• Your Personal Paradise •
A time of death
• PORTABLE HOT TUBS By SOFTUB •
The Origin of the Pink Triangle
PIPING HOT POOLS
293-8110
RELAXATION THAT FITS ALMOST ANYWHERE
BY TERRY BOUGHNER, Ph.D.
M E ditor's note: Today, we are fa ced with
the neo-nazis. This isn 't really a new
threat, nor is the hatred, prejudice and
bigotry which spawns such filth.
It has always been there—a ravening,
slavering beast, ready to come out from
where it has been hiding and gathering
strength. Needing only enough fea r or
indifference to give it another foothold.
We are the scape goats—again. Gay-bashing
is a popular sport. Thanks to our government,
we are once more termed deviants.
The follow ing begins a series o f stories,
related to author Terry Boughner by a few
gay survivors o f the N azi prison camps. It
tells, also, o f the beginnings o f the Pink
Triangle, which we now wear with such
pride.
Read them. Feel them. Learn from them. But
don't ever forg et them.
m I j
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just oui Y 14 W July 1990
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his is not a pretty story. For those who
think that the more' bloody parts of
history should be sanitized, read no further.
The Holocaust of the Jews at the hands of the
Nazis has been described in countless
volumes of prose and poetry. This is not to
mention the museums and memorials to the
victims that exist in the United States, Europe
and Israel.
But the Jews were not the only ones marked
out for genocide. There were millions of
others, and among these others were gays.
Until very recently, there were no memorials
of any kind commemorating the gay
Holocaust. Gays were mentioned only in
passing, or if some incident was so terrible,
so brutal, it couldn’t go unnoticed.
Much of this has been by design. According
T
to Ira Glasser, head of the American Civil
Liberties Union, in the September 10, 1975
issue of The New York Times, “the pink
triangle . . . lies buried as a virtual historical
secret” Glasser went on to say that “During
World War II, no king, no premieir, no
president, no prominent citizen came forward
wearing a pink triangle, as it is said the yellow
Star of David was worn by the King of
Denmark.” He might have added that
afterward, for all our sufferings, we received
no recompense of any kind. No one mourned
our losses or raised tear-filled and haunted
eyes to commemorate our dead. We were
outlaws before and so we remained.
Raul Hilberg, author o f The Destruction o f
the European Jews and a former member of
the President’s Commission on the Holocaust,
was quoted in the December 10, 1979 issue of
the New York Village Voice as being opposed
to including gays in any memorialization of
Holocaust victims. ‘T h at would be a travesty,”
Hilberg said, implying that any mention of
gays would somehow detract from the blood
sacrifice of the Jews. That gays were not
worthy to be mentioned in the same breath
with those who had been driven to the gas
chamber for their faith, whether Jewish or
Christian.
Eugen Kogon, a highly respected authority
on the Holocaust, himself interned at
Buchenwald and author of The Theory and
Practice o f Hell, states uncategorically that
"The fate o f the homosexuals in the
concentration camps can only be described as
ghastly.”
We shall see that the mechanisms of
genocide were set up to murder us. Gays were
the first. The context for the story of the Pink
Triangle has been easy enough to dig out.
Finding gay survivors who were willing to talk
was much more difficult. Remember, they
were criminals before the war and remained
criminals afterward. The German law (175)
under which gays were persecuted by the
Nazis remained on the books until 1969. Even
when it was finally removed, the prejudice and
hatred remained. These victims had no reason
to trust anybody.
These people had been through hideous
experiences, the pain of which would remain
with them for the rest of their lives. It was a
terrible thing for them to bring back all the old
memories of incredible suffering. I am
convinced that the only reason that they did so
was because I was gay, one of their own, as
one put it and they believed that I would tell
their stories with^sympathy.
Finding these people and interviewing them
was a process which took over 10 years (1970-
1980) and numerous trips to Europe. It was
largely in the nature of a chain reaction. I met
one who, in turn, introduce me to friends
and so on.
In pursuing this story, I lost my objectivity
and closely and emotionally identified with my
subjects. I can frankly state that never before
nor since have I felt so drained, so full of
sorrow and anger— and so very gay.
It was in the nature o f a personal quest to
find out as best I could, what had happened to
those who were existing as I am, in a society
determined to extinguish them.
I am not satisfied even now that I can in any
but a small way comprehend why it happened
or the enormity of it. T hat’s why I have waited
to write, hoping some insight would come.
This hasn’t happened, but I have come to
understand the obsessive need and
determination o f Jewish writers to get the story
out, hoping against hope that it might never
happen again. I am not optimistic. The Nazis
were, after all, not a German phenomenon, but
a human phenomenon.
I cannot say that yoy will enjoy these stories.
I don’t think that you will. But I want you to
know about them and I hope that I can make
you see through my words, the terrifying
reality behind the Pink Triangle which has
haunted me for nearly 20 years.
THE STORY OF HANS
1933 :
Nazis begin killing “filthy queers"
in brutal, hideous ways
is name was Hans. I first met him in a gay
bar in Munich that summer of 1970. It
was early, the bar was nearly empty, so I
ordered a beer and settled in.
I don’t remember him coming in. All I can
recall now is the feeling of regret at someone
slipping heavily onto the stool beside me.
Why, I asked myself, with almost every other
place empty, did he have to sit right beside
me?
I couldn’t help glancing over as he ordered.
He looked to be in his late 60s or early 70s. I
later learned that I'd overestimated his age by
about 15 years. I remember his high, shiny
forehead with its few strands of white hair and
his broad face with the scar, running
lightening-shaped down one deeply lined
cheek. I remember his fingers, long, thin, but
gnarled and twisted as if they had been broken
and not set right.
He took a sip o f his drink and then turned
and asked in German, “You are American,
yes?”
I nodded, with a look which I hoped said
that’s as far as I wanted the conversation to go,
but then he asked, “You have been to
Dachau?”
The question took me by surprise. Just that
day I had indeed visited the former Nazi
concentration camp located about 12 miles
outside the city and kept there by the wartime
four great powers as a memorial to Holocaust
victims.
In the commandant’s headquarters— now a
museum— I’d stood looking at pictures, done
in a series, of a young man being frozen to
death; one of the so-called medical
experiments done by demented doctors of
Hitler’■« Third Reich.
H