The History of Sex: Prague -- Puritanical Communists -- (Chapter X, Part 11)

For dirty tricks abroad, the Soviets liked to use their satellite spy network in Czechoslovakia, 'the aristocrat of all the Communist intelligence services.'

With its location in the heart of Europe, Czechoslovakia had always been a bridge between East and West, making it more cosmopolitan, prosperous and liberal than the rest of the Soviet bloc.

Its first democratic president, Tomas G. Masaryk, had been a former spook whose spies sided with the Allies during World War One; in 1918, he signed Czechoslovakia's declaration of independence in Philadelphia at the same table used by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin in 1776.

And in a nod to women's rights, the founder had also added his American wife's surname to his own: the 'G' stood for Garrigue.

Tragically, the Allies had tried to avoid a Second World War by gifting the tiny democracy to Hitler.

Unappeased, the Führer entrusted its subjugation to Reinhard Heydrich, an SS chief who'd helped engineer the Night of the Long Knives, chaired the committee on the Holocaust and masterminded the Salon Kitty project in Berlin.

'May 1945': A Czech poster
commemorating the victory over the Nazis '

When Czechoslovakia was finally liberated, the Red Army captured Prague first, and the Soviets quickly set about undermining democracy.

The Czech foreign minister—Masaryk's son—was one of the democrats who died mysteriously during the Communists' (relatively) bloodless coup, which became the blueprint for subverting democracies in the West.

And after briefly flirting with sexual excess as 'a provocation of bourgeois society,' Czechoslovakia soon pursued the Soviet ideal of 'Socialist puritanism.'

'In the early Fifties, we were more puritanical than in the West,' scoffs Jirina Siklova, a Czech feminist who came of age during the Stalinist era.

As a teenager, she remembers building a bridge as part of a Socialist youth brigade.

At night the sexes were strictly segregated: any boys or girls caught sneaking over to the other side were dismissed and officially blackballed for leading a 'bourgeois lifestyle.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- The USSR's Bureau of Free Love -- (Chapter X, Part 3)

For his part, the 'Father of the Russian Revolution' appears to have been appalled by the other revolution he'd unwittingly conceived.

Lenin confided to a comrade that the 'the so-called new sexuality of our young people and adults alike often seems to be merely petty bourgeois, like a version of the fine old bourgeois institution of the brothel.'

Lenin himself ended his days chaste and childless—Stern reckons 'the Communist titan was in fact a sexual pygmy'—and his successor eventually forced the USSR to do a U-turn on its disastrous (and often contradictory) sex laws.

By encouraging copulation, the Bolsheviks had hoped to boost the population.

One of the letters in the Erotic Alphabet designed by
Soviet artist Sergey Merkurov in 1931,
supposedly to combat illiteracy

An early Communist decree in Vladimir had ruled that 'from the age of eighteen all young women are hereby declared to be the property of the state,' requiring them 'to register, on pain of the strictest prosecution, with the Bureau of Free Love.'

When it came to choosing a spouse, frisky Vladimirians were allowed to pick a new one each month, with any offspring deemed 'property of the state.'

Paradoxically, in 1920, the Soviet Union had also become the first major country since antiquity to legalize abortion, effectively making it the birth control of choice.

By 1934, the ratio of abortions to live births was three to two in the countryside—and three to one in Moscow.

With Stalin purging Soviets almost as fast as the proletariat could pump them out, however, the USSR soon outlawed abortion (and homosexuality) and scrapped 'divorce postcards' in favor of red tape and taxes.

By the end of World War Two, the government had started lauding heavy breeders as 'Heroine Mothers,' and a survivor of the gulag recalled that male and female prisoners in his camp were suddenly allowed to commingle; the resultant bastards were spirited away—to be trained as policemen.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Spies and Czech Mates: From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis -- (Chapter X, Part 1)

Chapter Ten 

SPIES AND CZECH MATES 

From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis 

'The twentieth century has taught us that every society, every social and political order, has imposed certain prohibitions on sexuality.' 

--Soviet dissident Dr. Mikhail Stern, Sex in the USSR, 1979 

While hounding homosexuals, the Nazis also snooped on heteros, combining the latest technology and the world's oldest profession to pioneer a sinister new form of espionage.

In 1940, the SS converted a brothel in Berlin into a high-tech booty trap with microphones in the walls and a monitoring station in the basement.

Code-named 'Salon Kitty,' the project recruited twenty women to give their bodies for the Fatherland, plying diplomats and potential dissenters, including the Führer's own foreign minister.

The poster for the movie
based on the book by Peter Norden

Of course, sex and espionage were old bedfellows.

In the Old Testament, before the walls of Jericho came a-tumblin' down, two Israelite spies spent the night hiding in a prostitute's house.

As they made their escape, they promised the archetypal hooker with a heart of gold that she could save her family from being massacred by hanging a dyed rope from her window, forever linking the color scarlet to illicit sex.

Several millennia later, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them, spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain decided that preventing The End justified the means.

As a result, the Cold War finessed the use of sex bombs, making old-timers like Mata Hari look like deluded amateurs.

'I would not have kept her on my payroll,' sniffed Markus Wolf.

The East German über-spy was best known for infiltrating his spies into West Germany while keeping his own identity secret—for 25 years, Western intelligence didn't even have a photo of the spymaster they were fighting.

Wolf after the Cold War

In his memoirs, though, Wolf boasted that his real claim to fame should be his use of 'Romeo' spies.

'If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.'

Never mind that he was using similar techniques to those pioneered by the Nazis.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- An Uncomfortable Question -- (Chapter IX, Part 27)

At which point, I decide to go for broke and ask a question that sounds more controversial than it should be.

Let me explain: lots of people parrot the Nietzschean maxim that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger; Roman persecution, for instance, actually stoked the wildfire-growth of Christianity.

However, when you apply that same terrible irony to recent history and the groups that the Nazis tried to kill, well, people start to get uncomfortable: somehow it's not very politically correct.

But I've got to ask.

'In the long run,' I ask, 'do you think it was Nazi persecution that helped make Germany's gay movement as strong as it is today?'

Berlin's monument to the homosexual victims
of the Nazi regime

Karl-Heinz is speechless for a second, struggling to find the right words. 'I—I—I'm not a fan of arguing like that,' he says, gazing out the window.

'Because that gives all these activities a kind of shadow. It means that you're always reacting against something and you don't have your own ideas. If you want to live with all the rights that other people have, you should always fight for your rights.'

He mentions that this struggle is continually evolving.

'There is a new situation now, for example, with the children of immigrants who grew up with their religious thinking that does not fit in with our open thinking. And they would kick me out of this place if they could. So the forms of struggle and the aims will always change,' he concludes.

'There are always other questions and other conflicts.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- It's the Nazis, Stupid -- (Chapter IX, Part 26)

Karl-Heinz shows me around the museum's temporary exhibit entitled 'Paradise' and murmurs appreciatively: 'Here is a very interesting drawing.'

That's one word for it.

The artist was a German POW who swapped erotica for cigarettes with American guards.

The drawing shows a group of naked cuties in officers' caps putting the 'cock' into 'cocktail:' one is peeing into the proffered glass of another.

Mmm… fresh pee-tinis, anyone? 

Images from the museum's 'Paradise' exhibit

Gad told me before coming here that Karl-Heinz 'used to be gorgeous.'

For the record, that seems ungenerous, because he's only fortysomething and still a good-looking guy, with white teeth gleaming against his tan and a salt-and-pepper goatee.

He's also fun to talk with because he engages difficult subjects head-on.

In fact, I like him so much, I've decide to burden him with a couple of questions I've been dying to ask:

'I know that places around the world celebrate Christopher Street Day—even in Istanbul,' I start off. 'But why do gays in Germany focus on commemorating an American event rather than their own, far more important achievement: the founding of the world's first gay-rights movement?'

Karl-Heinz pauses before giving me a diplomatic, respectful answer that amounts to 'it's the Nazis, stupid.'

'You shouldn't forget that the infrastructure that there had been in the Twenties wasn't established again until the Eighties. From 1933, within half a year after the Nazis came to power, this widespread network and infrastructure was totally wiped out and had to go underground or become invisible. What is especially important for all the more history-oriented groups—but even for restaurants or the organizers of fucking festivals—is the knowledge that a very good community can be destroyed in less than half a year. So in Germany and Berlin this is maybe more on the table, as we say, than in other countries.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- No Famine of Phalluses -- (Chapter IX, Part 25)

In truth, that image summed up my initial impressions of Berlin's gay scene.

Given Germany's pioneering role in the gay rights movement and the sacrifices made by its homosexuals over the decades, it seemed overwhelmingly tragic that modern Berlin should be just another gay party capital renowned for shopping and shagging.

But then I went to see Karl-Heinz Steinle, the curator of the world's first Schwules Museum: the only 'Gay Museum' in the global village.

One of the museum's exhibits

'I would say that Berlin is actually more balanced than other cities,' he explains. 'Berlin has these dark-sex-triple-gangbang-fuck-rooms—'

—a word I would love to see written in German— 

'—with all the drugs and stuff. And it has, let's say, new ideas, experimental gender-crisscrossed rooms and programs and quite a few historical groups.'

The Schwules Museum began in a flat before the fall of the Wall and now occupies an old industrial workshop; its neighbours are a gay café and a shop called 'Faster, Pussycat!'

'There is one part of gays' thinking that isn't so interested in history, but there is another part which is enormously interested to be able to say "I'm not the first one,"' Karl-Heinz says.

'The museum's development from a little special interest group to the institution that we are now also establishes gay history as a scientific study. It's not done by gays who want to say, "I will collect 2,000 photographs of cocks."'

That said, there's no famine of phalluses in the museum's exhibit on two centuries of gay history.

Inevitably, as with Freud's house in Vienna, Berlin's Gay Museum takes the we-are-the-champions approach to history.

But amid the usual namechecks—nods to the Greeks and Romans, plus Dietrich, Wilde, Auden and Isherwood—it also displays plenty of curiosities: an anal diagram from a French medical text in 1878 showing 'Desordres que produit la pederastie' (it ain't pretty)… Gestapo photos of known homosexuals, taken in three poses (including with and without hats)… and kitsch Seventies copies of him: das magazine mit dem mann featuring weedy sex symbols with bush cuts and sideburns before the American gym-bunny aesthetic conquered the world.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Back to the Party -- (Chapter IX, Part 24)

Which all sounds eminently reasonable.

When I see him later that night, though, I begin to wonder if there isn't something to the 'self-loathing' tag that he resents so much.

Armed with the gay guide that Gad had a hand in, Lena and I have hit the gay clubs, including a joint with a tranny DJ and pictures of the German pope holding the host over the bar.

Around three a.m., we meet up with Gad at Rose's Bar, a smoky nook that's like walking into the belly of a debauched Muppet.

The walls and ceiling are coated with hot-pink, shag-pile carpeting that's so thick, the cilia-like hairs actually billow from the fan overhead.

The usual mock-religious bric-a-brac is scattered throughout the club, including a big painting of the Virgin Mary on the supply-room door and a portrait of Jesus surrounded by swirly lights.

Maybe it's the spiritual imagery—or a far stronger substance—but Gad has a confession of his own to make.

'I once had sex with a dog,' he announces to Lena.

She laughs.

'It was an Irish setter that belonged to a friend. I woke up and it was licking me. I was so drunk at first I pushed it away. But then I thought, this feels rather nice.'

Gad gabbles on like this until Lena and I take our leave to head to another club.

While we wait for a cab, he points to four small brass plaques capping the cobblestones in front of the bar.

They're Stolpersteine—'stumbling blocks'—and they're memorials to victims of the Holocaust.

In this case, the plaques are reminders that a family of four lived here until they were deported in 1943.

'Because the Nazis sent them to AUSCHWITZ!!!' Gad cackles, kicking at the blocks.

And then he turns and goes back to the party.

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'This Righteous Little Jew' -- (Chapter IX, Part 22)

Bizarrely, there's even a burgeoning subgenre of memoirs by the descendants of Nazis trying to atone for their families' sins.

The great-niece of Heinrich 'Holocaust' Himmler, for instance, wound up marrying an Israeli, claiming in her book that 'it was as if we were predestined to meet.' 

Imagine the pillow talk.

Meanwhile, a distant relative of Hermann 'Jew-Looter' Göring, a physiotherapist who grew up bullied by his classmates with his parents complaining that 'all our money's gone to the Jews,' has said he's thinking of converting to Judaism.

Matthias Göring already keeps kosher, wears a kippah, a Star of David necklace and even an orange 'anti-disengagement bracelet' in sympathy with Jewish 'settlers' in the West Bank.

According to Gad, many German converts to Judaism actually turn out to be homosexual (though not Matthias Göring, apparently: he's been married.)

'THEY HATE THE BEAUTY IN ME'

'A problem with coming out is that your conflict with society is based on sexuality,' he says. 'Now, that is… not… pleasant. It's disgusting. You can't build self-esteem on sexuality—especially people who come from villages. So I think they shift their identity from homosexuality and turn it in their minds into a conflict (with society)—"I was always a bit different". It's something righteous; it's not dirty sexuality. It's "As a matter of fact, I'm Jewish. I'm different because somehow in my inner self I'm this righteous little Jew. That is why they hate the beauty in me."'

He laughs—and oddly switches pronouns. 'You can't accept the beauty in you because you're homosexual, because there you really have to go very far to think that being homosexual is beautiful. So they try to find an identity that will explain their conflict and make it—dignified—that's the word. It's very dignified to be Jewish, especially in Germany now. Whereas if it's just your dick moving the wrong way, and you start lickin' somebody's ass and fisting—it's disgusting! That's not dignified! Are you fighting with your parents, who love you and raised you and sent you to school, just because you wanna fist?'

He cackles. 'And it's very funny, because these German converts—these awful, lower middle-class people, these Christian homos with their Aryan noses and their blonde hair—aagh!—and their glasses, to make them look like intellectuals—sit in the front rows of the synagogues.'

'Do they get circumcised, too?'

'If they want to become Jewish, yes, they have to. But quite a lot of homosexuals get circumcised nowadays. It's a sort of fashion now to get themselves cut—which is quite an operation, by the way.'

I don't doubt it.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Jew-Loving Germans -- (Chapter IX, Part 21)

What with all the stuff about Sodom and Gomorrah, though, Judaism isn't the most gay-friendly religion.

Before coming here, then, it was a surprise to me to find an online network of Jews in Germany trying to square their spiritual beliefs with their homosexuality.

Gad rolls his eyes and tells me about a run-in he had one year during Berlin's Christopher Street Parade.

'These people from Yachad Deutschland were walking there with the Israeli flag. And this was the middle of the intifada, and I just thought to myself we're having a nice, tolerant thing over here. We don't want an Israeli flag. We didn't have a German flag, we don't want any national flags.'

'So I went over and said, "Fuckin' Jews"—I was drunk—as a joke. And they were hysterical! They were waiting for it—they were waiting for somebody to do something—and nobody cared! So they jumped at me. And thank God I still had an Israeli passport—I took it out and said, "Sorry girls".'

He laughs devilishly. 'They were furious!'

He pauses to stub out a cigarette. 'Identity politics sucks.'

'Didn't you encounter any anti-Semitism when you came here?'

'Of course, I did. There's quite a bit of anti-Semitism here, but then there's quite a bit of anti-Semitism everywhere.'

But if anything, he adds, that's not the problem for Jews in Germany, particularly not in artsy circles.

'Nowadays I find the problem is also philo-Semitism—the love for Jews. It's disturbing. You don't know how popular you can get without having done anything. I lived in a flat, and my flatmate would clean the dishes all the time. And I was wondering, Is he in love with me? And then I found out—you know what? I'm a VIP! And that's a problem if you're sincere, in the sense that you really don't want people to like you just because, "Oh, he's Jewish, let's have a Jew around, that's exotic." Because German identity is based on guilt toward the Jews.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'The Hottest City for Israelis' -- (Chapter IX, Part 20)

Gad's family already knew he was gay when he told them he planned to study in Berlin in 1986.

His grandfather was fine about the move; it was the Middle Eastern side of the family that was the problem.

'It was more about being afraid of the unknown. It wasn't Germany itself. They had the idea that Western Christians were against Jews; not that the Muslims were against Jews.'

'But of all the cities in the world, why here?' I ask.

'Berlin was very free, in all sorts of ways. It was punk, it was hip, it was dangerous—not real danger; I mean, I came from danger—but there was squatting and you could have sex whenever you wanted to. There was freedom.'

A new 'Fatherland' or 'Time Bomb'?
A street mural of an Israeli flag superimposed
on a German flag

He points out that Germany now has the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, though admittedly off a very small base.

'There are almost 200,000 Jews in Germany now—200,000! England has 300,000, and it's falling.'

Most of the newcomers are Russian Jews, who receive social benefits the minute they arrive. In fact, the number of Jews immigrating to Germany rivals that of those going to Israel.

'Berlin is the hottest city in Europe now for Israelis,' he says. 'There are two or three thousand Israelis here; there used to be only two or three hundred. It's an enormous community.'

'Why is that?'

'Time heals all wounds,' he says grandly.

Then he snaps back into his camp Irish persona. 'It's true. I wouldn't have thought so. I would've thought the way you're thinking. But things are changing, and they're changing quite quickly. Like, you hear Hebrew here. I'm amazed! But they love it here! You can go out all night, fuck all night and have drugs all night. The drinks are cheap, and the livin' is easy.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Home of the Gay Israeli -- (Chapter IX, Part 19)

One of the more unlikely revelers in this new freedom was a gay Israeli who'd moved to Germany a few years earlier.

Since then, he's been portrayed back home as a self-loathing Jew, so he's reluctant to let me use his real name. Instead, I'll call him 'Gad'—as in '-fly' and the gay Jew who survived Nazi Berlin.

Given that I've already met a Bavarian Berliner who talks like a Jewish New Yorker, I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to find a gay Israeli who sounds like a camp Irishman.

But Gad's best friend is from Cork, so he's managed to pick up the accent, even though he's visited Ireland only once 15 years ago.

It's this omnivorous intelligence that makes a talk with Gad so entertaining: he's like Graham Norton with a brain.

Cocking his HB cigarette at a catty, inquisitive angle—'The Brits called them Hitler's Best; I call them Huns' Best'—he outlines his background for me.

On his father's side, he comes from Iraqi Jews, while his mother's family hailed from Galicia. Fortunately for Gad, his maternal grandfather was a Communist.

'He ran away from the Nazis—the only one from his family. That saved him from Auschwitz, which the rest of the family went to. Because he believed the Communist propaganda against the Nazis (about the camps), which of course was the truth.'

After the war, his grandparents tried to return to Galicia, 'but the Yiddish world they'd known had disappeared.'

They spent some time in Sweden, where Gad's mother was born, and then Brazil, before finally settling in Israel in 1951.

Gad's parents met as teenagers in the Israeli Communist movement, so it's probably inevitable that their son should view the world's ills in terms of class struggle.

'I remember the famous, eternal sentence of my grandfather. It was in a café in Israel, and he said: "The Germans are a very bad people. But you know, the Lithuanians are bad people. The Ukrainians are worse. But the worst"—and he stood up, I'll never forget the shame I felt—"are these damn Zionists!"'

Gad bashes his fist on the table, mimicking his granddad, then leans back and shrugs.

'He lived in Israel—very happily.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Ashamed and Open -- (Chapter IX, Part 17)

No one knows how many homosexuals were killed in the Holocaust: estimates range from tens of thousands to over half a million.

Incredibly, the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 was one of Hitler's few laws to remain in force under the Allies: in postwar West Germany, at least as many men were prosecuted for being gay as had been during the Third Reich.

As a result, many gay survivors were afraid to speak out for fear of being treated as criminals. 

'Germans in general are very good at feeling guilty,' Stephan told me, explaining that in the gay community, this sense of shame often manifests itself in extreme behavior.

He's even seen some gays dress up as Nazis for theme parties or as skinheads wearing jackets over LONSDALE shirts so that the logo looks like NSDAP: the Nazi Party's initials.

'I find it very strange that we would dress up as people who were our predators,' he mused. 'You can be ashamed and open at the same time.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'I Sometimes Wake Up Howling' -- (Chapter IX, Part 16)

In the camps, gay men were usually forced to wear pink triangles, making them targets for their fellow prisoners, as well as the guards and SS doctors, who injected gay men with hormones to try to 'cure' homosexuality.

Pierre Seel was a gay teenager in a French border town when the Nazis overran his country.

Although his boyfriend, 'Jo,' seemed to have escaped, Seel was arrested in 1941 and tortured along with other known homosexuals.

'Outraged by our resistance, the SS began pulling out the fingernails of some prisoners. In their fury, they broke the rulers we were kneeling on and used them to rape us. Our bowels were punctured. Blood spurted everywhere. My ears still ring with the shrieks of our pain.'

Worse came in the camp.

'One day the loudspeakers ordered us to report immediately to the roll-call. Two SS men brought a young man to the center of our square. Horrified, I recognized Jo, who was only 18. I hadn't previously spotted him…'

'The loudspeakers broadcast some noisy classical music while the SS stripped him naked and shoved a tin pail over his head. Next they set their ferocious German shepherds on him: the guard dogs first bit into his groin and thighs, then devoured him right in front of us.'

'His shrieks of pain were distorted and amplified by the pail in which his head was trapped. My rigid body reeled, my eyes gaped at so much horror, tears poured down my cheeks. I fervently prayed that he would black out quickly. Since then I sometimes wake up howling in the middle of the night.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'Such Nice, Pretty Boys' -- (Chapter IX, Part 15)

However, sex was so much a part of Gad's survival that you wonder whether a straight man in his position would have lasted as long as he did.

One of Gad's saving graces, for lack of a better term, was that he had few qualms about having sex with his male protectors.

He got an office job thanks to some help from his Uncle Paul—'which didn't limit itself to the typewriter:' 'we exchanged intimacy deliberately, intentionally, for the first time… It's amazing when you think that at the time he was pushing sixty.'

SOMETHING TO OFFER

And on his twentieth birthday, Gad's German boss took him for ice cream and offered him a place to hide illegals.

'Of course he wanted something in return. He wanted me. I wasn't totally uninterested… I had already noticed he had something to offer in his pants. He was wearing light gabardine slacks that brought out his anatomy nicely.'

One day Gad was told to get in touch with an engineering official named Paul Dreyer who'd helped one of his Jewish lovers escape to Switzerland (another of Gad's unlikely helpers was a middle-aged prostitute who claimed to be an aristocrat).

Ultimately, though, it was a turncoat for the other side who snared him: Stella Kubler, a Jewish femme fatale who hunted Jews in hiding.

The Nazis called Jewish traitor
Stella Kubler 'Blonde Poison'

One of her fellow 'catchers' snared Dreyer in March 1945.

This book was written by one of
Kubler's former classmates at a Jewish school

'He tried to improve his situation during the questioning by claiming he didn't know we were Jews,' Gad wrote.

Instead, Dreyer told his interrogators he'd helped them "because they were such nice, pretty boys."

A few months after the war, Gad saw Dreyer.

'He looked absolutely terrible. They had set two trained dogs on him—specialists in testicles and ears. There wasn't the slightest trace of outer ear to be seen, and he was virtually deaf. With regards to the other body part, he said all that was left was a hole for peeing.'

In the Seventies, Gad bumped into him again.

'He told me—he was around seventy to my fifty-five—that he had by no means given up on sex; there was another spot that had a lot of sensation. I got chills thinking about it.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'I Don't Even Know What That Is' -- (Chapter IX, Part 14)

Likewise, whereas the modern view of homosexuality tends to focus on anal sex and penetration—one expert on 'Greek Love' dates this 'sodomania' from the Seventies—Beck's memoir is a reminder that gay relationships haven't always been about buggery.

Though we're conditioned to think of pederasty as a rite of passage, so to speak—even for heteros these days—many of Krafft-Ebing's homosexual correspondents claimed they preferred everything but anal.

That's not to say that sodomy wasn't part of the gay repertoire—Isherwood was an avid butt man, while Auden had to be treated for a 'rectal fissure'—but anal sex was far riskier before the discovery of penicillin (indeed, that's one theory why Judeo-Christians banned sodomy: to keep their 'chosen peoples' clean and infection-free).

OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT

Recalling his first love, a fellow Zionist named Manfred, Gad says:

'Whatever we did, it was not much like gay sex as one thinks of it today, but then again, Manfred was not homosexual anyway. With him, as with many of the lovers my age, it was more about joy and fun and sharing hugs and caresses—to feel that the other person was just as aroused as you were… His parents and siblings noticed our relationship, but it didn't have to be talked about. Anyway, there really were other things to worry about.'

Like getting caught.

When Gad was finally captured near the end of the war with another lover, they were both interrogated by the Gestapo.

The officer torturing his friend Zwi taunted them: 'Did you fuck each other in the ass?'

Gad denied it and told him to also confirm it with his partner.

'And the man really did go back in to ask. The door was still ajar, and I could hear Zwi answer, surprised but truthfully, "No, I don't even know what that is."'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'A Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin' -- (Chapter IX, Part 13)

Amazingly, some gays managed to survive in the heart of the Reich.

One of the most extraordinary examples is Gad Beck, whose autobiography has an irresistible subtitle (Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin) and highlights just how much sexual attitudes have changed.

For example, he blithely recounts his first sexual encounter when he was nine or so—with his uncle, who was in his fifties:

'He put me on his lap and kissed me on both cheeks. And suddenly I felt that I was sitting on something! It was warm and firm and felt… well… nice. Nothing else happened. He smiled at me in a special way, mischievous and at the same time loving, which is why I tried to provoke these situations. For the first time, I had erotic feelings in that bottom of mine.'

After messing around with his schoolmates, Gad then had a one-off encounter with his PE teacher at the age of twelve.

'I embraced him and noticed that he was aroused as well. We caressed and rubbed against each other, not even all that much, and then we came, both of us.'

Later, when his mother asked how his day had been, he told her excitedly, 'Really nice. I hugged my gym teacher in the locker room. It was really fun.'

At this point, most modern parents would be on the phone to the police.

But Gad claims his mother 'was not at all upset: "Aha, I thought so," she answered dryly.'

Beck explains her response: 'Relationships between boys and girls were treated much more seriously.'

Mainly because of fears of pregnancy, but also Nazi laws on racial mixing.

'If something had happened with a girl in my class, I probably would have been afraid to say anything. But being affectionate with a male teacher? What could happen?... I came out, as you say nowadays, in a totally nonchalant fashion.'

It seems ironic that even the most liberal parents now, having grown up after both Sexual Revolutions, would act more conservatively than a bourgeois German mother in 1934.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- A Jumped-Up Chicken Farmer -- (Chapter IX, Part 12)

To justify the murders of so many loyal Nazis, Hitler backed up his prefabricated charges of treason by denouncing Röhm as a homosexual and declaring that gays would be expelled from the Party.

On the first anniversary of the purge, the Nazis reinforced Paragraph 175, revising it for the first time in its history.

The new law enabled the Gestapo to arrest gay men not just for 'unnatural acts'—namely, sodomy—but also any 'sex offences,' including hugging and having homosexual fantasies.

TIME TO RUN

By this time, the Nazis' Communist arch-enemies had also turned against homosexuality.

Ironically, Soviet media called it a 'manifestation of Fascist bourgeois degeneracy' and exhorted Communists to 'exterminate homosexuality and Fascism will disappear.'

In hindsight, for gays, this was definitely the time to run.

Whereas Hitler's artistic bent led him to view homosexuality as a sort of supremely bad habit for the master race, the man he put in charge of hunting gays was an animal breeder who believed they were genetic degenerates.

A jumped-up chicken farmer turned head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler took Darwinism and 'survival of the fittest' to its logical extreme.

He established the Lebensborn—or Fount of Life—to encourage 'biologically fit' Aryan men and women to reproduce (and provide maternity care for Teutonic prostitutes), while also telling his generals that the ancient German practice of drowning a homosexual in a bog 'was no punishment, merely the extinction of an abnormal life.'

Himmler condemned convicted gays to Level Three concentration camps, described by one historian as 'human death mills reserved for Jews and homosexuals.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Hitler's Gay Righthand Man -- (Chapter IX, Part 11)

Still, like most of the population, Germany's homosexuals managed to delude themselves into complacency and occasionally even allegiance to the regime.

After all, Hitler's righthand man was gay—he was even a member of the League for Human Rights.

Ernst Röhm was a scarfaced brute who'd done time in jail with the Führer and was one of the select few allowed to call him by his first name.

Röhm had transformed the brownshirted stormtroopers of the SA into Hitler's private army, an odd beast made up of beer-swilling, Communist-bashers who were buggered by their commanders as they ascended the ranks.

Tragically, just as leftwingers had tried to bring down the Kaiser by exposing gays in the government before World War One, it was a socialist newspaper that outed Röhm by publishing his love letters to another Nazi.

Despite the party's official condemnation of homosexuality, Röhm wrote that he was happy to be gay and argued that Paragraph 175 should be repealed.

Goebbels, Hitler and Rohm

Hitler's own attitude to homosexuality seems to have been ambivalent.

Though he publicly condemned it, he also seems to have understood it—possibly intimately, if you believe the scuttlebutt that he'd been a street hustler in Vienna.

Whereas his allies believed the Nazi Party had to be purged of homosexuals, Hitler tolerated sexual 'perverts' so long as they were useful to him.

By the middle of 1934, though, he'd decided that Röhm's ambitions threatened his own bid for power.

So Hitler purged the SA.

During the 'Night of the Long Knives,' he personally oversaw Röhm's arrest in a hotel near Munich.

In the same raid, the SS caught Röhm's deputy in bed with an eighteen-year-old troop leader.

Hitler had both of them executed on the spot.

Later, Röhm was given the chance to commit suicide; when he refused, the SS shot him dead, too.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'We Knew Too Much' -- (Chapter IX, Part 10)

But the sniping from his own side must have been even more hurtful.

While young foreigners like Isherwood admired Hirschfeld as a 'heroic leader of his tribe,' many of the doctor's one-time allies had begun to view him as a liability.

From the safety of his own closet, the writer Thomas Mann dismissed 'Hirschfeld and his ghastly Committee,' and the leader of Germany's largest organization for gay groups—the so-called League for Human Rights—even started quoting Nazi propaganda against him:

'It is clear that The People's Observer newspaper'—a Nazi mouthpiece—'does not aim to damn homosexuals universally, but instead by and large is striking out only at Jews (especially Magnus Hirschfeld).'

Which made it okay, then.

AND SO IT BEGINS...

However, soon after Hitler took over as Chancellor in January 1933, his 'Campaign for a Clean Reich' shuttered gay clubs and newspapers.

In May, the Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexology, carting away and torching most of its collection and ceremoniously throwing a bust of Hirschfeld onto the bonfire.

Fortunately, the institute's founder was out of the country lecturing at the time: he had the surreal experience of seeing himself burnt in effigy on a newsreel in a Paris cinema (to this day, the stock footage of the infamous Nazi book burnings is usually from the ransacking of the institute). 

Who knew?
This Nazi was probably throwing sex books on the fire

Hirschfeld died two years later in exile.

The Nazis had branded his research center 'an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth.'

However, one official at the institute had a much more intriguing theory: 'We knew too much.'

As the only place for counseling about sexual disorders, the center had treated people from many walks of life, including goose-stepping Nazis.

'Not 10% of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands were sexually normal,' the assistant director said.

'Many of these personages were known to us directly… and of others we saw the tragic results: a young girl whose abdomen was covered with pin scratchings through the sadism of an eminent Nuremberg Nazi; I refer also to a thirteen-year-old boy who suffered from a serious lesion of the anal muscle brought about by a senior party official and to a youth from Berlin with severe rectal gonorrhea…'

'Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material—we possessed about 40,000 confessions and biographical letters—was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.'

The History of Sex: South of France -- Nazism and the Paganization of Europe -- (Chap. III, Pt. 14)

A Catholic theologian summed it up nicely for an Anglican in the 1800s: 'A priest sacrifices himself for the sake of his parishioners. He has no children of his own, in order that all the children in the parish may be his children.'

Granted, the bit about a priest having all the children in the parish sounds unfortunate nowadays, but you get the drift.

What's more, sexual self-sacrifice also exists in the secular world—from football teams that ban sex before matches to artists who forgo parenthood to concentrate on their art.

Balzac churned out nearly 100 tomes for his Human Comedy but believed he could have produced even more if it hadn't been for carnal distractions: after sex, he would sigh, 'There goes another novel!'

A SEXUAL DRAFT DODGE?

In my fallen state, I should also admit that when Father Denis mentions that his class of twenty-two priests in 1946 was the last big ordination at his (now-defunct) seminary, I immediately wonder if the war had been a big motivator.

I ask him if going to seminary was a way of dodging combat.

Au contraire, he replies. 'We were a very patriotic generation before the war. We felt that the war was caused by heathenism—a paganization of Europe—and Nazism was a symbol of that.'

The Nazi Party's 'Horoscope of the Week'

'We believed in something: France—French culture, in the broad sense of the term. We couldn't imagine happiness without faith.'

He pauses. 'Now there is no faith in anything.'

'So did you and your companions view celibacy as a sacrifice on behalf of your congregations?'

'In a way, it was simpler than that,' he admits. His classmates acted as a support network for each other, providing chaste peer pressure.

'Celibacy now is quite an individualistic problem. A young man who dedicates himself to religious celibacy is—well, in French, we call it un bloc erratique.'

In geology, an 'erratic block' is a boulder that's carried along by a glacier but left stranded after the ice recedes. Given Christ's famous quote about founding the Church on a rock, the image seems particularly poignant: with Catholicism in long-term retreat, its priests have been left behind.

I mention the former Pope's reference to celibacy as a 'stumbling block' that keeps men from joining the clergy. 

'Celibacy can exist only if you believe in something to make a sacrifice for,' Father Denis says matter-of-factly. 'For the current generation, very little is done to introduce them to any ideal worthy of the name.'

* * *