Gay degenerates

John Broich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. It was repealed in That was just before the Nazis came to power, magnified the anti-gay law, then sought to annihilate gay and transgender Europeans.

Frank Kameny Tribute

The story of how close Germany — and much of Europe — came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress. In the s, Berlin had nearly gay and lesbian bars or cafes.

Vienna had about a dozen gay cafes, clubs and bookstores. In Paris, certain quarters were renowned for open displays of gay and trans nightlife. Even FlorenceItaly, had its own gay district, as did many smaller European cities. Films began depicting sympathetic gay characters.

And media entrepreneurs realized there was a middle-class gay and trans readership to whom they could cater. Its lead doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, also consulted on the Lili Elbe sex change. In the s, the Depression spread economic anxiety, while political fights in European parliaments tended to spill outside into actual street fights between Left and Right.

Fascist parties offered Europeans a choice of stability at the price of democracy. Tolerance of minorities was destabilizing, they said. Gay and trans people gay degenerates an obvious target. What happened next shows the whiplash speed with which the progress of a generation can be thrown into reverse.

Later still, its acting head was arrested. When Nazi leader Adolph Hitler needed to justify arresting and murdering gay degenerates political allies inhe said they were gay. This fanned anti-gay zealotry by the Gestapo, which opened a special anti-gay branch. During the following year alone, the Gestapo arrested more than 8, gay men, quite possibly using a list of names and addresses seized at the Institute for Sexual Research.

Not only was Paragraph not erased, as a parliamentary committee had recommended just a few years before, it was amended to be more expansive and punitive. As the Gestapo spread throughout Europe, it expanded the hunt. In Vienna, it hauled in every gay man on police lists and questioned them, trying to get them to name others.

The fortunate ones went to jail. The less fortunate went to Buchenwald and Dachau. In conquered France, Alsace police worked with the Gestapo to arrest at least men and send them to concentration camps. The total number of Europeans arrested for being LGBTQ under fascism is impossible to know because of the lack of reliable records.

But a conservative estimate is that there were many tens of thousands to one hundred thousand arrests during the war period alone. Under these nightmare conditions, far more LGBTQ people in Europe painstakingly hid their genuine sexuality to avoid suspicion, marrying members of the opposite sex, for example.

Still, if they had been prominent members of the gay and trans community before the fascists came to power, as Berlin lesbian club owner Lotte Hahm was, it was too late to hide. She was sent to a concentration camp. In those camps, gay men were gay degenerates with a pink triangle.

In these places of horror, men with pink triangles were singled out for particular abuse. They were ostracized and tormented by their fellow inmates, too.