The bottom line when searching for homosexuals in history, as with Hitler, or in contemporary life, as with Atta, is that the "clues" have to be interpreted responsibly. When they aren’t, you wind up with sloppy scholarship such as Noel I. Garde’s From Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History (Vantage Press, 1964), in which large trees of innuendo grow from small seeds of evidence. The standards should be closer to those of historically perceptive and sensitive scholars such as Blanche Wiesen Cook, whose biography of Eleanor Roosevelt is a model of how to understand a historical figure’s sexuality in the context of her life and times. The second volume of Cook’s projected four-volume work on Roosevelt, for example, explicates in great detail how Roosevelt’s intense, often erotic connections to women formed the basis of her domestic and human-rights work and helped shape the New Deal.
There’s simply no way to argue that Machtan meets this standard. (It almost goes without saying that the Enquirer doesn’t.) Unlike Cook’s masterful biography of Roosevelt, Machtan’s work is full of holes. He doesn’t have any hard evidence to prove that Hitler was gay. No man actually claims that he slept with Hitler, and there are no explicit letters, diaries, or communications — so that page after page relies on the endless rhetoric of conjecture. Machtan’s text is littered with "maybe," "perhaps," and "possibly." Sometimes he goes even further with "in light of this it makes sense to assume" and "there may also be documents locked away in Swiss strong rooms that would shed light on these years" or even the more impertinent "it would be irresponsible to rule out that Hitler may have made approaches to wealthy men [for sex]." Often his jumps are breathtaking: the "fact" that Wagner’s world-famous Bayreuth opera house "was a notorious international rendezvous for prominent homosexuals" — the "opera queen" theory of history — proves nothing.
At the end of 434 pages, we are left with a house of speculative cards that can hardly stand on its own. All history asks us to make some leaps of faith, but like a magician, Machtan wants us to suspend disbelief almost all the time. He is the master of circumstantial evidence. Complicating matters is the fact that he simply avoids placing his materials in a larger context. There is almost no substantive discussion of Magnus Hirschfeld (who was a communist, sexuality researcher, and an early homosexual activist) and his Institute for Sexual Research; the complexity of German naturalist movements (which often promoted a desexualized form of homoeroticism); or the Wandervogel movement that conflated nature with nationalism. Machtan also seems unaware that most historians reject the label "gay" or "homosexual" for non-contemporary figures, and his use of both words to describe Hitler’s identity flies in the face of sound historiography and correct usage. Furthermore, he fails to recognize that same-sex activity does not necessarily dictate self-identity. Hitler’s extreme conservatism, deep homophobia, and strong desire to belong to the mainstream most likely precluded him from seeing himself as an "invert," the term then in use (defined as a woman’s soul in a man’s body, and viewed by the mainstream as a pathological condition). Therefore, even if Hitler was attracted to or had sex with men, he almost certainly did not self-identify as "gay" or "homosexual."
The narrowness of Machtan’s historical vision — he is intent on finding every single suggestion of homoeroticism in Hitler’s life and friendship circle — continually undercuts whatever interesting information he has uncovered, such as the provocative rumor that Rudolf Hess was known to some allegedly gay men as "Fraulein Hess" or "Black Emma." Even worse is Machtan’s constant assertion that Hitler (and Hess, among others) were "almost pathologically sensitive, weak, and impressionable" persons with "markedly feminine traits" This conflation of "feminine" with male homosexuality is a sure tip-off that Machtan falls far too easily into homophobic gender stereotypes of essential "male" and "female" characteristics. After finishing the book, you have the impression that the Third Reich was run by screaming, hysterical nancy boys. And yet the book is being marketed as a serious work of historical investigation and, interestingly, received as such. It was published simultaneously in 15 languages and is a bestseller in Germany.
Machtan’s inability to deal in any sophisticated way with gender is not incidental to the way "gay" stereotypes and homophobia have taken shape historically. One of the reasons The Hidden Hitler and even the National Enquirer story on Atta are so accepted and acceptable is that both pander to the most commonly embraced homophobic stereotypes. Machtan’s work is strewn with images of devious, duplicitous, overwrought closet cases, and the Enquirer story is so predicated on a close-binding, suffocating mother/distant father it could come out of a 1950s psychoanalytic textbook. It portrays Atta as both too manly and too feminine — apparently to make sure all the bases are covered. Whatever kernels of truth may be in Machtan’s book or the Enquirer article are completely ancillary to their methods, intentions, and conclusions.
IT’S IRONIC to note that, for better or worse, the Machtan biography and the National Enquirer piece are creations of a new world shaped by the gay movement and feminism. In his book The Hitler of History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), historian John Lukacs notes that "history means the endless rethinking — rewriting and revisiting — of the past" and that the past is created as quickly as we can create the present and the future. All new histories now have to take into account the gay and lesbian politics and past that homosexuals have been creating for decades. Machtan attempts to do this with some restraint and seriousness; the National Enquirer article is part of a backlash against the social and political gains the gay movement has made during this time.
On some level, all history — and all writing — is about politics, and it would be incredibly naive to think that the "outing" of historical figures does not have a political basis. From the 1897 list constructed by Ellis and Symonds to the National Enquirer’s piece on Atta, such work forwards clear political agendas. The idea of a gay Hitler is not new. It was used by the Communists after World War II to attack fascism, and one of the more popular and dangerously loony books from the Christian right over the past few years has been Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams’s The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Founders Publishing Corporation, 1995), which blames homosexuals for the Third Reich and the Holocaust. And the advent of a gay movement has, to a large degree, complicated the heterosexual world’s relationship to homosexuality. Once a form of unmentionable depravity, homosexuality now occupies a clear and present place in the world. But despite the work done by gay and lesbian activists to promote positive gay images, the specter of the "evil homosexual" holds enormous fascination for Western culture.
In many ways homosexuality functions on a primeval level as the great signifier of evil. Homosexuals have become to the modern world what the Jews were to the medieval world — they corrupt children, they spread disease, they stand outside the sanctified, secure boundaries of nationalism, and they seek the destruction of the state. It is no surprise, then, that both Adolf Hitler and Mohamed Atta — despite, rather than because of, whatever historical evidence there may or may not be — have become so easily identified as "gay."
The deeds of Hitler and Atta are unthinkable, in much the same way that homosexuality has always been unspeakable (after all, it was, according to Lord Alfred Douglas, "the love that dare not speak its name"). In some ways, it makes perfect sense that the once unspeakable — now articulated — could become the first line of expression for the unthinkable.
Still, it raises the question: what kind of a person actually thinks Hitler and Atta are somehow more evil because they may have been gay?
Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com
