This article originally appeared in the September 1979 issue of Christopher Street, on pages 17-18.
Barry Mehler’s interview with his German friend Hans (“In Neo-Nazi Germany,” June 1979) was one of the most confused and confusing pieces of writing that I have encountered in many a moon. The “intense, gentle” Hans is justly concerned with the rightist backlash and the stepping up of neo-Nazi propaganda in West Germany. Well, good for him! But his statements also betray a great deal of sympathy for the people who are directly responsible for the backlash, Berufsverbot, and all the rest of the things Hans is complaining about. These are of course the Marxist-Leninist terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group who, through their bombings, hijackings, and assassinations strove to compel an unwilling nation to become a totalitarian state or, failing that, to discredit its pluralist democratic institutions by forcing it into a backlash.
I was in West Berlin (where I lived during most of the 1950s) a little less than a decade ago. During my visit, those terrorists (they were riding high at the time) exploded a bomb in the one remaining Jewish synagogue in Berlin in order to show, they said, that they had gotten over “the post-World War II German liberal guilt over their treatment of the Jews.” In the light of subsequent revelations, they also must have done it to please their ally, Yassir Arafat of the PLO, who armed them, financed them, and trained them at his El Fatah camp. Hans’s concern about the neo-Nazis and his disgust at anti-Semitic jokes rang a bit hollow for me, considering his other sympathies.
During that visit to Berlin, members of the same terrorist group placed another bomb (which was fortunately found and defused) at a large department store, the K.D.W., where working-class families were Christmas shopping with their children. The intention was to punish those workers for enjoying the luxuries provided by the capitalist economy instead of opting for the austerity of the People’s Republic, situated, as it happens, only a few blocks away from the K.D.W. Does Hans really believe that people with this kind of fanatical, fundamentalist mentality are capable of bringing about the “just, democratic, humane society” for which he yearns?
The remainder of the interview is even more confusing. After telling us that gays are repressed in West Germany, Hans proceeds to enumerate a series of advances in gay rights there that are surely unprecedented in European history. He also says that gay militancy and activism have resulted from the example of the equally spectacular progress of gay rights in post-Stonewall America. But then he tries to credit as much of this liberation as he can to the Communists, of all people. Yes, things are “not very good” for gays in Communist East Germany, Hans concedes (but there are about fifty of them who can meet in private homes, he adds hopefully, and they have even seen Rosa von Praunheim’s film). Yes, the West German Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and the rest are all virulently anti-gay, but then, in some inexplicable way “we have our major support on the left, and the anti-gay groups are rather isolated.” But what is this mysterious “major support” and why be coy about revealing it, after depicting this solid wall of Marxist homophobia?
I don’t suppose Hans will want to hear anything about the decades of genocide practiced on gays by the Marxist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, or about the corrective camps for gays in Cuba. It is of far greater interest to him that there was one bona fide member of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands who, back at the turn of the century, supported Magnus Hirschfeld’s fight for gay rights—the magnificent and deluded Hirschfeld, who in the 1920s was hoodwinked into mistaking Lenin’s crackdown on Russia’s gays for a progressive, pro-gay move and who passed “the word” about it to the West. The “word” still reverberates. There were hundreds of Russian gay refugees in Berlin in those days—musicians, dancers, waiters—but it never occurred to Hirschfeld to ask even one of them why he had fled from the Bolsheviks. Nor would Hans today want to talk to a Cuban refugee or a Russian gay recently arrived from the Soviet Union. Isn’t the testimony of anyone who has lived under a system that calls itself “socialism” and experienced inhumanity and repression under it automatically suspect?
As I type this letter, I am experiencing a sinking feeling at the thought of the resentment and anger it is sure to provoke in several authentic gay liberationists of whom I am personally fond (and you won’t even bother to call me the next time you visit San Francisco, will you, Gary?). I am breaking an aspect of the unwritten, but rigidly enforced gay liberationist etiquette, one that says gay oppression today exists only in pluralistic societies such as the United States and West Germany (which Christopher Street did not hesitate to qualify as neo-Nazi) and that it is always caused by the rightist reactionaries. The more freedom we who live in these societies obtain, the more widely accepted we become, the angrier and more oppressed we are supposed to feel. Well, the more I look into this subject and the more I read about it, the more convinced I am becoming that the totalitarians of the left—the Marxist-Leninists, to be precise—have perpetrated gay oppression in this century on a scale that dwarfs the efforts of either the Nazis or of Anita Bryant. The massacre of gays in China under Mao, as documented in Bao Ruo-Wang’s memoir The Prisoner of Mao (Penguin Books, 1976), must have occurred on a scale that boggles the mind.
But one mustn’t mention such things, because to do so is to lay oneself open to instant charges of McCarthyism, of red-baiting, or of being in the pay of the CIA. The result is a great deal of self-imposed brainwashing about this aspect of the topic in the gay movement. We have by now reached the stage where many younger gays are ready to believe Hans when he assures them that present-day gay liberation, with its huge visibility, parades, and political clout, owes its inception and its victories to our friends the Communists. And why not? Aren’t there gay Nazis in Los Angeles who will assure you that Hitler was pro-gay? ❡
