The Daily Dave

… Queers and David’s Stars

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The Indigo Girls’ “This Train Revised” begins in a packed railroad car headed to a Nazi extermination camp:

It's a fish white belly
     A lump in the throat
Razor on a wire
     Skin and bone
Piss and blood
    In a railroad car
One hundred people
    Gypsies, queers, and David's stars1

The song was a gut punch when I first heard it in 1994.2 I played it a few days ago and discovered it was just as powerful and harrowing as ever but, alarmingly, more relevant now than 31 years ago.

We’ll get to that in a moment.

First, let me explain how a conversation about Nazi persecution of Jews and queer people sent me scrambling for an Indigo Girls deep cut.3

No, let’s put that aside for a bit, too.

This is going to be a long post, so I’m gonna give you the tl;dr before we dive into any of that:

Nazi persecution of Jews and queer people was intertwined, as Jews were blamed for homosexuality and both groups were seen as threats.

While the Holocaust’s scale and intent were uniquely genocidal, failing to make a connection—whether out of indifference, ignorance, or plain old homophobia—distorts history and leaves us less prepared to fight against modern threats to the rights, dignity, and lives of Jews, queers, and other groups.

“For fuck’s sake, Dave,” I hear you saying. “Your last post was about Dolly Parton. How the hell did you get on this topic!?”4

Well, since you asked …

Picture It: Germany, 1933 … or the United States, 2025

I shouldn’t need to explain why many people are comparing current events in our country to what happened nearly 100 years ago in Germany. Anyone who isn’t a fucking idiot who thinks rationally and understands history sees an alarming number of parallels.

Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Another equally gifted and renowned writer recently put it this way: “It’s not quite the original song. It’s the extended dance remix.”5

After the National Park Service wiped any mention of trans people from the Stonewall National Monument, I had this exchange with a friend:

Friend: Transgender people are to MAGA what Jews were to the Nazis

Me: Well, transgender people are to MAGA what transgender people were to Nazis.

Friend: I know. But it wasn’t as out in front as the Jews. The Nazis wanted to eliminate everyone but the Aryan race … LGBTQ, the Roma, communists, etc. However, the main target was the Jews. The Jews were the ones blamed for the bad economy and everything else that was wrong in the world.

Well, I said, you’re right, but there’s a big but.

And you’re wrong, but there’s a big but.

And we didn’t get much further than that because, you know, we have jobs and bosses and coworkers generally dislike it when you say, “Sorry, I’m gonna cancel this meeting because I’m texting with a friend about Nazi Germany.”

To be honest, I was relieved that we had to cut our discussion short. I’ve never had to articulate my point of view before, so I struggled to explain it logically and clearly.

The conversation I wanted to have kept playing out in my head, along with the lyric about “queers and David’s stars.” I started writing down my thoughts.

And now, here we are.

Jews and Jewishness

Nazis sought to eliminate not just Jews, but Jewishness, from Germany.  This meant more than ejecting Jews from public life and, eventually, committing genocide. It also meant purging so-called Jewish influence from German society and culture.

That put antisemitism at the heart of Nazis’ attacks on political ideologies, cultural organizations, academic institutions, and, you guessed it, what they considered sexual deviance.

A notable, yet not isolated, example of how the Nazis fit all these hatreds together is the destruction of the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin.

The Institute was founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, who was:

  • Gay
  • Jewish
  • A physicist studying human sexuality
  • One of the earliest and loudest advocates for queer rights and acceptance

That was all evidence Nazis needed to prove Jewish intellectuals were corrupting society through sexual deviance. All they needed was a legal pretense to destroy the institute.

It came a day after the Reichstag fire in 1933.

Nazis claimed the arson meant a communist rising was imminent. Then, ostensibly to fight this threat, they gutted the constitution, removing a slew of rights and protections—including ones providing freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and fair treatment from law enforcement and in the justice system.

Two months later, the brownshirts and a Nazi student raided and burned down the institute. It was an unmistakable statement and violent warning to Jews and anyone associated with Jewish thinkers. It also, sadly, destroyed decades of important and irreplicable research.6

Jews and Their Kind

Of course, not all Jewish people were queer, and not all queer people were Jewish. However, the groups were not mutually exclusive. Regardless, the Nazi justification for persecuting all queer people—Jewish or not—was driven and justified by antisemitism.

Remember, Jews and queer people (and Jews who were queer people) in Germany just before Nazism wouldn’t have thought of themselves as anything other than Germans. Jews had gone from being an ostracized religious minority to an integrated part of German business, culture, politics, and society. Queer people were on the same trajectory.7

This level of integration and increasing social acceptance set Jews and queer people apart from many other groups Nazis rounded up, such as the Roma and non-Jewish Poles.

Why Didn’t You Learn This in History Class?

“Hey Dave,” I hear you saying. “I kinda see what you’re getting at, but why don’t more people know about this?”

I can give a handful of reasons, but they all boil down to one thing: No one cared.

Historians, until recently, haven’t given a flying fuck about queer people—LGBTQ history was virtually nonexistent as a research field until the 1980s.8 Governments and societies still vilified queer people, so victims could not share their stories freely and safely.9

For Jews, the world quickly learned about, acknowledged, understood, and responded to the depth of Jewish suffering and weight of loss. Mountains of evidence and countless survivor testimonies created a foundation for Holocaust studies and education. Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity, and the State of Israel was established.10

For queer people, stigmas far outweighed sympathy. Survivors could not speak out. They faced criminalization and discrimination no matter where they went—including here in the United States. Many queer people found themselves in prison not long after being liberated from concentration camps.

In spring 1945, Allied soldiers liberated concentration camps and freed prisoners, including those wearing the pink triangle. But the end of the war and the defeat of the Nazi regime did not necessarily bring a sense of liberation for gay men. They remained marginalized in German society. Most notably, sexual relations between men remained illegal in Germany throughout much of the twentieth century. This meant that many men serving sentences for allegedly violating Paragraph 175 remained in prison after the war. Tens of thousands more were convicted in the postwar era. 

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

To this day, we have no idea how many queer people were murdered by Nazis. The numbers, undoubtedly, are minuscule compared to those of the Holocaust.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates there were “hundreds, maybe thousands” of non-Jewish gay and bisexual victims. That number doesn’t specifically include Jewish victims who were also queer.

An Important Distinction

I can’t end this post without recognizing a potential flaw in my argument. The Nazis saw Jews as a threat to both moral and racial purity. They saw queers primarily as a threat to moral purity. The interconnections and implications are complicated, and I’m not a professional historian. I don’t even play one on teevee.

So, I may be conflating things that shouldn’t be conflated. You’d be right to challenge what I’ve written in this post. In fact, I can argue against it myself. After all, the tactics, intensity, and consequences of Nazi persecution were different for both groups—queer people mostly faced suppression and punishment; Jewish people faced genocide. There is no equivalence there.

So why write this?

Because I think there’s a blind spot in our understanding of history. A significant one. One that might be impairing our awareness of what’s happening now and impairing our ability to navigate our way forward with as little suffering as possible.

Antisemitism is more brazen and open than any other time I can member, queer people are under attack and being barred from health care and public life, and the specter of authoritarianism grows every day.

I might be wrong about exactly what’s in that blind spot. But I’m not mistaken in thinking that one exists. With so much at stake, we can’t afford to ignore it.

Footnotes
  1. I can give Amy Ray a pass for using this word in the 1990s, but it’s now considered a slur. I’ll use Roma in this post. ↩︎
  2. The last line of the opening verse has stuck with me for more than 30 years. It contains a word that has become a slur, a slur that has become a point of pride, and the most heartbreakingly apt examples of metonymy you’ll ever find. ↩︎
  3. I’m going to use queer throughout this post as a catch-all descriptor. While this keeps things simple, the reality was a bit more complicated. While Nazis likely saw all LGBTQ people as sexual deviants and threats to Germany morality, gay men were targeted more than lesbians. Queerness as we understand it is a modern concept.
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  4. You also may be saying, “You’re the only person I know who can make the tl;dr too long.” ↩︎
  5. It’s me. I’m the person who said this. Please tell me when and where to pick up my Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. ↩︎
  6. Some historical context: In the Weimar Republic, because of efforts by Hirshfeld and others, queer people had begun to gain acceptance and legal protections. In fact, the Reichstag came close to repealing Paragraph 175, the statute criminalizing same-sex behavior that had been on the books since the unification of Germany in 1871. The Nazis were having none of that, of course. They enforced Paragraph 175 more vigorously (and violently) than the republic did. In 1935, they increased the penalties (months in prison became years) and broadened the scope so much that anything more than a handshake between two men could be prosecuted as sodomy. ↩︎
  7. Jews and queer people (and Jews who are queer people) in the United States now don’t think of themselves as anything other than Americans. I trust you can connect the dots.
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  8. It might not exist much longer. ↩︎
  9. A suspiciously high number of Jews were targeted during the Red and Lavender scares in the United States in the 1950s. Check out “The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America” by Eric Cervini. ↩︎
  10. This paragraph is an oversimplification of what happened. You don’t have to look far to find proof that antisemitism persisted in many places. ↩︎