Gay neo-Nazis?
Johann Hari has written what is likely to be a very controversial piece on the alleged historical links between homosexuals and fascist movements which will, if nothing else, piss off both groups. He makes a number of interesting claims and documents some interesting facts and observations. Among them:
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 …. 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 …
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.” …
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.” …
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.”
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I have to be absolutely straight on this and admit I wouldn’t have a clue.
Comment by observa — 7/2/2004 @ 2:21 am
This is simply a retread of the arguments in Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams’ widely ridiculed book “The Pink Swastika". Like that book, you have to ignore a lot of facts, stretch others, and invent many more – ignore, for example, the Nazi anti-homosexual purges (many homosexual men ended up in concentration camps), the liquidation of the gay facist Ernst Roehm, etc.
Another example: the existence of homosexuality in the English upper class during the 30s is hardly new information. How this is supposed to prove that fascist ideology is a gay ideology is unclear…
Likewise, using Pim Fortuyn as evidence of a fascist homosexual agenda is laughable. Pim Fortuyn might have been far right by today’s standards, but there’s no evidence he was a fascist. Espousing anti-immigration rhetoric isn’t sufficient; if it was, Robert Menzies would be a fascist.
Comment by Jason Stokes — 7/2/2004 @ 4:27 am
I am not sure they actually know what Fascism is - I purchased a book “Fascism by Roger Eatwell", and I still don’t really understand just what Fascism actually is. I am going to have to read it again because Eatwell tends to write well but often obscurely, as if he too, isn’t totally certain what it is.
But Fascism was started by Mussolini in Italy, so I suspect we have another case of inventing a social phenomenon in order to sell lots of books.
Comment by Louis — 7/2/2004 @ 9:32 am
Jason Stokes
Agreed re Pim Fortuyn. He was illiberal in some respects (though not in others) but hardly a fascist or racialist.
Re fascism I’m not sure that fascism is the right word to describe Radical Right neo-nazi leaders.I think of fascism as basically non-communist Statism/corporatism and anti-individualis, - Mussolini and Franco were Fascists. Fascism is non-racialist (originally there were Jews in Mussolini’s Fascist party and many Italian fascists went along half-heartedly with collaboration with the Nazi extermination programme).
Comment by Jason Soon — 7/2/2004 @ 12:33 pm
I do wish we stop using the epithets of “Nazi” etc. All were/are socialists.
What those philosophies have to do with sexual orientation escapes me. I always thought homosexuality was a biological feedback mechanism to control population levels in species lacking predators.
But then I am just a dumb geoscientist, not a social scientist
Comment by Louis — 7/2/2004 @ 6:15 pm
“What those philosophies have to do with sexual orientation escapes me. I always thought homosexuality was a biological feedback mechanism to control population levels in species lacking predators”
Well presumably this is the same question that Johann Hari is puzzling with. Which is why he wrote the article as he thinks he has spotted a trend. Maybe he’s wrong and there isn’t one but what he documents is curious nonetheless. I don’t think he has any anti-homosexual agenda (he writes for the left wing UK broadsheets)
Comment by Jason Soon — 7/2/2004 @ 6:39 pm
Johann Hari is actually gay himself and writes a lot on gay issues. He’s also a dedicated controversialist. You could of course mount an equally convincing (or not) case about the over-representation of gay men in far Left causes over the last century. Indeed, the numbers of same therein would greatly outnumber the Ernst Rohms.
I suspect that there’s an important subtext that’s being missed: the ongoing debate between those gay men who see normative, masculinist models of being gay as antithetical to their notions of queer purity, versus those who perceive crusading “liberating” insistence on gender-blurring as a tedious wank.
The fact that “fascist tendencies” are continually discerned (by gender-blenders)in gay blokes who look like blokes should come as no great surprise to regular consumers of standard blogospherical discourse.
Comment by Geoff Honnor — 7/3/2004 @ 10:16 am
louis, that sounds dangerously like group selectionism.
the unit of selection is almost never the species. (and you can probably drop the almost)
an individual either lives or dies, copulates or doesn’t, and passes on half its genes (with two mate sexual selection)
phenotypes are always genotype + environment, and never one or the other, although i greatly suspect that homosexuality is predominantly cultural.
especially strict homosexuality, as opposed to mere bisexuality which i think is a side-effect of requiring males to be constantly horny. (because we’re not that good at detecting when females are fertile)
to sum up, i reject the notion that homosexuality is some group selection mechanism, mainly because what you think is group selection almost never is. (dawkins selfish gene is the seminal reference for this) group selection requires such narrow conditions that it probably never occurs.
Comment by c8to — 7/3/2004 @ 2:54 pm