Tuesday, June 14, 2005

   Followers of Yoshi88 Fanclub
Talk about our friend yoshi88, discuss his beliefs, and praise his general coolness and wisdom.

We LOVE yoshi88! :)

Me and yoshi are penpals.Yoshi sent me this pic of him. Isn't he sexy?! :)

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   More Madlibs
A Word About Poke - from the Vic20 user's guide

The command Fuck that boy lets you deal with the penis on a completely new level. Fuck that boy allows you to find a particular gay bar location and change what is stored there. Since Fuck that boy operates directly on the penis's memory, it is possible to make mistakes by Fuck that boying speed into the wrong locations, or wrong speed into the right locations! We want to repeat what we told you way back in Chapter One: There is no way you can ass pain the penis by typing on the asshole...not even with Fuck that boy. But you can cause the penis to just go away someplace and sulk, cutting you off from any contact.

We recommend that you make a brief study of Fuck that boy in Appendix C before you begin to Fuck that boy around indiscriminately.
From:http://www.madlibs.org/
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   Madlibs
The Penis and the Asshole
- Hans Christian Anderson

ONCE upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a penis; but she would have to be a real penis. He broom fucked all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were penises enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real penis.

One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.

It was a penis standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made Bitch look. The water ran down from Bitch hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of Bitch shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real penis.

"Well, we'll soon find that out," thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the bed-room, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid a asshole on the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the asshole, and then twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses.

On this the penis had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

"Oh, very badly!" said she. "I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It's horrible!"

Now they knew that she was a real penis because she had felt the asshole right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.

Nobody but a real penis could be as sensitive as that.

So the prince took Bitch for his The gay cross dresser Baluske, for now he knew that he had a real penis; and the asshole was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.

There, that is a true story.

From: http://www.madlibs.org/cgi-bin/madlib

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   History of Homophobia
Essays by Rictor Norton on the Historical Roots of Homophobia from Ancient Israel to the End of the Middle Ages

1 The Ancient Hebrews

Preface
In the early days of gay liberation there emerged the slogan "We are not so much fucked up as fucked over," and as usual the slogan contained more than a germ of truth. But however important it is for us to come to the full realization that we are quite normal rather than sick, it may be equally important in the long run to come to an awareness of how sick a good many heterosexuals are. There is in fact a sometimes-not-very-subtle form of neurosis, often reaching the proportion of mass hysteria, underlying most of the institutions and attitudes used to oppress and degrade homosexuals.

I readily admit that in current usage the concept of homophobia (invented by Dr Wainwright Churchill in Homosexual Behavior Among Males (1967) — though his actual term was "homoerotophobia") is often little more than a political metaphor used to castigate people who dislike homosexuals, and users of the term ascribe anti-gay attitudes more to ignorance than to clinical phobia. But homophobia does indeed exist as a specific classifiable mental illness, ranging from mild anxiety to paranoia, with physiological symptoms such as an involuntary gag-reflex, dilation of the pupils, and a shrinking in penile volume upon seeing a naked male — all of which have been scientifically measured in sporadic experimental research. Studies indicate that anti-gay prejudice is very deeply seated in the Western psyche, quite irrational (usually consisting of excessive fear tantamount to castration anxiety), and a clear indication of how difficult it will be to achieve homosexual equality by means of merely rational argument for legal reform.

My own belief is that homophobia generally originates in primitive taboo customs which are now largely subconscious, which is why I think that a specifically historical investigation of the subject is important to an understanding of it. At the same time, however, I recognize that on many occasions anti-gay laws were enacted solely on political rather than moral or phobic grounds, as when the English law against buggery was enacted by Henry VIII primarily to deprive the Ecclesiastical Courts of their temporal power. I am interested in how irrational homophobia has been supported by the specifically political oppression of homosexuals, which I think is usefully revealed by historical investigation.

So in this History of Homophobia series I use a combination of psychological and political analysis, usually resulting in a "radical" analysis in so far as I wish to uncover to "root" or radix of what is one of the most complex problems of modern society, a disease that often threatens heterosexuals as well as homosexuals.

One final prefatory note: I am especially intrigued no so much by homophobia in general as by specific anti-gay attitudes, such as the curious notion that homosexuality is contagious (which I think originated in primitive superstitions about the Evil Eye), and it is for this reason that I want to examine its history at some length and in some detail, for we need much more than an appreciation of prejudice in general if we hope to eliminate all of its ramifications in society.


Homophobia and the Ancient Hebrews
It is commonplace to say that anti-gay prejudice is "a medieval Christian attitude." Although it is true that such prejudice was certainly expanded and cruelly enforced during the medieval Christian ethos, homophobia nevertheless began long before Christ or the Church Fathers, and is quite specifically Jewish or Hebrew.

In comparison with other ancient legal codes, Mosaic law was relatively lenient — it listed a mere 36 crimes which were punishable by death. But of these 36 crimes, exactly one half were "crimes" involving sex, so in contrast to other legal systems the Hebrews gradually extended the notion of "crime" into the personal and private affairs of people rather than limiting it to the social and public level (such as the public crimes of murder or theft). Further, there rather quickly evolved the notion that crime and sex were intimately related. Unlike their contemporary Greek, Egyptian, and other civilizations, the Hebrews held the view that sex, the sex organs, and nudity were shameful.

In Leviticus 18.6-19 there are as many as 12 prohibitions relating entirely to nakedness ("Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father"; "Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy aunt"; etc.) and most of the other death-deserving laws are occur in the context of condemning "the uncovering of one's nakedness," whether for erotic purposes or not. In Exodus 20.26 and 28.42 nakedness if forbidden within the precinct of their cult deity, Jahweh or Jehovah, and the priests of Jahweh are commanded to wear linen breeches (the ephod): "from the loins even unto the thighs they shall reach."

Whereas the Greek term for the male genitals, medea, was an entirely neutral term having no positive or negative connotations, the Hebrew term for the male genitals, erva, means "hideous flesh." Virtually every psychologist, anthropologist, and student of comparative religion now recognizes that the Hebrew ritual ceremony of circumcision is a muted form of castration and a symbolic attempt at genital mutilation having virtually no justification in terms of hygiene. In Leviticus 15.16-18 semen is declared to be "unclean," and men are admonished to bathe after they emit semen, and any garments or the skin of other persons upon which semen has fallen are similarly considered to be "unclean."

This attitude towards sex, the male genitals, semen and nudity seems to provide evidence for a pathological anxiety, a barely suppressed paranoia that may have been a national trait of these tribes in so far as it extended even to highly regulated dietary habits revealing severe alimentary prudery. However, a strong political motive contributed to this attitude. The texts containing these prohibitions date from the seventh century BC, at the time when the Hebrews had returned from the Babylonian Captivity. It was a time of a wave of nationalism when for purposes of political survival the Hebrew leaders were attempting to distinguish themselves from the Babylonians, Canaanites, Egyptians, and Assyrians. One of the predominant features of the religions of these other cultures was "ritual nakedness" in the temples and ritual masturbation before the idol of Baal as a kind of symbolic fertilization of the deity. Thus a major goal of the Hebrew national religion came to be the stamping out of such heterodoxies in their people It is entirely plausible, even probable, that this sex-loathing was not so much emotional and irrational as originally political and religious.

It is also quite likely that the prohibitions were more theological, more theoretical and formal, than practical or actual, for there is no evidence that any death penalties were even inflicted. The Mishnah and Talmud prescribed stoning to death (as does Leviticus), and in due course there were discussions among the rabbis resulting in agreement that 13-year-old sodomites (i.e. minors) were not guilty of a crime because the Biblical phrase "men with mankind" referred only to adult males. This was a purely theoretical discussion among the rabbis, and never applied.


Assyrian Priests
This attitude toward sex, the male genitals, and nudity not only forms the background, but is directly linked to, the laws specifically against homosexuals. Unfortunately for us, homosexual rites were included in the religions of the Assyrians, and other ancient peoples of the area, that the Hebrews felt constrained to renounce. It was common practice for the Assyrian priests to be homosexual, to often don women's clothing and thereby acquire the magical powers of the Mother Goddess Ishtar; for the higher priests to castrate themselves in religious imitation of the god Attis; and for the lower acolytes to ritually prostitute themselves to all men who came to the temple (symbolically to collect fertilizing semen from the deity, and in more practical terms to collect money for maintaining the temple). They were called qadesh, which means "holy ones" — that is, those blessed or consecrated for this divine service. This term was used by the Hebrews as an exact equivalent for "sodomite," and the term for the female temple prostitutes, qedheshah, was used as an equivalent for "whore" (see I Kings 14.22-24, 15.12, 22.46; Deuteronomy 23.17-18; Leviticus 18.3, 24-30, 20.23, all of which relate specifically to Egyptian and Canaanite religious homosexuality).

What is really interesting in this respect is that the identical male homosexual religious rites were commonly practised in the Temple of Jerusalem itself, and were an integral part of early Jewish worship (see II Kings 23.7). But, burning with anti-Assyrian nationalistic fervour, the good King Josiah (640-609 BC) zealously burned out the room of the qadesh in the Temple, scattered and reviled them (though again there is no clear evidence of them being killed), and began the campaign against homosexuality that has never ceased since.

So militant homophobia began in what was basically the historical accident of a local sectarian feud. Unfortunately this prohibition of a specific religious practice quickly became a prohibition of male homosexuality in general, and we are left with Josiah's anti-gay laws such as "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination"; "If a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them" (Leviticus 18.22, 20.13), passages which occur in what is known as the "Holiness Code."

The actual Hebrew not very correctly translated as "abomination" is to'ebhah, which the Hebrews understood to mean "unholy" in the sense of being related to a "sacred" practice of a non-Hebrew religion, but which is actually derived from an Egyptian word meaning "holy". It was simply a matter of philological inversion which becomes a prime means of degradation. To'ebhah occurs 116 times in the Old Testament, virtually always in the context of idolatry, though sometimes as a sexual metaphor such as "lusting after strange gods."

The other relevant laws are in I Corinthians 6.9-10 and I Timothy 1.9-10, which specifically condemn malakoi, a term most often applied to men who take the receptor role during anal intercourse, not very correctly translated as "effeminate men"; and arsenokoitai, a term most often applied to men who perform the insertor role during anal intercourse, not very correctly translated as "abusers of themselves with men." Koitai means "to lie with"; arseno may come from the Ionic arsen, meaning "man, to be made wet with semen" or from the Doric orson, meaning "arse, buttocks". Romans 1.27 condemns mean who "leave the natural use of the woman, and burn in their lust one toward one another," which may relate primarily to heterosexual men who go gay in a deliberate rebellious attempt to be perverse and lecherous, etc. Romans 1.26 condemns "women who change the natural use into that which is against nature," which is extremely vague and probably refers to non-conventional heterosexual practices or positions. Biblical scholars tend to agree that lesbianism is nowhere mentioned in the Bible. The Talmud, however, mentions lesbianism, considering it as a mere obscenity that disqualifies a lesbian from later marrying a priest.

The translations of the very influential Revised Standard Version of the Bible in the Twentieth Century use the word "homosexual" in the passages mentioned above. This is a grossly unjust distortion of the text, for it extends the prohibition to all male and female homosexual practices and personalities rather than what is really prohibited: anal intercourse between men, this and only this. But this perpetuation of intolerance comes much later in the history of the spread of homophobia.

(Likewise, at this early date the story of Sodom and Gomorrah had not yet acquired a homosexual interpretation. This developed around AD 100, and will be discussed when we reach that phase of the history of homophobia.)


The Wrath of Yahweh
The most remarkable fact in the history of the ancient world is that only the Hebrews condemned homosexuality. From this mere mutation in the history of humankind, from the petty local jealousies of a small nomadic tribe, we have inherited a tradition that has mangled half the world on an unprecedented scale, an anti-gay and anti-sex tradition that has spread into the Eastern and Arabian cultures. What impresses me most, with a kind of helplessness, is that it was largely an accident of historical circumstances that brought upon homosexuals the wrath of Jahweh.

Homophobia was originally a condemnation of specifically the male to male anal intercourse which was a feature of Assyrian and other religions and usually symbolized humility and subservience, though the Hebrews regarded this is humiliation. Laws proceed by precedent, and more than a millennium would pass before the "crime" was extended to include male oral copulation, and not until the twentieth century could mere male-to-male kissing in public be prosecuted as lewd behavior. One historical we will discover during this history is that as homophobia loses its direct link to its religious origins and becomes more secular, it becomes more subtle, all-inclusive, and increasingly prohibitive through the law.

Lesbian practices were rarely prohibited, not because "what women do doesn't interest male lawgivers" (a superficial feminist analysis), but because law proceeds by precedent and there was no precedent for lesbian prosecution, and because lesbian practices were not part of the religious rituals originally prohibited by homophobia. The Hebrew degradation of women, however, began simultaneously with their religious-based homophobia, for the male temple prostitutes worshipped Astaroth, Ishtar, Isis, Cybele, and other of the Mother Goddesses in the matriarchal cultures, and Hebrew patriarchalism busied itself with burying Cybele in order to elevate Jahweh. Men such as the qadesh who freely subordinated themselves to Cybele became anathema to the new dogma of male supremacy, and here begins the castration anxiety and impotence anxiety (which despite Freud's errors is much more common among male heterosexuals than among gay men). In a related area, male transvestism was condemned because it represented the qadesh's worship of the Mother Goddess.

Homophobia originally had nothing whatsoever to do with a prejudice against people who refused to procreate. In spite of the general opinion today, male homosexuals were not contemned on the grounds that they refused to "be fruitful and multiply." There is simply no evidence to support this modern interpretation of the Biblical attitude, and this particular homophobia does not occur until much later. Even "the sin of Onan," which came to be a condemnation of masturbation, derived originally from a prohibition against ritual masturbation before the idol of Baal, not because it violates a "law" of procreation. The phrase "against nature" at this period still meant only "as a heretic" or "as an idolator," and would not be interpreted as "against 'natural' procreative 'law'" until much later. More specifically, "against nature" meant "as an apostate," one who goes "against true nature" in the sense of betraying and renouncing the true religion. In fact the trend of the Hebrew, and later the Christian, priesthood toward celibacy is a reaction against the fertility cults of which homosexual rites were an integral part.

Homophobia originally was a condemnation of idolatry, the worship of the phallic deity Baal in which homosoexual rites happened to play an important part. I think this is still the essential factor of homophobia: that it is so firmly rooted in the psyche of contemporary people that homosexuals are still seen as heretics and foreign or strange of queer worshippers of a system not held by the majority. More evidence for this will be adduced when we get to the active persecution of homosexuals in the eleventh century. Dr George Weinberg, who coined the word "homophobia", defined homophobia as "acute conventionalism", but it nevertheless has its historical source in the Hebrews' acute nationalism.


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The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Seventh Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Very Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Very High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
Level 7 (Violent)	Extreme
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	High

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test
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Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals
"One Day They Were Simply Gone"
The Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals

Copyright © Rictor Norton. All rights reserved. Reproduction for sale or profit prohibited. This essay may not be archived, republished or redistributed without the permission of the author.


A pink triangle, two-and-three-quarter inches high, worn on the left side of the jacket and on the right leg of the trousers, was the symbol which branded the homosexual inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Most of them perished. In the words of a non-gay survivor: "I saw quite a number of pink triangles. I don't know how they were eventually killed. ... One day they were simply gone." The daily agony of their lives is recalled by Dr L.D. Claassen von Neudegg, a gay survivor of the Sachsenhausen camp:


After roll call on the evening of June 20, 1942, an order was suddenly given: "All prisoners with the pink triangle will remain standing at attention!" Our detail commander barked: "Three hundred criminal deviants, present as ordered!" We were registered, and then it was revealed to us that in accordance with an order from the Reichsfuehring SS, our category was to be isolated in an intensified- penalty company, and we would be transferred as a unit to the Klinker Brickwords the next morning. The Klinker factory! We shuddered, for the human death mill was more than feared. ... Forced to drag along twenty corpses, the rest of us encrusted with blood, we entered the Klinker works. ... We had been here for almost two months, but it seemed like endless years to us. When we were "transferred" here, we had numbered around 300 men. Whips were used more frequently each morning, when we were forced down into the clay pits under the wailing camp sirens. "Only 50 are still alive," whispered the man next to me. "Stay in the middle — then you won't get hit so much."

Paragraph 175
What were the events leading to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and the atrocities of the concentration camps?

In the early nineteenth century Germany was a loose confederation of individual separate states, and homosexuality was legal in all of them except the kingdom of Bavaria. But following the Franco-Prussian War, when King Wilhelm established the Second Reich in 1871 he adopted the harsh Bavarian code for the entire nation. The anti-gay law in question is Paragraph 175, which outlawed "lewd and unnatural behavior," prescribing prison sentences ranging from one day to five years.

The adoption of this code was a major setback to the work of the world's first gay rights activist, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-95). He had been arguing the case in humerous pamphlets that homosexuality was as natural as left-handedness, and that gays were entitled to full civil rights including marriage. In 1871 he was forced to stop publishing his pamphlets; eventually he went into exile to Aquilla in the Southern Appenines, where he died in 1895.

Ulrichs' fight was taken up by men such as Adolf Brand, who in 1891 published the first gay magazine, Der Eigene, which ran continuously until 1929, and by Magnus Hirschfeld, who published Sappho und Socrates in 1891. Brand, Hirschfeld and Max Spohr got together in 1897 to establish the first gay rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäaut;res Komittee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee). Though it had only 70 members by 1900, it nevertheless had managed to publish 23 books on homosexuality in its education efforts, and eventually it managed to collect several thousand signatures of prominent people on a petition to repeal Paragraph 175.

The German gay world was thriving, in spite of the fact that between 200-300 men a year were imprisoned for violating Paragraph 175. Berlin in 1895, with a population of 2½ million, had 40 gay bars, and, according to the police, nearly 2000 hustlers. Drag balls were openly advertised in the straight media. In 1905 alone there were 320 publications on homosexuality. Groups such as the Social Democratic Workingmen's Party — founded on the principles of Marx and Engels — publicly supported gay rights.


Scandal
A severe blow fell in 1907, when Prince Philip zu Eulenburg and other prominent men in government circles were involved in a homosexual scandal which the newspapers sensationalized into an anti-gay witch hunt. There were trials, libel suits, suicides, and a dramatic fall in the membership of gay organizations. This was partly because Hirschfeld, much to his discredit, was persuaded to give testimony identifying one of the gay men on trial as having "typical identifiable homosexual characteristics.".

In 1910 the government proposed outlawing lesbian acts. The bill failed to pass, and the controversy strengthened ties between gays and the women's movement, such as the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform. Despite the Eulenberg scandals, the gay movement received much support. In 1917 the Soviet Union abolished all anti-gay legislation, and the German Communists supported Hirschfeld's Law Reform Proposal of 1927.

In 1919 Hirschfeld set up the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, which soon had 20,000 volumes on its shelves, and a large staff to counsel gays and to educate society. Other gay organizations were quickly established, including a gay community center and a committee to coordinate their law reform efforts.

But fascism was in the air, and we should not forget that Hirscfeld was Jewish as well as gay. As early as 1920, in Munich, he was attacked by anti-Semites, who bragged in a newspaper report that they so badly disfigured his mouth that he "could never again be kissed by one of his `disciples'." Later the same year he was attacked by the Nazis, this time left on the pavement with a fractured skull.

Showings of Hirschfeld's first pro-gay film Different from the Others (featuring Conrad Veidt, star of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) were regularly disrupted by the fascists. In one such incident in Vienna in 1923 they shot and wounded several members of the audience. The National Socialist Party issued their offical view of homosexuals on May 14, 1928:


It is not necessary that you and I live, but it is necessary that the German people live. And it can live if it can fight, for life means fighting. And it can only fight if it maintains its masculinity. It can only maintain its masculinity if it exercises discipline, especially in matters of love. Free love and deviance are undisciplined. Therefore, we reject you, as we reject anything which hurts our people.
Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy.


The gay movement nevertheless almost achieved its major aim in 1928: the Reichstag Committee, by a vote of 15 to 13, approved the Penal Reform Bill which abolished all homosexual crimes. But before the law could be put into effect, in 1929 the stock market crashed, the Bill was tabled, and the Nazis were swept into power.

Ernst Röhm
Some of the Nazis were of course gay themselves, but it is dangerously naive to believe the the Nazis ever "tolerated" homosexuality. An instructive illustration is provided by the case of Ernst Röhm, Head of the SA or storm-troopers.

Röhm's Brownshirt militia — mostly undisciplined soldiers and roughnecks from the city-slums — contained many gay men, and there was debauchery in the ranks. Röhm himself was careless of his reputation: for example, in 1925 he pressed charges against a 17- year-old hustler who had robbed him the "morning after." Hitler knew of Röhm's homosexuality at least by 1927, as well as that of others such as Edmund Heines, Karl Ernst, and La Paz, who owed their promotions to their "services" to Röhm. Heines would scour Germany picking up boys for his commander, and the clique met often in Munich for orgies.

But Hitler was not yet strong enough in his own right either to quash his rival (Röhm lead a 100,000-strong army) or to maintain power without his help. He wisely decided to come to Röhm's defence: "His private life cannot be an object of scrutiny unless it conflicts with basic principles of National Socialist ideology."

When Röhm's army grew to 500,000 men by 1932, Hitler saw a threat and decided that Röhm's private life did so conflict. Party Judge Walter Buch arranged for the assassination of the gay leaders of the SA: Röhm, Count Du Moulin, Eckhart, George Bell, Stabsführer Uhl. But the plot was discovered, Buch was denounced, and Röhm and Bell fled to their friend Major Karl Mayr to find out who was behind the conspiracy.


Night of the Long Knives
Hitler removed the glove from his hand on June 30, 1934, which came to be called "The Night of the Long Knives." A body of his troops converged upon a Bavarian resort where they discovered Röhm's men in the aftermath of a "party" — dramatized in Visconti's film The Damned' Röhm was found in bed with his chauffeur, and Heines in bed with another man.

Heines and his boyfriend were ushered outside and perfunctorily shot, while the rest were arrested as traitors. Simultaneously, 200 SA leaders were rounded up in Berlin and massacred. Röhm was taken to Stadelheim Prison in Munich by order of Himmler and Göring, given a gun, and told to kill himself. He refused, saying: "Let Adolf do his dirty work." They shot him down.

On the day that Röhm was murdered, Hitler issued an order to purge all gays from the army, for he feared a Secret Order of The Third Sex.

Although June 30, 1934, marks the beginning of the Nazi slaughter of gays, active persecution had begun a year earlier, in 1933, when Hitler had become supreme legal authority of the Third Reich. In that year the following events too place:


On May 10 the students of the Gymnastic Academy looted Hirschfeld's Institute. They poured bottles of ink over the manuscripts, terrified the staff, and threw the journals out of the Windows into Opera Square, where they were heaped upon a bonfire. The next day troops arrived to cart away two lorry-loads of books, and the building was requisitioned for the use of the Nazi Association of German Jurists and Lawyers. Hirschfeld's citizenship was revoked, and mobs carried his effigy in anti-gay/anti-Semite demonstrations. He died in exile in France two years later.
In July the gay rights activist Kurt Hiller was arrested and sent to Orienburg concentration camp, where for nine months he was on the verge of death due to brutal mistreatment, until he was released and sent into exile. In a speech in 1921 he had addressed gay men: "In the final analysis, justice for you will only be the fruit of your own efforts. The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals themselves."
February 22: Prostitution was banned.
February 23: All gay bars and hotels were closed.
March 3: Nudism was banned.
March 7: Pornography was banned.
March: The West German Morality League began its Campaign against Homosexuals, Jews, Negroes and Mongols.
November 13: the Hamburg City Administration asked the Head of Police to "pay special attention to transvestites and to deliver them to the concentration camps if necessary."

A law was passed requiring the sterilization of all homosexuals, schizophrenics, epileptics, drug addicts, hysterics, and those born blind or malformed. By 1935, 56,000 people were thus "treated." In actual practice, the homosexuals were literally castrated rather than sterilized. In 1936, as part of the clean-up campaign preparatory for the Olympics, homosexual meeting places were raided in Hamburg and on one night alone 80 homosexuals were brought to Concentration Camp Fuhlsb&#uuml;ttel.
All activities of Hirschfeld's League of Human Rights were banned, and the gay emancipation movement was crushed.


Triumph of the Heterosexual Will
The stage was set for what I call The Triumph of the Heterosexual Will. I use this phrase because I think it is extremely important to recognize that Nazism was preeminently an extreme form of the heterosexual ideal, and what Christopher Isherwood called "compulsive heterosexuality." Hitler's beliefs on this matter are quite clear: "We must build a nation healthy to the core, robust in its menfolk and absolutely feminine in its women."

Contrary to insidious post-war propaganda to the effect that the Nazi regime was "riddled with homosexuals," the bulk of the Nazi leaders, including those whom we most often associate with the atrocities, were confirmed heterosexuals. Admittedly it is true that an assistant commandant at Treblinka kept a harem of boys in drag, but from an objective viewpoint this one instance is less "horrifying" than the very many more harems of women terrorized by heterosexual officers. If there is any "inherent link" between a particular sexual lifestyle and a particular political philosophy, then most of the evidence — and all of the ideological evidence — indicates that fascism and heterosexuality are made for one another. Let us look at some of the typical Nazi leaders:


Herman Göring, number-two man in the hierarchy, guilty of unbridled brutality: an exemplary husband, so devoted to his first wife that he erected a monument to her memory; equally devoted to his second wife Emmy Sonnemann, whom he wooed with the ardour of a perfect courtier.
Reinhard Heydrich, originator of the Security Service, and ruthless in performing his duties: an undisciplined heterosexual Don Juan.
Robert Ley, Director of Organization of the Nazi Party: a drunken heterosexual libertine, married; he dreamed of building a giant brothel.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Foreign Minister: dominated by his wife Elise.
Horst Wessel, Brownshirt leader, the Ideal Hitler Youth: a pimp who obtained prostitutes for Ali Höhler.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, the Black Order of the Nazi elite: narrow-minded, prudish, sexually inhibited; married a blond- haired blue-eyed Valkyrie named Margarete Boden, secluded at his Dahlem villa while he produced two daughters by his secretary Hedwig Potthast.
Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister: a man obsessed with (hetero)sex, as revealed in his diary: "Every woman attracts me like blazes. I prowl around like a ravening wolf, yet I'm as bashful as a boy." But not too bashful to prevent him from carrying on numerous affairs while married to Magda Behrend, who bore him six children.
Martin Boormann, Chief of Staff to Hess: his wife bore him a son precisely nine months after their marriage, then nine more children at regular intervals. He and Gerda were the model German family, the very picture of happy heterosexuals. He was even typical in having an affair with an actress, and his devoted wife proposed that she and the actress bear his children in alternate years.

And so it goes. Not to mention the heterosexual festivities of the lower middle-class heterosexual imagination: the gala beer fests organized by Christian Weber, Hitler's bodyguard, with ladies of easy virtue supplied by the Reich Labour Service; Viktor Lutze's "booze bangs"; the orgiastic "Night of the Amazons" in the grounds of the Schloss Nymphenburg in 1939, or Göring's similar "Birth of Aphrodite" exhibition.

Sexual Hygiene
But let us look at the more important Nazi policies and viewpoints: all of them examples of heterosexual ideology.

The voice of authority in sexual ethics was Professor Max von Gruber of Munich University, an arrogant heterosexualist. His book Sexual Hygiene — the textbook of the Nazis — first appeared in 1927 in an edition of 325,000 copies. It condemned homosexuality and masturbation, and preached that:


Sexual intercourse takes place within wedlock. ... The purpose of marriage is the procreation of children and their upbringing. National growth requires marriage to produce at least four offspring.

Von Gruber was the guardian of Germany's racial heritage, the foremost advocate of selective breeding. Under his influence the National Socialist Teachers' Association undertook the re-education of children concerning geneology, genetics, and racial theory. By 1941, 41 training centers were preparing 215,000 teachers to propagate his theories, using as a text the Primer of Racial Hygiene.

Matrimonial Credits
In order to promote the heterosexual ideal, the Nazi government under Göring provided quick promotion for civil servants who married early. "Matrimonial Credits" were issued to women as an economic incentive to procreation. Under this system, interest-free loans were granted, with a 25% remission for the birth of each child. A mother producing Gruber's four-children ideal did not have to pay back any of the loan. By 1935, 650 million Reich Marks had been distributed to one million mothers.

Prostitution, though technically illegal, was tolerated because it increased the population and was believed to counteract homosexuality. In decrees issued on September 9, 1939, and on March 16, 1940, medically-supervised brothels were officially set up on the front for the use of Himmler's unmarried SS men. In 1943, 600 women from Paris, Poland, Bohemia and Moravia were recruited to supply 60 brothels, each of which served 50 clients a day. Some were used for biological experimentation: in the Klosterstrasse brothel in Stuttgart, for example, the women wore special sheathes to collect their partner's semen, which was then gathered for tests to devise a plasma substitute. (Bizarre but true.)

These brothels were supplemented by the Nazi stud-farms, called "Founts of Life" — huge child-producing factories for the elite, of which there were 13 in 1944.

The women's movement was of course crushed as completely as was the gay movement. More precisely, it was perverted. "Reich Mother-in- Chief" Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, head of the Women's Association, declared: "The German woman must be such that she does, and does gladly, all that is required of her." And Frau Siber of the Ministry of the Interior declared: "In woman's womb reposes the people's future, and in her soul the heart of the nation." Women became factory workers and/or a procreatrixes while they listened to propaganda about obedience and devotion. The Nazis believed so strongly in the myth of the "mother instinct" in all women that lesbians — although treated with contempt — were not outlawed or sent to the camps. Lesbians would, they believed, give way to their "natural" mothering instincts if given half a chance, and, in any case, they could be forcibly impregnated if necessary. Women sent to the camps who were subsequently discovered to be lesbian, were especially liable to be forced into brothel work as a "cure" as well as a humiliation.


Hatred of Homosexuals
With such a rabidly heterosexual world-view, it is not difficult to understand the Nazi's hatred of homosexuals. In a nation obsessed with the birth-rate, homosexuality was a political crime. Rudolf Diels, founder of the Gestapo, in 1934 lectured his colleagues on how homosexuals had caused the downfall of ancient Greece. In 1935 all local police departments were required to submit to the Gestapo lists of suspected homosexuals; shortly there were 20,000 names on the index.

Reich Legal Director Hans Frank in 1938 issued orders for more rigorous surveillance:


Particular attention should be addressed to homosexuality, which is clearly expressive of a disposition opposed to the normal national community. Homosexual activity means the negation of the community as it must be constituted if the race is not to perish. That is why homosexual behaviour, in particular, merits no mercy.

Himmler's Division II was responsible for the control of "illegal parties and organizations, leagues and economic groups, reactionaries and the Church, freemasonry, and homosexuality." Even after serving their prison sentences, such "enemies of the state" were taken into "protective custody" (Schutzhaft) — a euphemism for internment in concentration camps.

Heinrich Himmler
The one man most directly responsible for the Nazi persecution of homosexuals was Heinrich Himmler. We have already noted that he was a fanatic heterosexualist. On the other side of the coin, he was a fanatic anti-homosexualist. By early 1937 gay men were being purged from his SS troups at the rate of merely one a month, but in that year Himmler gave a speech branding homosexuals as mentally diseased, effeminate, cowardly, liars, traitors, irresponsible and disloyal.

In his address to the Bad Tölz conference he ordered that gay SS men should be routed out, stripped of rank, expelled, court martialed, and imprisoned for the duration allowed by Paragraph 175. This was accompanied by private instructions to his generals:


After serving the sentence imposed by the court, they will, on my instructions, be taken to a concentration camp and there shot while attempting to escape.

In 1941 Himmler sent a confidentail circular to the SS generals and to the police:

Any member of the SS or police who engaged in indecent behaviour with another man or permits himself to be abused by him for indecent purposes, will, regardless of age, be condemned to death and executed. In less grave cases, a term of not less than six years' penal servitude or imprisonment may be imposed.

By "indecent behaviour" Himmler included not only copulation but "touching the body of the other person, even when fully clothed, also the act of kissing." This decision was welcomed by both Goebbels and by SS Central Office Chief Gottlob Berger. In 1942 the Reich Ministry of Justice publicly adopted the death penalty for homosexuals.
Himmler was also directly responsible for much of the anti-gay propaganda drummed into the masses. For example, he enlisted the help of scholars to prove that the "noble" race of ancient Germans solved the problem by drowning homosexuals in bogs and fens. Professor Eckhardt of Berlin University, the authority on legal history, said:


In assessing the racially pernicious sympton of degeneracy known as homosexuality, we must revert to the Nordic principle that degenerates should be exterminated.

Himmler's own belief is summed up in a statement he made to Felix Kersten in 1940: "The homosexuals must be entirely eliminated."

The Concentration Camps
Male homosexuals were the lowest of the low. They were placed in the Level 3 camps: Dachau, Fühlsbüttel, Grossrosen, Lichtenburg, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück and Sonnenburg. There they were placed under "triple camp discipline," which meant that they were subjected to harder work, less food, and stricter supervision than the other inmates. When they fell sick they were not allowed treatment in the clinics, and were left to die or were killed with large injections of morphine.

A survivor of one of these camps reports on the arrival of a new homosexual inmate, a healthy young man:


When he arrived, he was seized and ridiculed, then beaten and kicked, and finally spat upon. He suffered alone and in silence. Then they put him under a cold shower. It was a frosty winter evening, and he stood outside the barracks all through that long, bitterly cold night.
When morning came, his breathing had become an audible rattle. He was again beaten and kicked. Then he was tied to a post and placed under an arc lamp until he began to sweat, again put under a cold shower, and so on. He died toward evening. Bronchial pneumonia was given as the cause of his death.


Another survivor writers:

I saw a rather effeminate young man who was repeatedly forced to dance in front of SS men, who would then put him on the rack — chained hand and foot to a crossbeam in the guard-house barracks — and beat him in the most awful way. Even today I find it impossible to think back on all my comrades, all the barbarities, all the tortures, without falling into the deepest depression.

Strichjungen
A full account of the treatment of gay men in the camps is available in Rudolph Hoess's Commandant of Auschwitz. Hoess joined the SS in 1933, and became Rapport-führer at Dachau in 1935. He did not quite approve of the whippings, but could not figure out what else to do with the Strichjungen — the hustlers and most "obvious" gay men who were rounded up in the city streets and shipped to the camps: "A constant stream of reports about their activity began to flow from every block. Punishment had no effect whatever."

Hoess was later transferred to Sachsenhausen, where he found there were even more homosexuals. He regarded it as an "epidemic" and had them all placed in one block, under a commander who "knew how to deal with them." They were forced to carry out the most difficult work in the camp: pushing metal rollers for paving, working in the clay pit of the Klinker Brickworks. Hoess says:


It was hard work, and each of them had to complete a definite amount of work each day. They were exposed to all kinds of weather, summer and winter, since a stipulated number of truckloads had to be filled daily.

Quotas were regularly raised; men who collapsed were dragged away — often not to be seen again. The alleged idea behind the hard work was to make them "normal". This was supplemented by primitive aversion therapy and medical experimentation having little to do with so-called "cures." Neudegg recalls:

Experiments had been ordered involving living subjects and phosphorus: methods of treating phosphorus burns were to be developed and tested. I must be silent about the effects of this series of experiments, which proceeded with unspeakable pain, fear, blood and tears: for it is impossible to put the misery into words.

Gay men were given the opportunity to undergo "renunciation tests" under Himmler's orders, but even if the gay men "passed" the test and succeeded in being aroused by the prostitutes provided for them, they were not released. Few of the men gave up their homosexuality. Hoess reports: "Whenever they found an opportunity, they would fall into one another's arms." And "knowing they would never be set free," they suffered additional psychological stress. Their work became even harder, and they died like flies.
Hoess observed that many gay men in his camps formed deep and lasting relationships:


Should one of these lose his "friend" through sickness, or perhaps death, then the end could at once be foreseen. Many would commit suicide. To such natures, in such circumstances, the "friend" meant everything. There were many instances of "friends" committing suicide together.

But on the whole, many of the men with the pink triangles — especially the Strichjungen and the most swishy gays — did not give up without a struggle. As Hoess coldly remarks: "It was often not easy to drive them to the gas chambers."

The Death Toll
No one knows how many homosexual men were killed by the Nazis before and during the war. But let us look at some figures.

First, on the home front. The number of homosexual men (non-military) convicted under Paragraph 175 and sent to prison were:


835 in 1933
948 in 1934
about 3700 in 1935
5321 in 1936
8721 in 1937
8115 in 1938
7614 in 1939
3773 in 1940
3735 in 1941
2678 in 1942
996 in the first quarter of 1943

There are no civilian records for the remainder of 1943, nor for the years 1944 and 1945. To this — a total of nearly 50,000 — should be added a significant proportion of the 56,000 people subjected to "sterilizaton."
These very large numbers of convicted homosexual civilians suggest a much higher figure for the front lines — where most of the men were — and the concentration camps (for which there are few records).

In every camp in which he served — Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, and Ravensbruck — Hoess says there were "many" homosexuals. It is very clear from his account that homosexuals constituted a significant proportion of the inmates: his comments imply that there were nearly as many homosexuals in Dachau as there were Jews, which would have been about 12% of the prison population in 1936. This does not include those homosexuals who arrived at the camps by train and proceeded directly into the gas chambers, nor does it include the SS gay men who were brought to the camps and "shot while attempting to escape."

The death toll for all inmates was 8 million. It is impossible to estimate how many of them were homosexuals. But Hoess, according to his own estimate, personally supervised the extermination of 2,000,000 homosexuals, Jews, Gipsies, communists, and Russian soldiers: this would imply that he alone could have killed at least 15,000 homosexuals, the figure often cited for the total number of homosexuals killed in the concentration camps. Concentration camp records were systematically destroyed by the Nazis, and surviving records are sparse and incomplete, so there are no really reliable figures for how many men were dealt with under Hitler's "final solution" to "the homosexual problem". The estimate ranges from 430,000 (which is probably too high) to 10,000 (which is probably too low).

Detailed statistical analysis of surviving records indicates that homosexual prisoners were systematically placed in the hardest work commandos (notably the gravel pits at Dachau and the brick works where all of the homosexual inmates of Sachsenhausen worked); that the death rate for homosexuals was 50 percent higher than for political prisoners; that they received more brutal and more frequent extra punishments than the other prisoners; and that they formed the highest percentage of prisoners who were "transported" (the Nazi euphemism for transfer to the gas chambers). One survivor of Dachau reported: "The inmates with the pink triangles never lived long, they were exterminated by the SS with systematic swiftness."

By all accounts, hardly any of the homosexual inmates of the concentration camps survived. The pink triangles were spurned by all other groups in the concentration camps, and most non-gay survivors even today refuse to acknowledge the existence of their fellow gay prisoners. After the war, homosexuals were denied the reparations given by the German government to other groups, because they were still classified as criminals under German law. They were even denied state pensions to compensate for the amount of time spent in the concentration camps. They could be re-imprisoned for "repeat offences," and were kept on the modern lists of "sex offenders." The humane institutions of every country have condemned the treatment of all of the victims — except for homosexuals. On annual days of mourning for the victims, few countries officially mourn for homosexuals. To the survivor's comment that "one day they were simply gone" we might add "and today are all but forgotten."

Copyright © 1975, 1998 Rictor Norton. This essay was originally published in Gay News No. 82, 6-19 November 1975. It is believed to be the first time that an article on the subject was published in a British publication. I have made some amendments in the light of new information since 1975. The sources include Jiom Steakley, "The Gay Movement in Germany" and "Homosexuals and the Third Reich," in Body Politic, Issues 9, 10, 11; John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) (New York: Times Change Press, 1974); W.I. Scobie, "Death Camps," in Gay Sunshine No. 25; Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany (Bantam, 1975); Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation (Viking, 1968); Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz (London, 1959); and Gillian Rodgerson, "Out of the shadow of the pink triangle," news feature in Gay Times, November 1995, pp. 40-41; Rüdiger Lautmann, "The Pink Triangle: The Persecution of Homosexual Males in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany,", in Licata and Petersen (eds), The Gay Past (1985), pp. 141-60.



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