A Look To The Past

You all have probably seen this photo of the Brown Shirts burning books, but do you know what books they are burning?

They are burning books from Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research because they were “Un-German”

Berlin in the 1920s and 30s we a LGBTQ+ hot spot.

Jeanne Mammen 1928

A Peek Inside Berlin's Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It

A new book tells the true stories behind Cabaret, and what was possibly the most thrilling gay party scene the world has ever known. Read an excerpt here.
The Advocate
By Clayton J. WHISNANT
July 19, 2016

The following is an excerpt from Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945 by Clayton J. Whisnant:

As early as the turn of the century, Berlin’s gay scene was attracting such notoriety that it frequently was mentioned in tourist literature, lifting up the city’s gay scene as proof of the evils of urban life and the dangers of modernity; in them, Berlin became the country’s Sodom and Gomorrah put together, a sure sign of the land’s degeneracy.

On the stages of Berlin, the Tiller Girls showed off their legs, dancing a Rockettes-style performance that amazed and titillated spectators. In crowded cabarets, audiences admired “tableaux” of women posing naked or watched actors telling risqué jokes and singing lewd songs

Clubs full of men wearing powder and rouge as well as shorthaired women dressed in tuxedoes offered images of a world seemingly turned upside down. For the general public, this world was bewildering—and quite possibly terrifying.

It wasn’t just lesbian and gays,

In one of the establishments, he had the pleasure of hearing the local bartender sing a song about “the third sex” that one of the members had composed. As the bartender sang, he threw off his apron, pulled on a braided wig and woman’s hat, and “made all kinds of feminine movements and facial expressions that a professional female impersonator could hardly improve on.”

It was into this environment that the Brown Shirts stepped and used us as scapegoats for all the ills of Germany. The Nazi said that Germany problems were all the result of Jew, Romani, the disabled, lesbians and gays, and us. The Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum writes,

Later, a harsher revision of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code went into effect, making a broad range of “lewd and lascivious” behavior between men illegal and punishable by imprisonment. The revision of Paragraph 175, however, did not ban sexual acts between women. Therefore, lesbianism, while not condoned, did not face the same persecution as male homosexuality, and very few lesbians were arrested or punished.

Are we heading in that direction?