,” these stories are often glossed over. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, ends their article on “Lesbians and the Third Reich” appearing to blame those who suffered for their identity by saying that the ones who “were willing to be discreet and inconspicuous, marry male friends, or otherwise seem to conform” often “survived.” This presumably means that they avoided internment in concentration camps, but the article ignores the traumatic aspects of losing one’s friends and lovers, entrapping oneself in a heterosexual marriage, and working to avoid being “outed” for fear of death. It does not diminish the other atrocities of the Holocaust to also acknowledge the dangers that LGBTQIA+ afab people navigated as a targeted but simultaneously unrecognized group.
Despite my desire to focus on queer history as a source of joy, I think it is important to remember these events not solely for the human suffering, but also as a warning. The history of LGBTQIA+ people during the Nazi Germany period holds power beyond the tragedy of individual suffering because we do not live in a world incomparable to that of these victims. In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is tempting to frame the era in entirely terms of the heroic queer people who opposed the hate of the Nazi regime, such as the half-Jewish lesbian Frieda Belinfante who was a key member of the Amsterdam resistance, but we must also acknowledge that there were prominent gay Nazis.
Some (non-Jewish, non-Roma) gay men held positions of power from the beginning of the Nazi movement up until the end of the war. The most prominent figure of the time, Ernst Röhm, was a close friend of Hitler who had been arrested for his role in the original failed coup d’etat in 1923. He went on to become the leader of the SA, the Nazi party militia, as an openly homosexual man. Perhaps the only positive aspect of his time in charge of the paramilitary force was that he used it to support worker’s strikes in pursuit of a more equitable, albeit terribly limited in its justice, society. Aside from his class consciousness, Röhm failed to prioritize other axes of privilege and oppression. He complained that “feminine homosexuals” gave the community a bad image and pioneered the theory that gay men were superior to their heterosexual counterparts because they did not rely on women. He obviously was comfortable denouncing non-white homosexuals based on their ethnic identity as virulently as the heterosexuals. He actively supported the imprisonment of “undesirable” disabled, homeless, and non-conformist people. Although Röhm was assassinated during the Night of the Long Knives—a consolidation of power made by Hitler in 1934—with his sexuality used as a justification, he was not the only gay man in the Nazi Party. Many served in the military, including both the SA and the SS, and received leniency based on their proximity to the masculine ideal, according to Giles in an article on the topic. The thought of calling such people who were complicit with the rest of the Nazi social agenda my queer siblings turns my stomach. And yet, they were gay men—some of them proudly open about their sexuality.
The active participation of gay men in the oppression of less privileged social groups, to the extent that it harms other LGBTQIA+ people, asks us to reconsider what it means to be a queer community. Is it only identity, fitting the criteria of L or G or B or T, or can we ask more of our community members? If we believe so much in the concept of chosen families, we should never need to extend unconditional love to someone simply because of their queer identity. Furthermore, a lack of community standards means that members who are marginalized based on other aspects of their identity are being to be told to share the same spaces as people who do not show them mutual respect. Though it might sound odd, I think that there must be some separation of queer identity (being LGBTQIA+) and queer community (being LGBTQIA+ and commiting to uplifting not just the”respectable” people who fall under the queer umbrella). Having a queer community cannot simply meaning have a group of people who are some combination of of the letters of LGBTQIA+ and disregarding the intersections of those identities. We cannot measure the success of LGBTQIA+ inclusion based on the status of the Ernst Röhms of the world.
Ernst Röhm used his gay identity to unabashedly perpetuate sexism, to attempt to become acceptable as a “masculine” homosexual by his denouncing other gay men (and trans women). This lingers in the gay community both subtly (“no femmes” in Grindr profiles) and obviously (cisgender gay people who campaigned for marriage equality being silent on trans issues in the Trump administration). Röhm also dreamed of an elite order of hyper-masculine gay men to fight for Nazi Germany, a confusing mix of LGBT identity and nationalism with an equally funny name: homonationalism. Coined by Jasbir K. Puar, the term homonationalism denotes “the favorable association between a nationalist ideology and LGBT people or their rights.”
Conservative LGBTQIA+ people’s fusion of nationalism and supposed-LGBT advocacy is a deadly combination. It allows more privileged LGBTQIA+ people to ignore their responsibilities to the larger community by instead pursuing nationalist ideology. Homonationalism vividly takes, in my mind, the form of LGBT police officers proclaiming to “Police with Pride,” a slogan that was debuted in San Francisco’s Pride Parade this past year, while black community members face extreme violence from that same institution. Ultimately, it hurts our own community. Whether it takes the form of denouncing the Pulse Night Club shooter as a foreign terrorist to justify the occupation of whichever Middle Eastern country the US army occupies next or the Israeli government using a “gay friendly” image to justify the occupation of Palestine, it disrespects the history of the queer community by endangering our queer siblings.
Homonationalists should never be able to leverage their LGBTQIA+ identity to justify their persecution of others. Furthermore, their inclusion in the LGBTQIA+ community is a direct insult to the tens of thousands of queer people who died not only in Nazi concentration camps, but also closeted under conservative regimes. It is a stain on the memories of the people who that the Reagan and Bush administrations sentenced to death during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is an attack on the LGBTQIA+ people still criminalized and harassed around the globe. It has no place in the community that LGBTQIA+ people build.
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