I’m getting the feeling from discussions going round these last 2 weeks is that many people view discrimination towards gays is basically about getting married and the inconvenience of having to stay in the closet.

And if losing your job and profession because you were outed was the only repercussion, I guess I would rank that as less severe than death and slavery. But only as a matter of proportions. Because losing your livelihood, your ability to work, is indeed a form of slavery. The Communists used this all the time - forcing intellectuals into back-breaking menial jobs to grind them down over the years (or simply as a slightly slower way to murder, as the Gulags offered).

And I think many of us know that Oscar Wilde spent a few years in jail for being gay, which had the result of ruining his health and sending him to an early grave. Of course he’s not the only gay to be imprisoned, and arbitrary extra-legal punishments by mob rule have been the norm for millenia. [I had a friend who suprised me by telling me about a gay guy who came onto him, and how he viciously beat the guy up and threw him in a dumpster. I never talked to him again, but I’m still amazed he would brag about such a thing.]

But the origins of the Pink Triangle bring greater shame. Not only did the Nazis round up gays, castrating some and sending others to jails and concentration camps (it’s hard to get the numbers right - only recently did Deutsche Welle up the estimates to 55,000 killed, while other estimates have from 20-40,000 dying at Auschwitz alone). But they were also abused by their fellow campmates, not just their guards. And then after the war they weren’t even eligible for reparations because they were still illegal “sodomites”, some sent back to jail for crimes brought up by the Nazis. Of course other gays had the good sense to flee in front of the Nazi onslaught when from a publicly gay population of over a million (Berlin was a flourishing cultural city of gays and Jews, a la Cabaret), some 100,000 ended up on Gestapo lists.

Just as it also took Gypsies 50 years to get full acceptance as victims of the Nazi holocaust, belated acknowledgement for gays has been slow in coming, and for most people the fate of the gay community in Germany and Poland remains just another unknown historical blind spot.