The Gay Holocaust

Last week, I saw a fact going around on the net about gays during the Holocaust. I thought everyone knew it. Turns out most people don’t. So it prompted me to write more about gay history and our world. So that other people might know more about where we come from. 

The Holocaust Memorial Day was last week. We all know the atrocities it commemorates. But here’s a part people don’t seem to know. When the liberating armies freed the surviving inmates in the camps, they rounded up the gay ones and sent them to prison.

At the start of the war, the Nazis took gay men out of prisons and sent them to places like Auschwitz and Dachau. The Pink Triangle, today’s symbol of the LGBTQ community, was the badge that the Nazis put on our uniforms. Our yellow Star of David. We weren’t gassed but instead worked to death. And the liberators sent any surviving gay men back to prison to serve out the rest of their sentences. 

While everyone else was innocent, we were deemed criminals.

The Nazis didn’t keep very good records of us. I’ve heard tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and even a million gay men died in the camps. And if a million seems an impossible number, remember that 1930’s Berlin had 750,000 more people than today and was the center of the gay world. Most of our greatest scientists, psychologists, philosophers and artists all lived in Berlin at that time. 

We’ll never know how many gay men died during World War 2. But we do know that our holocaust continued. The war against us has never ended.

In the 50s and 60s, homosexuality was criminalized in most of the world and punishable by incarceration and death. It was decreed as a mental disease until 1973 in America. 

The 1970’s though is when gay men began to gather political and social momentum again. San Francisco and New York were beacon cities for gay men. So once again, we gathered numbers and began to demand the same rights that everyone else was entitled to.

Harvey Milk is a martyr in the Gay community. He was one of the first openly gay men elected to public office in America, serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He won on a majority of minority votes. Meaning, he went to every other group that wasn’t straight, white and rich and convinced them that we had more in common than we didn’t. And that’s how he got elected.

But his success is what got him murdered. They made a film about it called, Milk. Have you ever noticed every time there’s a major Hollywood film with a gay main character it’s the same ending? Gay character dies tragically. Heterosexual actor gets Oscar. I’d like to not thank the Academy.

TV is where LGBTQ people see ourselves these days. Real life gay, lesbian, non-binary and trans characters are popping up in every show. Where their sexuality is not their storyline. But if we look at Pose and It’s A Sin, you see also how dire things were at the start of the AIDS crisis. 

There’s a photo of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus taken in 1993. It shows the hundred men of the Choir all dressed in black, facing away from the camera. Except for six, dressed in white who look into the lens. They were the only surviving members of the original hundred. Six. AIDS taught us a lesson we’ve never forgotten. When it only affected gay men, no one cared. This disease literally killed an entire generation of my people, while most of society stood by and watched. 

In the 80s and 90s those who weren’t dying were looking after those who were. And a shout of recognition to all the lesbians and heterosexual women who took care of their dying gay friends, because those men’s families had disowned them.

But what that meant for men like me coming into our twenties, was that we lost all our elders. So those elders never trained us to be next elders. I think this is something that my community is still recovering from.

As for COVID, gay men and many other socially or economically disenfranchised communities watched the concerted effort by the planet to find COVID vaccines. Since we’ve proved we can to do ten years of immunology work in one, can we direct that effort next into finding a cure for HIV? Asking for a friend. About thirty eight million of them.

I think a huge part of why people discount gay men or just don’t like us is that, unlike racial minorities, we aren’t born to our own kind. Gay men don’t exist as family groups, something relatable to the heterosexual majority. I didn’t have gay parents or gay brothers and sisters. I wasn’t raised in a gay house with gay music, gay thought, gay culture and pictures of gay leaders on the walls. I didn’t have gay grandparents bouncing me on their knees telling my what things were like in our home country.

Instead, we figure out on our own that we aren’t like everyone we’re related to, or anyone else in our neighborhood or town. We’re not like anyone at school. And we’re terrified that everyone’s going to find out. Because we’re raised in a world that tells us that everything about us is at best, other. At worst, abominable.

I think things are better now. There’s so much more love and acceptance for LGBTQ children. But when the right to free speech protects anyone holding a holy book who’s convinced themselves that their God has told them to hate us, that noise never has the volume turned down.

Imagine if people told you that you can pray away your ethnicity. Or that the country you were born in was a choice. Or that the color of your eyes was a phase. Or that you are being jailed or put to death for being tall.

In 70 plus countries it’s still illegal to be gay. That’s over a third of the world. Many more have discriminatory laws against us. So maybe it’s no wonder 25% of the homeless population in America is LGBTQ. We over index on anxiety and depression and all the -isms people can fall into to cope with that.

Everything I’ve talked about here is something every gay man to some degree is buried under, battling through, or has worked so very hard to personally overcome. If there is a gay agenda, it’s to stop having to legitimize our very existence.

So where is gayness from then? The writer and shamanic teacher Daan Van Kampenhout has a wonderful explanation. Almost cientific in fact. His theory is called Queer Ancestry. 

That the queerness that makes all LGBTQ people today was carried through the generations before us. The people we saw in our photo albums as children, and other ancestors stretching back through our family trees.

Back to a time where queer people occupied sacred spaces in pre-Christian societies. We were considered of two spirits. Queer people were the shamans, healers and oracles. We were revered.

But that queerness in humans, where did that come from? It dates back to a pre-human earth when it was only animals that roamed the surface. Queerness is in animals. The book Biological Exuberance documents 450 animal species that have homosexual behavior. 

Which means before animals existed, the queerness that made them was in the earth itself.

Which means before there was a queer earth, queerness was in the stardust that formed our planet.

Which means there is a queer breath in the universe. That’s where gay people come from. So while we battle every day against the forces and attitudes that oppress us, people don’t realize that we are an essential part of life itself.

Which means whatever that queer essence is that made me and is in me, is in you too. Just like everything that made you, is in me.

So maybe the greatest lie we’ve ever told ourselves, is that we are different to each other.