Then, in June 1934, in part because of political infighting among Nazi leaders, the SA was purged, and Röhm and the other high-ranking leaders were all killed. Most of Berlin’s gay bars remained open after the Nazis took power, except for about 15 of the best-known establishments, which they closed in the first months of their rule. If you looked at someone the wrong way you could be arrested and interrogated. “They thought it was something that could be cured for the most part.” A criminal act included flirtation. “They thought it was a perversion,” said Beachy. But Nazi attitudes toward homosexuality “didn’t have the racialist or ideological heft of the anti-Semitism or any of the other racially motivated persecutions.” The Nazis didn’t believe in homosexuality, so they weren’t interested in killing this group to wipe out their culture. Nazi rhetoric associated homosexuality with femininity and Jewishness it was only “an issue in the sense that it undermined Nazi pro-natalist policies,” said Beachy. Röhm, like many men and women, didn’t see Hitler’s anti-gay crackdown coming. One such public figure was Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s closest friend, one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party and the leader of the SA, the Nazi militia. “They would have lived their lives quite openly.” Lots of prominent cultural figures were “pretty widely recognized as gay or lesbian, and in some cases they had life or long-term partners” who were treated as spouses-not people to be hidden or embarrassed about, said Beachy. You could be out, at least in smaller circles of friends. And of course there were those 100+ gay clubs and bars, catering to a variety of tastes and background-the world we know from Cabaret.īerlin at that time “reminds me of what I know about New York and maybe San Francisco in the 1970s,” said Beachy. During this time, Hirschfeld founded a research center that experimented with the first sex reassignment surgeries and primitive hormone therapies. They were supported by advertising from bars and clubs-as well as dentists and doctors and lawyers, said Beachy. Beachy said that from 1919 to 1933, over 25 separate gay, lesbian, and transvestite journals were published in the city. In fact, Germans’ “respect and regard” and faith in science, said Beachy, is part of the explanation for why they rejected traditional religious views of homosexuality more quickly than the rest of the West.Īfter World War I, Germany almost completely eliminated its censorship laws, and a gay press flourished in Berlin.
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Hirschfeld was at the forefront of a medical establishment that widely accepted homosexuality as a “new sexual minority,” said Beachy. Berlin was also home to a burgeoning gay civil rights movement led by a German-Jewish physician and sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld. The police tolerated gay bars, which was one reason that Berlin became a global center for gay prostitution. Homosexual acts were illegal on the books, but a combination of factors allowed a vibrant gay culture to begin to establish itself in Berlin as early as the late 19th century. Why was pre-World War II Berlin an epicenter of gay life, and what was that culture like? We talked with Robert Beachy, author of Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity and a historian at Yonsei University, to find out about the lives the characters in Bent-Max and his boyfriend, Rudy, bar owner and drag queen Greta-might have led before Hitler came to power. The first scenes of Bent take place there in 1934, just as that world came crashing down.
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