Karl-Günther Heimsoth

Another victim of the Night of the Long Knives was Karl-Günther Heimsoth.* He was in many ways the brains behind gay Nazism. Röhm wasn't much of an ideologue and Blüher in fact wasn't much of a Nazi. But Heimsoth (though he eventually lapsed, after Hitler de facto abandoned radicalism - see below) was at least for a time a true believer in every way.

Heimsoth fought in the Prussian Army during the closing years of the Great War. After the war he went on to study to be a doctor, but took in his spare time took part in right-wing armed uprisings in the Ruhr and Silesia with the Freikorps. In 1924 he wrote his dissertation on the subject of (quelle surprise!) homosexuality, which he called 'homophilia' (which etymologically is actually the correct term).

According to Wikipedia,

The thesis argued that in certain erotic and friendly relationships there are certain norms looked for and desired which are "the same". This homophilia can occur both in relationships between men and between women. In contrast, Heimsoth saw heterophilia as a relationship characterized by "the opposite"; considered well within the range of heterophilia are platonic relationships between an effeminate man and a masculine man. His interpretations of homosexuality and male friendship were based upon previous ideas, as developed in 1903 by Otto Weininger in Geschlecht und Charakter ("Sex and Character") and in 1919 by Hans Blüher in Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft ("The Role of Eroticism in Male Society"). Heimsoth's reflections start with Blüher's theory on the central meaning of eroticism between men to society.

From Weininger, Heimsoth took the "law of the polar union" as an impulse of the sexual union and completed it with a second "law of the homopolar union". He basically tried to prove that a masculine man could want another masculine man, because there were esoteric and friendly connections in such a relationship which were not wanted nor looked for in the other sex, but rather in the same sex, as an opposite pole.

Like Blüher, Heimsoth distanced himself from the creepy "third sex" weirdness of Magnus Hirschfeld, and again like Blüher he found a platform for his views about sex and politics in the pages of Der Eigene.

"All heroic and masculine love between friends" remains, "in his idea and possibilities of understanding[,] foreign to the Jewish spirit". Heimsoth's ideal was that of a whole man, virile and Aryan. Homoerotic friendships between men were to serve as a nexus of "obersten Machtaufgebot" (called higher power). Heimsoth thought that he could find examples of such heroes among the soldiers of World War I and among the Freikorps environment, as can be gathered from his 1925 publication in the magazine Der Eigene: in it he asked to be sent documentation to demonstrate the "circumstances and homoerotic relations in the Kampfwagen formations and secret societies" and wanted to obtain material "about heroism, the heroic leader problem and the psyche of the volunteers, the desperate, Landsknechte, Freikorps members, and secret societies". 

[Wikipedia]

Given the similarities between their ideologies, it was perhaps inevitable that Heimsoth would end up handing out in gay pick-up joints with Ernst Röhm. After the failed putsch in Munich, the old pervert had buggered off and written his memoirs, and Heimsoth, having read between the lines of Röhm's self-described "traitor's story" and detected a kindred spirit, wrote to him on the vexed question of parliament tightening up paragraph 175. (The Nazis were officially in favour.) Eventually the two of them got picked up by the Berlin Police, and their "intimate" letters to each other subsequently came to public attention.

Thanks to Röhm, of course, Heimsoth became not just a nutty esoteric right-winger but a full-blown (and I use that term advisedly) Nazi. According to the leftist Nazi Gregor Strasser, he was a "burning National Socialist", although he subsequently left the Party and joined first Strasser's radical Nazi "Black Front" (which along with the likes of Röhm and Goebbels, supported a "Second Revolution") and then, of all things, the German Communist Party. (Radical Nazism and Stalinist, is turns out, really aren't so very different.)

And of course by the time of the Night of the Long Knives there can't have been very many people who were sorry to see him go.

*I can't actually find any pictures of him on line, hence the silly illustration.

Hans Blüher

Hans Blüher did not found the Wandervogel movement but he was an early member of it and its first "historian". (Amongst other things he considered it as 'an erotic phenomenon'.) Anti-schools and anti-churches, he was also ideologically anti-family. Having enjoyed sexual relations with other boys from the age of 14 onwards, he became a proponent of Heinrich Schurtz's theory of the Männerbund - the idea that the original "unit of society" in Europe had been not the family but a "homo-social" society of men.

Despite this seemingly somewhat parochial gay iconoclasm, politically Blüher was a staunch conservative and monarchist, even visiting Kaiser Bill during his exile in Holland. Indeed, Blüher vision of homosexuality wasn't the standard cultural Marxist one. Rather than undermining society, his hope was that through pederasty and male bonding within Männerbunden homosexuality would lead to a healthier nation and a stronger state.

It has to be admitted straight off that this is a little bit batty. It's hugely unlikely that our thatched house-dwelling, wagon-driving, dog-owning, mead-drinking Aryan ancestors ever organised their societies around glorified circle-jerk groups rather than along the standard lines of mummies and daddies and kiddies that we have (still, just about!) today. There are cognate words for 'wife' in enough Proto-Indo-European languages to suggest that the concept existed and was an important one, even if the wives themselves were little more than chattels. The family, in other words, was clearly a "thing" even very early on, to suggest that the family has indeed been a "thing" since Proto-Indo-European times. And recent attempts to re-imagine blood brotherhood ceremonies (or. in Christian times adelphopoiesis ceremonies) as pre-modern versions of "gay marriage" are similarly unconvincing.

Such ideas are at least interesting though, partly because they hold out the possibility of homosexuality being a positive rather than a purely negative phenomenon, and partly because the "Männerbund thesis" went on to become a key element of what I call radical National Socialist ideology.* Blüher himself, his pro-Hohenzollern politics notwithstanding, did end up supporting the Nazis, if only as the least worst political option available in a mad and dangerous world.

Despite his ideological opposition to families, Blüher did eventually fall for a member of the opposite sex and settled down and had children. And he withdrew his support for the Nazis after the Night of the Long Knives effectively marked the end of radical National Socialism. Whether Blüher ever actually "saw the light" is a moot point. He died in 1955.

* Indeed, it reached a wide non-Nazi gay audience via Germany's prototype gay magazine Der Eigene. According to Wikipedia, when the magazine was closed down by the Nazis in 1933 all of the materials that had gone into it were handed over to none other than Ernst Röhm.  (Who else!?) As an aside, but somewhat unsurprisingly, modern boylovers have also taken an interest in Blüher and his work.

Fascist Gays vs. Gay Neo-Fascists

When analysing the riddle of gay fascists, the question we must ask again and again is of course Which comes first, the fascism or the homosexuality? And not in terms of historic psychological or political development! Rather, is a man a fascist who happens to be gay or a gay who happens to be a fascist? Is fascism merely a means to achieving a more gay-friendly world, or is homosexuality part and parcel of his fascist mentality? If a man is a gay xenophobe, for example, is he for real? Is he genuinely concerned that hordes of foreigners (i.e. Muslims) will not "accept his sexuality" and are determined to kill him? (After all, normally the intrinsic Marxism of most gays makes it quite unusual for them to take any sort of right-wing political stance about anything. And if he's in the closet then, is the xenophobia just a ploy to put other right-wing people off the scent?) Or could he at a certain level be using his homosexuality as a cover for his bigotry? (Now that homosexuals are a protected group, could the racists ones be starting to push their luck?)


Fascist Gays
These are really right-wing liberals (or possibly neocons). My feeling is that normally they use their gayness to justify their xenophobia. In England certainly, right-wing gays tend to be very much of the liberal right/left. They're often academics and intellectuals, such as David Starkey and Alan Sked (the founder of UKIP), or Madsen Pirie (of the Adam Smith Institute) or Douglas Murray (who before he became almost the only English intellectual to out himself as a neoconservative, wrote a literary biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, who, like his gay lover Oscar Wilde, ended up becoming a devout Catholic). I'm sure there are similar people in America. Chris Crain and Jeff Gannon, anyone? - not to mention the Log Cabin Republican, GayPatriot and GOProud gangs - not to mention the notorious Peter Thiel, who is so right-wing in a libertarian sense that he is actually anti-democracy - which, if you think about it, is even more right-wing! But the American Left is much more homogenous and tightly knit, in keeping with America's duolithic society. There is very little room for any sort of split between gays and Muslims, for example. (Witness the hilariously awful film-version of V for Vendetta, where Muslims are such obvious, natural allies of the gays in their struggle against the Christian fascists!) On the continent, however, these sorts of people do exist, though they tend to be labelled "far right". Really they're neoconservative liberals. Geert Wilders is a good example, even though he isn't gay, because his politics are very much in the footsteps of Pim Fortuyn. Wilders is also a lapsed Catholic, and in France too the "far Right" FN are ditching traditionalist Catholicism in favour of racism of the neo-libertarian variety.


Closet Cases
Often of course adopting "right-wing" positions can, potentially, be a way of disguising one's sexuality. In Europe still there are people like Jorg Haider - another lapsed Catholic - who just happened to be gay. Haider was more of a closeted "traditionalist" rather than an openly gay neocon. The German post-war nationalist right has also had its fair share of secret poofs in high places. Michael Kühnen had to quit when he found out, so did Bela Ewald Althans. Similar things, it is now quite clear, used to go on in the old British National Front. Nicky Crane was notorious in his day. Martin Webster hasn't improved with age. And looking further afield, Terreblanche was presumably supposed to fit into this tradition, though to be honest liberal post-mortem fantasies about him probably owed more to the ongoing gay liberal sex fantasies about fascism (i.e. P J O'Rourke's famous nostrum but applied to homosexuals). Perhaps Ian McKellen will end up playing Terreblanche in the anti- biopic: it could be his version of Martin Shaw's Rhodes! Either way, I'm sure Peter Tatchell will enjoy it. (The implication of the film JFK, would seem to be that these were the sorts of people who killed Oliver Stone's hero.) And let's not forget Frank Collin!

Gay Neo-Fascists

In reality, as we have seen, fascism is a good means and end when it comes to justifying all sorts of whacky sorts of sexual deviancy. Then again, of course, there are the genuinely right-wing, genuinely gay pederasts. Michel Caignet would be a good example for France, Jessie Dumanch (perhaps) for Germany. James O'Meara (formerly of Where the Wild Boys Are) seems to think along similar lines.You can't really tell me that Dr. Fredrick Töben isn't a bit of a woofter on the side. And it's worth bearing in mind quite how many boylovers have been from a conservative, militaristic background. (For some reason Nona leaves General Gordon and Wilfrid Owen off his list of famous perverts and doesn't mention the famous Verlaine/Rimbaud relationship at all.) Think of T E Lawrence and Laszlo Almasy. Think of the Round Table Conspiracy - which the Marxist Left tried to associate with the Catholic Church of St Pius X - see here, here and here, and so on! (Then of course there are always modern right-wing gay classics such as American Psycho and Fight Club!) The 2005 German documentary film Männer, Helden, schwule Nazis sounds as if it gave a good overview of modern "Far-Right" gay subculture. (I haven't actually seen it.)