Your gay in german
“Are there gay Jews?”
I’ve often been asked: do you possess problems as a Jew in Germany? And I possess to say: I’ve actually had more negative experiences akin to my homosexuality. I always wear the Magen David, the Star of David, around my neck. In the summer at the pool, it’s clearly visible. And I’ve never had problems with it. In Germany today, I can live my homosexuality as adv as my faith, my Jewishness. So as a Jew I’ve made my peace with Germany.
I come from a secular family: we’re believers, and we’re part of a congregation, but we’re not strictly pious. Especially when you’re young, when you spend time partying and enjoying existence, and then you go to synagogue, you can acquire difficulties. When I came out of the closet and started to survive my homosexuality openly, I noticed that it disturbed people that I wasn’t as much a part of the congregation anymore. I no longer felt at home in my parents’ collective, so I left. I have always felt like a bit of an alien there – like I didn’t really belong.
LGBTQ People: Germany's long-forgotten victims of the Nazis
"Now you're a same-sex attracted pig and you've lost your balls." That was how Otto Giering was taunted by a guard in August 1939 after his forced castration in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Even before his deportation to the concentration camp, the 22-year-old had been convicted twice for homosexual contact and sent to a labor camp.
The harrowing story of the Hamburg-born journeyman tailor can be read in the book "Medicine and Crime," published by the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, to which the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial and museum belongs.
Otto Giering survived the ordeals, but his health was ruined: "Due to the concentration camp imprisonment he had heart problems, stomach problems, suffered from headaches and migraines," the book recounts.
Later, his application for compensation was rejected, and he did not come house for days and was reported missing. "The police found him confused and disoriented," the novel says.
Otto Giering died in 1976, a few months before his 60th birthday. He was one of an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men who were deported to German concentration camps by the end of the N
6 May 1933: Looting of the Institute of Sexology
On 6 May 1933, the Institute of Sexology, an academic foundation devoted to sexological research and the advocacy of lgbtq+ rights, was broken into and occupied by Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later the entire contents of the library were removed and burned.
The institute was initially occupied by The German Learner Union, who were a collective of Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later, on 10 May, the entire contents of the library were removed to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square. That night, along with 20,000 other books across Germany, they were publicly burned in a symbolic attack by Nazi officials on their enemies.
Book burning after looting of the Institute of Sexology
Founded in 1919, the institute had been set up by Magnus Hirschfeld, a world-renowned expert in the emerging discipline of sexology. During its existence, thousands of patients were seen and treated, often for free. The Institute also achieved a global reputation for its pioneering work on transsexual understanding and calls for equality for homosexuals, trans people and women. Hirschfield himself was a passionate advocate for homosexua
Gay Dictionary German
Warm
The word Passionate can be translated into English as warm, affectionate, heated, friendly, etc. and at least since the 18th century is a slang that has given rise to a immense number of expressions to refer to homosexuality and homosexual people, especially men. Although the written references date from that century it is not dominated out that their inception is much earlier.
Since the end of the 18th to the present there have been several efforts to explain the inception of this slang that we discard. The most curious of these are the conclusions of one of the forerunners of LGBT rights, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who said that the uranists (that’s what those pioneers called us) had a body temperature higher than the rest of people. Another explanation found is in the fact that gay men get horny with those of their matching sex, and finally, the one that relates the heat with the dangerousness that has always been attributed to homosexuals.
In our opinion there are two possible origins that are related. The first is explained by the interpretation of warm, which would be an intermediate temperature between cold and fiery, and the secular dichotomous visi