Tel Aviv will soon erect a monument commemorating the countless queers who died during the Holocaust.
As you can see, the designers have been inspired by the ever-important pink triangle, which gay men wore while in concentration camps.
Lesbians, meanwhile, were meant to wear a black patch, which doesn’t seem to have found its way into this particular structure.
CitizenGeek
Wonderful! It’s great to see the thousands of gays who were sent to Nazi death camps being remembered.
hells kitchen guy
At the risk of being politically incorrect, there were very few lesbians compared to gay men persecuted during the Holocaust.
Leland Frances
Your Linguistic Chic use of the word “queers” in this context is ahistorical at best.
As for the “black patch,” while it seems more and more sciolists are erroneously equating it with lesbians, some actual historians say there is no record of it having been used for lesbians at all. Those who treat historical fact like chewing gum one can blow bubbles with or stretch at will, as some of the morons who contribute to Bilerico, are among the former.
The black triangle was officially for the catchall “asocials” [“arbeitsscheu” in the German, or “workshy”]. It included such groups as prostitutes and alcoholics, and, at times, Gypsies who sometimes were assigned a brown triangle. The “well, lesbians were ‘asocial’ so, therefore, they COULD have been forced to wear a black triangle” is like the proverbial straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
“Lesbians were not regarded as a threat to Nazi racial policies and were generally not targeted for persecution.” – US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Meeting places that catered to lesbians were closed, literature suppressed, and a failed effort to add lesbians to Paragraph 175, the ever expanding law used against gay men, but “finally, the Nazis dismissed lesbianism as a state and social problem because they believed lesbians could still carry out a German woman’s primary role: to be a mother of as many ‘Aryan’ babies as possible. Every woman, regardless of her sexuality, could serve the Nazi state as wife and mother.” – USHMM
Z.
how thoughtful!
http://www.ilovezeren.com
Leland Frances
Clarification of #1: gay men were not sent to “death camps” as such. They were among those who were sent to concentration camps either to simply separate them from Nazi society [homosexuals in occupied countries were treated far more leniently based on the idea that their “infection” would help weaken the occupied], extension of regular prison sentences, and/or for slave labor. Their deaths, estimated to be 60%, were primarily the result of harsher treatment in the camps, particularly of being assigned to extreme “work to death” details.
“An estimated 1.2 million men were homosexuals in Germany in 1928. Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and of these, some 50,000 officially defined homosexuals were sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.” – USHMM
One additional aspect still given insufficient attention is that, after the war, “Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps.” – USHMM. Paragraph 175 was not repealed in West Germany until 1969.
Julia
What Hell’s Kitchen guy said and Leland Frances sort of half-said, to clarify – no lesbians were sent to Nazi camps specifically because they were lesbians. No lesbians died in Nazi prison camps unless they were also Jewish, or Catholic, or Gypsies, or Socialists, or some other “undesirable” element. The Nazi state, in it’s infinite wisdom re: gender politics and the female psyche thought that women could not be gay, they were merely misguided. They thought that when women were deprived of men or led astray, they became lesbians, but that it was a psychological condition that could easily be corrected, by force (ie: rape) or otherwise.
Gay men, on the other hand, proved to be a far greater threat to the Nazi regime, because they defied the basic code of what a German man should do which was, in short, reproduce and create more German sons. The gay men who were persecuted were usually German and Aryan, and their treatment was equally bad as if not worse than some of the treatment suffered by the Jews. Gay men were constantly given some of the hardest work, and often brutalized and raped by their guards. The mortality rate of a gay man entering a prison camp was about equal with that of a Jew.
…I could go on a while, I did my senior thesis on this, but basically, in answering your question, the monument is commemorating gay men because gay men were the ones sent to camps. Lesbians were suppressed, but never killed. Apparently, German wombs were really valuable. Thank you, sexism. Thank you.
Daniel
The lives of women have seldom been acknowledged in history so the fate of lesbians during World War 2 is largely an unwritten record. Being raped by Nazis because they felt they could turn you straight was obviously an evil committed against lesbians, and the threat of the camps or of just plain being shot in the head for refusal is nothing short of brutal torture against our gay sisters.
Daniel
I found a site gaymemorial.org that has a lot of info about memorials and monuments around the world.