Is 'gay fascist' a contradiction in terms? Should being gay, indeed, imply having such a live-and-let-live attitude to sexual morality that some version of "liberalism" (at best libertarian-ism, at worst Marxism) should be the only political option available to one?
The obvious answer is, of course, No - if only because gay fascists (not to mention gay authoritarians of all political stripes) have existed and do exist, both in the various fascist movements of the Second World War and in nearly every
fascistic political movement that has grown up since. (Nor by any stretch of the imagination have they all been hypocritical closet-case types either: Jörg Haider may have been in, but Ernst Röhm was very much out and proud.)
A few years ago now, the "liberal" Johann Hari had a silly but entertaining
article in which he gave plenty of examples of the latter phenomenon. The one big problem that found himself faced with though was of course
the myth of the "Gay Holocaust". After all, the gay lobby hitched its cart to the anti-Nazi (and thus the, er, Shoah-business) bandwagon a long time ago, and ever since then actual facts have seldom been permitted to get in the way of their slightly sleazy sob-story. And thus for example we have the figure of '10,000 gay people [who] were slaughtered in the Nazi death-camps' (Hari again, this time in the
HuffPo!*), which is of course
total fiction - unless we are to assume that of the putative six million Jews who died in the gas-chambers only 0.16 per cent were actually gay (which even I'd say seems suspiciously low). The truth, alas, is that yes, gays were sent to concentration camps. A number of them, indeed, may well have died in them. But they were sent to the camps because homosexuality in Germany at the time was illegal. In reality concentration camps were not the same as "death camps", and they were used to house common criminals as well as "political" prisoners; and the Nazis did not "ban" homosexuality, much less did they wage an anti-gay genocide against homosexuals. There was certainly no "Holocaust" against them in the same way as there was (at least probably, when all is said and done!) against the Jews. (I'd have thought it goes without saying that to pretend that there was is deeply offensive to genuine victims of the Nazi regime.) Homosexuality had been illegal in Germany before the Nazis came to power, and after the Third Reich was overthrown it continued to be illegal up until the law was changed in the 1960s.†
Given quite how many gay Nazis there have always been, it is course tempting at this point to dismiss fascism as having been demonstrably immoral right from the beginning. (There really was no excusing people like Röhm in the early days of the Nazi movement.) And of course by the same token it would be easy (but misguided) to point out the fascistic tendencies of the modern "gay rights"movement. After all, the central thesis of
The Pink Swastika is that fascism and homosexuality are virtually the same thing: the authors make much of the notorious Röhm's leadership of the SA in the NSDAP's early years, but they also give some attention to the modern "Far Right", as well as to the "gay rights" movement (which has in its time had a significant following on the Far Right). But as with those who would try to discredit Christianity by posting pictures of Hitler going to church and so on, to go down either of these cul-de-sacs is to make a category error - or at the very least to have misunderstood the nature of fascism.
In practice, the simple truth is that some fascists are and always have been "gay", just as some Christians are gay and always have been in the past. More to the point, there is no logical reason why a homosexual should not be drawn towards fascism - or at least any less than a Christian or a Muslim should be. If one is to understand the riddle of fascism one must look into the nature of the thing itself, and do so quite dispassionately. A lot of Christians and homosexuals (and indeed Socialists!) may find the results of such an examination disturbing. But the first and most important thing to know about fascism is that it has a near universal appeal, and this should not be seen as reflecting badly on any one group or other.
'Fascism' literally means strength through unity. In practice, of course, the unity is always imposed by a strong political authority, so whether the strength comes from the unity or vice versa is a moot point. Moreover, in practice that 'strength' means not stability but violence. A fascist government is always (and is by definition!) a violent government. Its authority is based not on reason but on pure will, and is, again by definition, utterly arbitrary. It is not just irrational but anti-rational. Violence is both its means and its motive: it is the political means by which it enforces its will and it depends upon violence in order to survive, but for a fascist regime violence is also an end in itself. And so fascism is not necessarily a "racist" creed (except in a very loose sense of that term), let alone a reactionary one (ditto!), but it is always a militaristic or quasi-militaristic one. Can this force be properly harnessed to achieve particular human, indeed political goals? Such a possibility may seem plausible, but I am wary of repeating the mistakes of the Left by trying to justify the human failings of particular fascist regimes on the grounds that "it" was not implemented properly. There is no "right" way to put into practice what is in essence a political cult of violence.
For me, the single best film about Nazism ever made was actually an American propaganda cartoon for children produced by Walt Disney called
Education for Death: The Making of a Nazi (and it's viewable on YouTube
here). There's a rumour floating around that it is now banned, and if that's true then it's shocking: such a ban can only serve the purposes of the neo-Nazi "Far-Right" - partly because it doesn't mention the Holocaust, and so a ban would fuel the paranoia of the Holocaust-deniers, and partly because, given that it doesn't mention the Holocaust, it's all the more chilling an exploration of pure fascist ideology in all its irrational (and irreligious) brutality. The second best Nazi film is of course
Triumph of the Will, whose very title says it all: according to the Nazi doctrine it is the will - that is to say the pure, brute appetites of man - that is supreme, whereas reason (the "divine spark" reason) is largely irrelevant.
If this then is the true nature of fascism, one would have to ask why brutish
homosexual appetites should be thought of as
more rational - and hence less "susceptible" to fascism - than heterosexual ones. It would be very difficult even for the most committed of "homosexualists" to demonstrate that they are.
Brutal homosexualists? There are plenty of them about. To take just one (albeit fairly obvious) example, I was half amused and half disappointed a few years ago to find one of dear old Peter Tatchell's ageing hobby-horses apparently still doing the rounds on Raybeard's
fine blog. The line, that William L Shirer's
pop-history version of Nazi Germany†† is defective because there aren't enough gays in it is one that Peter was in fact peddling in the mid to late 1990s, when he was slightly less respectable and pro-Establishment than he is now. In fact he actually used to defend Holocaust denial on the back of it. So, is Peter Tatchell really a homo-fascist? His dress sense alone is perhaps a giveaway. His utterly dispreputable political
tactics moreover speak volumes, given that he and his group deliberately pick soft targets that are normally deemed non-political (if only for the sake of taste and decency), such as schools and church services. They picket them and intimidate the children and old people they find there. It's
not normal politics. What it
is is classic "direct action" bullying, and it's clearly an atmosphere that over time Peter and Peter's friends have become addicted to. Yes, Peter Tatchell has indeed spoken in support of Holocaust denial (or, as he would put it, the "freedom" to deny the Holocaust). And unlike the mainstream Left he distanced himself from the anti-war movement in the run-up to the Iraq War. He also tried to woo the Right with a violent (albeit pathetic) political stunt when he tried to attack the first black president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, claiming that he was arresting him for human rights abuses. (He was easily blocked by Mugabe's bodyguards, who, in a bizarre little piece of tragicomic street theatre, he then pretended were beating him up.) His attitude (and I use to word advisedly) to Islam, moreover, is just as nasty as his attitude to Christianity. He's not merely opposed to radical and fascist Muslims (Iranian revolutionaries and al-Qa'eda and its allies respectively), but also to what he calls "fundamentalist" Muslims - which
presumably means
most observant Muslims.
As for Shirer's Third Reich, the reality was of course slightly more complicated than either he or Peter Tatchell might have you believe. For Hitler, the embarrassing truth was that there were plenty of gays in the Third Reich. Some, such as Röhm and his followers, whom Hitler eventually disposed of on the infamous Night of the Long Knives, were quite open about it. Others, such as Baldur von Schirach, were closeted. Hitler himself, indeed, was
not above suspicion. In general though, the Long Knives were unnervingly efficient, and gay Nazism is now little more than another of those recherche little "details of history". How may histories of the "gay holocaust", after all, mention Adolf Brand or Edmund Heines? Even Ernst Röhm's sexuality nowadays tends to get airbrushed from "mainstream" histories.
Speaking personally, though I do not support in any way the Marxist-inspired "gay rights" agenda, and though I suspect that physical “man-love” or “man-sex” was actually confined to just a small group within the SA, presumably it became an important part of the male Gemütlichkeit that would have existed in the SA’s unofficial Männerbund. As such, I do believe that homosexuality was (and remains!) an integral part of radical National Socialism, by which I mean the movement within the Party for a “Second Revolution”, after 1933, as advocated by Goebbels, Röhm and Darré.
I used to call myself a ‘traditionalist’, but I have now dropped the term. I am concerned about the demise of traditional forms of aesthetic and spiritual wisdom in the world today, and more specifically I am concerned about the decline of the so-called white or "Nordic" race. I do not, however, hold the central traditionalist belief that all the world’s religions descend from a single source - except in the sense that they may all contain within them some natural inkling of divine truth. It might be more accurate to say that by instinct I am a Uranian counterrevolutionary or a reactionary rather than merely a traditionalist. I am also interested in some "neo-reactionary" ideas.
By 1933 the German people had lost the monarchy, in both Bavaria and Prussia. They had also lost their faith in the Catholic Church, they had lost the Great War itself, and they had of course lost their savings (in the hyperinflation of the 1920s) and, finally, their jobs (in the Great Depression). Given that at the heart of both National Socialism and homosexuality there is an intense and abiding self-pitying narcissism, for me the important question about the rise of National Socialism is whether men in Germany eventually turned to the cultivation of their Aryan heritage when they had lost (and lost touch with) everything else?
And in today's world, when fewer men than ever before are raising families or serving in HM Armed Forces or (indeed!) serving the Church as priests or religious, the question What will happen next? is quite startling.
*It's actually not great. Hari for example confuses the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae - who were not gay, except possibly in dodgy modern movie versions that have them sporting leather underpants, digitally modified abdominal muscles and not much else - and the legend of the Sacred Band of Thebes. He's clearly no more comfortable with history than homosexuals in general are with reality.† Most homosexuals who were “persecuted” by the Nazis were in fact arrested under Paragaph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which had existed since 1871 and which was only amended by the Nazis in 1935 – in other words they removed the specification against anal sex and the qualifier widernatürlich ‘unnatural’, making the law rather against the vaguer activity of ‘lewdness’; which in theory made the law tougher but in practice would have made it much more open to abuse. The law also called for leniency for those under the age of twenty-one. Over all, the Nazi law is surprisingly mild.
†† To be fair, Shirer's so-called 'Luther to Hitler' thesis - that Martin Luther was the Third Reich's true spiritual ancestor - no doubt has some merit. It is at any rate more convincing than the standard anti-Catholic interpretation of the likes of Avro Manhattan (and, no doubt, Peter Tatchell himself!).
