XPost: ca.politics, alt.politics.media, ca.environment
XPost: alt.mountain-bike
The news that Jorg Haider - the Austrian fascist leader - spent
his final few hours in a gay bar with a hot blond has shocked
some people. It hasn’t shocked me. This is a taboo topic for a
gay left-wing man like me to touch, but there has always been a
weird, disproportionate overlap between homosexuality and
fascism. Take a deep breath; here goes.
Some 10,000 gay people were slaughtered in the Nazi death-camps.
Many more were humiliated, jailed, deported, ethnically
cleansed, or castrated. One gay survivor of the camps, LD
Classen von Neudegg, has written about his experiences. A
snapshot: “Three men had tried to escape one night. They were
captured, and when they returned they had the word ‘homo’
scrawled across their clothing. They were placed on a block and
whipped. Then they were forced to beat a drum and cheer,
‘Hurrah! We’re back! Hurrah!’ Then they were hanged.” This is
one of the milder events documented in his book.
So the idea of a gay fascist seems ridiculous. Yet when the
British National Party - our own home-grown Holocaust-denying
bigots - announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in
the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism
didn’t blink. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the
heart of every major fascist movement that ever was - including
the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of
Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe
in the past thirty years have been gay. It’s time to admit
something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a
nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is - in part, at
least - a gay thing, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to
wake up and face the marching music.
Just look at our own continent over the past decade. Dutch
fascist Pim Fortuyn ran on blatantly racist anti-immigrant
platform, describing Islam as “a cancer” and “the biggest threat
to Western civilisation today.” Yet with two little fluffy dogs
and a Mamma complex, he was openly, flamboyantly gay. When
accused by a political opponent of hating Arabs, he replied,
“How can I hate Arabs? I sucked one off last night.”
Jorg Haider blasted Austria’s cosy post-Nazi politics to rubble
in 2000 when his neo-fascist ‘Freedom Party’ won a quarter of
the vote and joined the country’s government as a coalition
partner. Several facts always cropped up in the international
press coverage: his square jaw, his muscled torso, his SS-
supporting father, his rabid anti-Semitism, his hatred of
immigrants, his description of Auschwitz and Dachau as
“punishment centres”. A few newspapers mentioned that he is
always surrounded by fit, fanatical young men. A handful went
further and pointed out that several of these young men are
openly gay. Then one left-wing German paper broke the story
everybody else was hinting at. They alleged Haider is gay.
Rumours of an Indian waiter with “intimate details” of Haider’s
body broke into the press. The Freedom Party’s general manager
Gerald Miscka quickly quit, amid accusations that he was
Haider’s lover. Haider’s close gay friend Walter Kohler - who
has been photographed showing off a holstered pistol while
Haider chuckled - declared his opposition to outing politicians.
Haider - who was married and has two children - kept quiet while
his functionaries denied the rumours. The revelation that he
died after leaving a gay bar suggests these rumours were true.
On and on it goes. If you inter-railed across Europe, only
stopping with gay fascists, there aren’t many sights you’d miss.
France’s leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was
not batting for the straight side. Germany’s leading neo-Nazi
all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of
AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of
a study of European fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was
something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a
homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the
edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an
impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were
‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want
ties to wife, children and family.’”
And it wouldn’t be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in
Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight.
They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as
“evil”, and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the
bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying,
“The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of
carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world’s
journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these
creatures repulsive.”
But scratch to homophobic surface and there’s a spandex swastika
underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front
organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote
a four-page pamphlet detailing his ‘affair’ with Nick Griffin.
“Griffin sought out intimate relations with me,” openly-gay
Webster explained, “in the late 1970s. He was twenty years
younger than me.” Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist
movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist
groups, says it’s all too plausible. Homosexuality is “extremely
prevalent” in the upper echelons of the British far right, and
at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement’s
organisers were gay, he claims.
Gerry Gable, editor of the anti-fascist magazine ‘Searchlight’,
explains, “I have looked at Britain’s Nazi groups for decades
and this homophobic hypocrisy has been there all the time. I
cannot think of any organisation on the extreme right that
hasn’t attacked people on the grounds of their sexual preference
and at the same time contained many gay officers and activists.”
Griffins’ alleged gay affair would stand in a long British
fascist tradition. The leader of the skinhead movement all
through the 1970s was a crazed, muscled thug called Nicky Crane.
He was the icon of a reactionary backlash against immigrants,
feminism and the ‘hippy’ lifetsyle of the 1960s. His movement’s
emphasis on conformity to a shaven, dehumanised norm resembled
classical fascist movements; Crane soon became a campaigner and
leading figure in the National Front. Oh, and he was gay. Before
he died of AIDS in the mid-1980s, Crane came out and admitted he
had starred in many gay porn videos. Just before he died in
1986, he was allowed to steward a Gay Pride march in London,
even though he still said he was “proud to be a fascist.”
The rubber-soled friction between gay fascists and progressive
British gay people sparked into anger in 1985 when the Gay
Skinhead Movement organised a disco at London’s Gay Centre.
Several lesbians in particular objected to the “invasion” of the
centre. They felt that the cult of “real men” and hypermasculine
thugs was stirring up the most base feelings “in the very place,
the gay movement, where you would least expect them.”
And this Gaystapo has an icon to revere, an alternative Fuhrer
to worship: the lost gay fascist leader Ernst Rohm. Along with
Adolf Hitler, Rohm was the founding father of Nazism. Born to
conservative Bavarian civil servants in 1887, Ernst Rohm’s life
began - in his view - in the “heroic” trenches of the First
World War. Like so many of the generation who formed the Nazi
Party, he was nurtured by and obsessed with the homoerotic myth
of the trenches - heroic, beautiful boys prepared to die for
their brothers and their country.
He emerged from the war with a bullet-scarred face and a
reverence for war. As he put it in his autobiography, “Since I
am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more
than the good bourgeois order.” After being disbanded, he tried
half-heartedly to get a foothold in civilian life, but he saw it
as alien, bourgeois, boring. He had no political beliefs, only
prejudices - particularly hatred of Jews. Historian Joachim Fest
describes Rohm’s generation of alienated, demobbed young men
humiliated by defeat as “agents of a permanent revolution
without any revolutionary idea of the future, only a wish to
eternalize the values of the trenches.”
It was Rohm who first spotted the potential of a soap-box ranter
called Adolf Hitler. He saw him as the demagogue he needed to
mobilize support for his plan to overthrow democracy and
establish a “soldier’s state” where the army ruled untrammelled.
He introduced the young fascist to local politicians and
military leaders; they knew him for many years as “Rohm’s boy.”
Gay historian Frank Rector notes, “Hitler was, to a substantial
extent, Rohm’s protégé.” Rohm integrated Hitler into his
underground movement to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
Rohm’s blatant, out homosexuality seems bizarre now, given the
gay genocide that was to follow. He talked openly about his
fondness for gay bars and Turkish baths, and was known for his
virility. He believed that gay people were superior to
straights, and saw homosexuality as a key principle of his
proposed Brave New Fascist Order. As historian Louis Snyder
explains, Rohm “projected a social order in which homosexuality
would be regarded as a human behaviour pattern of high repute...
He flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted his cronies
do the same. He believed straight people weren’t as adept at
bullying and aggression as homosexuals, so homosexuality was
given a high premium in the SA.” They promoted an aggressive,
hypermasculine form of homosexuality, condemning “hysterical
women of both sexes”, in reference to feminine gay men.
This belief in the superiority of homosexuality had a strong
German tradition that grew up at the turn of the twentieth
century around Adolf Brand, publisher of the country’s first gay
magazine. You could call it ‘Queer as Volk’: they preached that
gay men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented
an elite, warrior caste that should rule. They venerated the
ancient warrior cults of Sparta, Thebes and Athens.
Rohm often referred to the ancient Greek tradition of sending
gay solider couples into battle, because they were believed to
be the most ferocious fighters. The famous pass of Thermopylae,
for example was held by 300 soldiers - who consisted of 150 gay
couples. In its early years, the SA - Hitler and Rohm’s
underground army - was seen as predominantly gay. Rohm assigned
prominent posts to his lovers, making Edmund Heines his deputy
and Karl Ernst the SA commander in Berlin. The organisation
would sometimes meet in gay bars. The gay art historian
Christian Isermayer said in an interview, “I got to know people
in the SA. They used to throw riotous parties even in 1933... I
once attended one. It was quite well-behaved but thoroughly gay.
But then, in those days, the SA was ultra-gay.”
On June 30th 1934, Rohm was awoken in a Berlin hotel by Hitler
himself. He sprang to his feet and saluted, calling, “Heil Mein
Fuhrer!” Hitler said simply, “You are under arrest,” and with
that he left the room, giving orders for Rohm to be taken to
Standelheim prison. He was shot that night. Rohm was the most
high-profile kill in the massacre known as ‘the Night of the
Long Knives’.
Rohm had been suspected by Hitler of disloyalty, but his murder
began a massive crackdown on gay people. Heinrich Himmler, head
of the Gestapo, described homosexuality as “a symptom of
degeneracy that could destroy our race. We must return to the
guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates.”
German historian Lothar Machtan argues that Hitler had Rohm -
and almost all of the large number of gay figures within the SA -
killed to silence speculation about his own homosexual
experiences. His ‘evidence’ for Hitler being gay is shaky and
has been questioned by many historians, although some of his
findings are at least suggestive. A close friend of Hitler’s
during his teenager years, August Kubizek, alleged a “romantic”
affair between them. Hans Mend, a despatch rider who served
alongside Hitler in the First World War, claimed to have seen
Hitler having sex with a man. Hitler was certainly very close to
several gay men, and never seems to have had a normal sexual
relationship with a woman, not even his wife, Eva Braun.
Rudolph Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of
Hitler’s private thoughts on homosexuality. “It had destroyed
ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious
effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most
manly of characters, eliminating from the breeding pool the very
men the Volk most needs.” This idea - that homosexuality is
‘contagious’ and, implicitly, tempting - is revealing.
Rohm is venerated on the Homo-Nazi sites that have bred on the
internet like germs in a wound. They have names like Gays
Against Semitism (with the charming acronym GAS), and the Aryan
Resistance Corps (ARC). Their Rohmite philosophy is simple:
while white men are superior to other races, gay men are “the
masters of the Master Race”. They alone are endowed with the
“capacity for pure male bonding” and the “superior intellect”
that is needed for “a fascist revolution.” The ARC even
organises holiday “get-togethers” for its members where “you can
relax amongst the company of our fellow white brothers.”
So it’s fairly easy to establish that gay people are not
inoculated from fascism. They have often been at its heart. This
begs the bigger question: why? How did gay people - so often
victims of oppression and hate - become integral to the most
hateful and evil political movement of all? Is it just an
extreme form of self-harm, the political equivalent to the gay
kids who slash their own arms to ribbons out of self-hate?
Gay pornographer and film-maker Bruce LaBruce has one
explanation. He claims that “all gay porn today is implictly
fascist. Fascism is in our bones, because it’s all about
glorifying white male supremacy and fetishizing domination,
cruelty, power and monstrous authority figures.” He has tried to
explore the relationship between homosexuality and fascism in
his movies, beginning with ‘No Skin Off My Ass’ in 1991. In his
disturbing 1999 film “Skin Flick’, a bourgeois gay couple - one
black, one white - are sexually terrorised by a gang of gay
skinheads who beat off to ‘Mein Kampf’ and beat up ‘femmes’. He
implies that bourgeois gay norms quickly break down to reveal a
fascist lurking underneath; the movie ends with the black
character being raped in front of his half-aroused white lover,
as the racist gang chant, “Fuck the monkey.”
I decided to track down some gay fascists and ask them directly.
Wyatt Powers, director of the ARC, says, “I always knew in my
heart racist and gay were both morally right. I don’t see any
conflict between them. It’s only the Jew-owned gay press that
tries to convince us that racialism is the same thing as
homophobia. You can be an extreme nationalist and gay without
any contradiction at all.”
One comment board on a gay racist website goes even further into
racist lunacy. One gay man from Ohio says, “Even if you are gay
and white, or retarded and white, YOU ARE WHITE, BOTTOM LINE!
Instead of letting the white race go extinct because of
worthless races such as the Africans or Mexicans popping out
literally millions of babies a day, we have to fight this fucked
up shit they are doing. They are raping our country.” It’s true
that racism and homophobia do not necessarily overlap - but as
Rabbi Bernard Melchman explains, “Homophobia and anti-Semitism
are so often part of the same disease.” Racists are usually
homophobic. Even after reading all their web rantings, I didn’t
feel any closer to understanding why so many gay men ally
themselves with people who will almost always turn on them in
the end, just as the Nazis did.
Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has a sensitive and
intriguing explanation. “There are many reasons for this kind of
thing,” he says. “Some of them are in denial. They are going for hyper-masculinity, the most extreme possible way of being a man.
It’s a way of ostentatiously rejecting the perceived effeminacy
of the homosexual ‘Other’. These troubled men have a simple
belief in their minds: ‘Straight men are tough. Queers are weak.
Therefore if I’m tough I can’t be queer.’ It’s a desperate way
of proving their manhood.”
‘Searchlight’ magazine - the bible of the British anti-fascist
movement, with moles in every major far-right organisation -
offers an alternative explanation. “Generally condemned by a
society that continues to be largely hostile to gays, some men
may find refuge and a new power status in the far right,” one of
their writers has explained. “Through adherence to the politics
espoused by fascist groups, a new identity emerges - one where
they aren’t outcasts, because they are White Men, superior to
everyone else. They render the gay part of their identity
invisible - or reject the socially less acceptable parts, like
being feminine - while vaunting what they see as superior.”
But there’s another important question: will fascist movements
inevitably turn on gay people? In the case of the Nazis, it
seems to have been fairly arbitrary; Hitler’s main reason for
killing Rohm was unrelated to his sexuality. From my perspective
as a progressive-minded leftie, all fascism is evil; but should
all gay people see it as inimical to their interests? Is it
possible to have a gay fascist who wasn’t acting against his own
interests? Fascism is often defined as “a political ideology
advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies
equality to certain groups.” It’s true that this hierarchy could
benefit gay people at the expense of, say, black people. But
given the prevalence of homophobia, isn’t that - even for people
who don’t see fascism as inherently evil - a terrible risk to
take? Won’t a culture that turns viciously on one minority get
around to gay people in the end? This seems, ultimately, to be
the lesson of Ernst Rohm’s pitiful, squalid little life.
The growing awareness of the role gay men play in fascist
movements has been abused by some homophobes. In an especially
nutty work of revisionist history called ‘The Pink Swastika’,
the ‘historian’ Scott Lively tries to blame gay people for the
entire Holocaust, and describes the murder of gay men in the
camps as merely “gay-on-gay violence.” A typical website
commenting on the book claims absurdly, “The Pink Swastika shows
that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder
committed against innocent people by Nazi homosexuals than there
even was against homosexuals themselves.”
Yet we can’t allow these madmen to prevent a period of serious
self-reflection from the gay movement. If Bruce LaBruce is
right, many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body
worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority
figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus
can thrive. Do some gay people really still need to learn that
fascists will not bring on a Fabulous Solution for gay people,
but a Final Solution for us all?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-strange-strange- story_b_136697.html
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