![caught and forced gay sex stories caught and forced gay sex stories](https://www.nydailynews.com/resizer/q0A_XrQ4nGCSvX_r_qyXEMGXTDo=/1200x0/top/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/4QHBBUP5WAI4KUMMVSSJMLEFF4.jpg)
Instead, even after liberation, they left as convicted criminals. Overall prospects for gay prisoners were poor: an estimated 65% died, and an unknown, albeit likely disproportionate, number committed suicide.īut, tragically, gay Holocaust survivors did not leave their camps as recognized victims. There, they were subjected to barbaric tortures, including sexual abuse, castration and medical experiments, and were further ostracized by fellow inmates. Under Paragraph 175’s aegis, police forces arrested approximately 100,000 gay men before the war came to an end, of whom around 10-15,000 were sent to concentration camps. These Nazi-era modifications would amount to a death sentence for gay men, and haunt them for years to come. Decades of pioneering work and community life had been erased, thus depriving queer Germans of their sources of solidarity both during and after the Third Reich.īy 1935, Paragraph 175 of the German penal code-the existing Prussian-era provision outlawing sodomy- was revised to include a harsher sentence and criminalize virtually any kind of male same-sex intimacy. Realizing the power these movements held, the Nazis began their anti-gay purges by immediately targeting the very hubs of queer cultural production and kinship, namely clubs, societies and Magnus Hirschfield’s renowned sexology research institute. Weimar-era Berlin came to be labeled as the “gay capital of the world,” a city where a booming queer nightlife scene was wedded with the budding dissemination of new academic ideas calling for greater acceptance of homosexuality and gender non-conformity.
![caught and forced gay sex stories caught and forced gay sex stories](http://cdn-webimages.wimages.net/052e2bbfeb0a564263be3e83eac0aa4662d74b-v5-wm.jpg)
Although male homosexual activity had been technically illegal in Germany since the 19th century, it was generally tolerated and even celebrated within certain urban circles prior to Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933. Within the National Socialist vision, homosexuality represented an insidious “threat” to the “Aryan” race’s survival that needed to be stamped out. The truth is that for the queer survivors of Nazi oppression, 1945 did not bring about any kind of liberation rather, it marked the beginning of a systematic process of persecution and willful suppression-one that would result in their erasure from the pages of popular history. This, however, isn’t the consequence of an accidental historical oversight. Eighty years later, while Holocaust remembrance has become an integral part of our civic duties, stories like those of Seel and other LGBTQ victims are often missing from that collective memory.