I've never heard of Johann Hari, but he has published a book on the British monarchy and he appears to know his history pretty well. I don't agree with everything he says, but it is a provocative piece.

I guess this only underscores the idea that there is no easy equation between being homosexual and being liberal, open, progressive, or forward-thinking.

JohannHari.com: The strange, unexplored overlap between homosexuality and fascism

Interesting piece that brings together much of the apocrypha and fact on this connection, a topic that is certainly deserving of more and professional,* unbiased study. But I wonder how research into this would be regarded by GLAAD, and those other advocacy groups who believe "gays can do no wrong," if the findings concluded that there was some truth to the theory that a conservative mindset, even if "trapped in a gay body," is a mentally disordered one?
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*E.g., Roehm being arrested in a Berlin hotel; he was arrested with scores of other SA men in bed with each other at their annual retreat at a lakeside hotel outside Munich.

There is a male brotherhood aspect to Fascism which may be relevant here.

The Nazis were fascinated by the stories of the King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table. The Croatian Ustashe Fascists modelled themselves on mediaeval knights on crusade.

The idea of being accepted as a member of an elite, alpha-male brotherhood is obviously going to be seductive to many young men with "issues".

I think you're correct. Fascist groups tend to provide a powerful sense of belonging, which makes them attractive to people who feel like outsiders. Toss in a cult of masculinity, and you're going to appeal to guys who are insecure about their masculinity and feel a strong need to prove it. As far as the racism aspect--well, it would be nice to think that people who feel oppressed would band together. However, quite often it seems they choose to denigrate some other group, perhaps to bolster their own self-esteem.

It's probably fair to say that many gays grow up feeling like outsiders, lacking confidence in their masculinity, and generally having low self-esteem. So...not that surprising that some gays become part of fascist movements. I doubt very much that a really scholarly study would find that fascism was primarily a gay thing, though.

Klaus Theleweit actually wrote on the relationship between sexuality and fascism in his two-volume study Male Fantasies, which includes some unusual psychological analyses based on the work of Wilhelm Reich, but which also gets at the root of homosociality and homosexuality, outsiderism, racialism/racism and misogyny, and the unique aspects of what allowed fascism to take (its particularly horrific) root in Germany.

One important thing that Hari does bring up is how homophobes have attempted to use the particular histories of Röhm and Hitler (which in any case is much more hazy in sexual terms) to batter homosexuals, while espousing the utilizing the very anti-gay rhetoric, and proposing the same extreme measures, that the Nazis employed. The GLAAD everything-that's-gay-is-good is a defensive mechanism and a reaction, but quite understandable given that we live in a society (and world) in which homosexuality continues to be viewed and treated with considerable hostility, to the point of systemic and direct anti-gay attacks (including FMA).

Great thread guys.

As a novice intellectual historian, I've always wondered how and when the current gay liberation movement would appropriate the various pre-histories of Hitler's Germany that related to homosexuality.

And I've wondered if writing this "pre-history" would ever be an important milestone in our effort to better understand our own bodies, minds, souls.

As of now, I can't imagine a scenario where a gay man in the 21st century could learn from the lives of the secretive, fraternal-like societies of Fascist Germany.

Okay guys come on, this is propaganda posing as information. I don't know what Hari's motives are, or where he comes from, but he makes vast generalizations :"all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay." I mean that is just an unsupported and unsupportable statement, you can't accept it as fact, is simply opinion posing as fact. Sure he goes on to give a few examples, but his agenda seems really questionable.

And then the conclusion affording Bruce LaBruce with being "right" about fascism: "body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for the authority figures and cruelty" is no more a gay motif than just a general population at large motif--straights are equally enamoured, or repulsed by of these traits as they preport gays to be.

6iron, the best example of writing illuminating pre-Stonewall gay culture is "Gay New York," which was written by a U. of Chicago history professor (George Chauncey?) a few years ago. It's revealing for showing that we were there, after all, and not just on the fringes of society. Jonathan Katz's "Gay American History" is also decent, if less focused and more general, and the work of Magnus Hirschfeld (? FT, help me here) developed as much as it detailed pre-Nazi gay culture in Germany.

Together, these books are rather "affirming" in showing that we've been part of society all along, thank you very much, and not just creatures of Stonewall. In fact, one thing I'd like to see more research on is what I'll call "the inevitability of gay liberation." In other words, given the vastly-increased numbers of us courtesy of the Baby Boom and its sequelae, we were "bound" to come out as a matter of course. That might well prove alarming - and disarming - to those modern "activists" who pride themselves on having created gay liberation sua sponte. Methinks it was just waiting to happen - if it hadn't already been done before!

Yes, Hirschfeld was one of the pioneers of gay studies in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. (Karl Ulrichs introduced the term \"Urnings\" in 1864 to describe male homosexuals.) There are several very interesting recent books that detail gay and lesbian history before Stonewall: Homosexuality and Civilization by Louis Crompton; Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World by Nicholas C. Edsall; Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality by Jonathan Ned Katz; Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century by Graham Robb[/]; [i]Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 by James McCourt.

I also recently finished the puckish Douglas Shand-Tucci's study of gay Harvardians, which points to that institution's key role in producing notable gay and bi Americans (philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and George Santayana, poets Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Adrienne Rich, novelists William S. Burroughs, Andrew Holleran and Andrew Tobias (John Reid), architect Philip Johnson, cultural avatar Lincoln Kirstein, etc.) Shand-Tucci makes excessive claims, but the detailing of the role of so many notable homosexuals in the shaping of American intellectual and artistic culture is quite interesting.

Very good points, gmg. Of course the activists take great credit when in truth it was the cumulative action of thousands (millions?) over a long span. But we should not ever slight the role of figures like Hirschfeld, who was arguing on behalf of homosexuality as a normal aspect of human experience when others did or would or could not. Or Wilde, who put his flamboyance on display and inspired people all over the place, before being crushed by anti-gay laws. Or Whitman, who was brave enough to put his same-sex desires on display at a time when doing so was anathema. Or those brave Daughters of Bilitis, or the members of the Mattachine Society, or Frank O'Hara, who wrote openly about his gay lovers during the McCarthy witchhunt era...or Sappho, or Shakespeare, or André Gide, or Stein, or Ma Rainey, or Bayard Rustin, or Francis Bacon (either one)....

[ July 06, 2004, 02:17 PM: Message edited by: fantomas ]

I don't know if this is too simplistic but this goes to show that not all gays are good

we're just like everyone else--we have the saints and the sinners

FT, would that be the Frank O'Hara who wrote "A Rage to Live?" What's his story?*
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*Yes, I could google, but I choose not to for fear of losing the gay nuances.

Well, gmg, you could say that gay liberation was inevitable...but you could also argue that Stonewall (or some other confrontation with the police somewhere) was probably inevitable, given the political climate of the late '60's. And with the civil rights movement and women's liberation movement as inspiration to draw on, it was inevitable that gay activism would arise in a very in-your-face way. You don't really think that if nobody ever bothered to challenge the laws or campaign politically for gay rights that the state legislatures would just have seen the error of their ways, do you? Obviously, the time had to be right or they would have suffered the fate of Oscar Wilde, but people still had to stand up and claim their rights. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

I'm irritated by the complacent "we're almost there", "homophobia's not really that big a problem anymore" attitude of a lot of conservative gays. It's easy to think that way when you live in a big city in the northeast or on the west coast. It's important to keep in mind that millions of Americans could not legally have sex in the privacy of their own home until the summer of 2003--and that if your beloved W. is reelected and gets an opportunity to name a couple supreme court justices, that decision could easily be reversed. We still have a long, long way to go in many parts of the country.

Yes, JC, I agree with you on both counts; the general tenor of the '60s - my own HS years - had a lot to do with the inevitability theory. Nor do I hold that state legislatures, let alone Congress, would have addressed our issues back then. But what made them stand up and take notice was in large part due to the sheer numbers of people effected by continued discrimination. I'm not at all saying that modern activists had nothing to do with the loosening of prejudice we've seen in the last decades, but there were many other people working in many different ways - in my own case, in the courts, where confrontationalism is, thankfully, replaced by civil procedure - to end that discrimination than just a bunch of people parading in the streets.

As for my "beloved W," well now, I wouldn't be hoping/praying for an open convention if he was all that dear to me, now would I? But enough said on that! wink

Stonewall could not have happened if gay America had not been becoming increasingly self aware and organized. The Daughters of Billitis (sp?) and the Mattachine Society significantly predated Stonewall. There are pictures of gay rights protests outside the White House much earlier in the 60's. On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure that translated into a very high profile among the public at large, and certainly did not translate into massively changing attitudes among the unwashed masses. No matter what the reality of the historical importance of the stonewall riots themselves, they are a visible and identifiable high profile event that makes it easy to hang significance on the date. June 29, 1969 is important as a date just like July 4, 1776 is important. There was organized resistance to British tyranny before that date, and afterward there was no meaningful independence, but something happened that day that was easy to point to as a major event. So to with Stonewall.

Close--but that's John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), who as far as I know was straight.

Frank O'Hara was one of the four New York School poets (the others are John Ashbery, still living; James Schuyler; and Kenneth Koch).* They constituted one of the most playful and important American avant-garde movements of the mid-to-late 20th century. O'Hara was openly gay, roomed in college with artist Edward Gorey, was painted by Fairfield Porter and nude by Larry Rivers (who was briefly his lover), worked at the Museum of Modern Art, studied music and wrote about art, befriended such poets as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and James Merrill, and infamously died when he was run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island at 1966. He is best known for poems that follow the pattern \"I-do-this / I-do-that.\"

Though some academics do not like O'Hara's chattiness, humor, surrealist tendencies (he and the others were strongly influenced by French experimentation and Pasternak), obvious camp sensibility and the overt homosexual references, he wrote many gems. Here are two, the first commemorating the death of Billie Holliday, the second about painting:

and



[ July 06, 2004, 09:07 PM: Message edited by: fantomas ]

I think Quentin Crisp should be added to that list, as I'm sure there are many others who I do not know about.

Off at a tangent. One of the catalysts for the de-criminalisation of homosexuality in the UK was that our naval officers and Ministry of Defence staff kept on getting caught in gay honeytraps by the Russians. Legalising homosexuality was the most effective way of eliminating the risk of them being blackmailed into giving away Cold War secrets. Was that a factor in the US too?

Not really, as far as I can tell. On a state basis, the laws were viewed as contrary to the various states' constitutional protections of equality under the law, or changes in public attitudes, or both. SCOTUS struck down the Texas sodomy laws on similar bases, but concerns about military officials had little effect.

Actually, though, when were Britain's anti-sodomy laws struck down? Are there still any anti-gay laws on the books?

Canada's sodomy laws were struck down in 1969, as our then Prime Minister, the Late Pierre Trudeau, said that the government had no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

It only took the US 34 years to catch up

:-)

The short answer is 1967.

Longer cut-and-paste history lesson!

There were laws against sodomy (no distinction between men/women/animals) in the Middle Ages but they were hardly ever used. Just as well - punishments included being burnt to death or being buried alive. The law was tightened in 1533 (no sodomist to be allowed to join the clergy(!) and a maximum punishment of death, forfeit of all property and disinheritance of wives and heirs). That law lapsed at one point so sodomy was not illegal between 1548 and 1563 when the 1533 law was re-enacted.

Other homosexual acts were not illegal. It was necessary to prove anal penetration. London had a very open gay culture at every level of society in the 1700's for example.

In 1861, the death penalty for sodomy was reduced to life imprisonment but some other homosexual acts were criminalised for the first time inxcluding oral sex and mutual masturbation.

In 1885 the Labouchere Amendment led to the wholesale criminalisation of homosexuality by creating a catch-all offence of "gross indecency" (though famously not for lesbians as no politician wanted to be the one to explain the concept to Queen Victoria when it came to her signing the Royal Assent so they left it out!). The maximum sentence was two years hard labour. This was the "Blackmailer's Charter" which caught Oscar Wilde amongst others.

In 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised homosexuality, stating, with reference to England and Wales only, that “a homosexual act in private shall not be an offence provided that the parties consent there to and have attained the age of twenty-one years.” Scotland followed in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982.

In 1994 the age of consent was lowered to 18 in England, Wales and Scotland. An amendment for 16 was rejected then but finally passed in 1998.


BUT the legal definition of "in private" went unchanged so consensual sex is still technically illegal in many cases (see old article explaining those anomalies)

No more than there is between heterosexuality (or any ethnicity, or the proverbial left-handedness) and any of those qualities (or their opposites).

Key point from Hari's article:
I think there's a lot of truth to this quote, because what it describes is much like the self-conscious, even obsessive butchness found in many closeted men ... including "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy (who actually spent the war pumping gas in Sheboygan) and other crypto-fascist reactionaries of the not-so-fabulous, queer-baiting '50s ... not to mention the homophobic theocrat preachers who periodically get caught in the very crime (homosexual abuse of minors) of which they love to accuse us.

As Shakespeare might have said of their ilk, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much."