The strange, strange story of ‘gay fascism’ deniers

By WND Staff

By Dr. Scott Lively

There has been an article floating around the Internet for a long time by a self-described “gay left-wing man” named Johann Hari, a columnist for the London Independent. The article is titled “The Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists,” and you can read it for yourself at the vehemently pro-“gay” Huffington Post website. It contains the remarkably forthright admission that homosexuality and fascism have always gone hand in hand. Hari writes:

“The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was – including the gay-gassing, homocidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past 30 years have been gay. It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is – in part, at least – a gay thing, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.”

Now, I have a special interest in this article because I am the co-author, along with Orthodox Jewish researcher Kevin E. Abrams of “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party,” which makes a nearly identical claim, but one backed with nearly 400 pages of documentation.

What I find most interesting about Hari’s article is that it has garnered virtually no opposition. The few comments on the HuffPo page are mostly benign, and if you do a search on Hari’s name you find not a single suggestion that his article constitutes “Holocaust revisionism” or that he, himself, is a “homophobic bigot.” That’s very strange, because I’ve been called both a revisionist and a bigot for writing “The Pink Swastika.” Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center (that legendary beacon of fair-mindedness) has labeled me a “hate group” for writing it (though they refuse to publicly debate me on the issue).

On a recent speaking trip to Oklahoma City, my arrival was featured in the newspaper in a story characterizing me as a “Holocaust revisionist.” This label has been permanently added to the “gay” activist talking points about me, as well as the canard that “the book has been discredited by historians.” It has not.

The Hari article is not the only admission by homosexuals that the Nazi Party was filled with “gays.” At least a fifth of the sources we cited in “The Pink Swastika” were homosexuals. For example, consider this incredible statement by Ludwig Lenz, the “gay” assistant director of the Berlin Institute of Sexology (headquarters of Germany’s “gay” movement in the 1920s and early ’30s) following the attack on the Institute by Nazi Brownshirts May 6, 1933.

“Why was it then, since we were completely non-party, that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime? The answer to this is simple …We knew too much. It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions [but] … not 10 percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal. … Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material – we possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical letters – was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.” [Haeberle, Irwin J. “Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Elite Rights Committee,” 1992 p. 369.] (Is Haeberle some fringe conservative? Far from it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_J._Haeberle.)

How about this quote from Adolf Brand, editor of Der Eigene, the first homosexual magazine in Germany.

“Men such as Captain Roehm [Hitler’s ‘gay’ mentor], are, to our knowledge, no rarity at all in the National Socialist Party. It rather teems there with homosexuals of all kinds. And the joy of man in man, which has been slandered in their papers so often as an oriental vice although the Edda frankly extols it as the highest virtue of the Teutons, blossoms around their campfires and is cultivated and fostered by them in a way done in no other male union that is reared on party politics. The threatened hanging on the gallows, with which they allege they want to exterminate homosexuals, is therefore only a horrible gesture that is supposed to make stupid people believe that the Hitler people, in the matter of male-to-male inclinations, are all as innocent as pigeons and pure as angels, just like the pious members of the Christian Society of the Virgin. …” [Oosterhuis, Harry, and Kennedy, Hubert (eds.). “Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany: the youth movement, the gay movement and male bonding before Hitler’s rise: original transcripts from Der Eigene, the first gay journal in the world.” New York, Harrington Park Press, 1991.] (Both Oosterhuis and Kennedy are “gay” college professors and historians.)

The Washington Blade, the newspaper of the homosexual community in Washington, D.C., reported on the research of John Fout, a “gay” history professor at Bard College in New York:

“The Nazis shut down the two or three active gay political organizations that had been operating in German (sic) as soon as Hitler took power in 1933. However, according to Fout, gay bars and bathhouses remained open until the late 1930s. … ‘The gay urban subculture survived the Nazi period,’ said Fout.” [“Researcher says Nazi persecution not systematic,” The Washington Blade, May 22, 1998.]

Jewish homosexual Gad Beck, director of Berlin’s Jewish Adult Education Center, also challenged “gay” dogma on the degree to which homosexuals were persecuted in Germany. In his book, “An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin,” Beck claims, “There was no problem be[ing] a homosexual Jew. Everyone turned a blind eye to whatever we boys were up to with each other” and cited only one case of the Nazis persecuting a homosexual man. [Beck in “Fearless under the Fuhrer,” The Advocate, Oct. 26, 1999.]

These are just a few of dozens of citations to “gay” sources in “The Pink Swastika.”

But back to Hari and the problem of “gay fascism” deniers. At the end of his lengthy article, in which he corroborates a great many facts cited in “The Pink Swastika” and adds quite a number that we were not aware of, Hari states:

“The growing awareness of the role gay men play in fascist movements has been abused by some homophobes. In an especially nutty work of revisionist history called ‘The Pink Swastika,’ the ‘historian’ Scott Lively tries to blame gay people for the entire Holocaust, and describes the murder of gay men in the camps as merely ‘gay-on-gay violence.’ A typical website commenting on the book claims absurdly, ‘”The Pink Swastika” shows that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi homosexuals than there even was against homosexuals themselves.'”

Herein lies the core of the problem. Leftists will abide one of their own who dares to tell the truth about homosexuality in the Nazi Party, but let a pro-family conservative compile their admissions into a single document and it becomes “an especially nutty work of revisionist history.” The book does not, by the way, “blame gay people for the entire Holocaust, and [describe] the murder of gay men in the camps as merely ‘gay-on-gay violence.'” That is a misrepresentation, something Hari was especially good at until he was suspended by the Independent for plagiarism in 2011.

In contrast to his self-serving (and “gay” cause-serving) libel about “The Pink Swastika,” Hari’s recitation of the facts about homo-fascism in history (as well as those of other “gay” sources) have an especially high degree of trustworthiness. They fall within a category of testimony that our judicial system calls “admissions against interest.” Homosexualists can be expected to insult pro-family conservatives, and one rightly suspects their opinions of being biased. But when a died-in-the-wool “gay” activist writer like Hari tells you that “gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was,” and “all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past 30 years [except LePen] have been gay,” you can take it to the bank.

So what about those hard leftists like the Southern Poverty Law Center folks and other homosexualist “experts” who know the truth about “gay” fascism but suppress it? Well, that’s what “The Pink Swastika” is for: to be a resource filled with undeniable facts to show up the dishonest “deniers” for who they really are. I urge you to pick up a copy of “The Pink Swastika” at the WND Superstore, but in the meantime you are invited to read a free PDF of Chapter 1 to see the truth for yourself.


Dr. Scott Lively is the founder and president of Defend the Family International and has been since 1997.  An attorney, pastor and human-rights consultant, he has promoted and defended the biblical view of marriage and family in more than 30 countries. The author of five books, including “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party” (with Orthodox Jewish co-author Kevin Abrams) and “Redeeming the Rainbow: A Christian Response to the ‘Gay’ Agenda,” Dr. Lively is currently based in Springfield, Mass., where he and his wife run an inner-city mission church they founded in 2008. He holds a Juris Doctor of law (J.D.) from Trinity Law School and a Doctor of Theology (Th.D.) from the Pentecostal Assemblies of God School of Bible Theology, as well as a Certificate in International Human Rights, from the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasburg, France.

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