Recognition of gays in the Holocaust comes to America

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Heading into the American Bicentennial year of 1976, as a West Hartford, Conn., resident, I spotted press items saying that local Jewish and human rights activists had started efforts to create a Holocaust memorial, a "Mandala," in the city. An activist myself, I saw an opportunity for inclusion of the homosexuals put into concentration camps by the Nazis, and worked to death or outright killed. At the time, based on the readings of the available sources, I believed that some 250,000 homosexuals had been exterminated in the Nazi camps, although later historians have greatly reduced their estimates of those killed to perhaps 10,000.

I began with a December 1, 1975, letter to Inge Klein, chair of the West Hartford Human Rights Commission (WHHRC), who rudely dismissed my approach. I found it distressingly difficult to get through to anyone, including rabbis, to show them my research. It appeared to me that these prominent and self-righteous do-gooders were themselves perpetuating one of society's oldest and most deeply embedded prejudices, against gay people, while calling public attention to the racism, bigotry, and genocide of the Holocaust.

Some folks from the local Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a Christian communion oriented toward gays and lesbians, joined me at a Holocaust memorial meeting on April 27, 1976, handing out informative leaflets to the public, since no one would talk with us in person or allow us onto their program. We didn't say so out loud, but we could not fail to note the irony that Governor Ella T. Grasso gave the opening welcome to the meeting - she who had for a couple of years already openly voiced concern about homosexual schoolteachers in a blatant attempt to quash the first legislative attempts in the state to pass anti-discrimination laws.

We were outsiders to history. In truth, although the left had never silenced their memory of the Nazi repression and the resistance, silence and a kind of willed forgetfulness about the Holocaust had been the post-war norm in many Western nations, certainly in America. Survivors were only in the late 1960s just beginning to be encouraged to talk about their experiences, until it became almost a minor industry. (Much has been written about the reasons Holocaust memory suddenly became necessary, some of them associated with the transformative 1967 Arab-Israeli War, but this goes beyond the scope of this writing.)

Many Jewish organizations took responsibility for promulgating the historical record, but in those years it was, virtually without exception, entirely and exclusively focused on the Jews. The published record, in its fact-filled authoritativeness, appeared to answer all your questions, and lead you, through impressive bibliographical citations, to other sources. No wonder rabbis, community leaders, and good citizens turned the other way when alternative, or additional accounts were brought forward, and not always by fringe writers: Ira Glasser, for example, published an op-ed piece in the New York Times September 10, 1975, "The Yellow Star and the Pink Triangle," that called attention to this suppressed homosexual history.

But some of the neglect was willful. During the WHHRC's April 27, 1976, program, a candle was lit in memory of Christian victims of the Holocaust, so some awareness of other-than-Jews had broken through. That program featured a benediction by the Rev. Denis T. Ferrigno, pastor at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, the Roman Catholic priest who had ordered the invited MCC off the cathedral grounds just a few months previously during the Hartford community's Asylum Hill Octoberfest. So much for the noble words in the Mandala fundraising brochure: "We have stood by and watched Blacks being lynched, American-born Japanese being interned, Indians being deprived of their rights...when will it all end? Only when we as individuals take a firm stand and act positively against any form of human degradation."

Three days after the April 27th program, I wrote to Ms. Klein and the WHHRC, outlining fifteen measures and projects the Commission could undertake immediately to start dealing with homophobia.

In response to the resounding silence we got from the good folks of West Hartford, MCC and "None of the Above" - a weekly show which I co-produced on WWUH, the community radio station of the University of Hartford - planned an evening called "The Pink Triangle: A Gay Community Holocaust Memorial" at the Unitarian Church in Hartford, on Thursday, June 24, 1976, during Gay Pride Week. Afteran organ prelude and a welcome, Keith Brown - whom we had featured as a radio historian of the Hartford gay community, and who later went on to produce a longrunning gay radio program at WWUH called "Gay Spirit" - gave an invocation. I delivered the main address about the history, "an untold story," drawn from a number

of published sources, some in German, that we cited in the printed program. I began my remarks by observing that the local weekly, the Advocate, had come this close to publishing its announcement of the event "honoring the gas victims of Nazi concentration camps." Some copyeditor had instinctively corrected "gay" to "gas," assuming it to be a typo; but it was caught in time. "History is a living lesson," I reminded our audience. "We are now saying - along with the Jews of the world - never again!" Some readings from the published testimony of gay survivors followed, then "The Song of Choice," an original composition by Steve Carter. Rev. Jay Deacon of MCC gave a short summary of where the gay movement is now in America, and with a postlude, and a collection to defray expenses, we concluded. The audience of about fifty experienced some nervousness when a television camera appeared - people could lose their jobs!

I had written to the ambassador of East Germany and the Boston consul for West Germany, asking for speakers on the Pink Triangle program, but neither provided one. Almost no public officials attended, although there were letters of support from one state senator and the Hartford Peoples Bicentennial Commission. "Representatives from the Greater Hartford Council of Churches and the East Hartford and West Hartford Human Rights Commissions showed up. But the latter representative left shortly after Gordon's speech, in which the West Hartford people were criticized for not including a gay representative in their April 27 memorial program for the Holocaust," according to the Boston-based Gay Community News (July 14).

My partner at the time, Michael Jospe, designed the poster for our program, which depicted a swastika emitting flames that were consuming a pink triangle. It bears mentioning that Michael was a Jewish South African whose parents had both fled from Germany in the 1930s, as Michael himself had left his own native country out of disgust with apartheid.

That day remains one of my proudest: We were well aware that this was the first public recognition anywhere in the world of the experience of homosexual repression and extermination in the Holocaust. Our "None of the Above" collective editedthe program for broadcast on WWUH on August 2.

This is not the end of the story, however. The saga of the Mandala would play out over the next couple of years.

In the meantime, I enjoyed a short career as a public speaker on the Pink Triangle. The New England Gay Conference of 1977 took place April 1-3 in Providence on the campus of Rhode Island College. Keynote speakers included Rev. Malcolm Boyd, an openly gay Episcopal priest and author, Merle Miller, author of a comingout book called On Being Different, pioneering gay historian Jonathan Katz, and myself. I thought the information I had gathered was important for gay people to know, and apparently an audience existed for it.

 The Mandala marches on

On Monday night, January 16, 1978, my campaign with the West Hartford Holocaust Memorial folks started up again. Now a formal Mandala Committee had been organized, to raise money and erect a public monument honoring those who died in the Holocaust. I spoke at their meeting that night and offered to help raise money in the gay community, assuming that the Mandala showed some recognition of the persecution of gay people by the Nazis. I offered to write literature the Mandala organizers could use, "but didn't appear readily accepted," said the Hartford Courant (January 17). The former chair of the West Hartford Human Rights Commission, Inge Klein, with whom I had tangled about the town's exclusionary Holocaustobservance back in 1976, and who had walked out of our Pink Triangle commemoration at the Unitarian Church, now served as head of the citizens' Mandala campaign. Clearly, a struggle over representation was bound to ensue.

The West Hartford Mandala was believed at the time to be the first such Holocaust memorial in any community in the U.S. After so much silence and rejection from Inge Klein and her committee, I wrote to her pleading for her to come to terms with us: "I have little desire to make the Mandala a subject of public controversy, no desire to wage a feud with you or with other leading citizens of the town. But I do feel that unless we can come to some understanding, there is no recourse for those of us who wish to work with you, than to keep on raising the issue publicly. I am sure that will be uncomfortable, embarrassing and so unnecessary for everyone concerned. I would want to see the Mandala remembered as a symbol of the potential for unity in the community, not as a symbol of continued silence and oppression." Ms. Klein responded, in language that strongly suggests input from lawyers, that the project would not answer "ultimatums" nor be "threatened, intimidated, or coerced into actions that do not serve the best interests of the Mandala."

That gratuitous slap in the face led me back to the West Hollywood Human Rights Commission, now chaired by a Republican lawyer named Austin Carey, Jr. I wrote to him hoping that he might grasp our view of the issue: "This is not a 'threat' of any kind; it is merely the recognition that if Mandala, Inc. continues to refuse our participation in any way, we feel obliged, in the memory of our martyred forerunners, to protest the ongoing inhumanity embodied - of all places! - within the very groups that purport to know and transmit to our children the lessons of the past." In the meantime, I had taken up a two-month residency in New Orleans, to finish work on my Tulane dissertation in history. I advised Mr. Carey of my absence, and that I would be back in June so we could resume the Mandala conversation. I learned in early May that the Commission had called a hearing on the subject which, according to the Hartford Courant (May 2), I "failed to attend."

Naturally, I protested, writing to the WHHRC (May 8) over their conducting a hearing on the Mandala subject without me, when I had clearly made it known that I would be out of town. "Can you see now, members of the Commission, how deeply ingrained homophobia is as a part of our cultural pattern? How adamant the 'normal' majority of 'good Germans' can be when it comes to minority, or let us say, full human rights? I know that historically those who raise such issues are considered 'difficult to get along with.' But if getting a Ph.D. in history means anything at all to me, it means sticking my neck out, raising the public consciousness, being...an educator."

MCC's Rev. Jay Deacon also wrote to Carey, requesting a rescheduled hearing at which we could present our points, challenging the absence of "self-examination that ought to be the point of any memorialization of the victims of the most terribleexpression of bigotry in our history." Jay and I both apprised the media at each stage of the controversy. Newspapers such as the Hartford Courant, Gay Community News, the Advocate, West Hartford News, and the New Haven Register all carried articles on the Mandala story.

Jay and I were asked to appear at the June 13th meeting of the commission, and we presented our view. An Orthodox rabbi, Isaac Avigdor, appeared, saying (from my notes) that he had received "hundreds of calls" about the issue. "Religion considersgay people sinful, if not sick," the rabbi told the commission. "Omission is not always a discrimination." His followers insisted on a completely separate Jewish remembrance monument rather than one that included homosexuals. The Rev. Ronald Milley, president of the Connecticut Association of Evangelicals, claiming to represent 500 churches, chimed in: "The Scripture is very clear as to homosexuality. It may not be outlawed here, but it is still sin." The motion to deny scheduling a rehearing carried the Commission unanimously.

"I really never anticipated, when I first wrote to Inge Klein in December 1975," I summed up to Austin Carey in a letter on July 1, "that my offer to help with the Commission's Holocaust commemoration would eventually break out into such a community-wide furor. It has become that only because of the remarkable intransigence of the WHHRC, and then Mandala, Inc. when faced with the logical consequences of their own high-flown, but obviously insincere rhetoric.... In many ways this whole issue has symbolized the stagnation of liberal thinking in contemporary America: Human rights are fine when they apply to those far away or dead, but let not our own complacency and prejudices be questioned by those right here at home. No matter what the eventual outcome of this complaint against Mandala, Inc., I do not doubt that you, the Commission, and sectors of the general public, have come away with a much clearer notion of the kind of bigotry that victimizes homosexuals every day of their lives."

 Aftermath of the affair

All along, Jay Deacon and I had followed the strategy of trying not to directly inflame the local gay community against the Mandala project, in the hope that we would eventually come to some agreement with them. But in the end, when all that remained were the lonely voices of a few who chose to bear witness, I summarized our position going forward. In the local gay monthly Night Shift that June I wrote

"Lessons from Holocaust":

Yet the struggle is not lost. It still may be possible to educate the town of West Hartford to some of the lessons we have learned from the

Holocaust. We have learned that silence is complicity with the crime. Thirty-three years after liberation from the death camps, we have

ahead of us a long campaign to eradicate the ignorance, superstition, blind faith and complacency that keep people of good will from joining us,

and that keep us alienated from them. That campaign requires us to be attentive on all fronts to the opportunities which permit both a

further deepening of our sense of gay community and a fusing of our struggles with the broader movement for human rights and dignity....

These are times of increasing polarization of gays vs. straights. Somehow it should be possible to point out that as in Nazi Germany,

where homosexuals were the first group to go, the new mobilization against us by the political and religious right-wing can only lead to accelerated oppression for everyone.

This is not a moment to isolate ourselves in the comfort and familiar surroundings of our own gay culture.

It is instead a time to reach out and solidify our alliances with all who seek tolerance in a pluralistic society. It's time to get involved.

That summer the whole affair petered out. As a matter of fact, the Mandala never got built at all. Apparently, some town body vetoed the project and the whole plan was dropped. Did our campaign put the kibosh on it? I have no way to know, but perhaps there was some fear that the site would always attract protest, and perhaps vandalism. Perhaps the town decided after all that if the Mandala was meant to serve exclusively Jewish memory, it should be built on Jewish-owned, not public property. Some proposals and drawings survive at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, located in West Hartford, but that's it, aside from the newspaper record and now this brief memoir.

The Mandala episode fills an inch-thick folder in my archive, and I've not recounted each and every detail. Maybe one day a graduate student in search of a master's thesis topic will undertake an in-depth study of the social forces that went into this struggle.

 Ever since, I have remained alert to the issue of broader acknowledgment of loss in the Holocaust. For many years now I have consistently noted that other groups than Jews also regularly get named - political resisters, trade unionists, Rom (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals, with frequent illustrations of the different colored badges each group was forced to wear, including the Pink Triangle. There are even physical monuments to the homosexuals in different places today.

Over time, we made our point effectively. I look back with satisfaction on our work of those years, we who pursued the cause with passion and self-sacrifice, and yes, some ego too.

At an outdoor gathering that August 1978 sponsored by a gay human rights organization in Connecticut, I spoke as the resident intellectual, listed on the program in the début of the new initials following my name, Ph.D. I spoke of "The Burden of History." Amidst references to the Holocaust, and to the forthcoming California vote on the Briggs Initiative, which would allow any public school employee to be

fired from their job for advocating gay rights or engaging in homosexual behavior, I said: "I believe that we, like all peoples, cultures and subgroupings of humanity, have a special insight - we see things from just a slightly different perspective - and that our burden is to show how that view of things enhances the human condition. How in our own way we contribute to the knowledge that the human family is One and Indivisible. How from our history we have learned an old lesson: We are our brothers' and our sisters' keepers."

Image: poster showing the Pink Triangle done for the June 1976 Holocaust commemoration Hartford, CT.

 

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