So I found this in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, from 1960, which I’ve been reading through since I found a first edition while I was out antiquing with David. Shirer is fleshing out the organizational structure and leading figures of the S.A. (the Sturmabteilung, or stormtroopers: paunchy, stupid, roughneck gangsters who brawled with Communists in street fights because the economy was in the tank and they didn’t have anything better to do), and I get to this description of its leadership:

But the brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, [Ernst] Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murder. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their particular jealousies, can. [First ed., 120]

Here we see the American heteronormativity of the time fossilized for our amusement. Now, an American writer (Shirer was a CBS journalist) writing in 1960 portraying homosexuals as scandalous scofflaws against nature is no great surprise, but the peculiarly comical portrayal here is, I think, worth mention. (Somehow I get an image of brown-shirted bears going around whining and slapping each other in sissy-boy fights, with armbands and jackboots flying everywhere in the chaos.) “Notorious” seems to be Shirer’s standard qualifier for “homosexual”; he uses the phrase elsewhere.

Really, I don’t bring this up to blame Shirer for sharing in the ignorance and bigotry of his era, but rather to look positively on the progress we’ve made in such a short time. No writer this side of Ann Coulter would think of casting their observations this way today, and that’s an accomplishment we should thank the previous generations of GLBT activists for.

Tags: Gay rights, History