"The Gestapo Lives On": West German and American Gay Activists and the Politics of Memory

BEGINNING in the 1950s, West German and American gay activists sometimes invoked the image of Gestapo-like repression to galvanize support for gay rights. In West Germany and the US those who decried homosexual rights were increasingly accused of Nazi-like behavior. An effort to construct a homosexual Holocaust history was happening by the 1970s. Some gay activists also invoked analogies that equated the victims and survivors of Nazi persecution with the victims and survivors of post-Nazi persecution. I examine the reasons why West German and American gay activists deployed Holocaust and Nazi symbolic vocabulary and visual imagery in the early Cold War era. And I argue that mapping how the historical memory and political uses of the Holocaust and Nazism affected early European and North American gay rights discourse divulges key features of Cold War sexual politics. The West German and American gay press in the 1950s and early 1960s was meager relative to what it would become in the 1970s. However, the newspapers and journals that were published reveals both a consciousness that some gay men had been persecuted in Nazi Germany and an effort to politicize that realization. It is telling that West Germany would later hold an annual gay pride event in many major cities called Christopher Street Day after the Greenwich Village street where the 1969 Stonewall gay riots took place and that the Nazi persecution of homosexuals so readily became a prominent aspect of gay collective memory in the United States. This, to me, reflects a building of intercontinental ties plus a sharing and propagation of symbols and strategies that I see well underway in the 1950s.