The Pink Triangles: The Story of the Gay Holocaust (Complete Documentary)

[Behind the Aegis]

It is an hour and 15 minutes. I knew most of the information, but there were even a few things I learned. This is worth watching, especially for those who don't realize how horribly gay men were treated during the rise of the Nazis, during the Holocaust, and after the camps were liberated.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

1. Thanks for sharing!

I knew about this history but hadn't seen this doc yet.

[Collimator]

2. I do know that many Gay men. . .

. . .were subjected to horrible sexual abuse/assaults by their Nazi captors.

And I know that you, BTA, have reacted strongly to the suggestion that any and all homophobia is motivated by suppressed homosexual inclinations.

The deeply disturbing reality of our larger world culture is the nexus of power and violence and hatred that crosses into the primacy of sexuality.

Sex is essentially a good thing because it results in feelings of pleasure and joy. How and why it has become perverted into an expression of anger and contempt is a tragic mystery. Certainly, there is a degree of self-hatred whenever anyone weaponizes sex to such ends because sexuality is an intrinsic aspect of our shared humanity.

Teaching people to hate their bodies and their responses to touch and their desire to share sexually intimate touch with some other human being is the real perversion that exists in the world.

There are some activities and expressions of sexuality that seem a little strange to me. But then again, I'm a fairly vanilla little prude. That being said, honest, joyful, consensual sexual expression is not perversion and it needs to be a protected right for all people.

[NullTuples]

3. It's no mystery

"How and why it has become perverted into an expression of anger and contempt is a tragic mystery."

Sadly, it's no mystery. You can tally it up on the social influence scoreboard as a point for Christianity in our society long before the Protestants, Puritans and others. Most of the cultures the Church assimilated (often somewhat violently) were far more sex positive. Some were matriarchal / matrilineal / nature based. Some while still primarily patriarchal like the Romans, saw sex as a part of life. but just as the Church needed to counter Rome's polytheism with monotheism, it needed to counter women's power in outlying areas, small villages, etc by deeming them flawed. Original sin, and all that. It's amazing, what subjugating a full half of a society can do. Part of their mechanism for spreading a binary patriarchy were the Church backed kingdoms that sprang up all over Europe. To gain the Church's favor, they had to have male lineages. Anyway, mixed in with all this was a full restructuring of sex to be a combination service a wife provide for her Master (uh, I mean "husband&quot and something interwoven into the religious beliefs (part of assimilating matriarchal cultures). So, a binary patriarchy it had to be, and sex became very strictly regulated via theocracy.

During roughly the same larger timespan, the story behind the early Church outlawing gays as priests though is a fascinating tale that involves St Anselm of Canterbury, his superior who was also his partner/lover/soulmate, and England wanting to tax the Roman church enough to hurt. Rome countered this by outlawing gay priests, who would incur the higher tax. Anselm fought this and was able to make the Church hold off, at least until after his death.