A true story: attitudes continue

Some years back now, I was involved in a project in the city I live in to raise a memorial in the gay district of town to the gays and lesbians who had been killed by the Nazis and their sympathisers. Yeah, it was a deliberate consciousness-raising exercise, but it was also a genuine memorial to these forgotten (or ignored) victims, and a way of saying "Lest We Forget".

It was to be called the Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial, on the basis of "the Holocaust" being understood to be the "Final Solution", the process by which all congenital undesirables were rounded up by the Nazis and exterminated.

But as soon as word got out of what we were doing, we were slapped with a legal injunction by the Jewish Council. We had to stop.

Their objection, on the surface of it, was that "the Holocaust" referred (they claimed) only and specifically to what was done to Jews by the Nazis. Anybody else, any other groups of people who happened to be rounded up and treated the same way, was merely co-incidental and shouldn't be considered part of "the Holocaust". Or so they claimed.

They also claimed that by (as they saw it) diluting and broadening the Jewish people's special claim to suffering during World War II, we were simply continuing the victimisation and disenfranchisement that Jews as a group have suffered throughout history.

We countered (in the face of being threatened with being dragged into the High Court, the highest legal court in my country, a prospect that would have wiped out our project with legal fees and put us all in considerable personal risk of bankruptcy and long-lasting impoverishment) that all we were trying to do was to acknowledge the people who were also rounded up and murdered because of who they'd been born as, not for anything they'd done; only that we were trying to acknowledge the ones who were normally denied and made invisible.

And then, out came the excuse that we knew had been there all along, but no-one risen against us had had the courage to say: in great anger and indignation, we were told that we were being insulting. That an attempt to suggest the suffering and deaths of homosexuals was in any way equivalent to normal people, to people who had families and weren't guilty of anything, was an insult and a slur on the Jews who had died.

For myself, I felt a great sadness at that. We had expected that Jews, of all people, would understand the need to acknowledge the wrongs that had been done.

In the end, we had to comply -- if for no other reason than we just didn't have the money to match the legal resources of a large, well-funded community organisation. Nor, when it came down to it, could we count on even a fair hearing from the media or the community at large, whereas our antagonists could. It was a battle we would lose.

In the end, it went ahead as the Gay and Lesbian War Memorial, which somewhat missed the point of what we'd set out to achieve. And wouldn't you know it, just after it was opened there was an entry in one of the columns of one of the big daily newspapers calling us divisive and elitist, asking why we felt the need to have a separate war memorial for gays and lesbians when the ones for "regular" people were already supposed to include everyone -- wasn't that good enough for us?

Sigh. So many people just want gays and lesbians to stay silent and hidden.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.