This weekend marks the height of the annual gay pride celebrations: the weekend closest to June 28, the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Occasionally people, both within and without the gay community, question whether these celebrations are necessary, or whether they serve any useful purpose other than to promote circuit parties, costumes, and corporate sponsorships.
Personally, I've never been to a pride celebration, except by accident. (I had to walk through part of DC Pride last year, on my way to the Folger Shakespeare Library for a performance of Taming of the Shrew.) While I was never one of the voices calling for an end to pride celebrations, I was one of those who didn't really see the need for, or the relevance of, such things.
That changed for me this year. Follow me below the squiggle and I'll tell you why.
I thought that since it was pride weekend, I might as well do something to acknowledge the day, so I watched, for the first time in several years, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's 2000 documentary film, Paragraph 175. They took the title of their film from the section of the German criminal code that criminalized homosexual conduct (for more of the history behind the film, see my 2010 LGBT History Month diary, Those whom memory forgot: Hitler's gay victims). In it, they interviewed a handful of men (and one woman) who had lived through some or all of the Hitler years as gay or lesbian. As they recounted in the commentary track on the DVD, they had a hell of a time finding survivors to begin with, and an even harder one convincing them to appear on camera and tell their stories--many of them for the first time ever.
The story that got me this evening was told by a then 92-year-old man who wouldn't allow the directors to use his full name (and who originally only agreed to participate in the project if they would film him in silhouette, so nobody would know who he was). Fifty years after the end of the war, thirty years after Germany decriminalized consensual gay sex, and ten years after Paragraph 175 had been stricken from the statute book, and this sweet man was worried about anybody knowing that he was (a) gay and (b) a survivor of the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals.
That was bad enough. But toward the end of the film, one of the interviewers asked him what he did after the war ended and he was released. He said he went back home and worked in the family business, but never said a word about the eight and a quarter years he spent in the camps with anyone in his family, because he was ashamed. His mother, he said, never said a word about it to him. When the interviewer asked if he'd have liked to speak with someone about it, he said, in tears, "Maybe with my father." He then added, "Nobody wanted to hear about that. If you mentioned one of those words, they'd say 'Enough about that, it's over and done with now.'"
Imagine. You live through one of the most unspeakable periods in human history, and yet you keep silent about your experiences for half a century because you're ashamed to have anyone know that about you. No one to help you through the rough times, no one to calm you when your nerves act up. Your own government refuses to recognize you in the same way that it recognizes other victims of Nazi persecution. In effect, you are, in the words of the title of Jean Le Bitoux's 2002 book that I used for my 2010 diary title, one of "those whom memory forgot."
All of the survivors that Epstein and Friedman interviewed for their film are gone now. The last known pink triangle survivor of the Nazi camps, Rudolf Brazda, died a little less than two years ago. He was not one of the interviewees for Paragraph 175, but he did publish his memoirs (Das Glück kam immer zu mir, "I Was Always Lucky") in 2011. To the best of my knowledge, they're still only available in the original German. If I had more time, I'd seriously consider taking a whack at translating them into English.
Because that's why we need pride weekend. So that those who lived--and too often died--in the shadows aren't forgotten.
- Epstein and Friedman, Paragraph 175
- Pierre Seel, Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1994)
- Jean Le Bitoux, Les Oubliés de la mémoire (Paris: Hachette, 2002)
- Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (Holt, 1988)
- Heinz Heger, Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (Hamburg: Merlin, 1972); translated by David Fernbach as The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps (Boston: Alyson, 1994)
- Alexander Zinn, "Das Glück kam immer zu mir": Rudolf Brazda--Das Überleben eines Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2011)
- Bent, the 1997 movie made from Martin Sherman's 1979 play of the same name
