ju st out T o cto b o r 2 1 , 1 9 9 4 ▼ 11
Coventry'
Cycle ( 1
W orks
Lively slant
on history
The OCA’s Scott Lively rewrites history to make gay men the
perpetrators in Nazi Germany
by Inga Sorensen
well-known Oregon Citizens Alliance
figure is embarking on a new career.
Scott Lively, the OCA’s membership
director, says he is currently writing a
book detailing “the truth about homo
sexuals in the Nazi Party.” When revealed. Lively
says, that “truth” will show that gay men were not
persecuted in large numbers by the Nazis during
World War II. More importantly, he says, the
"truth” will show that gay men were a major force
in the Third Reich and much of the Nazi Party’s
philosophy was directly derived from gay men’s
organizations of the imme
diate pre-Nazi era.
“Most people believe that
the Nazi Party persecuted ho
mosexuals. In one sense, they
did, but it wasn’t anything
like we’ve been led to be
lieve. In fact, it is almost
exactly the opposite,” ex
plained Lively, during a re
cent airing of Homosexual
ity and the Nazi Party ap
pearing on cable access tele
vision in the Salem area.
Among Lively’s claims:
the G erm an W o rk e rs
Party—the forerunner to
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party—
was founded at a gay bar in
Munich in 1919; the Nazi
Party ’ s most influential play
ers were gay; and the “sieg
h eil” salute, the term
“Führer,” and the use of the
swastika as a Nazi symbol
are all traceable to gay men’s
organizations.
Using a detailed chart,
Lively seeks to highlight the
various connections between
these groups and the Nazi
Party. “When we think of
the Nazi Party, we think of
what the liberals have tried
to present as a historic image
of the Nazis [which is] some
thing very different than they
were,” he says.
In addition to his speaking tour, Lively says he
is co-authoring a book on the subject with Kevin
Abrams, a Canadian orthodox Jew who has authored
The Other Side o f the Pink Triangle, in which he
asserts that in Nazi Germany “homosexuals as a
specific ‘group’ were never targeted for extermi
nation and were treated far better than most other
concentration camp prisoners.”
Many historians say men engaging in homo
sexual acts were in fact targeted for persecution by
the Nazis. Those deemed to have engaged in such
an act were marked in the Nazi concentration
camps with a pink triangle.
Some civil rights activists are taking Lively’s
current crusade very seriously. Gary Smith, a mem
ber of the West Valley Human Rights Coalition
and Equal Rights PAC of Marion County, has
watched Lively’s presentation on cable access.
Smith describes it as “anything but shallow. I think
it is not to be taken lightly. [His information] is
presented in a very professional manner. If we
have any good historians on the subject, I think we
should have a point-by-point-analysis of Lively’s
A
presentation.”
Film and radio producer Barbara Bernstein,
who has conducted numerous investigative reports
on the religious right, also offers an analysis:
“Lively’s historian experts are the historic equiva
lents to the religious right’s psychological experts:
Paul Cameron, Judith Reisman—who is another
expert cited by Lively in his Nazi work—and
Joseph Nicolosi. Cameron has been thrown out of
the American Psychological Association for un
ethical methodology; Reisman has been discred
ited by the [National Institute of Mental Health],
who paid her to conduct a
study which they refused to
publish [because] it was so
poorly executed; and Joseph
Nicolosi is currently under
attack for his claims that he
can cure homosexuals with
reparative therapy.”
M arcy
W esterling,
project coordinator for the
Rural Organizing Project,
says gay- and lesbian-rights
activists “need to get a bet
ter handle on the Holocaust.”
She says, “In the past, a lot
of people simply called Lon
Mabon and the OCA Nazis.
I think we need to address
the issue as one in which we
examine what it was about
German society that allowed
the Nazi Party to flourish.
What was the climate, and
how may that parallel with
what is occurring in Oregon
today? It’s time to stop the
name-calling and instead
embark on a substantive dis
cussion.”
According to Lively, he
in fact began his research
after bei ng cal led a Nazi one
too many times. “Most of us
who had anything todo with
the Measure 9 campaign got
used to the idea of being
called a Nazi every time a
liberal crossed our path ...
We were vilified over and over and over,” he says.
“Finally I said to myself, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”
Westerling says she believes the recent tour of
the Anne Frank Exhibit throughout small-town
Oregon may have been a catalyst for Lively’s new
project. ROP was instrumental in bringing the
exhibit, which examines the Holocaust through the
eyes of the young diarist, to Oregon.
“I think this is the first time we’ve turned the
tables on [the OCA],” she says. “Instead of us
reacting to them, we have forced them to respond
to the Anne Frank Exhibit, an extremely important
educational tool that has been viewed by thou
sands of Oregonians over the past year.”
But Bernstein says the education shouldn’t end
there. “Many people don’t have accurate informa
tion about the Nazis,” she says. “We need to have
the specifics in order to respond in an appropriate
and effective manner.”
Westerling says materials detailing Lively’s
current work have been forwarded to the Anne
Frank headquarters in New York fpr analysis.,
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