it's the philadelphia international gay and lesbian film festival this week. whenever any film fest comes to town, i would ordinarily rearrange my schedule and spend much of my free time seeing obscure films. but this year, the festival falls right after our move. with all the post-move crap i gotta do around the house, it looks like i won't have much time to overdose on gay cinema this year. as a case in point, at this very moment i am sitting at home doing my new hobby, waiting for the cable guy to show up.
but anyway, i did manage to see "heroes and gay nazis", a documentary about gay members of the german skinhead movement. the film had a lot of potential. i think the problem is that they tried to do too much and as a result ended up with too little.
the film interviews a bunch of gay neo-nazis or former neo-nazis in modern germany. about midway through, it then goes back in time and explore the sexual orientation of members of the nazi party during the third reich. but that itself could be it's own documentary. and because so much of the film discussed the 1930s and 40s, it's coverage of the modern gay nazis, the one's i was more curious about, felt a little thin.
that's not to say that the history wasn't an important element of the story. it just didn't have to be so much of the film. in short, the important part of the history is this: ernst rohm, founder of the sturm troopers and second in command during the nazi's early rise to power, was gay and that rumors of his homosexuality were used by nazi opponents in the early 1930s. once hitler came to power, he didn't need the brownshirts as much anymore so he turned on rohm, shot him and 150 others (during the night of long knives), and then used rohm's homosexuality to discredit him. the next year the nazi party passed the strictst anti-gay laws in the history of europe and then sent thousands of gays to concentration camps over the course of the following decade.
so this history raises an obvious question to pose to the gay neo-nazis of today: how can you idealize a regime that would have had you killed? the question does come up, but it's never really pushed as hard as it should. instead, they spend far too much time delving into the (rather dubious) question of whether hitler himself was gay and showing a lot of nazi footage of hitler praising the health and vigor of german men. in another unrelated diversion, the film follows a bunch of modern non-nazis who like to dress up in military uniforms and play in the woods together. at least the digression into nazi history was maginally relevant to the point of the film. the non-nazis were completely superfluous. i got the impression that the filmmaker followed those guys into the woods to film them doing their faux "basic training" in the hopes that he would discover a few that were secretly nazis. it turned out, none were. but he had all this footage and didn't want it to go to waste.
i'm meadering a little now. but this is only to give you a sense of the film; "heroes and gay nazis" meandered a little too much too. i did learn stuff from the film, so it is worth seeing. the subject matter is captivating: how a movement that is at its heart anti-gay deals with the fact that it seems to attract right-wing gays. and it did a good job tracing the neo-nazi movement's struggles to come to terms with prominent gay members (the story of michael kuhnen alone is pretty interesting. he was the leader of the german neo-nazis in the 1970s. he was initially closeted but then wrote a pamphlet arguing that homosexuals made better nazis than heterosexuals. as a result, he was thrown out of the party's leadership. after he died of aids in 1991, his fortunes reversed. the neo-nazis rehabilitated him and today he has became something of a martyr to the neo-nazi cause).
meandering again. sorry. the cable guy is still not here. but if i keep writing until he shows up, i fear that this post will never end.
