SVL venäläinen agentti

Mahdollisesti ja jopa todennäköisesti, mutta miten "hameasu" liittyy noihin natseihin tai venäläisiin? Tulee mieleen lähinnä junttisuomalainen homofoobikko papparainen.

minihamemies kirjoitti:

Mahdollisesti ja jopa todennäköisesti, mutta miten "hameasu" liittyy noihin natseihin tai venäläisiin? Tulee mieleen lähinnä junttisuomalainen homofoobikko papparainen.

NATSIT JA HOMOUS, rebortaasia uusiksi.

So the idea of a gay fascist seems ridiculous.

Yet when the British National Party - our own home-grown Holocaust-denying bigots - announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism didn’t blink. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was - including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is - in part, at least - a gay thing, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.

Just look at our own continent over the past decade. Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn ran on blatantly racist anti-immigrant platform, describing Islam as “a cancer” and “the biggest threat to Western civilisation today.” Yet with two little fluffy dogs and a Mamma complex, he was openly, flamboyantly gay. When accused by a political opponent of hating Arabs, he replied, “How can I hate Arabs? I sucked one off last night.”

Jorg Haider blasted Austria’s cosy post-Nazi politics to rubble in 2000 when his neo-fascist ‘Freedom Party’ won a quarter of the vote and joined the country’s government as a coalition partner. Several facts always cropped up in the international press coverage: his square jaw, his muscled torso, his SS-supporting father, his rabid anti-Semitism, his hatred of immigrants, his description of Auschwitz and Dachau as “punishment centres”. A few newspapers mentioned that he is always surrounded by fit, fanatical young men. A handful went further and pointed out that several of these young men are openly gay. Then one left-wing German paper broke the story everybody else was hinting at. They alleged Haider is gay.

Rumours of an Indian waiter with “intimate details” of Haider’s body broke into the press. The Freedom Party’s general manager Gerald Miscka quickly quit, amid accusations that he was Haider’s lover. Haider’s close gay friend Walter Kohler - who has been photographed showing off a holstered pistol while Haider chuckled - declared his opposition to outing politicians. Haider - who was married and has two children - kept quiet while his functionaries denied the rumours. The revelation that he died after leaving a gay bar suggests these rumours were true.


On and on it goes. If you inter-railed across Europe, only stopping with gay fascists, there aren’t many sights you’d miss. France’s leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was not batting for the straight side. Germany’s leading neo-Nazi all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were ‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.’”

And it wouldn’t be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight. They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as “evil”, and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying, “The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world’s journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures repulsive.”

But scratch to homophobic surface and there’s a spandex swastika underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote a four-page pamphlet detailing his ‘affair’ with Nick Griffin. “Griffin sought out intimate relations with me,” openly-gay Webster explained, “in the late 1970s. He was twenty years younger than me.” Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, says it’s all too plausible. Homosexuality is “extremely prevalent” in the upper echelons of the British far right, and at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement’s organisers were gay, he claims.

Gerry Gable, editor of the anti-fascist magazine ‘Searchlight’, explains, “I have looked at Britain’s Nazi groups for decades and this homophobic hypocrisy has been there all the time. I cannot think of any organisation on the extreme right that hasn’t attacked people on the grounds of their sexual preference and at the same time contained many gay officers and activists.”

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has a sensitive and intriguing explanation. “There are many reasons for this kind of thing,” he says. “Some of them are in denial. They are going for hyper-masculinity, the most extreme possible way of being a man. It’s a way of ostentatiously rejecting the perceived effeminacy of the homosexual ‘Other’. These troubled men have a simple belief in their minds: ‘Straight men are tough. Queers are weak. Therefore if I’m tough I can’t be queer.’ It’s a desperate way of proving their manhood.”

‘Searchlight’ magazine - the bible of the British anti-fascist movement, with moles in every major far-right organisation - offers an alternative explanation. “Generally condemned by a society that continues to be largely hostile to gays, some men may find refuge and a new power status in the far right,” one of their writers has explained. “Through adherence to the politics espoused by fascist groups, a new identity emerges - one where they aren’t outcasts, because they are White Men, superior to everyone else. They render the gay part of their identity invisible - or reject the socially less acceptable parts, like being feminine - while vaunting what they see as superior.”

But there’s another important question: will fascist movements inevitably turn on gay people? In the case of the Nazis, it seems to have been fairly arbitrary; Hitler’s main reason for killing Rohm was unrelated to his sexuality. From my perspective as a progressive-minded leftie, all fascism is evil; but should all gay people see it as inimical to their interests? Is it possible to have a gay fascist who wasn’t acting against his own interests? Fascism is often defined as “a political ideology advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies equality to certain groups.” It’s true that this hierarchy could benefit gay people at the expense of, say, black people. But given the prevalence of homophobia, isn’t that - even for people who don’t see fascism as inherently evil - a terrible risk to take? Won’t a culture that turns viciously on one minority get around to gay people in the end? This seems, ultimately, to be the lesson of Ernst Rohm’s pitiful, squalid little life.

The growing awareness of the role gay men play in fascist movements has been abused by some homophobes. In an especially nutty work of revisionist history called ‘The Pink Swastika’, the ‘historian’ Scott Lively tries to blame gay people for the entire Holocaust, and describes the murder of gay men in the camps as merely “gay-on-gay violence.” A typical website commenting on the book claims absurdly, “The Pink Swastika shows that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi homosexuals than there even was against homosexuals themselves.”

Yet we can’t allow these madmen to prevent a period of serious self-reflection from the gay movement. If Bruce LaBruce is right, many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus can thrive. Do some gay people really still need to learn that fascists will not bring on a Fabulous Solution for gay people, but a Final Solution for us all?