Talk:Homosexuals and the Holocaust

JohnD wrote: It is widely accepted that homosexuals were targeted during the holocuast. The second sentance even admitts there were gay people in the camp, and that they indentified as such.

The relevant question is whether they were targeted. A tangentially related question is what the 0.1% figure says about the 10% claim of Kinsey and other advocates of perversion. --Ed Poor ^Talk 09:33, 12 November 2008 (EST)--

I've added a reference as per your request.

But not a good one. You gotta do the math. --Ed Poor ^Talk 09:45, 12 November 2008 (EST)

• The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted the more than one million German men who, the state asserted, carried a "degeneracy" that threatened the "disciplined masculinity" of Germany. Denounced as "antisocial parasites" and as "enemies of the state," more than 100,000 men were arrested under a broadly interpreted law against homosexuality. Approximately 50,000 men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals, while an unknown number were institutionalized in mental hospitals. Others—perhaps hundreds—were castrated under court order or coercion. Analyses of fragmentary records suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps

1,000,000 estimated homosexual men
   10,000 homosexual men in concentration camps

1. That's a 1% figure. Compare that to 85% of all Jews.
2. Other sources say they were not "rounded up" but caught having public sex.

Please respond to this critique making further article edits. --Ed Poor ^Talk 09:45, 12 November 2008 (EST)

I'm not questioning the numbers. The way you have written the original statement suggests that only gay activists claim that homosexual were targeted during the holocaust. That isn't true. I'm interested to see you've labelled the United States holocaust museum as gay activists.

For another reference see [1] and references there in.

One thing to consider is that it's far more difficult to identify homosexuals than Jews, especially using the methods that the Nazis did. When you have synagogues with membership lists, exclusively Jewish communities, and people who, a few years before, had no reason to hide their identity, it's a lot easier to pick them out. The majority of gay people are private about their life style, you can't make a definitive definition of who's gay by tracking them through their ancestors, and, while they do (I can't speak for whether they did in the WWII era) have some gathering places and communities that are frequented by many gay people, there aren't many, and there probably were far fewer at the time, places that have lists that identify gay people. That makes it a little difficult to compare the percentages of Jews that were targetted to the percentages of gays. Mikek 10:45, 12 November 2008 (EST)

I haven't labeled the museum as activists. Rather, I identified them as a source used by activists.

And I concede the difficulty Mike points out. But linking the anti-homosexuality rhetoric of American conservatives to the Nazi Holocaust is unwarranted. Perhaps it depends on the tacit assumption that sex is an life requirement like breathing or a need (like drinking and eating).

But Jews were rounded up based on identity, while Homosexuals were arrested only for having public sex. Those pretending not to see the difference should avoid this discussion. --Ed Poor ^Talk 11:06, 12 November 2008 (EST)

Where on earth are you getting this idea that homosexuals were only arrested for having sex in public? The terms of the legislation ruled against "lewd and lascivious acts with another male" irrespective of whether it was in public or in private, & the Nazis used police lists of suspected homosexuals as well as a special Gestapo division to root out closet homosexuals & identify secret homosexual meeting places. Sideways 12:09, 12 November 2008 (EST)

I should point out that at the time Britain and most (possibly all?) of the US also considered homosexual acts to be a criminal offense. It wasn't at all unusual prosecute homosexuality - many held, and indeed many still do hold, the view that the state has a compelling increase in fighting homosexuality as a threat to public health and morality. The UK faced a lot of opposition to legalising homosexuality, and the US has a few states that would likely re-criminalise it if the supreme court hadn't somehow declared gay sex to be a civil right. What defined the Nazi approach isn't that they criminalised homosexuality, but the enthusiasm with which they did so - tightening the laws, establishing a specialist department with the single role of finding and catching homosexuals, and subjecting those arrested to cruel 'treatments' or to likely death in a concentration camp. They took the criminalisation of homosexuality to an extreme, singling it out above other sex crimes as specific menace to society and demonising homosexuals in propaganda as an 'enemy within' that would try to destroy Germany. While only a small percentage of homosexuals were actually prosecuted, this is not for a lack of trying - were it not for the identification process being so unreliable and time-consuming (Compared to the ease of Jew-finding), the Nazis would certinly have been more than happy to execute every single homosexual or bisexual person in Germany. But, if you want an alternative view, you can always study Scott Lively. NewCrusader 14:38, 12 November 2008 (EST)