Fatal attraction
So, the Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider was gay. He spent the evening of his fatal car crash in a gay cub, cuddling another man, and used to nip across the border to Slovakia for sex with young men. And Stefan Petzner, his protégé and successor as the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, described Haider as “the man of my life” on an Austrian radio breakfast show.
Can anyone explain the enduring fascination of Nazism for some gay men?
Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch far-right politician assassinated in 2002, was openly gay. The Nazi brownshirts, or SA, were suffused by an atmosphere of homoeroticism prior to the Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934). Their leader, Ernst Röhm, was famously gay, while Edmund Heines, boss of the SA in Breslau, was dragged from the bed of an 18-year-old storm trooper on the night of the purge and shot.
All of which raises a troubling question. Beyond the easy stereotypes – the male bonding, the camp allure of the uniforms, the theatrical appeal of the rallies – why would anyone feel drawn to an ideology which, with its spurious notions of “purity”, would exterminate them?
The Indy doesn't really understand the idea of blogs, does it?
Posted by: Neil McGowan | Monday, 27 October 2008 at 09:03 PM
The main problem I have with this post is that Pim Fortuyn wasn't a Nazi in the least. He was an excellent politician whose death was a major loss to Europe, and I would argue the entire West.
Posted by: Natalie | Monday, 27 October 2008 at 10:14 PM
Whether or not Fortuyn was an excellent politician (whatever that means), he was certainly no Nazi.
If the point of this blog is to note a paradox that gay men are drawn to an ideology that wants to destroy them (a contentious point I would imagine), it is worth bearing in mind that Fortuyn's stated political aim was to ensure that the Netherlands remained tolerant of minorities (such as homosexuals) in the face of different, imported social attitudes. Fortuyn's argument, as I recall, was that increased assimilation was needed, and that multi-culturalism could not succeed where such deep divisions between those cultures exist. I believe that even Howard Jacobson may have made similar arguments on the pages of the Independent.
Whilst I cannot comment on the validity of Fortuyn's argument, placing it in this context is inappropriate and suggests more support for racist far-right causes than is the case.
Posted by: Patrick Finch | Thursday, 30 October 2008 at 11:15 AM
Its interesting that their are hundreds of `google hits` proclaiming Haider gay, all based on the word of one Mossad asset,
Yet there are ZERO `google hits` speculating on who murdered Haider..
Who controls the media manufacturers their own reality- we live in the most dangerous of times.
Posted by: frederick | Friday, 14 November 2008 at 09:08 PM