The recent popularity of 2 well known celebrities having fun PLAYING gay has left me with mixed feelings. It seems of handed and full of privilage when history has been so treacherous to many who did not have the luxury to pretend to be gay.
Living in Germany where recent history proved to be a death blow for REAL gay men (from Wikipedia: " An estimated 1.2 million men were out homosexuals in Germany in 1928. Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and of these, some 50,000 officially were sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps. It is unclear how many of these 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in the concentration camps. The leading scholar Ruediger Lautman however believes that the death rate in concentration camps of imprisoned homosexuals may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors, and were also persecuted by their fellow inmates. This was a factor in the relatively high death rate for homosexuals, compared to other "anti-social groups". AND
"Homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution. Reparations and state pensions available to other groups were refused to gay men, who were still classified as criminals — the Nazi anti-gay law was not repealed until 1994, although both East and West Germany liberalized their criminal laws against adult homosexuality in the late 1960s.
Gay Holocaust survivors could be re-imprisoned for "repeat offences," and were kept on the modern lists of "sex offenders." Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps."
In 2006 and 2007 there were some brief discussions about some of the issues that passing for gay on in the cinema brings up- after the critical success of
Brokeback Mountain -see Truthdig
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